Word: sects
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...Texas New Charges For Jeffs A grand jury indicted breakaway Mormon sect leader Warren Jeffs on charges of sexually assaulting a girl under age 17. Five of his followers also face counts stemming from an April raid on the polygamist group's Texas ranch. Jeffs was convicted in Utah last year as an accomplice to the rape of a child bride and awaits trial in Arizona on similar charges...
...book Escape (soon to be a movie featuring Gray's Anatomy star Katherine Heigl). One of her reasons for leaving was to prevent Jeffs from marrying her daughter - nine of Merrill Jessop's daughters are believed to be married to Jeffs, according to experts who study the sect. Other names bandied about as the potential next Prophet include Jeffs' brother Isaac and even another Jessop - William Roy Jessop. The Utah dossiers sent to Texas describe Willie Jessop as "the most serious threat affiliated with the FLDS," and someone who "reportedly has a passion for violence, weapons (legal and illegal...
...hundreds of "protector deities" that distinguish Tibetan Buddhism from more purely philosophical varieties. Historically, the god is associated with maintaining, sometimes violently, the purity of Dalai Lama's own lineage of teachers and gurus, called the Gelugpa. Indeed the high Lama himself prayed to Shugden for years; but the sect's purist and exclusionary emphases contradicted his own outreach to other Tibetan lineages, and in 1996 he began demanding that monastic abbots renounce the deity...
...long claimed to have been shunned and harassed. A 1998 Amnesty International report, however, said Shugdenpa complaints fell outside its purview of "grave violations of fundamental human rights," adding that "while recognizing that a spiritual debate can be contentious, [we] cannot become inolved in debate on spiritual issues." The sect suffered a public relations setback in 1997, when Indian police were quoted in the press saying that practitioners were suspects in the ritual slaughter of one of the Dalai Lama's close associates. (The suspects have never been tracked down or tried, however, and the Shugdenpas claim they were never...
...Shugdenpas, partly because of insufficient data, partly, perhaps, because of a feeling that this was a Tibetan issue ("these are monk wars," said one), partly because many are themselves deeply invested in the Dalai Lama, and partly because of the whiff of fundamentalism and recklessness that clings to the sect. Shugden "is about vengeance," says Robert Barnett of Columbia University. "I think that any talk of [its devotion to] compassion is misleading." Barnett believes that the movement's true goals must be "brought out into the open" - especially to innocent Westerners - before "the real social concerns that must exist...