Sect
From RationalWiki
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A sect is a subunit of religion, larger than an individual congregation but not actually a separate religion. Religinists prefer their sects to be referred to as "denominations".
[edit] Example sects
Most sects are formed because the sect's founder disagrees with his or her religion's established doctrine on many points, but the disagreement is not significant enough to warrant actually renouncing those beliefs. Some larger sects, such as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (a.k.a. Mormons), will split into subsects, such as (in this case) the LDS church, the Community of Christ, and smaller, moronic ones like the Kingston Clan and the Fundamentalist Mormons.
Some religions have no "base values" and are instead composed entirely of different and competing sects. For example, there is no generic Islam - you are either Sunni, Shia, or Fucking Stupid. Other religions, such as Christianity, have texts that are so ambiguous that they can be interpreted to mean anything, so that each individual congregation could be considered a sect in its own right, but even so there is a generic "non-denominational" designation for those who do not wish to commit themselves to any specific belief system. Catholicism and Protestantism are often so at war with each other you'd think they're different religions and interpretations but they are actually the same, only the method of worship (and generally the degree of how seriously and literally you take the Bible) are acutally different. They are often included together in religion statistics under the generic term of "Christianity".
