Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka varför människor ansluter sig till sekter genom att studera vad aktuellforskning säger om ämnet. Detta har gjorts främst ur en psykologisk och sociologisk synvinkel. De vetenskapligaverk som har studerats är skrivna avforskarna Peter Åkerbäck, Håkan Järvå och Anton Geels. Dessaverkhar jämförts med teorier av Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman och Abraham Maslow. Resultatet blev att frågeställningarnainte går att besvara på ett simplifierat sätt, utan anledningen till att människor ansluter sig till sekter ligger på ett djupt sociologiskt och psykologiskt plan, som bottnar ien konsekvens av samhällets fragmentisering och individualisering. Studien efterlyser en kombination av olika perspektiv.

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This study presents an insider’s view concerning the significant influence of American fundamentalism at Prairie Bible Institute (Three Hills, Alberta, Canada) during the tenure of the school’s co-founder and primary leader, Leslie Earl Maxwell. During much of the period covering 1922-1980, PBI rivaled well-known American schools such as Moody Bible Institute, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) and Columbia Bible College in Columbia, South Carolina, in size. These schools were also highly efficient in producing hundreds of missionaries and Christian workers to serve the fundamentalist cause in North America and around the world. As a belated response to Dr. John Stackhouse, Jr.’s portrayal of PBI in his 1993 book, Canadian Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to Its Character, this thesis offers clarification and modification to Stackhouse’s work regarding how PBI during the Maxwell era should be viewed by students of church history. It is argued here that the ubiquitous influence of the United States of America on Canadian life is clearly visible in the nature of the Christian fundamentalism that prevailed at PBI under Maxwell’s leadership. The work thereby lends a certain amount of credibility to the suggestions made by some scholars that PBI during Maxwell’s career might legitimately be considered an outpost of American fundamentalism. Employing primarily a quantitative assessment of the evidence in combination with personal anecdotes and a few basic statistics, the thesis reveals that Maxwell’s personality and rhetoric were consistently more militant than Stackhouse allows. PBI’s affinity for many of the distinctives of American fundamentalist theology and culture are also documented. Such an approach serves the additional purpose of enabling the writer to call into question the utility of considering militancy the defining characteristic of twentieth-century evangelicalism when considered from a post-9/11 perspective. It also enables a challenge of Stackhouse’s assumption that what he identifies as “sectish” Canadian evangelicalism is ultimately as substantially different from American fundamentalism as the Canadian scholar infers. / Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiology / D.Th. (Church History)

Successive U.S. administrations have mired themselves in fruitless attempts to arrive at a peaceful conclusion to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jewish and Islamic extremist groups have both been complicit in the delay, complication and derailment of peace efforts undertaken by regional moderates and the international community. Whatever the ancillary secular motivations of these factions have been, both sides also lay claim to profound religious reasons for their opposition to peace. Israeli religious Zionist extremists acting on a divine mandate have pressed to incorporate all of biblical Israel into their modern state, pursuing settlement activity and violence against Arabs and fellow Israelis to achieve this. Palestinian Islamic extremists claim justification from their scriptures for their war against the Jewish state and their ultimate goal of seeing it annihilated. These scriptural dogmas have been reified by religious leaders of both faiths, and have been utilized as ideological grounds for violence by their respective religious extremist groups. This work is an effort to expose the significant religious motivations propelling Zionist and Islamic extremist opponents of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; seeking thereby to raise awareness of the origins of this complex and central dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among U.S. policymakers and intelligence analysts.

The aim of this study has been to find out what methods the Islamic State are using in order to mobilize their followers and strengthen the organization. The purpose of this essay has also been to find out what the dreams and visions the Islamic state has for the future. From a discourse analytical approach, the Islamic State propaganda newspaper Dabiq Magazine has been analyzed based on how well the material is consistent with Lincoln’s theories on cultural identity and Jameson’s theory on historical identities and myths. The results showed the Islamic state's conscious strategy of portraying itself as the religion’s only true interpreter and that religion holds a central domain of the collective identity as the Islamic State intends to create for the organization. The analysis also shows the Islamic state's dreams and visions for the future that are primarily manifested by the organization's power ambitions but also by apocalyptic references to prophecies from holy scriptures in the Quran.

