I mean you could do the same thing with the abstract ideas of post-marginal revolution economics and its adherents and get a positive result so the test is obviously wrong.
Honestly, apply it to your political party. I've come to see both parties can be very cultish as of late. If you leave the herd, you are immediately attacked even if it's for the smallest topic. People leave their families over it. When you start to think about it...it's starts to fall a bit into that. I think that is a more compelling argument than saying family itself is a cult, which is at the human core more than a political party.
I got basically a zero score when I did it for my company (except the separation one, which I guess is analogous to quitting) but when I tried my country I got a pretty good score - 8/10
(Edit: To be clear I'm not a member of a political party so I can't try that one.)
That doesn't sound so implausible. Many countries are cult-like and many people, even those who think of themselves as liberal, have a very cult-like nationalism.
I decided to do it for my church, and got zero. I think most companies and countries score higher than that.
Although even for my country I could only honestly give a point for the title. (No idea if it's the king or the prime minister who counts as the leader here, but it's an impressive title. There's plenty of laws, but they don't restrict much on the relational front. Well, there's restrictions on marrying children, and criminal jobs are illegal, so that might be another point.)
A good indication of a cult is that there is a shopping list of specific core beliefs (say 20) you are expected to believe. And you believe 19 of them but on the 20th you have a slightly different view.
If this causes you to be banished and ostracised, then it's probably a cult.
I was in the process of making a longer comment, but I think I will leave it at this one:
Non-Violence or 'Ahmisa' being a core tenant of Buddhism (and many other religions), is the one I would pick as a more apt comparison. I don't think it is reasonable to commit no violence, especially if you consider all life precious - even if you restrict to only humans. Not all people think the same, in fact some people are far more willing to enact violence to reach their goals.
Is protecting yourself and your community not included in the definition of 'violence'? If 'Ahmisa' is to be understood as, yes all forms of violence are sinful - then I outright reject that idea. You must be willing to protect other people, and you must be willing to enforce, and further able to enforce that.
I don't think I have to enumerate all the ways history has proven that violence in the protection of others (and self) was/is necessary.
I'm not arguing for or against any specific precept. I'm not a Buddhist.
My analogy was meant to out point that the argument, "I believe everything you believe, except for this one thing" is sophomoric, as the number of things we agree on matters less than the weight of what we disagree on – and vice versa.
Technically, he said eat babies, not kill them. So if the baby is already dead, ie SIDS. You would not be violating any of the precepts but you would still be getting funny looks.
A cult isn't a diffuse set of through processes and standards generally held in common to different degrees by different parties. That is very nearly the opposite of a cult. If you see a word with negative connotations and you desire to throw it at the houses as if it were a stray rock it may be a sign you aren't reasoning clearly.
If someone was a hard core advocate for equality and justice where black and Hispanic people were concerned but held an irrational bigoted views about Jewish people their fellow advocates would count their bigotry more significant than their tolerance.
You are naturally free to have your own positions on the topics raised but there is absolutely nothing logically inconsistent with the position that what they regard as bigotry being cause for concern and reaction even if as you say she and they agree on 19 other topics.
"I believe in the core teachings of Christianity and the truth of every sentence of the bible but have a "slightly different view" in that I am Jesus Christ, reborn."
Aside from all the content-free "Everything I Don't Like Is A Cult" chuntering I already see, what is the point of this? I thought it was a dig at how cult-like the "anticult" deprogramming stuff was back during the last big scare in the 1980s, but it isn't that, because the victims of deprogramming sessions weren't free to leave. That was rather their big problem: They kidnapped people and held them in motel rooms and such and they pointedly weren't free to leave until they'd been psychologically broken. So the part where this says "you" (some imaginary person in this second-person fiction thing) are free to leave undercuts that point, leaving this pointless.
I do have a point, though: Saying everything is a cult is bad for the same reason saying every relationship is abusive is bad. It gives cover to the real abusers. After all, if every situation is equally terrible, there's no real reason to leave the ones which are, in point of fact, terrible. "Everywhere else is just as bad" is a powerful tool for abusers to use on their victims.
I don’t think it has a point in that sense? Perhaps I’m lacking critical reading skills but this seems more like creative writing than social commentary.
Your response to all the other comments is very on point though. Cults are real, and I think this story repeatedly interacts with some very scary aspects of real cults - aspects not found in an Agile coach or middle manager, in my uninformed opinion.
Yeah, it's probably just a piece of creative writing, but I've seen the basic conceit done better. The Local 58 web videos, for example, do the "message to you" thing better because they build a world for that message to have come from, and draw you into that world using both text and paratext. This, on the other hand, does no world-building and doesn't even create an implied character for the message to have come from. It's too sterile.
Even if it is nodding at morally-questionable deprogramming outfits, one, that's kind of an odd reference to be making decades after the fact, and, two, there's nothing in the text to support that beyond the literal use of the word "de-programming" precisely once. However, there's no other obvious interpretation which would give this a point.
To me it sounded like they were offering people everything they need to get out of a cult, without forcing them to join a different type of cult. Maybe I'm too naive, but to me it sounds like they genuinely are trying to help.
My reading is that the very fact that it's so abstract and general is itself the point. What could the cult be? Politics? Religion? A particular professional mindset or focus? Many could fit. Apart from the reference to "promise of godly exaltation or gift in a theoretical afterlife" (which nod towards religion), you could apply a lot of this to many social groups.
> One of the hallmark tactics of a cult is to isolate you from the rest of the world. They make you depend solely on others within the community for your every need, thus making it extremely difficult to leave.
This line stood out to me and seems very apt in these days. For ex, how it's now normal to go after people's jobs directly via social media pressure tactics or business's revenue (and subsequently their employees jobs) via Visa/mastercard/paypal/ad buyers/etc, merely for stepping out of line from mainstream opinions... as Wikileaks and many others experienced.
Making society more resilient to cult-like behaviour is always a good thing. Even when these tactics might benefit your pet beliefs, it's rarely worth the trade-offs and usually backfires.
When the system you promote exclusively benefits a particular ideology or exclusive set of organizations that's usually a good indicator it's cultish.
If you stand apart you will be preyed upon by those that do not.
We are not designed or evolved or whatever to prowl alone, because it will always be in our nature to come together and some will exploit this. And so while you stand alone they will bring all their machinations to consume your very being.
Would you really be that strong to stand alone against all those that would look to exploit you.
I think this is something else because reality tends to be the exact opposite. Instead it's small groups of well organized radicals using their organization to impact everybody else disproportionately. To stick with safe examples, look at the KKK. A quick search indicates they hit their peak popularity in the 1920s with some 4 million claimed members, which would be ~3% of society. But of course they had an outsized impact on America. So you end up with a scenario where 3% of people were dominating the zeitgeist of 97% through intimidation.
And there's no particularly clear way to combat this. The internet has only made this worse. Now ever smaller groups can coordinate extremely effectively and instantaneously, while also simultaneously working to create the perception of far greater numbers than actually possessed.
The enemy is never the one you see in front of your face. It's the voice behind you that's your true adversary. So stand side by side and block him out.
Yup, the rest could apply to just about anything, but this brief phrase near the end makes it pretty clear that it's about religion. That, and phrases like "the cult has left noticeable marks on you". Somehow all atheists (or at least the militant kind) seem to believe religious people are all deeply scarred and twisted, no matter how "watered-down from its original form" their "cult" may be.
