The dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy defines cults as groups of followers of a religious or ideological bias. In a second sense, characterizes them as religious doctrines or ideologies that separate or different from others. This term is usually used to refer to a group of people who follow a different doctrine of the current accepted by the founder of a religion. At the end of the twentieth century occurred in the West, the revival of interest in traditional beliefs and doctrines. Hundreds of thousands of people were devoted to meditation on Buddhist or Hindu roots, searching for inner peace. The New Age, another move that expanded significantly in recent decades, is composed of groups who believe that humanity is on the threshold of a new age spiritual. His supporters stress the importance of intuition over the rational, and exploration of individual and collective unconscious. Take elements from different origins, such as the I Ching, astrology, tarot.
These churches, many of them born in the sixteenth century driven by the aspiration of Luther and Calvin to reform the Catholic Church are based on free examination of the Bible. Most of these should be considered as denominations split from Roman Catholicism.
According to Orthodox Jewish religious tradition comes from the will of God, expressed in the Torah, which is interpreted by the rabbis. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century emerged in Europe and the U.S. groups that rejected the rabbinical authority among them, the Jews of the Reform, the Reconstructionist and the Liberals.