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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3193 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 15, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Does anyone see red flags or signs of a cult?

The answer is moo as far as I'm concerned. A religion is just a cult with social standing. It's a very arbitrary distinction.

Do you think this church would provide many of the same benefits as a traditional church?

It would certainly be more interesting

Do you have any other information or thoughts about this church?

Well:

In Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, the Supreme Court heard arguments on 1 November 2005, and unanimously ruled in February 2006 that the U.S. federal government must allow the Brazil-based União do Vegetal (UDV) church to import and consume ayahuasca for religious ceremonies under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In September 2008, the three Santo Daime churches filed suit in federal court to gain legal status to import DMT-containing ayahuasca tea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_ayahuasca_by_country

So there's certainly precedent.

A religion is a cult with a track record, which is way more useful than social standing. Mass movements that turn into disasters over a decade or more are a dime a dozen; only if a movement has been around for several decades already do you have enough data to guess what disasters it's probably vulnerable to.

"Several decades" would mean that $cientology, Hare Krishnas, and arguably Moonies have made the transition from "cult" to "religion" by now. Certainly in the UK, the anti-cult crowd think that Scientology and Moonies are the most dangerous religious cults.

Yes, and perhaps.

The point of several decades of data isn't that the group definitely isn't going to be an ongoing disaster, it's that there's been time for the disasters to be ongoing rather than sudden. If you joined Scientology in 1960 and couldn't stay on their good side, you might have been quite unpleasantly surprised by what was to follow. I'm told the Readers' Digest exposes in the 1980s were quite brave. But by 1995 or so, if you weren't a kid dragged in by parents, joining Scientology was kinda on you.

Whereas, these guys? They might be perfectly fine. But even if they're not showing the classic "cult warning signs" now, who knows what might be going on after a couple decades of social churn and personal change? Cult leaders have gone downhill on that time scale even if they weren't using psychoactive drugs from the start. Lots of people thought Jim Jones seemed like a decent guy for a long time before the eventual paranoid spiral and the mass murder-suicide.

Mass movements that turn into disasters over a decade or more are a dime a dozen

I suspect that the ratio of "cults" doing something so odious that they become newsworthy to the actual number popularly accepted as cults isn't particularly significant.

It's not like established religions don't get up to shenanigans, while having more clout to enact their will.

In something like the example provided by OP, I strongly suspect that if they ever get rapped, it'll be because of something like the founder being a sex pest or coercing people into taking drugs. They're not about to launch the next intifada.

Not that I think anyone should join a religion or cult in the first place.

the founder being a sex pest or coercing people into taking drugs.

This is way more common than basically rolling your own violently-rebellious religion.

As for religion...it binds people together and is valuable; I've even heard that every religion creates a society in its image.

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