what's the difference between a cult and a religion?

[Midnight Pete]

Spelling.

No, it's quantity of stockpiled ammunition.

 

[tomato1236]

It is so fricking cold in here.

 

[logician]

All major religions began as cults, usually a number of them in competition.

 

[Katzpur]

One thing that fairly accurately separates a legitimate religion from a cult is that when the leader of a cult dies, it generally doesn't take all that long for the group to fall apart.

 

[logician]

One thing that fairly accurately separates a legitimate religion from a cult is that when the leader of a cult dies, it generally doesn't take all that long for the group to fall apart.

Define "legitimate".

 

[Revoltingest]

One thing that fairly accurately separates a legitimate religion from a cult is that when the leader of a cult dies, it generally doesn't take all that long for the group to fall apart.

The ones which don't fall apart become religions.

 

[Andywelikandy]

One thing that fairly accurately separates a legitimate religion from a cult is that when the leader of a cult dies, it generally doesn't take all that long for the group to fall apart.

Sorreee...Roman Catholicism is a cult of True Christianity. True Christianity is what the Holy Spirit gave to Saint Paul to proppogate to the world thru' the Holy Bible. The RC cult is still around strong as ever.

 

[McBell]

Sorreee...Roman Catholicism is a cult of True Christianity. True Christianity is what the Holy Spirit gave to Saint Paul to proppogate to the world thru' the Holy Bible. The RC cult is still around strong as ever.

Cult is a word used by people as an insult to those whose beliefs differ from their own.
Why are you throwing around the phrase "True Christian" as though you think it some how justifies your bigotry?

 

[Katzpur]

Sorreee...Roman Catholicism is a cult of True Christianity.

Wow. Spoken like a "true Christian." Jesus said that men would be able to recognize His disciples by the love they showed for one another. I bet He's really proud of you right now.

True Christianity is what the Holy Spirit gave to Saint Paul to proppogate to the world thru' the Holy Bible. The RC cult is still around strong as ever.

And you came up with that definition how? Because it's certainly not from the Bible.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

does anyone know?
is it time and acceptance?

In one sense it is certainly time. Although I've lost contact with many, I used to be friends with or spend a lot of time around (neo)pagans (I use the term inclusively to include Wiccans, Druids, non-Wiccan Witches, Goddess worshippers, and so forth; this doesn't include occult or those who practice ceremonial magic unless such practices are believed by the practitioner to be connected to an ancient religion). I also spent a fair amount of time (both for my secondary major and for personal interest) researching religious practices throughout history. Because I learned first the primary languages and the languages of the specialists of Greek, Hellenistic, and/or Roman religion, I have read more about these religions than others (and I'm ashamed to say I'm relatively ignorant of much in the way of anything but the historical development of most Eastern religions and know next to nothing about religions of peoples indigenous to the Americas). In classical, Near-Eastern, and ancient Mediterranean studies the word "cult" has no negative connotations. One finds everywhere scholarly/academic titles like Ancient Greek Cults by Dr. Larson or The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun by Dr. Beck, references to e.g., "the cults of Cybele and Sabazios" (Bremmer's Greek Religion), "the cults of Phrygian Acmonia" (Bowerstock's Hellenism in Late Antiquity), monograph supplements like the JSOT supplement vol. 43 The Cult of Molek: A Reassessment, and so on. To a certain extent this makes sense, in that religion for most of history and for most people was fundamentally something one did or practiced rather than believed So "cults" in this sense refers to something related to our notion of religion, but much less distinguished as a thing unto itself, much more incorporated into all facets of life, and (again) something one did.

This doesn't explain why we start seeing the use of cult changing in the 1600s & 1700s from a kind of worship to a kind of idolatry, heresy, rustic traditions of the ignorant, etc. (although I think it's fair to say that Christianity caused these changes, but in more than one way and I'm not sufficiently familiar with the history of the word in terms of apologetic & polemic dialogue to offer an explanation). However, it wasn't until the 20th century that “cult” took on the kind of connotations it does today (conjuring up images of mass suicides, notions such as brain washing, incidents such as Waco, etc.).
Of course, scholars from especially the 60s onwards have done what they usually do when a term is introduced or a new sense of it is: they’ve introduced more terms and clouded the meanings of them all. In Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, Jenkins notes in a parenthetical aside that “Frank Zappa once observed that the only difference between a church and a cult is the amount of real estate each owns”.

For some time a lot of the debate has been about differentiating their replacement term for “cults”, i.e., “New Religious Movements” (NRMs), from other terms such as sect, denomination, etc., and also types of NRMs. In Cults and New Religious Movements: A Reader there is a paper by eminent former sociologist Roy Wallis in which he distinguishes 3 types of NRMs. In the first (“world-rejecting religion”) he places together (among other NRMs) Krishna Consciousness and the Manson Family. To me this is a step in the wrong direction.

Others have used the methods by which NRMs are formed in addition to (or in place of) some class of worldview or espoused belief system. For example, to what extent does coercion play a role? How does individual identity become combined with or replaced by identity by role in the NRM? If we look at, for example, the origins of Wicca we see only the faintest hints of the kind of power dynamics typically associated with cults (Gardner’s attempts to retain a certain control over the “official” tradition in the face of an increasingly pissed-off Valiente and competing claims of authenticity, for example, or Aiden Kelley’s polemical Crafting the Art of Magic). And while I wasn’t alive when the first covens began, and the first outsider to gain an insider’s perspective (Tanya Luhrmann doctoral work Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft) was published in 1989, I am think I can safely say that no Wiccan group or coven used the kind of manipulative, authoritarian power-structures, or anything else remotely resembling even those NMRs that are thought to be relatively benign (some of the Mayan Millenarianism groups, for example). Then there’s the Satanic Cults, those baby-stealing, brainwashing, abusive, murderous cultists who…well…never existed. Sure, there were Satanists, but they had nothing to do with the fictions created largely by the media but also e.g., the recovered memory movement mainly in the 80s. The Satanism Scare, an attempt to bring an end to the madness, was published in 1991, but it took time for more scholars, the government, and the courts to look at the complete lack of evidence and longer still for the public to (mostly) regard Satanists with their normal levels of bigotry and ignorance rather than mass hysteria.

As someone who has read and discussed a fair amount on the history of Christianity up to Theodosius, I find it odd that whereas in such contexts I use or find used the term “sect” constantly, in the far less frequent discussions on modern Christianity I have to check myself lest I use “sect” rather than “denomination”.

A lot comes down to perceptions, biases, and numbers. Even if we try to apply the term to those groups thought to use “brain-washing”, violent coercion, etc., we’d still be left with the imaginary Satanist cults of the 80s and stuck trying to distinguish between Satanist NRMs that actually exist vs. the Satanists of fantasy and media-driven hysteria.