Approved for public release; distribution in unlimited. / In the mid 1980s, the Muslim separatist problem was eliminated in southern Thailand when the government took a two-fold approach: first, to empower the military to oversee both the police and civil-service sectors; and later, based on recommendations from the military, to initiate new social and economic policies. This thesis examines, through both an anthropological analysis of the conflict and a theory of counterinsurgency, the re-emergence of the Muslim separatist groups in southern Thailand and provides both short and long term solutions for the Royal Thai government. It offers a background analysis of the historical relationship between the Thai government and Thai Muslims in order to highlight why the former separatist problem occurred in Thailand. Next, the current separatist problem is examined to determine why this issue has reoccurred and possible reasons for the government's underestimation of the situation. This thesis then addresses measures the Thai government may take to preclude a future Muslim separatist insurgency, and offers both an analysis of former measures that were successful and an appraisal of the current conditions conducive to an insurgency. Finally, the conditions necessary for a successful resolution of the Muslim separatist problem are delineated in short term and long term solutions. / Lieutenant Colonel, Royal Thai Army

Reasons fundamentalists assert that normative reality is constituted by exemplifications of the normative reasons relation: an irreducible, sui generis relation that strongly supervenes on non-normative reality. In this dissertation, I argue that reasons fundamentalists cannot explain why exemplifications of the normative reasons relation strongly supervene on non-normative reality. Irreduciblists about normativity can avoid this problem by asserting, contra the reasons fundamentalist, that normative reality is constituted by exemplifications of thick properties, which provide material for a conceptual analysis of normative reasons. The theory that results analyzes normative reasons for action as answers to questions why an action promotes a thick property. Nearly every normative theorist affirms what I call Additive Normative Supervenience (ANS): Normatively discernible worlds must be non-normatively discernible. ANS asserts that, if Edward Snowden is morally good, then Snowden's counterparts in worlds that are indiscernible in all non-normative respects must be good. Reasons fundamentalists struggle to explain why ANS is true. I consider and reject potential explanations of ANS that appeal to conceptual entailment and a posteriori necessity. Rosen has recently offered an argument against ANS. Rejecting ANS, however, problematizes irreduciblist accounts of normative explanation and normative epistemology. Irreduciblists can avoid this dilemma by arguing that ANS is either incoherent or false and adopting an alternative formulation of normative supervenience. Bilgrami's arguments against the intelligibility of normative supervenience doctrines purport to show that ANS is in fact unintelligible, and Merricks' arguments against the supervenience of consciousness on microphysical properties can be extended to show that ANS is false. Neither argument, however, establishes the falsity or unintelligibility of a modified formulation of normative supervenience, Transformative Normative Supervenience (TNS): Normatively discernible worlds must be descriptively discernible, where descriptive discernibility is just discernibility with respect to non-normative properties or thick normative properties. Irreduciblists can explain the truth of TNS by adopting non-centralism about normative reasons--that is to say, by maintaining, contra the reasons fundamentalist, that normative reality is constituted most fundamentally by exemplifications of thick properties. This allows the irreduciblist to provide an account of normative explanation and normative epistemology, analyze normative reasons in terms of thick properties, and preserve buck-passing accounts of thin normative properties. Scanlon has argued that the reasons relation is a four-place relation, relating the facts that are reasons for an agent to perform an action in a given circumstance. I argue that facts are also reasons for an action with respect to a thick property that that action will promote, in contrast to sets of distinct actions that the agent could perform instead. The resulting six-place relation turns out to be an instance of the relation that holds between why-questions and answers. What it is to be a normative reason for an agent to do something is to be a correct answer to a question why that agent's doing that action will promote a thick property. Decades ago, Anscombe had also suggested that reasons were answers to why-questions of a certain kind. The attractiveness of this position has been relatively underappreciated in the philosophy of normative reasons, in part because Anscombe had offered the reasons- as-answers thesis as a thesis about motivating reasons rather than normative reasons. The reasons-as-answers thesis also provides resources for those irreduciblists about reasons who reject my non-centralist conclusions to avoid the wrong kind of reason problem for buck- passing accounts of normativity: they can distinguish between right and wrong kinds of reasons by distinguishing between answers to distinct kinds of why-questions.

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of self-construal and religious fundamentalism on terror management processes. It was found that both interdependent self-construal and religious fundamentalist beliefs offer protection against death-related thoughts and worldview defense following mortality salience. The implications for terror management theory are discussed.

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of self-construal and religious fundamentalism on terror management processes. It was found that both interdependent self-construal and religious fundamentalist beliefs offer protection against death-related thoughts and worldview defense following mortality salience. The implications for terror management theory are discussed.