After reading numerous books about secret societies, cults and being raised in a Christian home all my life I have come to the following conclusion:

People want to belong to something. People enjoy organisations of people; in that we strive to communicate in more than verbal and physical ways. People like power. People like to think about supreme beings and spiritual entities because it gives them a feeling of comfort.

it's all the same basket - people being humans and using their minds to find other descriptions for the goings-on of the environment they inhabit. Esentially all religions, cults and secret societies have the same ideologies and they are listed above.

I don't believe that religion can be sectionalized into the constraints of modern religious doctrine, I feel it's on a much broader spectrum.