Religion or Cult?

[GeoffP]

Nasor is correct and underscores the issue: cult is a pejorative, nothing more. A difference of degree at best. How can you really differentiate it from a religion unless you actually do? What if ten or twenty million East Korean peasants consider me a god? How do we know they're really wrong? What's the difference? Religion is malleable, so even if I died, it wouldn't matter.

 

[Jan Ardena]

Fraggle Rocker,

Scripture" means "sacred writing," and most religions arose long before the technology of writing was invented, so that can't be true.

That is irrelevant. The object of scripture is God, and in this day and age, religion is based on scripture. If it is not so based, it is a cult.

For example, the Cargo Cult, the Jonestown Cult. (How many people even at the time knew its proper name was "the People's Temple"?)

Jones wanted to be worshiped like God. That is a materialist ideal, ultimate sense gratification. He may have used scripture to sway people, the same way Dr Harold Shipman used his medical knowledge to sway people, but neither intention was deserving of the trust people put in them.

So the question remains: What differentiates a religion from a religious cult? The consensus answer on this thread seems to be the correct one: A religious cult is a religious belief system that markedly differs from its neighboring systems, usually in ways that the general population finds bizarre or downright objectionable, and a religion is a religious cult that has long survived the death of its founder and has usually either shed most of its bizarre and objectionable qualities or has been remarkably successful in evangelizing them.

Either you don't understand what religion means, or you are basing your definition on the "official" dictionaries, which strangely enough with each new edition, fades "God" out of the picture.
I wonder why that is?

Religion ultimately means worship of God in order to become liberated from material existence. This is absolutely the point of all scriptures, and of scriptoral based religions. Anything else may be regarded as "religion", but falls short of the point.

jan

 

[S.A.M.]

Nasor is correct and underscores the issue: cult is a pejorative, nothing more. A difference of degree at best. How can you really differentiate it from a religion unless you actually do?

Does it matter? Its all subjective after all, I've decided it really does not matter. After all, people find kaffir pejorative or heathen when really its no different than saying infidel or atheist.

 

[GeoffP]

I suppose it depends on common usage and intent. After all, there are people about who use the unfortunate word "niggardly". While protesting vehemently that this is not what the word is about, it still carries that stigma and ought to be avoided - like kaffir - by tolerant, clear-headed people.

 

[S.A.M.]

Hmm so much for the "right to offend"

 

[GeoffP]

Well it depends how one is offending. By criticism of ideas? Of course. By discriminatory slurs? Certainly not.

 

[S.A.M.]

Bastardising someone else's language?

 

[GeoffP]

It's hardly bastardy to learn the meaning of someone else's term for people they despise, is it?

 

[S.A.M.]

Despise? You despise atheists/theists [depending on which boat is floating your motion]?

 

[GeoffP]

?? Actually I despite neither. What are you talking about?

 

[S.A.M.]

Exactly. White South African colonialists using it as an ETHNIC slur is their racist problem.

The original meaning of the word was 'heathen', unbeliever or infidel, from the Arabic Kafir.[1] Portuguese explorers used the term generally to describe tribes they encountered in southern Africa, probably having misunderstood its etymology from Muslim traders along the coast. European colonists subsequently continued its use.[2] Although used often inoffensively between the 16th and 19th centuries, as racial tensions increased in 20th century South Africa, its use became more racially slanderous than just a general word to describe a race of people.

The term was mostly used in South Africa, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia.

See? Nothing to do with us.

 

[Red Devil]

Religion is a belief, a cult is a fixation.

 

[GeoffP]

Exactly. White South African colonialists using it as an ETHNIC slur is their racist problem.

...yeeeessss...

See? Nothing to do with us.

Oh, well that explains this then.

But the spiritual founder of the GIYC, Sheik Feiz Mohammad, once had very different plans for the children of Islam.

He was exposed in January last year as having told his followers in one of his many video lectures: "Today many parents, they prevent their children from attending lessons. Why? They fear that they might create a place in their hearts, the love, just a bit of the love, of sacrificing their lives for Allah.

"We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this: there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid (holy warrior). Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom."

He also said: "(Kaffir (non-Muslim)) is the worst word ever written, a sign of infidelity, disbelief, filth, a sign of dirt" and laughed about killing Jews like pigs.

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24777133-5001021,00.html?from=public_rss

And this, even. Huh.

“In South Africa, because of apartheid, all different communities were set up and it worked well. It kept people separate. We can be together in terms of our contribution to the wider community.”

http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=77&ContentID=113035

 

[Hapsburg]

"Cult" is properly and neutrally defined as a particular set of religious disciplines following a certain rubric of practices. It has no negative connotations when talking in an anthropological and sociological context, though the term "New Religious Movement" is beginning to come into use since the term "cult" does have negative connotation in common parlance.

A "religion" in a sociological and anthropological sense can have many definitions. A simple definition is that a it is a set of guiding principles or a set way of living. Sociology and Anthropology have different definitions and ways of analysing religion as an element of society and culture.
However, with the growth of individualism in the past century and a half regarding religious beliefs, the older definitions, especially sociological definitions of religion, can be seen as constrained and very limited. Mainly because sociology looks at religion as a structured, organized continuum in society, not exactly as a personal belief system.