Ask Lemmy

Philosophy debate club with no membership

Religion and cult is basically the same thing with different connotative subtext.

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.

Atheism.

Technically speaking, all religions are cults. The definition of "cult" is just an organized practice of religion.

Everything doesn't have to have an opposite, you know.

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.

A cult is just 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 they 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.

Not everything has an opposite. That is a trap of binary thinking.

Science

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

Intellectual freedom, with an appreciation of philosophy and scientific inquiry.

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.

Cult is just what the big congregation calls the small congregation

Philosophy?

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.

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.

A community in which everyone has equal power and acts in solidarity with one another

Normal society

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)

Ska band?

Philosophy or science?