The clever part about this writing is that it's so vague it applies to everyone. If you squint one way it's the group you are in. If you look sideways it's the group you dislike.
I think the idea is to craft a cult sales pitch framed as a support system for cult members that want to leave. The premise of the article is, of course, that we are all in some type of cult.
No, a cult leader would say that nobody outside the group is free. Only the group is free, and the freedom comes from the cult-leader in some way (flavor that last part to the kind of cult).
This is my take also, that society itself is a cult. They promise a theoretical "afterlife" of retirement after the age of 70, but until then we must suffer and work hard, usually to benefit someone else higher up the chain. They make you depend solely on others for your every need (food, housing, healthcare, etc.), making it extremely difficult to leave. But leave to where? There is no outside of this cult, other than the hell of homelessness.
The only real way out, it seems, is to create another cult with more humane values. Or go it alone, or with a small group of friends.
> The only real way out, it seems, is to create another cult with more humane values. Or go it alone, or with a small group of friends.
Bad news, one institution has monopoly rights on that role: Democracy. And if you have a problem with Democracy, you probably have unwittingly become a member of a cult (far right, likely) and indoctrinated into believing conspiracy theories.
> The heuristics that keep you navigating life without having to scrutinize every single choice from first principles.
Thanks for these words. Scrutinizing every single choice from first principles is exactly what i promote and what i find people are deeply resistant to, yet i haven't had this description of what's happening until now.
This has not been my experience in the past 7 years of addiction recovery. It's been imperative in order to root out as many ways my personality evolved to support addiction and has led to realizing many unconventional ways I've been avoiding my emotions than what's identified by most recovery or 12-step groups. Also, I've made arguments like what you're making before i entered into recovery to explain why i wasn't trying to make comprehensive changes to my life and explain away learned helplessness around changing myself.
My guess is what's viewed as decision fatigue could be unaddressed emotional issues, such as automated judgment/criticism, fear avoidance, normalized disempowerment narratives (which is related to cultivating a growth-oriented mindset, as opposed to one that says "this is just how i am and it can never be different"). Practicing radical acceptance and ignorance, as well as maintaining a playful attitude toward what I'm doing have been monumental to deeply examining myself. All this helps with perfectionism, which i also stopped practicing. Attempting to be thorough and comprehensive in the application of principles to one's life is not an effort in perfectionism; perfectionism is more about how one approaches doing such a thing. I think another term for what I'm referring to here is "monasticism."
These days, I'm also caring for a 4-year old while trying to examine everything we do from a generational trauma perspective. I no longer believe in ego depletion and consider it to be justification for people getting tired of stuffing/processing emotions that arise in the course of things, and potentially needs they're not aware of going habitually unmet. This brings me to another monumental thing i think has helped me in living a principled and intentional life: learning nonviolent communication and developing an awareness of feelings and universal human needs. To my knowledge,there are no studies examining the impact of these practices on decision-making.
I can say this: choosing actions/things based on what I think will meet my needs vs deny them is easy in a society where most decisions aren't oriented toward needs. There are learning challenges along the way, since there can often be no options present that effectively meet needs, so acceptance of the situation and creativity to come up with new options are both really important skills to develop.
As an aside, ego depletion and decision fatigue seem to be concepts without a lot of reproducibility behind them, or with much smaller effect sizes than previously reported.
None of what I am about to say is meant to discourage you; or dismiss you - keep fighting the good fight. It sure sounds like you've been through hell.
You should read my comments through an objective lens. I try to be as neutral/scientific/objective as possible with my words and I say this from my perspective as scientist/engineer.
The world is far too complex for any human to be able to model it at high fidelity; never mind compute the 1st, 2nd and n-th order consequences of any given choice on a long-enough time scale. It's one of the many reasons why we conceptually distinguish malice from ignorance - we are only human, not omnipotent/omniscient gods.
In practical terms when modeling dynamic systems there's the concept of Lyapunov time [1] - the timescale at which your "predictions" (first principles reasoning) falls apart.
None of this is meant to undermine individual attempts at being better; more thoughtful humans, but it's absolutely meant to discourage all pursuits of human perfection/exceptionalism. Holding oneself to impossibly high standards is equally psychologically harmful. Pragmatism before idealism.
It sounds like we're on the same page when it comes to perfectionism.
My hell has been living with ADHD and undiagnosed autism and CPTSD/PTSD and addiction in an addiction-oriented ableist society. I lucked out on addiction, cause i got addicted to gathering/hoarding/consuming/analyzing/problem identifying/ problem solving/synthesizing information early on in life. Every addiction builds superpowers and most of mine are around metacognition. Recovery for me meant a very broad view of addiction and recovery were needed, since we ARE information. My recovery is an un-compiled/-published case study in addiction with unique and meaningful contributions to the field. Looking forward to doing that work once i get my family stabilized in a supportive community (anarchistically nurturing a new person means throwing out a lot of parenting guidance and can be very brutal without a like-minded community in close proximity, and takes my whole day practically every day). And I thoroughly enjoy my life as it is. We're working to start a carnival dedicated to learning to confront and heal through trauma and it means building a community of people normalizing loving intimate relationships through openly practicing vulnerability.
In my reading I don't think this is the point. The deprogramming doesn't force the individual to adopt any beliefs to access those services. I think the point of the article is for the reader to consider - no matter what they and their opponents believe - that all are in a cult.
Perhaps I missed a meta level of satire with every cult starting out this way, however, but the point seems more about our existing cults.
I like your interpretation. One point of difference though, although the text doesn't mention forcing adherents to follow any beliefs, it also doesn't state that there are no conditions for the services.
My impression is that libertarian communities, similarly to Mensa, have more hostility between members than you might want to see in a well-functioning community. There are libertarian communities, but they are less community-like than the term would lead you to expect.
That might be directly related to the kind of person who joins a libertarian community (as seems to be the case with Mensa), or it might be an artifact of the fact that women hate libertarianism.
There's definitely libertarian communities. Although I'm sure they can become cultish, I imagine they are much less likely to become cultish than the state, since libertarian ideals would mean those communities produce more liberal ideas and thus less group think.
I wouldn't expect the Libertarian Party to become fascist but crazier things have happened.
I think people are reading too far into it. It's just a joke...
The point is that they're telling the subject of the story (in second person so it's addressed to "you") that you're in a cult and they're going to rehabilitate you - but as you read on, you might notice that the rehabilitation is describing, you guessed it, a cult!
It's not actually making a comment that everybody is actually in institutions that are like cults or anything, that's just part of the (satirical) brainwashing that the cult is using to bring people in.
Maybe this is one of those things like cold reading.
IMO, the text may be seen as a piece of advertising for a fictional "de-programming" (like they call it) treatment from a cult. However, it's written for an abstract general kind of cult, described only in terms of what is common about several cults. It's not specific about anything. Just like well done cold reading: it's right, but unspecific.
I believe the idea is that you identify some of the things you're doing in your life as a cult (guided by the general features given in the text) and pay more attention to them. The text, however, is vague enough to classify a lot of things as cults, even though you/I/we may believe these aren't.
You will experience unpleasant feelings here. Feelings your cult has told you are of the devil.
Part of our program involves exposing you to the idea that there are very rarely easy answers in life. People suffer for no reason. You will suffer, and have suffered, for no reason.
But people can also do great things for no reason, or rather unmotivated by some promise of godly exaltation or gift in a theoretical afterlife.
