Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60067. Filipino Israelism is the claim that the Filipino people are the descendants of ancient Israel, that the Philippines is the land promised in Scripture, and that the prophecies of restoration point to the islands rather than to the Middle East. It is less familiar in Britain than its Victorian cousin, but it is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60021. Scientology is one of the most recognised new religions in the world and one of the least understood, which is not an accident. Most people know the celebrities, the litigation and the shopfronts on the high street offering a free personality test, and very little else. What the organisation teaches at its higher…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60020. Mormonism presents itself as restored Christianity, and it does so with real confidence. Two young men in white shirts arrive at the door with Bibles under their arms, speak warmly about Jesus, ask about your family, and offer to pray. Nothing in that encounter tells you that you are meeting a different religion,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60019. Jehovah’s Witnesses are probably the group my church members ask me about most, for the simple reason that they are the ones who knock. Few movements are so widely recognised and so little understood. Most people know the door to door work, the magazines, the refusal of blood transfusions and the absence of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60018. Ask ten people what makes a group a cult and you will get ten answers, most of them about atmosphere rather than substance. It is small. It is intense. It is odd. It made my cousin move to Wales. Used that loosely the word becomes a way of saying that I find a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60015. The New Age movement is not a church, a denomination, or an organisation you can join, and that is precisely what makes it so difficult to pin down. There is no headquarters, no founder, no membership roll and no creed. What there is instead is a mood, a set of instincts about the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10103. Soul sleep is the teaching that the dead, believers included, pass into a state of complete unconsciousness at death and know nothing at all until they are raised at the last day. On this view there is no experience between dying and rising, so that the moment of death and the moment of…