What is an opposite version of a cult ?
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.
Sounds like a cushy gig 🤣
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.
The only difference is the person using the word.
The difference is the likelihood any given person overhearing could be offended.
Depending on whether offense is intended.
In practice it doesn't matter
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.
https://youtu.be/cxl_wPfVCTE
On religion vs cult? I can expand as a religious studies scholar
Yes please
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.
I know what you mean, but this is a fun exercise. The opposite of a Rat King clearly is a Cat Peasant. The opposite of an ant mill is trickier, there is no such machine that recomposes flour to make whole grains again, reversing the milling process, but the next similar thing would be making bread, so I pick Thermite Bakery.
If cults need to protect their members and beliefs from society and laws to survive, and with religions both support each other, then the opposite of an cult would be a society that needs to protect their members and laws from beliefs, taking drastic measures to separate their members from said beliefs. I guess some sort of atheistic authoritarian state would be the opposite, on your scale. So, North Korea? It doesn't feel quite right because those authoritarian states depend on a cult of personality. Maybe some technocratic AI state? I don't know if there is something simpler I'm missing.
The other way of thing it would be, the beliefs organization growing bigger and shallowing the society in that third stage, so people need to protect themselves from the big theocratic apparatus, taking drastic measures to restrict their members and separate them from the big theocracy, living in communities, farming and reading philosophy and cultivating science, educating each other? This is somewhat similar to the setting in V for Vendetta. Also reminds me of what people do in some places dominated by Islamic theocracy, a very cult like way of gathering in secret at houses, sharing banned books, and literally risking their lives for even discussing such things at their homes.
But I agree with you, OP needs to define better the difference perceived between cults and religions, so we can extrapolate a better answer.
What's the difference between a cult and a religion?
About 100 years.
Based on maga, I would say 8 years.
Not everything has an opposite. That is a trap of binary thinking.
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.
Atheism.
Technically speaking, all religions are cults. The definition of "cult" is just an organized practice of religion.
Some atheists treat atheism itself as a cult. I’d go one step further. My choice is Agnosticism.
I’m happy to say I don’t know. Maybe we are all on the back of a giant turtle. If the turtle was big enough, we wouldn’t be able to tell. It’s all good.
Some, sure. Most, no.
Atheism is simply the state of nonbelief in a deity. It requires no declaration nor even conscious thought. I don’t believe in leprechauns, but I don’t belong to an anti-leprechaun cult.
e: you’re likely atheist about Ra, Thor, Sheba, and Quetzalcoatl, right? Most atheists feel the same about Yahweh, and aren’t likely to bring it up unless you do. Most will even hold out for dozens or hundreds of times. Many Christians seem oblivious to how often they reference their religion in casual conversation. Often, Atheists only have to say it once.
Atheism isn't really a community either. The atheism community is more people who lack a belief in a god who banded together in various areas to protect themselves and others against having religious things forced onto them. Now an atheist group could turn into a cult because once you have a group systems of control can take over and it could turn into an authoritarian group.
Atheism is a spectrum too. At one end you have small-a atheists who would believe in a deity if presented with compelling proof. At the other end you have people with a fervent belief in no deities who would not be persuaded by evidence.
I think you’ll find vanishingly few even fervent atheists who wouldn’t be persuaded by actual evidence. I know some percentage of fervent atheists would say if real evidence of a god were presented, they wouldn’t follow it because it’s a monster (I’m in this camp), but I don’t believe any real percentage would stick their fingers in their ears and say lalalala. That’s kind of the opposite of what atheism is about. It’s literally about evidence.
Maybe I'm being nitpick-y, but I think you're pointing at one small part of the whole and saying "that's it, right there. All of it". Atheism is literally about what you don't do - believe in any god. Some atheists come to that point through consideration and self-reflection. Others don't.
You’re right, and that’s fair. I guess I was talking about general atheists in one breath, then the specific vocal atheists OP seemed to be talking about in another.
I shouldn’t generalise like that. Atheism is simply the lack of belief in a god – any god. And there are many gods. You can be atheistic about any of them.
What you are referring to, is people who are called atheists, not atheism itself.
Atheism is indeed just a simple definition. If anyone does not believe in any deity, they are atheists, whether they want to or not.
It's as simple as something being a spoon.
Now, those atheists come in various degrees. That's what you keep referring to. That is about a measure of intensity.
Some atheists are not even aware they are. Others are proud to be and will declare so, in various degrees.
Just wanted to clear that detail up.
Lotta downvotes in this thread. Seems like some of you feel like I'm disrespecting your non-beliefs. 😜
Proof of a powerful entity is just proof of something we haven't seen before. If it can be observed directly or indirectly it becomes something that exists, which is why nothing is supernatural.
