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Publication Details

Present-Time Religious Sectarianism

(Original title: O novodobom náboženskom sektárstve)
Otázky marxistickej filozofie, 19 (1964), 4, 343-354.
Type of work: Papers and Discussions
Publication language: Slovak
Abstract
Religions sectarinism is charakterized by the author as a by-product, as a deviation from a main religious movement or trend of a certain period. In the work particularly the dynamics, causes and characteristics of modern-time religious sectarianism are discussed. Religious sects of our time come into being on the fundaments of capitalistic society. Everywhere where the masses were not awakened and incited by class struggle to put up active opposition and refusal of bourgeois society in the name of a revolutionary programme, illusive outlets are being born. The traditional churches, compromised by their collaboration with the bourgeois state cannot quench the thirst of people yearning for „pure“ faith and righteous life Rc.igious sectarianism is the issue of opposition against mundane world as a whole as contrary to transcendental world. Consciously no service is being done to the ruling classes. The idol of the sectarians is outside of this, world. Their spastic utopies are born owing to ignorance, but also as a consequence of their being unable to find the way to be' followed in revolutionary turbulence. The consequent programme of negation towards the terrestrial world and society is given first of all by the social position of sectarians. Ousted from, active and creative social life they construct a programme of their own, adequate to this their position. Their phantasy, not fettered by any social praxis, freely soars into the limitless spheres of mysticism. From the mentality and style of bourgeois life the religious sects have taken over the dominating principle of individualism. For them it is not necessary to construct the institution of church as intermediary between god and the faithful. All their internal life and environment is filled with god. Judging according to the development as it is up to the present, the author sees but two perspectives left for the development of religious sects in the conditions of socialistic society: they are bound either to extricate themselves from their closed, exclusive pattern and develop towards church, or they remain aborting outside contemporary tendencies, in a state of rigidity and mortification, until their final expiration. In view of the fact that members of religious sects belong mostly to the senescent group, it can be expected that sects will develop in our conditions most often in the latter way.
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