It sounds like the problem thinking they're trying to address here is the idea, "I'm suffering because I've done something bad and am being punished by God."
But if they think this kind of thinking is directly linked to religion, then it's just ignorance and bigotry. Consider the folloing quote: "Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes the reason is you're stupid and make bad decisions." The people I know who most strongly connect with that quote have all been (right-wing) atheists.
By contrast, consider the following quotes:
'As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him."' (John 9:1-2)
'Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.' (James 1:2-4)
'In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.' (1 Peter 6-7)
'Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.' (Hebrews 12:7-11)
In other words, Christianity says that far from suffering always being a punishment from God for bad behavior, it is sometimes a gift from God to accomplish a greater purpose.
So consider three hypothetical universes:
1. Nearly all your suffering is your fault; the result of God's wrath and/or the natural consequence of your own bad choices.
2. Most suffering is pointless. It has no meaning or benefit or blame; it just happens.
3. Suffering can be valuable. It is allowed by God because it achieves higher purposes; we as individuals , and the universe at large, are both better off because of the suffering.
I agree with the authors, that universe #2 (if true) is better than universe #1. But universe #3 -- the universe actually described by Christianity -- is even better.
For those looking to find a definitive “actual” teaching on hell (or any topic) in Christianity, just be aware, it will take a while. There are a lot of denominations, each with many differing takes on hell.
The above comment is reflective of one such interpretation of hell. Not an exclusive interpretation, but still a valid one.
> Not an exclusive interpretation, but still a valid one.
This is only technically true in the sense that the weakest straw man still gets a seat at the table.
My comment is directed only to people who would be interested in investigating this topic with a sense of proportion. If you bring a sense of proportion to the investigation you will rule out fringe theologies and converge on a Christian teaching that looks nothing like the original canard.
My point is that there is no one Christian teaching. I know many people who believe in the literal fire and brimstone definition of Hell who are devout Christians. Trying to claim there is one “true” interpretation and all others are fringe is folly. What is true to one group is a cult belief to another.
If you want to claim that your Christian beliefs don't include that definition of hell, you’d have a much better argument. Just don’t claim you speak for all Christians…
> I know many people who believe in the literal fire and brimstone definition of Hell who are devout Christians.
This seems fishy to me. I'm sure you know (or know of) many people who you label in the category of devout Christians who believe in the existence of hell. It is a biblical teaching after all. But have you pressure tested their views in deep conversation to see if they hold to a 'literal fire and brimstone' view?
If you have, and feel confident that you are accurately representing their view, than I happily stand corrected. Just know that it doesn't track at all with my own direct experience, nor my studied understanding of the doctrinal teachings of the major Christian denominations.
> Just don’t claim you speak for all Christians…
This is an example of a statement that is so true it's devoid of information content. I would assume that a reasonable adult who is interested in investigating the bases for the theological doctrine of hell, is also well aware that there is denominational diversity of views within the faith.
The real problem with the 'not all Christians agree' public service announcements are that they have the insidious effect of leading people to believe that there is no subset of teachings on which Christians do agree and can speak coherently.
I know it's not your intention to undermine Christianity through this relativistic dilution and you are just trying to make sure the 'fire and brimstone and sulfur lake' view gets a fair hearing, but I do want to make the point that this pseudo-sophisticated bad faith argument is out there.
I mean, fire, brimstone, and sulfur lake are actual bible verses.
"But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” Revelation 21:8
"If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery hell." Matthew 18:9
"And the beast was seized, and with him the false prophet who performed the signs in his presence, by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image; these two were thrown alive into the lake of fire which burns with brimstone." Revelation 19:20
You do believe the bible literally, right? Because if you were trying to avoid hell with your beliefs, and don't believe in biblical literalism, a large faction of Christians are certain that you will also be going to hell; a burning one. Take your pick which beliefs will save you, sure sounds important to make sure you don't accidentally choose the wrong one...
> You do believe the bible literally, right? Because if you were trying to avoid hell with your beliefs, and don’t believe in biblical literalism, a large faction of Christians are certain that you will also be going to hell.
A rather large fraction of Christians don’t believe in literalism, and think it is not only a doctrinal error in itself, but also the source of numerous doctrinal errors.
At the risk of going too far off topic, there is a distinction between Biblical inerrancy and Biblical literalism.
For example, Jesus says: 'You are the salt of the earth.' He doesn't literally mean his followers are Sodium Chloride molecules.
Diving deeper in one specific interpretive case, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the Bible is Inerrant but the 'literal' interpretation is not always to be prefered.
This should be obvious because the Bible is not a book it's a library, and how you read it depends on which section of the library you are in.
The reality of hell is absolutely grounded in both the Biblical texts and the Christian tradition. Furthermore the image of 'fire' to describe this reality cannot be disputed. Thank you for looking up the most relevant verses.
It's a topic worth understanding and studying with seriousness. Otherwise you'll be prone to interpret the teaching as just a capricious punishment from God for some bad things that you've done.
My original post was in response to a snarky comment made along those lines but it looks like that context has been lost.
Eh, not really. Some people do like to creatively interpret their holy texts to make them more palatable, but the Christian holy texts are pretty clear on that.
You could argue that some people don't emphasize the worst bits, but trying to backpedal on Hell would certainly mean that you're going to there to my family, and they're not even particularly fundamentalist.
Maybe this will be unpopular, but Hell is not that bad of a place. In my opinion, Hell is exactly what many people on earth are asking for.
Many people I know who dislike religion say that if there is a god, they wish he would leave them alone. They want to live in a world where god does not exist.
This is what Hell is. Hell is simply a place where god is not, completely separate from god and his influence.
The reason Christianity describes Hell as a place of suffering is because god is the sole source of good in the universe. So Hell, a place without god, is a place without any good.
<Many people I know who dislike religion say that if there is a god, they wish he would leave them alone. They want to live in a world where god does not exist.
On the other hand there's atheists like Terry Pratchett who described himself as “rather angry with God for not existing".
Maybe Christianity is not a cult, but the cult. When I hear people call a group a cult, what they typically mean is that the group is a pale imitation of Christianity.
Many Christians would likely take issue with this description because they don't want to be on the wrong side of the dirty word cult.
But I personally don't think it's much of a problem if the person you worship is Jesus of Nazareth.
One thing TFA did do was to describe very well the bad things about a cult: separating you from friends and family, controlling you with guilt, forbidding you from engaging honestly with differing belief systems.
I have not been pressured to cut off from friends or family, regardless of their belief systems; I am not controlled by guilt; and I genuinely try to engage the best I can with other belief systems. I'm pretty sure I could make a case for atheism at least as strongly as you could.
> "Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes the reason is you're stupid and make bad decisions."
> In other words, Christianity says that far from suffering always being a punishment
I fail to see how the first statement is supposed to imply that any suffering is necessarily a punishment for some reason. For example, consider a despot whose stupid decisions only have bad effects on its powerless flock. And even it can bring the collapse of its society in distant future in which the despot no longer exists. This gives a perfectly reasonable description of events without implying that the despot either suffered in any moment of its life.
Also there is a difference between believing in causality and certitude that an absolute rationalism is reachable by humans.
> I agree with the authors, that universe #2 (if true) is better than universe #1. But universe #3 -- the universe actually described by Christianity -- is even better.
Is there any religion out there that propose an univocal description universe among which all its faithful agree on? Divergence in Christianity interpretations was often presented as a justification for war between Christians themselves.