The concept of a deity can't exist alongside proof, as they are no longer a deity.
I'm an atheist as far as real life goes but absolutely love deities and the supernatural in fiction/role playing games like D&D, media, etc.
Newly minted atheists are like new linux users. Once they've broken their chains, they're often quite loud and obnoxious about it.
You can’t really blame people who were raised in religious environments and have newly discovered intellectual freedom, though, right? Sure, they can be obnoxious sometimes, just like we all are when we learn a new thing that’s blown our minds. They’ll grow out of it, and we should have patience, like in all things.
That’s the “some” I had in mind, and you’re right.
Same here... but I guess I could also be considered atheist in some ways. It really depends on what your definition of a god is. Maybe we are in a simulation created by something else, but if we were manufactured it seems more likely the creator was as imperfect as we are.
Like a spark of flame, barley a second in time is our whole being, infinite bigness, infinite smallness, aka parallel universes
I'd go one step further to gnosticism.
Cult = listen to my communications with God
Religion = let's all get together and approximate communication with God
Gnosticism = communicate with God.
It's all terminology and labels.
Do you belong to a theology? No? Then you're an atheist. But that label has a stigma, so some opt for a different label.
Are you gnostic? No? Then you're agnostic. No one talks about gnosticism out of religeon or philosophy, so they know what you mean. But the subjects of gnosticism and theism are two different things.
But it also feels oversimplified when I put it that way, since these things a less black and white and fall more on a spectrum.
That said, do you play golf? No? Then you may also be an a-golfer, an a-tee-ist.
Which label you chose may be based on how much the stigma bothers you or how much of a troll you are.
The definition of cult is not an organized practice of religion.
This is a r/atheism edge lord response.
Maybe you should try picking up a fucking dictionary.
Merriam Webster:
a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious
great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (such as a film or book)
system of religious beliefs and ritual also its body of adherents
OP clearly didn’t mean definition three nor does the average person. Your aggressive response is childish. Maybe grow up?
When the major religions start practicing what they actually preach, then maybe they wouldn't also fall into the first definition. What many do is both unorthodox and spurious.
Everything doesn't have to have an opposite, you know.
Your scale is off there.. it should probably be more like:
cult(-100)...religion(-80).................atheism(0).................?'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.
A cult is simply a religion that's too small to have sects and too young to have legitimacy.
When people started worshiping a guy nailed to a torture device and said he was God, the Romans thought they were lunatics, because that's genuinely unsettling. The eating his body thing doesn't help either. It's just that the Christians won.
Logic.
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.
Science
Science club!
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
Your scale is off. Religions and cults are the same thing. The only difference is how accepting society is of them. There is no third option.
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.
Intellectual freedom, with an appreciation of philosophy and scientific inquiry.
Cult is just what the big congregation calls the small congregation
Philosophy?
I think this is closest to correct. If the metric is that cult members are kind of duped to go along with group think and philosophy is the practice of questioning belief and thought processes.
That positions philosophy as the meta-analysis end of the scale and cults as the automatic.
A philosophy group could turn into a cult. A lot of cults start out as going against whatever everyone else is doing/thinking.
My friendship.
It's full of love, support, and it's free.
An individual who thinks and acts rationally and who doesn't try to manipulate others.
Freedom.
The key difference between religions and cults, is the level of restrictions on outside information.
On that scale cults are at one end, religion in the middle, and science at the other end.
I don't like to see science presented as a belief system. Science is a tool for establishing fact about the natural world in a methodical and reproducible way. For debating the existence of gods, you need philosophy.
Eeehhh, unless you read every paper ever, you are kinda trusting the process like a black box in most cases, aka, believing. The most papers you have read in your lifetime, the less true that statement is. There is also a whole section of philosophy about this topic.
I agree. Science is a tool, people don't believe in science. You use science. You don't believe in gravity you accept it and our current understanding of it. Which may change as our tools to measure and understand our environment get better.
That's partly true.
Religion was the original way to explain the natural world.
Eventually, religion led philosophy, which in turn led to science.
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.
At the far end of the spectrum, with no judging and only help, is a food bank.
Normal society
Ska band?
A community in which everyone has equal power and acts in solidarity with one another
First and foremost, not all cults are negative. From that point we can have the scale be cult specific.
Negative Cult(-1) - Benign Cult (0) - Positive Cult (+1)
The opposite I would assume would be non spiritual groups of people who connect in another way outside of something "spiritual", without a set standard for beliefs provided by a singular leader required to be member to the group.
Negative Group(-1) - Benign Group (0) - Positive Group(+1)
Ok, I'll bite. Can you give me your definition of a cult? And then a positive and a negative example?
A cult is a group of people with extreme devotion to a person, place, object or idea.
Negative: The Peoples Temple
Positive: The Satanic Temple
ITT: no cult scholars. I am not one either.
I watch a lot of Knitting Cult Lady's content and I've read her book. From that I have a pretty good idea of what a cult is, which is an extreme form of group.
So I guess the opposite of a cult would be a solitary individual.
One point I keep seeing in these comments is religion. Religion isn't a cult, it's an idea. That ideology can be used by cults, but the idea itself isn't a cult. You can believe the idea all by yourself you don't HAVE to be part of the group.
Yes [insert religious group you're thinking of] is probably a cult. But it isn't one because of the idea, it's one because of controlling behavior and exploited labor and a bunch of other reasons.
I think of cults as more of systems of control. MLMs, jobs (Theranos), large-group awareness training (nxivm), political groups (Maga), exercise groups (CrossFit), fandoms, book clubs, families, online groups, etc can all be cults.
I suggest the podcast IndoctriNation by Rachel Bernstein to see many ways these "systems of control" as she calls them can manifest.
I personally think that cult behavior is just normal behavior taken to the extreme so there really isn't an opposite. Maybe being alone with no relationships.
The various types of groups we are on family, friends, work, recreational, etc have various controls on how you act and speak. This isn't necessarily bad. You probably want to be a little different with family than with your hobby group. I explained the broader meaning of cults to my Dad and he said the Marines have those aspects. I think an important part to know if a group is probably fine is if you can leave with no issues. If there are consequences to leaving the group that's a huge red flag.
I suggest looking at the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control. Which is a useful tool to check if a group is a cult. You can read up on problems with this tool, but it's still a good starting point.
Edit: No one joins a cult. They join groups for positive reasons and then those groups either turn into cults or as they get deeper into the group the control parts are introduced.
We all probably brushed up against cults without knowing. You could go to an exercise/spiritual/hobby/other group and what you don't know is if you had gotten more involved and took the special classes, or volunteered and became a part of the in group you could have become a part of a cult.
Philosophy or science?
Bowling league
I don't think this is smth that is to be put on a scale.
You can force the matter by choosing a narrative.
I mean you could argue for self deification, science, totalitarianism. Anything could be forced to make sense.
Now from your angle, where a groups beliefs offer predominantly positive benefits, eco restoration groups, foss folks, creative commons collective etc.
Belief , like the traditional cult of the ancestors in China, where you have no "priest" or "guru", it is just a bunch of people relying on elders to mimick the rituals, but in fact nobody remember it well, it is all disorganized, and nobody is really checking for "correctness" as much as checking if the commitment is done with intent. So the opposite of having a strong vertical domination by one person (cult) or an organized institution (religion) is a weak control of the rites by anyone (belief)
an atheistic commune
There are different kinds of cults. Cult is a different thing from religion. It doesn't belong on the same axis. But we can continue the thought if we define it as religious cult.
The scale is about excessive binding, control, rituals, restrictions, belief systems. If the left is the extreme, then towards the right we have weaker restrictions upon the belief system. The belief becomes weaker, and the beliefs do not have to restrict other and own people's activities and beliefs.
Religion in the middle makes no sense. It should be the label on the scale. "Religious extremism" or similar. Maybe narrow, restrictive, totalitarian.
I don't know specific terminology for the right side. Maybe open or unrestrictive practice of religion.
Normal lol
book reading club?
A park people go to masturbate and do sex stuff in... Dogging, Cruising, nature baiting.
Club
Fraternal service association, like Elks Club or Rotary Club? They may have traditions, but not a theology. They're nominally harmless, if not beneficial, both to members and to the community at large. They're easy to leave, just stop paying your dues.
actually opposite?
A cult is a thing, the opposite is not a thing. You can't name not a thing.
It's just everyone else doing whatever they want.
You could describe literally all human activity in the entire history of the earth that way, so that's not particularly helpful. :P
12 Step Support groups.
No dues or fees; no full time leaders; you are a member if you say you are and no one can say you aren't.
I expect many downvotes.
Oh good lord no.
Those are almost universally built on religion, and most are very cult-like. If that’s your take on them, I suspect you haven’t had more than a superficial interaction with them.
I've been through a couple of 12step programs. Some are most deff cult like.
So, there were others that weren't?
A couple. By and large though, I've found more that were cultish than weren't. Some are so cultish that the ones they "support" try to avoid them.
There are many definitions of cult. It can be a negative or dangerous religious group. A religious subset focused on a specific practice. Or a group with an eccentric leader focused on claiming they have the correct interpretation of canon.
Knowing you mean the first negative definition, then religion as the standard doesn’t make much sense. The positive of religion would simply be the benefit of religion, which is dependent on whichever religion is being discussed.
For Buddhism it would be spiritual development, enlightenment, and freedom.