Anyone see the HBO documentary “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God”?
All the woman did was drink and turn blue and couldn’t even heal herself.
There is a fun Netflix documentary where a guy creates his own cult: Kumare.
In the end he feels bad for taking advantage of peoples’ trust particularly when vulnerable and has a semi-sincere apology for including them in his project.
So the first requirement is you need to be a bit of a sociopath or a true believer (aka a bit crazy)
Extremely relevant video of Derren Brown, British illusionist: Miracles for Sale - It’s very easy to pretend you have some sort of miracle healing powers.
All this hullabaloo about a guy who never existed. Jesus buttfucking Christ.
I think we have archeological evidence for Jesus. Just not for the miracles obviously.
This is why claiming to be a “prophet” (by any of a multitude of definitions) is so popular for cult leaders.
You can say you have information from a deity, one way or another, or even that you get special treatment from a deity. No special powers needed. If people believe in the deity and they believe you were chosen by that deity, to counteract that would mean counteracting the belief in the deity itself.
False prophets will arrive and mislead many
Easy, join the cult of linux and bow to the power of the cult leaders: “doing math very fast”. BEHOLD.
If you learn Bash, you can do some proper command line magic. If text files are more like your thing, consider looking into Vim.
Well you see I expend all of my powers holding the darkness at bay. Notice how it gets dark when I get tired and fall asleep?
We need to test this with some sleeping pills and caffeine. Open wide!
A good deal of the miracles happen conveniently off-screen, and mostly become “true” because the whole group tends to unanimously trust the mythos.
“I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.”
- George Carlin.
Cults are built on the power of belief and the more people who believe in a movement the more powerful it becomes.
If ten thousand cult worshipers claimed their leader walked on water, how would you go about convincing them otherwise, even if you had proof.
Look at Islam or Christianity or Judaism, they influence the world but they’re all only built on the power of belief.
And you can equate religions and cults because the only difference between the two is time.
As authorized by the House of Apostles of Eris, I’m a card-holding genuine Pope. So are you and so is everyone who reads this message, if they so wish.
All power in our society is based on belief if you think about it.
My favorite example of this is the idea of money and finance.
There ate trillions and trillions of dollars worth of imaginary wealth everywhere. None of it can be backed by actual product or material … it all exists because we all collectively believe that it exists.
True, although most wealth is held in the form of things other than money, which represent a legal right to power over various things, like who can live in what house, and what thousands of people at a company will spend their time working on.
Not really, otherwise we’d have read a sovcit success story by now.
Belief is necessary but not sufficient.
And you can equate religions and cults because the only difference between the two is time.
There is more difference than time. Cults require a charismatic, authoritarian leader, religions do not. One can be religious and autonomous in practice.
Religions can be open source and decentralised, cults cannot.
At least both Christianity and Islamic religions started as cults and became religions. Christianity was even a sect of people believing in the coming of the end times, that’s what the revelation in the new testament is for.
A sect or a cult is always the root of any new religion and often new sects or cults are the offspring of an older religion. Religion, cults and sects are as concepts interconnected.
Religion, cults and sects are as concepts interconnected.
Oh, for sure. These ideas are related, but to claim that they are only separable by time is disingenuous.
Yup. The requirement of “faith” is a sure sign of charlatanism.
It’s a funny thing, when you think about it. If you were truly God, you wouldn’t need to prove it; you could just make it so everyone believes you.
Not if “believe” from the followers is some kind of cosmic energy that powers the gods or defines their hierarchy, a pandimensional twitter subscription counter of sorts. In that case the last thing you want is to prove your existence as a god, because as soon as your existence is proven all believe will pop out of existence and will be replaced with knowledge of the existence.
Believe is only possible when the thing to believe in is vague and unknowable, you can’t by definition ever believe in the existence of anything that you are sure of.
That’s composing quite an edifice of unprovable postulation to reverse engineer faith. “A” for effort!
I think that is undercutting the prime requirement to be in a cult… too dumb to question shit like that.
