Word: sects
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...Kiesler were approached by the Israeli government and asked to build a shrine for the scrolls, they knew that a boxlike building could fulfill the function. But they were struck by the historic coincidence in 1947 of the discovery of the 2,000-year-old scrolls in the Essene-sect caves with the re-emergence of the state of Israel. Deciding that the twin events cried out for symbolic representation, they found their guideline in the mystery that man from time immemorial has associated with caves...
Rising high in the center stands a bronze fountain, girdled beneath by the 22-ft.-long Scroll of Isaiah; the fountain sends a jet of water through an opening in the dome to baptize the exterior tile. Says Kiesler: "It is a purification, just as the Dead Sea sect purified themselves in water thrice daily." Below the sanctuary is a crypt of rubbly red rock, lined with relics that reveal the life of the 2nd century Jewish rebels who fought the Romans from their caves. Emerging from the sanctuary, the visitor travels along a 150-ft.-long roofless corridor...
...Jesus had an ironic reason for making a "good" Samaritan the hero of his parable: his Jewish listeners could think nothing but bad of the hated Samaritans, a heretical Jewish sect that claimed descent from Joseph and viewed Judeans as apostates. Samaritans then occupied one-third of Palestine, now they consist of only about 600 poverty-stricken people living in two decaying villages in Israel and Jordan...
More important, he learned in prison about the Black Muslims, an extremist sect founded in Detroit in 1930 by a shadowy peddler named W. D. Fard, and ruled since Fard's mysterious disappearance in 1934 by Elijah Muhammad. The Muslims offered Malcolm what Marcus Garvey had offered his father-and then some. They had caparisoned their movement with the trappings of religion, along with a mythology holding that the first human beings were Negroes. Other races-red, yellow and white-resulted only after a wicked and long-lived scientist named Yacub succeeded over many generations of genetic experiments...
...press, also began leaking stories of immorality among the Muslims. In an open letter, he accused Elijah of having fathered eight illegitimate babies by six teen-age secretaries at Black Muslim headquarters in Chicago. Other defectors-including two of Elijah's sons-began following Malcolm out of the sect. Naturally, this did not sit well with Elijah. "Only those who wish to be led to hell, or to their doom, will follow Malcolm," said his biweekly newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. "The die is set, and Malcolm shall not escape...