They aren’t open to medicine. Also most adult men have cell phones and hide them.
Every Individual in their community I’ve met has been super nice, but it’s still a cult and they still do fucked up shit.
EDIT: looked it up instead of going off my experience alone. They aren’t categorically anti-medicine as part of their beliefs, but generally don’t go to doctors unless it’s dire.
To be fair, every christianity is a cult. And most religions are divided into various cults. Cults are the local unit of any religion. In ancient Greece, each city would have a cult dedicated to its patron god, and maybe a few cults to other deities if it’s a big city. These days, we’ve got the methodists, pentecostals, orthodox, baptists, lutherans… People always have and always will organise their religion into cults. Larger groups just have weaker cohesion than smaller groups, so people want to be in a smaller group of some kind.
Broke: “I’m a prescriptivist, and I think the best language is what I learned in school as a child”
Woke: “I’m a descriptivist, and I think anything goes, I’ll respect anything that I can understand”
Bespoke: “I’m a prescriptivist, and I think we should be engineering new language to shift our culture in alignment with our ethical values”
When you’re looking at the validity of a linguistic shift, I don’t think it behooves us to uncritically accept whatever the current culture is. That’s centrism and it makes us weak to fascist manipulation of our language. Which is exactly what the Christians did to the word “cult”.
The Christians noticed that other religions are more likely to use the word “cult” than they are, because the word has a stronger history in paganism, and because these other religions didn’t have big connective organisations like the Vatican. So the Christians created a link between cults, Satanism, and religious abuse. And to be fair, there was a lot of religious abuse happening at the time. Still is. And most of it is Christian. But mainstream scientists could be fooled into thinking pagan religious abuse is somehow different from Christian religious abuse, and thus creating a field of study around so-called “cultic” abuse. And that legitimisation of the Satanic Panic, via epistemic vandalism of mainstream science, is why people think cult means abuse.
I’m a pagan, and lately I’ve been hanging out with some Christians and taking mental notes. They’ve got love bombing. They pressure members to give testimony about how Jesus helped them. They encourage people to give them money, so they can go set up missions in Africa. They use music and AI generated sermons to hype people up on endorphins so they become malleable. They induce seizure-like states as a form of religious experience. I see what the people in charge are doing to them. So no, I’m not going to buy any Satanic Panic propaganda that cults are uniquely pagan and inherently abusive. This shit is epidemic and systemic.
We need to fight back against these powerful and bigoted organisations changing our very means of communication to indoctrinate us.
There is no validity to linguistic shifts. The definitions of words exist as people use them, there is no objectively true way that they are “supposed” to be.
Certainly not any objective truth to language. Just subjective truths. It’s subjectively true that I think the shift in the word cult harms religious diversity. It’s subjectively true that I value diversity. It’s subjectively true that I think the Christian abuse of our language is bigoted and small-minded. It’s subjectively true that I think language should improve society, not make it worse.
Some individuals being hypocrites doesn’t invalidate their way of life. I admittedly don’t know much about them but I remember watching a documentary where the teen members of the community explore the outside world.
One girl comments on the public school education system that the students were focused on passing exams and not on actually learning anything. Always stuck with me.
I would be hesitant to call them a cult, since there seems to be a diverse range of communities and practices. Maga is a cult.
They aren’t open to medicine. Also most adult men have cell phones and hide them.
Every Individual in their community I’ve met has been super nice, but it’s still a cult and they still do fucked up shit.
EDIT: looked it up instead of going off my experience alone. They aren’t categorically anti-medicine as part of their beliefs, but generally don’t go to doctors unless it’s dire.
To be fair, every christianity is a cult. And most religions are divided into various cults. Cults are the local unit of any religion. In ancient Greece, each city would have a cult dedicated to its patron god, and maybe a few cults to other deities if it’s a big city. These days, we’ve got the methodists, pentecostals, orthodox, baptists, lutherans… People always have and always will organise their religion into cults. Larger groups just have weaker cohesion than smaller groups, so people want to be in a smaller group of some kind.
Does seem remotely related to what was said.
Regardless of its etymology, that is not how the word “cult” is used today.
Broke: “I’m a prescriptivist, and I think the best language is what I learned in school as a child”
Woke: “I’m a descriptivist, and I think anything goes, I’ll respect anything that I can understand”
Bespoke: “I’m a prescriptivist, and I think we should be engineering new language to shift our culture in alignment with our ethical values”
When you’re looking at the validity of a linguistic shift, I don’t think it behooves us to uncritically accept whatever the current culture is. That’s centrism and it makes us weak to fascist manipulation of our language. Which is exactly what the Christians did to the word “cult”.
The Christians noticed that other religions are more likely to use the word “cult” than they are, because the word has a stronger history in paganism, and because these other religions didn’t have big connective organisations like the Vatican. So the Christians created a link between cults, Satanism, and religious abuse. And to be fair, there was a lot of religious abuse happening at the time. Still is. And most of it is Christian. But mainstream scientists could be fooled into thinking pagan religious abuse is somehow different from Christian religious abuse, and thus creating a field of study around so-called “cultic” abuse. And that legitimisation of the Satanic Panic, via epistemic vandalism of mainstream science, is why people think cult means abuse.
I’m a pagan, and lately I’ve been hanging out with some Christians and taking mental notes. They’ve got love bombing. They pressure members to give testimony about how Jesus helped them. They encourage people to give them money, so they can go set up missions in Africa. They use music and AI generated sermons to hype people up on endorphins so they become malleable. They induce seizure-like states as a form of religious experience. I see what the people in charge are doing to them. So no, I’m not going to buy any Satanic Panic propaganda that cults are uniquely pagan and inherently abusive. This shit is epidemic and systemic.
We need to fight back against these powerful and bigoted organisations changing our very means of communication to indoctrinate us.
There is no validity to linguistic shifts. The definitions of words exist as people use them, there is no objectively true way that they are “supposed” to be.
Certainly not any objective truth to language. Just subjective truths. It’s subjectively true that I think the shift in the word cult harms religious diversity. It’s subjectively true that I value diversity. It’s subjectively true that I think the Christian abuse of our language is bigoted and small-minded. It’s subjectively true that I think language should improve society, not make it worse.
Some individuals being hypocrites doesn’t invalidate their way of life. I admittedly don’t know much about them but I remember watching a documentary where the teen members of the community explore the outside world.
One girl comments on the public school education system that the students were focused on passing exams and not on actually learning anything. Always stuck with me.
I would be hesitant to call them a cult, since there seems to be a diverse range of communities and practices. Maga is a cult.