Draft:Igor Kanterov

Igor Kanterov is a religious scholar at Moscow State University in Russia. He wrote a student guide in 2006. The guide criticizes a religious center's name change. He says the center still fights against sects, not studying religion. Kanterov also points out problems with how psychiatrists label non-traditional religions. In 2005, he argued that this labeling wrongly calls a million Russians "psychic terrorists." He believes this goes against their constitutional right to freely choose their religion. In 2010, Kanterov criticized two authors for ignoring Russian laws on religious freedom. These authors labeled some religious groups as "" without legal basis. Kanterov defends these groups' rights and questions the negative labels.

Content from Center for Religious Studies in the name of Hieromartyr Irenaeus of Lyons
In 2006, the religious scholar Igor Kanterov wrote a for students of Religious Studies "New religious movements: (introduction to basic concepts and terms)" that "In 2005, the Information and Consulting Center of St. Irenei Lyonsky changes its name and becomes the Institute for Religious Studies Research. The appearance of this "Institute" is nothing more than a simple change of signboard for a well-known sect-fighting institution. As time has shown, the views of the head and staff of the Institute have nothing to do with religious studies; as before, they work in the field of sectarianism. Кантеров,_Игорь_Яковлевич

Content from Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_Russia
In 2005, Igor Kanterov, a professor of the Moscow State University, wrote that psychiatrists and psychologists were actually being involved in a very unattractive occupation, stigmatizing "alien" religions and their followers, who were about 1 million first-class citizens of the Russian Federation, and putting them "on the basis of a list of them" in the category of "psychic terrorists." While reviewing Sidorov's article "Psychic terrorism is nonlethal weapon of mass destruction" published by the Rossiyskiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal in its issue 3 of 2005, Kanterov notes that, according to it, religious behavior is regarded as inherently deviant from the "norm", that similar type of behavior is always dependent and imposed by recruiting and manipulative influence and that, thus, the possibility to be initiated into religious organizations due to free choice of religious belief guaranteed by the Constitution of the Russian Federation is outright rejected. In his 2010 article, Kanterov writes about the works by P.I. Sidorov and V.E. Pashkovskiy and points out that inspired by the desire to expose the malicious actions of "," P.I. Sidorov and V.E. Pashkovskiy at the same time never resort to Russian laws regulating activity of religious associations, and it can hardly be considered accidental, since all the original sets of the authors are in flagrant contravention of current legislation. The Federal Law of the Russian Federation "On Freedom of Conscience and on Religious Associations" contains the following types of associations of believers: religious groups, religious organizations, local and centralized religious associations, and its legislator mentions about no "sects," "cults," especially with the frightening adjectives "destructive" or "." However, in Kanterov's words, peer-reviewed publications use the term "" as a key concept that naturally generates psychiatric disorders and produces horror stories about "psychic terrorism," "non-lethal weapon of mass destruction," "usurpation of belongings and savings of followers," "recruitment," etc. P.I. Sidorov presents a list of "" with the names of over twenty religious organizations, and many of them have status of registered centralized organizations that successfully passed registration and re-registration provided for by the Law "On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations" after the Expert Council for Religious Examination under the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation made for each of these organizations expert reports, in which the detailed assessment of the religious doctrine, rituals, attitude of the religious organizations to society, family, and individual were given, but no violations were found.