> Is there any religion out there that propose an univocal description universe among which all its faithful agree on?
Is there any belief system anywhere such that everyone allegedly on the same side believes exactly the same thing? Does atheism propose a univocal description of the universe which all the "unfaithful" agree on?
Do all physicists agree on everything? Do all economists agree on everything? Do all liberals (or all conservatives) agree 100% on every policy? Does a diversity of belief in any other area of life mean that the whole think is bunk, and that nobody is right about anything?
The world is a complicated place, and the truth is hard to find; moreover, even the best of us distort reality because we find the truth uncomfortable. That doesn't mean that there's no truth, or that some answers aren't better that other other answers. This applies as much to religion as to anything else in the world.
Apart the belief that there is no deity, atheism doesn't imply anything. It's not a doctrine or an economo-social program per se.
Much like physic, it doesn't prescribe what way is supposedly better to behave. This probably helps much on having broad consensus on very precise statements.
Economics, surely, is closer to a cult. It runs some quantification over the process, but there is always some core doctrine which prescribe what are the relevant metrics. Should biodiversity enter in the equation? Should the feeling of fulfillment of operators be considered? Is animal suffering a concern? Should next human generation be given a sustainable society?
With due respect, many survivors of religion appreciate the harm that magical thinking causes, to which remaining adherents interpret as bigotry since to recognize said issue generates significant pain and cognitive dissonance. To acknowledge such is not bigotry but lived experience of exiting organizations that do not allow you to leave with your dignity intact. Is your counterthesis that the article is bigoted because it notes that magical thinking (attribution of positive and negative events as an effect stemming from an external entity's judgment) is usually not a good explanation for cause?
With due respect, you can't say "respect" and then "magical thinking" in the same sentence. More than that, "magical thinking" is basically content-free: you haven't actually described what behavior or ideas you're object to, so there's nothing really to say in response.
Your one concrete accusation is about people "exiting organizations that do not allow you to leave with your dignity intact". But that's 1) not specific to religious organizations 2) not a feature of all religious organizations. Try leaving the Chinese Communist Party, for instance, without leaving China. And while I'm sure that my Christian friends and family would be disappointed if I became an atheist, I don't think their disappointment and opposition would really be that much more than you'd get from your atheist friends and family if you decided to become a Christian.
I know that there certainly are religious organizations where that's not the case -- where they're much more willing to use guilt, or social ostracism, or even harassment to try to punish you for leaving; but that's just wrong. That's never how Jesus operated.
Put it this way. Are people harmed by the current medical system? Yes. Should we completely get rid of all doctors and hospitals and everything? No -- we should strive to root out the bad actors and correct the systems and culture which allow harm to take place.
Are people harmed by bad police departments? Yes. Should we completely get rid of all police departments? Some people say yes, but I disagree. We should strive to root out the bad actors and correct the systems and culture which allow the harm to take place.
Are people harmed by bad governmental policies? Yes. Should we completely get rid of the government? Again, some people say yes, but I disagree. I think we should strive to root out bad actors and correct the systems and culture which allow the harm to take place.
Jesus' bitterest enemies were the religious leaders of his day: and what really made him angry was the harm they caused to ordinary people. (Some quotes at the bottom.) Insofar as the "harm" you have in mind is genuine harm, it's probably something Jesus has already objected to.
Getting back to "ignorant and bigoted": I said that if the think that "I'm suffering so I must have done something bad" has a 1-1 link with religion, they are ignorant and bigoted.
They're ignorant because they're wrong in both directions: Many atheists do think that way, and many religious people do not think that way.
It's not bigoted be ignorant: if you don't know that many religions teach that God allows good people to suffer to accomplish higher goals, then you don't know. But if you judge people without actually taking the time to find out what they actually believe, then you are bigoted.
---
Here are some things Jesus said about some of the religious people of his day. No Christian should read these without taking a good look at their own life to make sure they aren't implicated as well:
"Woe to you, [religious people], you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
"Woe to you, [religious people], you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.
"...Woe to you, [religious people], you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
"Woe to you, [religious people], you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed an...
But suffering can be valuable without it (suffering) being caused by supreme being. No mater why i experience suffering i can learn from it, and prevent in future. By the way author talks about "reason" for suffering. There is no mention that you can't learn from it (meaning, benefit).
Thanks for the keyword "Azure DevOps" I would have never guessed it was that. For Microsoft centric Engineering teams, it might be an easier sell. Then again Azure tends to like to cancel services. Although they are very nice and support those cancelled things for quite a while first.
I also don't see how JIRA can make things bad. I mean bad to use the software maybe, but it is not really enforcing a type of agile onto anyone.
Sure, this is nothing about being "Microsoft" or "Linux" centric, you can use it as a ticketing and CICD tool that literally has plugins to connect to AWS or GCP through terraform cli stages and deploy from there. Azure DevOps is about as centric to Microsoft as Jira is to Canonical in terms of service functionality. If your only criteria for tool selection is "MS bad" you might want reconsider how you evaluate your tool set. I say this as someone who started out using Linux, still uses Linux for the majority of their job, and uses a MacBook Pro for work and personal use, outside of gaming of course. The only things we use in Azure specifically are Active Directory and Azure DevOps, which again, right tool for the right job. You probably wouldn't want to attempt using FreeIPA because "MS bad" when AD has already been production ready for years. And again, there is no way you will be able to see how JIRA does things wrong if it's the first and only tool you ever use. Search functionality is a relative dream in Azure DevOps, for starters.
Another way of saying we are all a great distance from absolute truth about the world. Which my cult says is absolute nonsense. Some cults are better than others
Every now and then an article gets to the front page of this website that completely baffles me as to the reason it got there. Could someone explain this one to me?
I looked at the data; the upvoters are ordinary HN users—not bots, unless someone created bots 7 years ago to comment about monorepos and upvote Haskell blogs.
Cults (and cult-deprogramming) rely on socio-psychological hacks. So it's definitely related to hacking, though maybe not in the way most tech folks default to.
I see the reasoning - but I don't think there needs to be a hack involved in submissions to Hacker News. Just an interesting story that might appeal to the sort of people who hang around, apparently this one caught on.
I don't personally like articles that start off with "accusing" the reader of something - like this or the You will never "fix it later" one - but it's easy to click "hide" or to just ignore if I'm not interested.
Since the day we're born we're interpreting the world around us, or we're told stories explaining it. We live in our image of the world, not in reality.
When grown up, most are afraid of the real world, protecting their dreamy world with ferocity, afraid to peek out.
There are variations on this article that I think could be useful to give some perspective on certain patterns of thought. The strange-loop aspect demonstrates how we can operate on a belief that originates from a circular reference, and as a consequence, the logic of our ideas and reasoning may not be consistent with the external world. If our conclusions justify indulging in an immoderate vice (e.g. the seven deadlies or another obvious list of things we know we are capable of choosing better options than) it's probably worth examining more closely.
While we always are part of a generalized belief system, some are open ended and some are closed ended. That is to say, if you are willing to postpone your “truth statements” in order to promote your own critical thinking and inquisitive behavior, you are probably open ended. If someone attacks your insert belief statement , and if you do not feel threatened, you are willing to entertain beliefs other than your own, without surrendering your individual capacity for critical thinking and curiosity, that is probably open ended belief.
