Philosophy debate club with no membership
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
65 points (94.5% liked)
Ask Lemmy
32527 readers
2382 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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 🤣
Religion and cult is basically the same thing with different connotative subtext.
The only difference between religions and cults is the size.
And age!
The only difference is the person using the word.
The difference is the likelihood any given person overhearing could be offended.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
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.
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.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Not everything has an opposite. That is a trap of binary thinking.
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.
load more comments
(11 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
Everything doesn't have to have an opposite, you know.
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.
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
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.
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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
Ska band?
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)
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›