[Updated Aug 30, 2024.] Persecution is an unfortunate part of life in this world. No matter what you believe, how you behave, or how you look, there are people who will harass you and try to stop you from living your own life or sharing your ideas. All because they believe themselves to have the authority to be the arbiters of what is acceptable to look like, behave or believe. They may even try to kill anyone whose beliefs or teachings they do not like. Persecution Let us look at the definition of persecution we will be considering here. Persecution is the purposeful neglect, oppression or violence committed toward someone whom one considers different than themself. It is a crude and selfish behavior that arises from the failure to recognize the autonomy of other people while simultaneously assuming one’s own superior authority to condemn them. It is not simply words spoken from a platform identifying bad actors and bad behaviors. It includes intent to affect the lives of those with ...

Every single day anti-cultists, politicians, corporations, religions and the media attempt to blur the lines of what is or is not dangerous by exaggerating harmless things as dangerous and downplaying dangerous things as harmless. To help you learn to distinguish these things for yourself, we will begin examining traits of dangerous cults in order to have a foundation from which to examine false claims about how to identify a dangerous or destructive cult*. How to Identify a Danger That a trait of some group disturbs you, such as their wearing robes or speaking in a way you find strange or handing out leaflets, is nothing to be worried about. If they do not actually damage the person, they cannot be dangerous or destructive by any measure, and are more than likely completely harmless in such practices. Though strange or militaristic uniforms and impenetrable forms of speech can be surface-level indicators of something deeper deserving investigation. But those things alone are not enou...