The Virtual Gigolo

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional “next world” is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.
- Richard Dawkins

Once promoted to Kernel Panic it’s a short step to General Disaster

I don’t ask this question with regard to any specific religion, rather I am questioning the use of the terms. It seems that cults are not accepted and religions are… I might not be able to act within the recommendations of a given cult, say, at work (taking breaks when my cult requires) but with a religion I would tend to be able to. So where do we draw the line between the two? Why is Satanism generally thought of as a cult and not a religion – while really there is little distinction between it and Christianity to a non-believer.

It seems that the generally accepted principle in society is that the use of the term cult has negative connotations. We talk about cults as bad things, but religions are perfectly good entities.

One suggestion might be that cult implies a degree of control, whereas religion is simply a description of belief. In that case though wouldn’t most Evangelical Christianity be defined as cults, Catholicism to a certain extent and almost certainly all but the most lenient treatings of Islam.

It does seem that the term cult is one used to attempt to distinguish religions we don’t like, from those that are large enough that we have to like for fear of being accused of discrimination. We can hold back a small cult, we can say it’s not important enough to have to consider in our laws… and discriminating against a small enough group of people has always been socially acceptable; but a religion we must accept, take steps to relax discrimination laws with respect to and generally treat as a reasonable entity. Cults are bad things or, worse, false things; we can’t have people believing in something we consider to be false, can we…