There are many things we probably belief that we want to belief rather than are true. That does not have to be a problem. Problems usually arise when we make future statements that entail a salvation aspect. “Do this and everything will be better” , “follow me because I know better.” The more exclusionary the tone of this salvation message, the more cultish it will score.
I try to live my life being open to challenging and being challenged by anything. But there are some things — needing money, clothes, electricity — which are hard to escape. I’ll try and have another go though, I promise.
Yet try mentioning this when a new js framework gets released and submitted on here and your comment gets flagged almost immediately. FREE YOURSELVES MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS AND COME TO THE LIGHT, FOR PYSCRIPT IS HERE TO SAVE YOU!
A lot of people here seem to be offended by this essay because of the literal definition of the term "cult" and start looking for potential cults they may be part of. I think they are mistaken.
To me, this essay clearly speaks about the maladaptive conditioning we receive from our families and society in general during childhood and adolescence which causes us to suppress our feelings and authentic selves and treat the pain of it with medication, distraction, and OCD behaviors instead of healthy emotional release.
I might be too, but this was my takeaway as well, though I stopped short of the link to medication and distraction. Family and society were enough to consider ;)
That's where my mind went as well - in fact, it reminded me of Guy Debord:
> In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
The difference is how much the program makes you search inside yourself and ALONE for the answers you seek as opposite to reaching for an external authority.
If you feel you are dependent on an external human the most likely event is that they or their group made you dependent on purpose via some sort of manipulation.
But is relying on your own answers really better than relying on an external authority? Only if it's always the same authority. But always thinking you know better than everybody else doesn't really sound any healthier.
This is a misreading. Relying on your own judgment does not mean that you need to be an island who thinks that they know better than anyone else. What it means is that your judgment is founded on your own critical thinking, which still allows you to recognize when you lack some experience and perspective and defer to the wisdom of others when necessary.
I know of a guy through a social worker friend who, if he goes off his medication (which he does with some frequency), becomes convinced that there are vampires who are out to get him.
The human mind is not always a terribly reliable authority, especially your own (where you lack perspective).
Effective approaches to this I've heard of involve learning to treat the hallucinations with respect, learning to communicate effectively with them, and learning from them. This is reflected both in how some tribal cultures approach hallucinations & modern approaches to schizophrenia and the like. Avoiding these things by medicating them away seems like a form of suppression that preserves the underlying thought/behavior processes (like avoiding one's fears of monsters or death) that are feeding into the hallucinations. Effective solutions usually don't pathologize or avoid experiences.
If we get caught up in judging what's real or imagined, then we can lose sight of what's available for us to learn from.
>If you feel you are dependent on an external human
Absolutely not, I’m a free trapper who built its own computer from scratch.
Joke apart, who is thinking really that interdependence is inherently bad? Things like symbiosis are generally connoted rather positively, aren’t there?
Now, being dependent on a group which is applying rigid rules which are systematically leading to toxic behaviors for all or part of its members, that is certainly a sound concern.
It seems to me that "independence" is a none issue: no man is an island[1]. It’s all about the way we steer our interdependence, with indefinitely many governance models we can try, but as soon a you put apart solipsism from deemed beliefs, none will honestly pretend that anyone can be absolutely independent.
There is such a thing. If you've ever been inauthentic for some time and then authentic, you know there's a massive difference in how you feel about yourself.
But it's true that the term is thrown about a lot without being explained, and I'm guilty of this as well of course. Being authentic means being able to express your opinions and preferences without feeling shame of fear of abandonment. That's how I would describe it in short.
>maladaptive conditioning we receive from our families and society in general
We adapted to the world through our families and society. A human alone 50,000 years ago was a delicious meal, not a rugged individualist.
I would suggest that anything that encourages you to live an atomized life is maladaptive. We can get away with some degree of that now, but only due to thousands of years of various cult-like behaviors that built the world to be more fit for humans.
Cultures vary. Also individuals vary. That’s true now, and it was very likely true 50000 years ago.
Maybe not all the rugged individualists survived, but quite likely a few wandering souls travelled far away from their original homes, and got to see different places and experience different things.
Choosing to isolate yourself from others or strive to be overly individualistic would be an example of maladaptation in my view. If you grew up in a emotionally nurturing familiy of origin you probably will have no intention to do so.
One characteristic of cults is how they get defined and define themselves. They define themselves in conjunction with everyone "outside" but it goes further as "outside" itself gets defined partly by them and partly by others. For example, if a bunch of newspapers says "X organisation is a cult" then it provokes a kind of self-reinforcing reaction in the organisation to separate themselves more from those not in the group. The group becomes more strong by defining itself in comparison to those outside the group. A member of a group finds their membership and sense of belonging stronger when people outside the group separate them. Polarisation isolates the poles but it also strengthens them.
It's therefore kind of one sided to say that a cult isolates a member from the outside world, although they do actually do that. It also gives a potential path away from dangerous cults to be formed - it's about allowing groups to exist within ones life and allowing people to move around - a kind of tolerance for the other or the margins.
Outside of cults, 2 examples: A good example of the group solidification mechanism is in the parallel with US politics where people in either sides think it's the other side that polarises politics. "I'm not an extremist you are". There's also an example of Reddit about subreddits and communities. Reddit organisation labelled subreddits "communities" where before the labelling the people who visited subreddits didn't think of themselves as a community. "communities" were created to isolate certain problematic subreddits who indeed had a unique group identity. Quarantine was introduced at the same time to perform the isolation. Subreddits turned into communities by becoming identified as such from within and outside but also the communities own self-culture, moderation rules became stronger because they were labelled as such.
Well, I'm only interested in the part where they provide free arbitrary meals on demand. The economics of that are intriguing, but, hey, since I'm clearly a poor soul to save, they can't deny me this right, right ?
Where do I sign up for your totally-not-a-cult thing ?
This is a pointless article that baits the reader into thinking there is a point, as evidenced by the fact that you can read many comments here of people trying to extract meaning out of it and not find anything that is actually profound and not incredibly overwrought.
326 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 413 ms ] threadhttps://cult-escape.com/cult-test/
(Edit: To be clear I'm not a member of a political party so I can't try that one.)
Although even for my country I could only honestly give a point for the title. (No idea if it's the king or the prime minister who counts as the leader here, but it's an impressive title. There's plenty of laws, but they don't restrict much on the relational front. Well, there's restrictions on marrying children, and criminal jobs are illegal, so that might be another point.)
If this causes you to be banished and ostracised, then it's probably a cult.
JK Rowling would be an example of this.
Non-Violence or 'Ahmisa' being a core tenant of Buddhism (and many other religions), is the one I would pick as a more apt comparison. I don't think it is reasonable to commit no violence, especially if you consider all life precious - even if you restrict to only humans. Not all people think the same, in fact some people are far more willing to enact violence to reach their goals.
Is protecting yourself and your community not included in the definition of 'violence'? If 'Ahmisa' is to be understood as, yes all forms of violence are sinful - then I outright reject that idea. You must be willing to protect other people, and you must be willing to enforce, and further able to enforce that.
I don't think I have to enumerate all the ways history has proven that violence in the protection of others (and self) was/is necessary.
My analogy was meant to out point that the argument, "I believe everything you believe, except for this one thing" is sophomoric, as the number of things we agree on matters less than the weight of what we disagree on – and vice versa.
Cult-like.
Honestly, the people here so desperate to find an argument for rigid ideological adherence just kind of prove my point.
If someone was a hard core advocate for equality and justice where black and Hispanic people were concerned but held an irrational bigoted views about Jewish people their fellow advocates would count their bigotry more significant than their tolerance.
You are naturally free to have your own positions on the topics raised but there is absolutely nothing logically inconsistent with the position that what they regard as bigotry being cause for concern and reaction even if as you say she and they agree on 19 other topics.
I'm confident I'm thinking clearly though.
I do have a point, though: Saying everything is a cult is bad for the same reason saying every relationship is abusive is bad. It gives cover to the real abusers. After all, if every situation is equally terrible, there's no real reason to leave the ones which are, in point of fact, terrible. "Everywhere else is just as bad" is a powerful tool for abusers to use on their victims.
Your response to all the other comments is very on point though. Cults are real, and I think this story repeatedly interacts with some very scary aspects of real cults - aspects not found in an Agile coach or middle manager, in my uninformed opinion.
Even if it is nodding at morally-questionable deprogramming outfits, one, that's kind of an odd reference to be making decades after the fact, and, two, there's nothing in the text to support that beyond the literal use of the word "de-programming" precisely once. However, there's no other obvious interpretation which would give this a point.
1. It doesn't say everything is a cult. It says 'You're In A Cult'
It's kind of a Voight-Kampff induction
You can read it as if it was written for you and perceive how it makes you feel.
2. It's an introduction. Figure out how to implement the red and green button in your life, and you can do the rest.
This line stood out to me and seems very apt in these days. For ex, how it's now normal to go after people's jobs directly via social media pressure tactics or business's revenue (and subsequently their employees jobs) via Visa/mastercard/paypal/ad buyers/etc, merely for stepping out of line from mainstream opinions... as Wikileaks and many others experienced.
Making society more resilient to cult-like behaviour is always a good thing. Even when these tactics might benefit your pet beliefs, it's rarely worth the trade-offs and usually backfires.
When the system you promote exclusively benefits a particular ideology or exclusive set of organizations that's usually a good indicator it's cultish.
We are not designed or evolved or whatever to prowl alone, because it will always be in our nature to come together and some will exploit this. And so while you stand alone they will bring all their machinations to consume your very being.
Would you really be that strong to stand alone against all those that would look to exploit you.
And there's no particularly clear way to combat this. The internet has only made this worse. Now ever smaller groups can coordinate extremely effectively and instantaneously, while also simultaneously working to create the perception of far greater numbers than actually possessed.
It's brilliantly subversive and makes you think.
Maybe they're talking about the child genital mutilation.
Just a fun joke on the societal norms around you.
Which is precisely what a cult leader would want their victims to think: "Nobody is free, so stay in the group!"
On a cloudless night, go to the last rest stop before Furnace Creek. There you will find...
It was everything.
So it's funny x 2
The only real way out, it seems, is to create another cult with more humane values. Or go it alone, or with a small group of friends.
Bad news, one institution has monopoly rights on that role: Democracy. And if you have a problem with Democracy, you probably have unwittingly become a member of a cult (far right, likely) and indoctrinated into believing conspiracy theories.
Now: back to work, citizen.
Everything your parents, your family; your community and your society taught you.
The heuristics that keep you navigating life without having to scrutinize every single choice from first principles.
Thanks for these words. Scrutinizing every single choice from first principles is exactly what i promote and what i find people are deeply resistant to, yet i haven't had this description of what's happening until now.
Decision fatigue will catch up with anyone who lives like that soon enough.
Time is a finite resource. Don’t waste it on perfectionism.
My guess is what's viewed as decision fatigue could be unaddressed emotional issues, such as automated judgment/criticism, fear avoidance, normalized disempowerment narratives (which is related to cultivating a growth-oriented mindset, as opposed to one that says "this is just how i am and it can never be different"). Practicing radical acceptance and ignorance, as well as maintaining a playful attitude toward what I'm doing have been monumental to deeply examining myself. All this helps with perfectionism, which i also stopped practicing. Attempting to be thorough and comprehensive in the application of principles to one's life is not an effort in perfectionism; perfectionism is more about how one approaches doing such a thing. I think another term for what I'm referring to here is "monasticism."
These days, I'm also caring for a 4-year old while trying to examine everything we do from a generational trauma perspective. I no longer believe in ego depletion and consider it to be justification for people getting tired of stuffing/processing emotions that arise in the course of things, and potentially needs they're not aware of going habitually unmet. This brings me to another monumental thing i think has helped me in living a principled and intentional life: learning nonviolent communication and developing an awareness of feelings and universal human needs. To my knowledge,there are no studies examining the impact of these practices on decision-making.
I can say this: choosing actions/things based on what I think will meet my needs vs deny them is easy in a society where most decisions aren't oriented toward needs. There are learning challenges along the way, since there can often be no options present that effectively meet needs, so acceptance of the situation and creativity to come up with new options are both really important skills to develop.
As an aside, ego depletion and decision fatigue seem to be concepts without a lot of reproducibility behind them, or with much smaller effect sizes than previously reported.
You should read my comments through an objective lens. I try to be as neutral/scientific/objective as possible with my words and I say this from my perspective as scientist/engineer.
The world is far too complex for any human to be able to model it at high fidelity; never mind compute the 1st, 2nd and n-th order consequences of any given choice on a long-enough time scale. It's one of the many reasons why we conceptually distinguish malice from ignorance - we are only human, not omnipotent/omniscient gods.
In practical terms when modeling dynamic systems there's the concept of Lyapunov time [1] - the timescale at which your "predictions" (first principles reasoning) falls apart.
None of this is meant to undermine individual attempts at being better; more thoughtful humans, but it's absolutely meant to discourage all pursuits of human perfection/exceptionalism. Holding oneself to impossibly high standards is equally psychologically harmful. Pragmatism before idealism.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time
My hell has been living with ADHD and undiagnosed autism and CPTSD/PTSD and addiction in an addiction-oriented ableist society. I lucked out on addiction, cause i got addicted to gathering/hoarding/consuming/analyzing/problem identifying/ problem solving/synthesizing information early on in life. Every addiction builds superpowers and most of mine are around metacognition. Recovery for me meant a very broad view of addiction and recovery were needed, since we ARE information. My recovery is an un-compiled/-published case study in addiction with unique and meaningful contributions to the field. Looking forward to doing that work once i get my family stabilized in a supportive community (anarchistically nurturing a new person means throwing out a lot of parenting guidance and can be very brutal without a like-minded community in close proximity, and takes my whole day practically every day). And I thoroughly enjoy my life as it is. We're working to start a carnival dedicated to learning to confront and heal through trauma and it means building a community of people normalizing loving intimate relationships through openly practicing vulnerability.
> They make you depend solely on others within the community for your every need...
Is followed by:
> We have partnerships with organizations that can connect you to schooling, work, housing, and medical care...
Perhaps I missed a meta level of satire with every cult starting out this way, however, but the point seems more about our existing cults.
As a bit of a libertarian, this struck me as anti-Statist (i.e. modern secular states are basically cults)
That might be directly related to the kind of person who joins a libertarian community (as seems to be the case with Mensa), or it might be an artifact of the fact that women hate libertarianism.
I wouldn't expect the Libertarian Party to become fascist but crazier things have happened.
There is an answer, I found it outside of the story.
But this a a good hint.
I incorrectly chose the wrong X from these lines. It does narrow it down. The "buttons" threw me. Still not sure what they represent.
