News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Look into it. But not too hard or too publicly.
Were you paying attention earlier in the thread when I said cults are small, or are you expecting me to investigate Scientology and find that surprise, they're actually very small and don't have many members?
I thought they were global and pretty large scale, but I haven't got any numbers for you and I wouldn't dream of comparing their size with major world religions.
My assertion, which I admit I didn't express, is that the distinction between cult and religion is less about size and more about how much members lose personal autonomy and how secretive the organisation is about its beliefs and practices.
That's the way I see it anyway, otherwise there's not a lot of point having two different words for it. There are grey areas, sure, but that doesn't mean that there is no distinction.
You're using a definition invented whole cloth by Christian pastors in the 70s with absolutely no basis in historical tradition, which was created solely with the intent of confusing people in order to push a political agenda.
Oh. Wikipedia says that the anti-cult movement in the 70s was secular? Did you mean the anti-cult movement of the 40s? I didn't know anything about that stuff till you brought it up, sorry.
I'm not particularly wedded to a particular definition of the word, but you seem to be using the modern and more critical meaning when you claim all religions are cults, whilst criticising me for not using the more neutral meaning of the word from antiquity, which I find confusing.
Some people like to argue just for the sake of arguing.
I use the neutral meaning from antiquity, and I never said all religions are cults. You must have me confused with someone else
Why not use the contemporary meaning so the rest of us don't argue with you just because you're using a definition that was only current about a century ago?
Actually, yes, you're just the one that asserted that scientology isn't one. There's an inconsistency where you use the older, broader definition and then deny that it applies to scientology, and I'd like you to state for clarity what you mean by a cult and why you feel it doesn't apply to the church of scientology.
A cult is a small religion. Scientology is big. The new definition platforms ahistorical biases that attack smaller religions, particularly those with hundreds of years of history as cults, through linguistic association with abuse. That's bad. It perpetuates satanic panic dogma.
Earlier you insinuated that scientology was small, now you're saying it's big. You don't like the usual meaning of the word cult because you prefer to make cult mean "small religion" (which I think is a pretty pointless definition and confusing for most people). You claim that this is because it's bad to have a word for a secretive group whose members lose personal autonomy or is otherwise particularly abusive. I don't see it as in any way bad to be able to make that distinction, and I'm suspicious of the motives for removing it.
Citing "satanic panic dogma", you mysteriously conclude the mere existence of a word with connotations of abuse is bad. It smells like a cover up, but I have no idea what you're trying to blur the lines between because you haven't made it clear which group that we saw as abusive you want us to reinterpret as merely small, or which group that we saw as merely small (and not cultish) you want us to use the word cult for.
You claim that something is ahistorical, but it's never really clear what, since you aren't using many of the key words to mean the same as the rest of us and haven't made explicit the context that you're referring to. I'd guess it's something to do with the 1970s, but that's really just a guess, I have no idea.
No I didn't. I said scientology isn't a cult. My reasoning was that it's too big. You're just bad at listening.
No I don't. You really need to work on your listening skills. I'm saying that using an already existing word, which already describes a set of marginalised groups, as a slur is bad. For example, suppose white Christians went around saying that "person of colour" means criminal. That would be horrible, right? Do you understand why? It's because using a term that already describes vulnerable people as a bad word is bad.
No, I'm not bad at listening, you're bad at being clear and honest about what you mean.
I read some of your comments elsewhere in this thread, and you feel that the word cult has been used negatively against Wiccans and Hellenists. You spend some time arguing that only big religions have the clout and money to be harmful, and you want the word cult to mean specifically just small rather than abusive.
The problem is that you lost the battle over the meaning of that word about 80 years ago from what I can tell from reading it up. You may as well try to stop people from using the word fantastic in a positive light and just use it to mean absurdly implausible. It's too late. The meaning has changed. Rather than saying things like "Wicca is a cult, it's just not harmful because it's not a religion, stop using the word cult to mean harmful" instead, say things like "Hellenism isn't a large, harmful religion, it's a small harmless one". You seem to identify with "cult" and you see that as positive and you dislike larger religions which you see as harmful. Instead of arguing over the meaning of the word cult, argue with people who criticise Hellenism.
You picked a big long argument over the meaning of the word cult because you can't let go of a meaning from a century ago. Meanwhile your intent was lost because you didn't make your perspective clear early on.
Here's how society is: when it sees an abusive group using religious ideas led by someone with a big personality, it calls it a cult, meaning it loosely and negatively, and then you shoot into the argument saying "no, no, don't call them a cult, they're a religion". To everyone else, you sound like you're defending them, whereas what you mean is "don't use the word cult for bad things", but that's not what you say! Not for a long time! It's a different day and we're tens of comments away from when you first tried to intervene! You obliquely say stull like "no, they're not a cult they're too big, and they're too powerful" and then people say "but cults can be big and powerful" and you say "no, cults are only small. big powerful ones are called religions" and the whole argument isn't explicitly about what you mean. Your point is lost.
It's like saying "no I'm not a troll, I live in a 1980s semi" when you'd be far better off saying "no, I wasn't being sarcastic at all - I meant it, we just disagree". The word troll has changed its meaning, and trying to talk about height or whether someone lives in a house in an argument about whether someone is arguing in bad faith, without ever mentioning caves, which was your real point, because your great aunt lives in one of the ancient cliff homes of Matera in Italy, but inexplicably you never mention it.
Rebrand. Give up on the word cult. I know it has all kinds of positive connotations for you, but that ship has sailed for the rest of society. You'd get a lot more sympathy if you were just open and honest from the start, like "I'm a pagan and we always got called a cult pejoratively in the 1970s and I don't like people using that word negatively. Could you use the word religion instead?" and then at least the people arguing with you know what they're arguing about. You'll still lose that argument, but at least you wouldn't waste as much time being indirect. It's simpler to give up on the word and rebrand. After all, "Wicca" and "White witch" are rebrands, avoiding the negative connotations of witchcraft (eg poisons and love potions aka date rate drugs). Rebranding works. The satanists regularly troll rightwingers/christofascists by asserting their religious freedom to oppose the abusive anti-minority practices of the alt-right in ways that are popular online. Not by saying "stop calling bad religions satanic".
By the way, wikipedia thinks there are somewhere around 800,000 wiccans and less than 40,000 scientologists, so I think even that by your own definition, scientology is more of a cult than wicca. But in terms of using the legal system to silence opponents, it's certainly much more powerful. Did you want me to stop calling things cults if they're powerful now?