WP:Jewish religious movements does a decent job of confirming what I thought the distinction was. "Sects" refers to groups like you get in Christianity, where they split off because of differing beliefs, and then keep having differing beliefs and practicing separately. (And then you get that horribly stupid thing where two Christians from different sects can't take Communion together because their churches have different rules for what initiation you need before you can take communion.) I can imagine it could apply to things in Buddhism that work that way. The Jews tend to not like it because they all orbit around the same religious texts, and there's enough argument and interpretation involved within any given Jewish community that you don't have that kind of discrete units. More of a bell curve of beliefs and practices within any given Jewish group. (Although, yeah, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim are the most discrete groups of anything, or at least they were until they started muddling it by immigrating here and intermarrying.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-12-26 03:42 am (UTC)