TLDR - what’s the question mark in the following scale
Cult(-1)……………….Religion(0)……………….???(+1)
Long version (a.k.a my stupid mind’s question that is keeping me awake):
My understanding of cult is a group of people with an absurd or even possibly nefarious belief system. Like something negative.
By that definition I would put religion in the middle (though a majority of it leans towards the cult side). A group of people that is very serious about what they believe in, no matter how illogical it is.
So with this understanding what would you call the positive side ? A group of people coming together to have a tradition and belief system just for the fun of it ? Is there such thing ?
Philosophy debate club with no membership
I actually think you’ve nailed the task with this
Yeah they were probably the only one in their philosophy debate club
I was made treasurer of the philosophy club by emailing the list at college to join. We met one time because the president and VP were excited someone joined.
There were no funds to manage.
There were no funds to manage.
Or so you kept claiming
I’d never want to be part of any club that’d have me as a member
I have a good mind to join a club and beat you over the head with it.
Religion and cult is basically the same thing with different connotative subtext.
The only difference between religions and cults is the size.
And age!
I was told it’s time.
Scientology is pretty new, and pretty big.
~3/4 century.
Not much relatively but they’re getting there.
On the age scale, they’re barely a blip. On the size scale, they’re massive enough to disappear people with zero accountability.
They’re a full-blown religion.
Do they still have the abulity to do that? they seem to have been way more quite recently or they could just seem less crazy compared to the general state of the world.
Pretty sure they do. They still own Clearwater, Florida (including the police department) and have a significant presence in East Grinstead, England, plus at least one mega-yacht in international waters. All they need to do is relocate you there then ‘handle’ the investigation when you come up missing.
Shelly is still missing to this day.
e: they may have toned down the crazy publicly because they were attracting too much attention, but I don’t think their power has diminished.
Nah, cults have other characteristics too, like a particularly charismatic leader, a tendency to have an extreme us-vs-them mentality, a desire for isolation rather than spreading the ‘good word’ far and wide, etc. There are definitely things that distinguish a cult of 100 people from a religion of 100 people, for example.
This is reductive at best.
I would love to see a good faith discussion on this because I’ve thought about it for a while.
Cults to Consciousness has an episode with Andrew Gold on this topic.
On religion vs cult? I can expand as a religious studies scholar
Yes please
Not everything has an opposite. That is a trap of binary thinking.
I’ll answer your question with two more questions:
What’s the opposite of a rat king? What’s the opposite of an ant mill?
Also I have to question your whole premise of the relationship between religion and cult. Where a cult is the bad kind of something and a religion is the neutral, default kind.
A religion is just the final form of a successful cult that got big enough and old enough that it no longer needs to take the drastic “cult-like” measures to restrict its members and separate them from society- because it has thoroughly infiltrated and colonizied that society to such an extent that being born into that society is enough.
What’s the difference between a cult and a religion?
About 100 years.
Community.
They’re all groups of people with some kind of shared purpose or values. Cults are harmful and power based. Communities are helpful and consent-based. Religions can fall either way, or somewhere in the middle.
This or “support group”. Community implies those already around you. Something like AA would fit the bill for something that is similar to religion or a cult but positive and affirmative.
Support groups for sure, but I was more thinking of things like sporting clubs, dog parks, skate parks, artistic communities, soup kitchens, men’s sheds, book clubs. Third spaces.
Anything where participation is voluntary, hierarchy is absent or minimal, and people come together to share interests, resources, time, or company.
Any group can become a cult, because cults are systems of control. Loosely organized groups are going to have a harder time becoming one, but sporting club which probably have rules and hierarchies, a soup kitchen is probably a nonprofit so would need rules and leaders. Artistic communities may have rules to use the space. Any group can become authoritarian if they get structured enough.
Rules and leaders don’t have to be harmful or coercive though. Even very egalitarian communities need norms. Hell even an anarchosyndicalist commune will have some shared set of expectations of its members.
Like you said, cults are about control. I have a hard time seeing much of a parallel between the necessary structure and norms of a community or club, and the coercive nature of a cult.
“Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Rules and leaders are needed, but they always have the chance of being misused. That why checks and balances are always needed.
You have the normal rules and norms, but what if you take them to an absurd level. Let’s say your in a Club. It has a rule that only members allowed and every member has to dress nice and be clean and presentable at all times inside. Well one member falls into the food table, getting food all over them and breaking their leg. Does the manager of the Club demand the person who fell get up and leave immediately? After all they are no longer clean and presentable. Well a reasonable Club would care more about having the person not move and getting emergency services in there. A cult would demand they get up and leave. The emergency personnel wouldn’t be allowed inside anyway since they are not members.
I see the parallel because I see cults as normal behaviors taken to the extreme.
AA could be a cult. Synanon which was a drug rehab organization became a cult. A lot of cults start out as positive and affirmative groups.
Everything doesn’t have to have an opposite, you know.
Cults and religion are the same. The only thing that differentiate them is time. If you have a systematic set of illogical beliefs that have been around for a few years or decades or even just one lifetime, it’s more likely to be called a cult. Give that group a lot more time and it will be called a religion.
As for your question … I don’t think it’s anything the opposite of religion / cult but rather which belief system. I think as humans, we will always come up with some sort of belief system because we will always want to. We’re just wired that way.
And to me the best belief system is one where we value one another no matter what, who, where, why or how. That includes honoring, respecting even those who don’t believe what you do. A belief system where we honor all life, human, animal and organic. A belief system where we do our best not to harm one another or any life around us.
If we could that, then following a religion wouldn’t be so bad because the belief system would be used to actually benefit all life.
Your scale is off there… it should probably be more like:
cult(-100)...religion(-80).................atheism(0).................?'A group of people that is very serious about what they believe in, no matter how illogical it is.
It’s pretty easy to invert that statement: a group of people that is very unserious about what they believe in? That would be folks like DIscordians, the Church of the SubGenius, Pastafarians, etc.
Logic.
A cult is basically just a religion that is not large or old enough to force people to take it seriously. It just so happens that small, new religions are also extremely volatile and unstable and prone to extremely stupid decisions
Science
Science club!
The opposite of an oppressing group believing in farytales is atheism. It’s weird there’s a name for not believing bullshit, but there it is. Every religion is a cult, they are just of different scales.
Normal society
Defining characteristics of a cult: inside information and ritual, seperation from others and non believers, words and speech that are internalized and often only understood by cult members, heiradchy - often to one person or small group, loss of self, loss of independence, removal of physical items or required clothing, and generally there is an eventuality that those in power will begin abuse that is often sexual.
Now, the actual beliefs have nothing to do with it. Where a religion ranks in the scheme is debatable.
