The terms cult and culture have the same problem(s) as sect and religion. There is no one clear-cut definition, but many competing definitions, most of which are kind of vague or ambiguous. Both sect and cult are usually used in us versus them narratives. If you pick a random person and try to discuss if and why something is a cult/sect or culture/religion you are almost guaranteed to run into unresolvable conflict because you’ll likely have different definitions in mind. The obvious solution is to settle on a common definition beforehand, but that will just cause the next conflict because there are so many and there is no obviously correct one.

People often bring up an aspect of control as the defining characteristic of cults/sects. Does that make all states cults? Does that mean every major Christian denomination was a sect 200 years ago?

Another common definition is that of a new group splitting off from the established group. Does that mean the entirety of Christianity is just a jewish sect?

Most definitions, when applied rigorously, imply that every culture/religion has been a cult/sect at least for some time in the past. And here comes the trouble: Most people from some culture/religion will provide you with a definition for cult/sect, when arguing about it, but will not accept when you apply it to theirs and point out that by that definition it either is a cult/sect, or was 200/500/1000 years ago. Because most people use those terms to denote otherness possibly even in a pejorative way.

In an academic context (for example anthropology or history) the distinction between cult and culture or sect and religion can be useful when a definition is given in the context and it is applied consistently. Outside of academia those terms aren’t very useful beyond instigating people against each other or minorities, solidifying circle jerks, or starting flame wars.

My nonprofessional take on it:

Every culture started out as a cult and all cultures are or have been horrid given the opportunity.

Every religion started out as a sect and all the sects’ and religions’ fairy tales are equally ridiculous when observed from the outside.

The distinction between cult and culture, and sect and religion, has no net positive benefit outside of academia and should be avoided outside of fiction.

I’ve never seen this on the web, Jerboa, or Boost.

𝖄𝕰𝕾! 𝕷𝕰𝕿’𝕾 𝕿𝖄𝕻𝕰 𝕷𝕺𝖀𝕯𝕰𝕽!

When am I getting any shit done with all the sleeping, eating, and taking showers?

I mean, they are fine books!

Thanks for the pointers. I’ll have to look at that sometime.

I like the idea of a federated network of lots of smallish instances. You’re absolutely right, though, that some flux is to be expected, and evident.

While we’re at it: Villa Straylight is the name of an abandoned space habitat from the same series ;-)

The text portion of your comments and posts lives on everywhere where it was federated. All images uploaded to the instance are gone.

If you’re referring to wintermute, that’s the name of an AI from a Gibson novel. Soo, pretty common among cyber punk nerds online. My name is an allusion to one character from that series, too: count zero.

Well, the administrative account went by “wintermute”. Good luck finding a wintermute online that’s actually them.

*JetBrains. IntelliJ IDEA is their java/kotlin IDE.

It never occurred to me, that people would use calibre to read books. I only use it to move books between devices (kindle →PC ⟷ smartphone) and to strip DRM. The stripping of DRM is actually my primary motivator to use calibre.