The point is that they're telling the subject of the story (in second person so it's addressed to "you") that you're in a cult and they're going to rehabilitate you - but as you read on, you might notice that the rehabilitation is describing, you guessed it, a cult!
It's not actually making a comment that everybody is actually in institutions that are like cults or anything, that's just part of the (satirical) brainwashing that the cult is using to bring people in.
IMO, the text may be seen as a piece of advertising for a fictional "de-programming" (like they call it) treatment from a cult. However, it's written for an abstract general kind of cult, described only in terms of what is common about several cults. It's not specific about anything. Just like well done cold reading: it's right, but unspecific.
I believe the idea is that you identify some of the things you're doing in your life as a cult (guided by the general features given in the text) and pay more attention to them. The text, however, is vague enough to classify a lot of things as cults, even though you/I/we may believe these aren't.
But if they think this kind of thinking is directly linked to religion, then it's just ignorance and bigotry. Consider the folloing quote: "Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes the reason is you're stupid and make bad decisions." The people I know who most strongly connect with that quote have all been (right-wing) atheists.
By contrast, consider the following quotes:
'As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him."' (John 9:1-2)
'Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.' (James 1:2-4)
'In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.' (1 Peter 6-7)
'Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.' (Hebrews 12:7-11)
In other words, Christianity says that far from suffering always being a punishment from God for bad behavior, it is sometimes a gift from God to accomplish a greater purpose.
So consider three hypothetical universes:
1. Nearly all your suffering is your fault; the result of God's wrath and/or the natural consequence of your own bad choices.
2. Most suffering is pointless. It has no meaning or benefit or blame; it just happens.
3. Suffering can be valuable. It is allowed by God because it achieves higher purposes; we as individuals , and the universe at large, are both better off because of the suffering.
I agree with the authors, that universe #2 (if true) is better than universe #1. But universe #3 -- the universe actually described by Christianity -- is even better.
Besides, you know... Hell, lakes of sulfur and eternal damnation.
For those interested in knowing the actual Christian teaching on the topic of hell, just be aware that this comment is completely incorrect.
The above comment is reflective of one such interpretation of hell. Not an exclusive interpretation, but still a valid one.
This is only technically true in the sense that the weakest straw man still gets a seat at the table.
My comment is directed only to people who would be interested in investigating this topic with a sense of proportion. If you bring a sense of proportion to the investigation you will rule out fringe theologies and converge on a Christian teaching that looks nothing like the original canard.
If you want to claim that your Christian beliefs don't include that definition of hell, you’d have a much better argument. Just don’t claim you speak for all Christians…
This seems fishy to me. I'm sure you know (or know of) many people who you label in the category of devout Christians who believe in the existence of hell. It is a biblical teaching after all. But have you pressure tested their views in deep conversation to see if they hold to a 'literal fire and brimstone' view?
If you have, and feel confident that you are accurately representing their view, than I happily stand corrected. Just know that it doesn't track at all with my own direct experience, nor my studied understanding of the doctrinal teachings of the major Christian denominations.
> Just don’t claim you speak for all Christians…
This is an example of a statement that is so true it's devoid of information content. I would assume that a reasonable adult who is interested in investigating the bases for the theological doctrine of hell, is also well aware that there is denominational diversity of views within the faith.
The real problem with the 'not all Christians agree' public service announcements are that they have the insidious effect of leading people to believe that there is no subset of teachings on which Christians do agree and can speak coherently.
I know it's not your intention to undermine Christianity through this relativistic dilution and you are just trying to make sure the 'fire and brimstone and sulfur lake' view gets a fair hearing, but I do want to make the point that this pseudo-sophisticated bad faith argument is out there.
"But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” Revelation 21:8
"If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery hell." Matthew 18:9
"And the beast was seized, and with him the false prophet who performed the signs in his presence, by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped his image; these two were thrown alive into the lake of fire which burns with brimstone." Revelation 19:20
You do believe the bible literally, right? Because if you were trying to avoid hell with your beliefs, and don't believe in biblical literalism, a large faction of Christians are certain that you will also be going to hell; a burning one. Take your pick which beliefs will save you, sure sounds important to make sure you don't accidentally choose the wrong one...
A rather large fraction of Christians don’t believe in literalism, and think it is not only a doctrinal error in itself, but also the source of numerous doctrinal errors.
For example, Jesus says: 'You are the salt of the earth.' He doesn't literally mean his followers are Sodium Chloride molecules.
Diving deeper in one specific interpretive case, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the Bible is Inerrant but the 'literal' interpretation is not always to be prefered.
This should be obvious because the Bible is not a book it's a library, and how you read it depends on which section of the library you are in.
It's a topic worth understanding and studying with seriousness. Otherwise you'll be prone to interpret the teaching as just a capricious punishment from God for some bad things that you've done.
My original post was in response to a snarky comment made along those lines but it looks like that context has been lost.
You could argue that some people don't emphasize the worst bits, but trying to backpedal on Hell would certainly mean that you're going to there to my family, and they're not even particularly fundamentalist.
Many people I know who dislike religion say that if there is a god, they wish he would leave them alone. They want to live in a world where god does not exist.
This is what Hell is. Hell is simply a place where god is not, completely separate from god and his influence.
The reason Christianity describes Hell as a place of suffering is because god is the sole source of good in the universe. So Hell, a place without god, is a place without any good.
On the other hand there's atheists like Terry Pratchett who described himself as “rather angry with God for not existing".
Many Christians would likely take issue with this description because they don't want to be on the wrong side of the dirty word cult.
But I personally don't think it's much of a problem if the person you worship is Jesus of Nazareth.
I have not been pressured to cut off from friends or family, regardless of their belief systems; I am not controlled by guilt; and I genuinely try to engage the best I can with other belief systems. I'm pretty sure I could make a case for atheism at least as strongly as you could.
> In other words, Christianity says that far from suffering always being a punishment
I fail to see how the first statement is supposed to imply that any suffering is necessarily a punishment for some reason. For example, consider a despot whose stupid decisions only have bad effects on its powerless flock. And even it can bring the collapse of its society in distant future in which the despot no longer exists. This gives a perfectly reasonable description of events without implying that the despot either suffered in any moment of its life.
Also there is a difference between believing in causality and certitude that an absolute rationalism is reachable by humans.
> I agree with the authors, that universe #2 (if true) is better than universe #1. But universe #3 -- the universe actually described by Christianity -- is even better.
Is there any religion out there that propose an univocal description universe among which all its faithful agree on? Divergence in Christianity interpretations was often presented as a justification for war between Christians themselves.
Is there any belief system anywhere such that everyone allegedly on the same side believes exactly the same thing? Does atheism propose a univocal description of the universe which all the "unfaithful" agree on?
Do all physicists agree on everything? Do all economists agree on everything? Do all liberals (or all conservatives) agree 100% on every policy? Does a diversity of belief in any other area of life mean that the whole think is bunk, and that nobody is right about anything?
The world is a complicated place, and the truth is hard to find; moreover, even the best of us distort reality because we find the truth uncomfortable. That doesn't mean that there's no truth, or that some answers aren't better that other other answers. This applies as much to religion as to anything else in the world.
Much like physic, it doesn't prescribe what way is supposedly better to behave. This probably helps much on having broad consensus on very precise statements.
