The article about NRMs mentions J. Gordon Melton. I have not read much by him but he has a point when he writes that some cults and NRMs suffer from unjustified stigmatization. But...... Melton shows in his writings two traits that I think are unrealistic. The first one is naivety. I do not only mean unrealistic trust in the purity of the motives and intellectual honesty of others but I also mean naivety about your own tendencies to distort truth unconsciously in order to fulfill your psychological and other needs. I mean to say that not every guru, who says crazy things is a con man, and that you should trust yourself and others not too much in their ability to distinguish truths from falsehoods, especially if you are emotionally involved. The second unrealistic trait that Melton shows is, I think his unfair bias about the reliability of testimonies of ex-members. Scholars are inconsistent if they demand that the public does not make general statements about cults because they are so diverse, while at the same time making themselves the very general statement that vocal critics of these cults are unreliable.
Andries
