Seems obvious to me that regular religions and cults exist on a continuum. At one end would be those who insist that religious observance is purely a personal matter available only by individual realization, and do not attempt to convert others, like some individualist pantheists or mystics; on the other, those for whom religion is nothing more than an excuse to coerce money and obedience out of followers, and have no real belief in its substance - like one imagines of the founders of Scientology.
In the middle exist the mass of traditional churches and organized religions, for whom religion provides some measure of structure and social control, but whose ministers, priests, rabbis and imams are more probably than not believers themselves.
There is never going to be an absolutely bright line between them, as any individual religion is constantly in a state of evolution. A traditional-type church can throw out a charismatic leader who uses the structure of thge church to build a cult-like fiefdom (think of Jim Jones); OTOH, a cult-like organization can, over time, evolve into an ordinary middling religion.
The criterion may not explicitly say that the charismatic leader must be alive, but I think it’s heavily implied. The leader has to be available and capable of exerting active influence upon the cult members’ beliefs and lives. Jesus and Mohammed, analytically speaking, are not leaders but icons.
Powers &8^]
Which just makes the list silly. It means that he minute before L. Ron died, Scientology was a cult. The minute after he died, it ceased to be a cult and became a religion.
Any criterion that produces such bizarre results is essentially worthless.
Back to the OP for a moment… Your post is loaded with so many idiosyncratic assumptions and definitions and conceptual ambiguities that it makes answering, impossible:
What exactly do you mean by a “true Christian”? I’m not familiar with what a “true Christian” even is. What distinguishes a “true” Xtian from one who’s not?
What exactly is one’s “spiritual self”? And what exactly does it mean to “reach” it?
What exactly do you mean by “achieve spiritualism”?
I think you mean spirituality, anyway. Spiritualism was a specific kind of metaphysical/paranormal woo-woo mumbo-jumbo from the 19th century, involving mediums, seances, and “ectoplasm”. (You can Google or Wiki the term for more info.)
They aren’t meant to account for every possible eventuality. If a leader leaves or dies, of course there’s going to be a transition period. If the organization no longer has a single charismatic leader, then it’s hard to continue to call it a cult, yes, but I don’t see why it would lose that status instantly.
Powers &8^]
In no way could either Jesus or Mohammed be described as leading Christians or Moslems. Christians and Moslems might follow their teachings; but that’s a passive process, not an active one.
If something is “universally true”, then it’s an absolute. There are no exceptions.
Since there clearly are exceptions, then we’re not dealing with something that is universally true.
:rolleyes:
If you are a Roman Catholic you do not “lose all control over your reproductivity”. Of course you have touched on a topic here that could lead on to a meaningful debate, but then you blow it all by making further sweeping assertions that don’t hold up to any sort of scrutiny.
Clearly any organisation that tells its members how to spend their money is exercising (or trying to exercise) considerable control over them. But most Christian churches don’t do this. And so far as I’m aware, the Church of England at least doesn’t tell its members when to attend church, and certainly not “with whom”.
You seem to have failed to grasp an important distinction between mainstream religious (or other) organisations, and at least the more troublesome sort of cults. An organisation might express opinions as to its members’ conduct. But there’s both the degree to which it does this, and the methods by which it enforces it. That’s what I understand by “considerable amount of social control over the lives of the followers”.
But if you don’t agree with the position of the Church of England, then whatever it says about you leaving it is irrelevant. Anyway, you can leave the C of E with probably less hassle than you would if you wanted to leave your current bank!
In contrast, the stereotypical cult will even use physical coercion to prevent someone from leaving its ranks.
If a state church were really exerting a “considerable amount of social control” over its members, it’s a little hard to understand how the Church of England has ended up with such a low membership; its official website states that only 40% of the population “regard themselves as belonging to the Church of England”. Note the choice of words: even with such a loose definition of membership, well over half the population still aren’t members!