Click here for the only sure way to avoid being deceived by a cult.   A cult is here defined as that which looks to anything other than the living Lord Jesus Christ for salvation, righteousness, satisfaction, fulfillment, revelation, wisdom, power, or solutions or that is of any spirit other than the Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit.  Cults are often identified as organizations, but they really are spirits or ideas, and they infiltrate organizations and churches to varying degrees.    Babylon speaks of confusion. Denominationalism has caused terrible confusion so that the unbeliever is totally left without help. But there is an extreme individualism, mixed with dogmatism, that aggrevates this situation, a situation which is already confusing. If you have a church of 453 members, you are likely to have 453 mini-denominations or divisions within the Church. These divisions are mostly over doctrinal issues, each one being in love with his or her own interpretation of some point of doctrine. Many are willing to divide the Church over their pet theories and rationalized speculations.  This is not what God planned when He designed the Church. The Book of Revelation speaks of a Great Prostitute. Often, the Bible contains types, which God uses to convey meanings. This Great Prostitute is a type of the Church gone wrong, and prostitution is a type of idolatry in Scripture. Numbers 15:39 says: seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring: That is a plain reference to the idolatry of Babylon and the root cause of it. Everyone wants to do his or her own thing. How can God bring the Church into unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God according to Ephesians 4 when each little group and even each person thinks that his or her ways are the ways that should be the pattern. No one cares about the pattern in Scripture. In fact, they are offended by that pattern. Proverbs 5:6 also gives much insight into the problem of the Great Prostitute: