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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An individual who thinks and acts rationally and who doesn’t try to manipulate others.
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.
Normal society
an atheistic commune
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.
Freedom.