Economics, surely, is closer to a cult. It runs some quantification over the process, but there is always some core doctrine which prescribe what are the relevant metrics. Should biodiversity enter in the equation? Should the feeling of fulfillment of operators be considered? Is animal suffering a concern? Should next human generation be given a sustainable society?
Your one concrete accusation is about people "exiting organizations that do not allow you to leave with your dignity intact". But that's 1) not specific to religious organizations 2) not a feature of all religious organizations. Try leaving the Chinese Communist Party, for instance, without leaving China. And while I'm sure that my Christian friends and family would be disappointed if I became an atheist, I don't think their disappointment and opposition would really be that much more than you'd get from your atheist friends and family if you decided to become a Christian.
I know that there certainly are religious organizations where that's not the case -- where they're much more willing to use guilt, or social ostracism, or even harassment to try to punish you for leaving; but that's just wrong. That's never how Jesus operated.
Put it this way. Are people harmed by the current medical system? Yes. Should we completely get rid of all doctors and hospitals and everything? No -- we should strive to root out the bad actors and correct the systems and culture which allow harm to take place.
Are people harmed by bad police departments? Yes. Should we completely get rid of all police departments? Some people say yes, but I disagree. We should strive to root out the bad actors and correct the systems and culture which allow the harm to take place.
Are people harmed by bad governmental policies? Yes. Should we completely get rid of the government? Again, some people say yes, but I disagree. I think we should strive to root out bad actors and correct the systems and culture which allow the harm to take place.
Jesus' bitterest enemies were the religious leaders of his day: and what really made him angry was the harm they caused to ordinary people. (Some quotes at the bottom.) Insofar as the "harm" you have in mind is genuine harm, it's probably something Jesus has already objected to.
Getting back to "ignorant and bigoted": I said that if the think that "I'm suffering so I must have done something bad" has a 1-1 link with religion, they are ignorant and bigoted.
They're ignorant because they're wrong in both directions: Many atheists do think that way, and many religious people do not think that way.
It's not bigoted be ignorant: if you don't know that many religions teach that God allows good people to suffer to accomplish higher goals, then you don't know. But if you judge people without actually taking the time to find out what they actually believe, then you are bigoted.
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Here are some things Jesus said about some of the religious people of his day. No Christian should read these without taking a good look at their own life to make sure they aren't implicated as well:
"Woe to you, [religious people], you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
"Woe to you, [religious people], you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.
"...Woe to you, [religious people], you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
"Woe to you, [religious people], you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed an...
Step 2) ???
Step 3) Enjoy your good agile.
I also don't see how JIRA can make things bad. I mean bad to use the software maybe, but it is not really enforcing a type of agile onto anyone.
The blogging platform for this one is interesting, if you follow the rabbit hole a bit you'll find e.g. https://herman.bearblog.dev/building-software-to-last-foreve...
I don't see that many posts, but it appears to have some interesting traffic on it at present. Worth holding on to perhaps?
https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog/
I don't personally like articles that start off with "accusing" the reader of something - like this or the You will never "fix it later" one - but it's easy to click "hide" or to just ignore if I'm not interested.
When grown up, most are afraid of the real world, protecting their dreamy world with ferocity, afraid to peek out.
It takes courage to face it.
Neat.
There are variations on this article that I think could be useful to give some perspective on certain patterns of thought. The strange-loop aspect demonstrates how we can operate on a belief that originates from a circular reference, and as a consequence, the logic of our ideas and reasoning may not be consistent with the external world. If our conclusions justify indulging in an immoderate vice (e.g. the seven deadlies or another obvious list of things we know we are capable of choosing better options than) it's probably worth examining more closely.
It’s pseudo science at best, psychobable at worst.
There are many things we probably belief that we want to belief rather than are true. That does not have to be a problem. Problems usually arise when we make future statements that entail a salvation aspect. “Do this and everything will be better” , “follow me because I know better.” The more exclusionary the tone of this salvation message, the more cultish it will score.
Some good resources : https://www.igotout.org/resources
A recent book to imagine what it’s on the inside is the book Cult Trip : inside the world of coercion and control.
I try to live my life being open to challenging and being challenged by anything. But there are some things — needing money, clothes, electricity — which are hard to escape. I’ll try and have another go though, I promise.
Very clever.
When you think about it, the entire article can out of the box apply to both.
To me, this essay clearly speaks about the maladaptive conditioning we receive from our families and society in general during childhood and adolescence which causes us to suppress our feelings and authentic selves and treat the pain of it with medication, distraction, and OCD behaviors instead of healthy emotional release.
But I might just be projecting.
I might be too, but this was my takeaway as well, though I stopped short of the link to medication and distraction. Family and society were enough to consider ;)
> In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
I've got to admit I have no idea what the difference is between brainwashing and deprogramming.
The difference is how much the program makes you search inside yourself and ALONE for the answers you seek as opposite to reaching for an external authority.
If you feel you are dependent on an external human the most likely event is that they or their group made you dependent on purpose via some sort of manipulation.
The human mind is not always a terribly reliable authority, especially your own (where you lack perspective).
If we get caught up in judging what's real or imagined, then we can lose sight of what's available for us to learn from.
Absolutely not, I’m a free trapper who built its own computer from scratch.
Joke apart, who is thinking really that interdependence is inherently bad? Things like symbiosis are generally connoted rather positively, aren’t there?
Now, being dependent on a group which is applying rigid rules which are systematically leading to toxic behaviors for all or part of its members, that is certainly a sound concern.
It seems to me that "independence" is a none issue: no man is an island[1]. It’s all about the way we steer our interdependence, with indefinitely many governance models we can try, but as soon a you put apart solipsism from deemed beliefs, none will honestly pretend that anyone can be absolutely independent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devotions_upon_Emergent_Occasi...
It could be the dogmas of a society, it could be the rules of a social group... it could even be a technical group.
I'm not sure there actually is such a thing.
But it's true that the term is thrown about a lot without being explained, and I'm guilty of this as well of course. Being authentic means being able to express your opinions and preferences without feeling shame of fear of abandonment. That's how I would describe it in short.
We adapted to the world through our families and society. A human alone 50,000 years ago was a delicious meal, not a rugged individualist.
I would suggest that anything that encourages you to live an atomized life is maladaptive. We can get away with some degree of that now, but only due to thousands of years of various cult-like behaviors that built the world to be more fit for humans.
Maybe not all the rugged individualists survived, but quite likely a few wandering souls travelled far away from their original homes, and got to see different places and experience different things.
I think you misread me.
It's therefore kind of one sided to say that a cult isolates a member from the outside world, although they do actually do that. It also gives a potential path away from dangerous cults to be formed - it's about allowing groups to exist within ones life and allowing people to move around - a kind of tolerance for the other or the margins.
Outside of cults, 2 examples: A good example of the group solidification mechanism is in the parallel with US politics where people in either sides think it's the other side that polarises politics. "I'm not an extremist you are". There's also an example of Reddit about subreddits and communities. Reddit organisation labelled subreddits "communities" where before the labelling the people who visited subreddits didn't think of themselves as a community. "communities" were created to isolate certain problematic subreddits who indeed had a unique group identity. Quarantine was introduced at the same time to perform the isolation. Subreddits turned into communities by becoming identified as such from within and outside but also the communities own self-culture, moderation rules became stronger because they were labelled as such.
I can recommend Spying in Guru Land for a book about cults. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2487851.Spying_in_Guru_L...
Where do I sign up for your totally-not-a-cult thing ?