Religion and Cults

I'm making this post in the vain thought that any of you really care about my opinions. Or, I suppose, in response to another post here by T. B. regarding the recent raids on the Texas enclave. His point, if I may, is that we should not classify religious sects as a 'cults'.

I'll repost the comment here:

1) What constitutes "seedy?" Is believing in that bread transfigures into human flesh seedy? Is believing that premaritally released semen is unpure seedy? If so, we can call some very large organizations seedy. Likewise, is the Catholic church seedy because some of its official representatives broke the law? What about the number of worshippers of various religions that break laws?

2) Should the Baha'is of Iran be raided because their religion is illegal to adhere to under that government? Who is to say which government's laws appropriately deal with religious institutions if neither government acknowledges a higher, international law?

I really don't know and I still stand by the idea that calling them "seedy" or "cults" does not help us understand or appropriately deal with them.

I feel as if using the word 'cult' in a non-technical sense without a definition is playing politics with a word. Were we to throw out the word 'cult', how would we classify religious organizations with dangerous, or anti-social, or criminal intentions? I don't think you're arguing that the word cult is too politicized, but rather, that we should judge no religious organization.

To which I say, we shouldn't judge religions, but organizations and institutions are fair game. That is the rational basis of society.

Let me give an example. Say we have a number of laws - and for a good reason. The good of the public, the prevention of unnecessary risk, et cetera. Say an organization works against those laws, or encourages its members to flout those laws, or breaks those laws itself. That organization is then breaking the law. If the group itself is religious in nature, it is, in my mind, a cult. Perhaps one additional qualification would be ease of exit from the organization and control of ideas and speech (manifested by separation from society at large).

So, the base assumption is, if an organization is flouting the laws of the land(assuming the laws are just), the executive has the duty to enforce the laws. Now, perhaps the Branch Davidians example shows an inappropriate executive response. So be it. I concur.

Were the Branch Davidians a cult? Yes. Is Mormonism a cult? No. Is the Fundamentalist Church a cult? If the allegations are true, yes. It has the trappings of a cult. If it walks, talks, and looks like a duck ... well, you get the picture.

I understand your point that the rhetoric of cults has no place in the American religious discourse. I respectfully disagree. I feel as if it is a useful term we can use to describe these organizations. It's not hyperbole when these organizations really are dangerous.

On to your specific points:
1. Seedy beliefs are different from seedy organizations. If an individual in an organization breaks the law, it then depends on the spread. If a group of individuals break the law, then we have a bigger problem. If the organization is based on charismatic religious leadership and illegal activity, then it is a cult.

2. Now, ideas should not be illegal; organizations should be. And we should have discretion over the use of the word. If some nation decides that Baha'i is a cult, then they are wrong. So I think the misuse of words shouldn't preclude the use of the word.

Sure, "cult" has baggage; but as a descriptive term, it's second to none. Now, we should provide evidence as to why a religious organization is a cult.

And my question for you - was Heaven's Gate a cult? Is Scientology a cult?

Maybe I'm looking at this from a legalistic perspective, but that perspective matters. The religious one can sort itself out if we lay our hands off of people's practices and NRM's and target only lawbreaking cults.

Remember Ted Haggard?

I wonder if anyone has seen this:


It's Richard Dawkins v. Ted Haggard in a fight over evolution. Hilarious. What do people in the scientific community think of people like Ted Haggard? Or, for that matter, Richard Dawkins? Are science and religion mutually exclusive?

--And I've already broken my "new" rules - quality over quantity, form with my function, etc. C'est la vie.

new features: rss feed, tag cloud

There are a few cool new features on our blog today.

First, I've added my 'starred' feed from Google Reader. You can now see my most recently starred items. I'll try to only star 5 a day so you can see what I think is cool without having to subscribe the feed.

Adding an RSS feed is pretty straightforward in Blogger. Just add the RSS element and copy the RSS link from your google reader.

Second, I added a Tag Cloud that displays labels from our blog (From Phydeaux). It's pretty handy and in the future will probably be a better representation of my interests than my del.icio.us tagcloud. Del.icio.us has some cool stuff on it but most of my content is - well - lame. Lamer, at least, than LOTR jokes.


I've been reading A.J. Jacob's The Year of Living Biblically. It's quite good and very 'bloggy'. It's written in a diary-esque fashion. It's funny and-at times- moving, but I think he tried to take too much meaning from his experiences. The moral at the end of the story is something we, American consumers, derive way too much pleasure from. I think his documentary style almost requires it. In the vein of Morgan Spurlock, he undertakes some major change in habit for a period of time and document it. His previous book was about reading every article in the encyclopedia.

The religious idea, to live biblically for an entire year, following the commands of the bible with a literalism interpretation, is quite novel and fascinating. Americans are changing religions more and more frequently. We're entering a period where religious enlightenment is not attained through depth, but through breadth. Jacobs explores the depth of the religious movement in this country, but he does it in an individual way (which he acknowledges the limitations of). Unfortunately, it's the group experience which really interests social scientists. The few candid portraits he paints of group experiences - Hasidic Jews in New York having a drunken Crown Heights bash, for instance - are fascinating.

It is a good, interesting book but it definitely could have delved a little deeper and taken a step out of being a memoir. While that style definitely makes for a good read, it sometimes lacks in the subject's content and favors the individual experience.


I've been thinking about my multimedia project for class. I thought of two viable ideas and one completely non-viable idea. I'll try to describe each in a short little blurb, and maybe expand on the two viable ideas before I decide on which to do.

Viable Ideas:
1. Create a flash-based timeline of a historic cultural or political event. I would incorporate video (from youtube, slideshows, etc), audio (music, noise, speech), and static content (pictures, text). It would involve a lot of borrowing (Especially if the content was already collected at some source in another format) and a lot of creation, but it could end up being really cool. Imagine a self-scrollable timeline with shifting colors, content, etc. The form could change as you moved along it to match the event.

2. Economoic / Political Youtube videos. I would create videos describing basic or current political or economic concepts, such as Superdelegates, the subprime lending crisis, etc. The videos would be stylistically similar to the Commoncraft "Explanations in Plain English" videos. Mallory even gave me an idea for a style and a name. I could call it Candycraft or something similar; and use candy to describe basic items. For instance, I could use different colored jellybeans to represent trade goods. I might come up with another, more interesting theme / style; but we'll see.

Non-Viable Idea:
This is more my own little imagination running rampant. I would create a python script with two inputs - two Wikipedia pages. The script would then crawl the pages, collect links, and then piece them together to make a sort of visio-venn diagram/ flow chart (Here, clearly, the "Sort Of" denotes how much work this idea would require to get anywhere). It's like Kevin Bacon meets Wikipedia meets Visio.
Unfortunately, my Python skills aren't all that hot and I'm not sure this would even produce an interesting result. C'est la vie. Sometimes I regret not going into Computer Science. Then I remember how frustrating that can really be.