Two hundred years ago the world was segmented in ways that it’s not segmented now. The interrelationship between different communities in the world did not exist. Now there is a lot more traveling in between places, and traveling in between countries, and various communities.
Interestingly it started with colonialism, and in some places, this colonialism never ended. But at least they’ve gotten some inkling and understanding of the communities that they were in.
In some areas of the world, these interrelationships of different cultures didn’t go very well, f you look at different parts of the world you will see that there are constant wars, and a lot of these wars have to do with cultures clashing and/or religious ideas clashing.
Cultures are interesting things. They develop in local areas and they take on a certain flavor of their own, and then the people take on that flavor. And different cultures have trouble understanding other cultures; there are barriers to understanding cultures, and many times the barriers are not just knowledge. There are distinct society barriers where they won’t let you enter into their culture. For instance: racism, religious differences, caste systems. All of the various phenomenon in the world try to separate people from each other. The cultures do a lot of this separating. They hold themselves at a certain level, and don’t allow other people, for their own reasons, to integrate into them.
Now, we have to look at the word cult, and cult takes on a certain meaning. Usually what it means is a small group that has taken on its own ideas separate from the larger communities at large. What happens is, some of these things that start out as cults become very large where they become the dominant cult within an area.
Take a look at Christianity in its founding days. There were 12 people involved. Now look at it. Take a look at Islam in its founding days in Mecca. There were maybe 20 people. Now look at it. Take a look at Judaism. At the time of Jacob, there was Jacob and his 12 sons; now it’s expanded and it’s much larger.
So cults become cultures. Cults become religious movements. When they traverse the area of being small, they become mainstream. All of a sudden they begin to be looked at in a different way.
But we should all remember that they all started out as cults, and we should also remember that they all introduced, for themselves, certain ways of understanding
There were barriers that separated all of these cultures, and usually these barriers were the oceans and the land masses that you had to travel to go from one culture to another. We’ve overcome a lot of those, but even though we’ve been able to overcome the physical barriers between people, we haven’t been able to overcome the cultural barriers between people, and we haven’t been able to overcome the religious barriers between people…
