Five cults that have nothing to do with God
A cult is built on belief. Of giving yourself over to a higher power. What you’re actually believing in, what that higher power actually is? That’s somewhat secondary to the act itself.
This might sound strange, but it’s true. What’s more, it’s something that people who aren’t in cults do all the time. Not to get all Richard Dawkins about it, but look at the heavily religious. Oftentimes, the specifics of what a religion calls you to believe in are secondary to the act of sublimating yourself to the religion you were born into. You can’t expect a die-hard Christian to truly work the fact that their holy book says that wearing mixed fabrics is a sin into their day-to-day life, we’re busy, but that doesn’t make them any less of a believer.
However, cult logic is so insidious that you get people giving themselves to them in their entirety without even the presence of an all-powerful God figure to threaten them with. It’s true, the line between cults and religions can be thin at the worst of times. However, all a cult needs to be a cult is a group of people supporting one charismatic figurehead. Cults can absolutely exist without a supernatural figure at their core, and loads of them do already.
So let’s have a look at five cults that have absolutely nothing to do with God. It’s a void some of them fill with art, with business, with self-improvement, but whatever void they fill it with, the effect on their followers is exactly the same. Honestly, that’s quite a bit scarier to me than the alternative.
Five cults that have nothing to do with God:
Aesthetic Realism
Many of the followers of Aesthetic Realism will tell you that art is as much a higher power than any God you care to mention. If I as feeling sarky, then I’d say this was because they’re in a cult, but the truth is, they might be more onto something than any of us would like to admit. I know the closest things I’ve had to religious experiences have been at gig venues and theatres, and Aesthetic Realism is the logical extreme of that phenomenon, but in the world of visual art.
Built around the so-called “teachings” of the poet Eli Siegel, who theorised that all kinds of art is a way of balancing how much one liked the world with how much contempt one had for it. That finding a balance between those two concepts was the way to true self-acceptance and happiness. It all sounds pretty interesting until you get to all the people who said that following Aesthetic Realism gave them a way out of homosexuality and into heterosexuality, and then it all comes crashing down again. It’s just cult shit, nothing to see here.
Landmark Worldwide
Anyone who’s been on the LinkedIn Lunatics subreddit will tell you that the way some absolute melts talk about work and business is completely indistinguishable from cult speak. Landmark Worldwide is the mask-off point, where people just admit that they worship money and find the act of gathering capital to be literally holy. Of course, like any good cult, they’ll tell you that it’s obviously not a cult, after all, how can this be a cult if there’s no leader? It sounds like a good point on the surface.
Landmark Worldwide don’t have a “one above all” the way that most cults do. However, why would they have one person telling people when they could have everyone telling everyone else what to do?! That’s their secret. There’s no pressure like peer pressure, and Landmark Worldwide is made up of thousands of people all seeking to keep everyone else honest. That’s not a community, that’s a panopticon, and just because there isn’t an L Ron Hubbard-type figure doesn’t make Landmark Worldwide any less of a cult.
LaRouche Movement
Politicians with a cult-like furore around them feel like a new phenomenon, and it’s true, the internet has made cults of personality that border on the literal very easy to achieve, but it turns out that it’s as old as politics itself – in fact, while the LaRouche Movement is one of the best examples of the point where politicians become cult leaders, it’s actually one of the more recent examples of the phenomenon, even though the movement began in the 1960s, with Lyndon LaRouche starting his political career as a radical left-wing politician, building up support from student activists in the 1960s.
However, this radically changed in the early 1970s, both in terms of ideology (out went Marxism, in went anti-semitic conspiracy theories), and in terms of practises – LaRouche’s followers stopped trying to convert voters and began installing LaRouche’s toadies in positions of power, which is why LaRouche ceased being a politician and started being an insane bigot who tried to grab power by having a bunch of his ideologues rig the system from the inside… Good thing we don’t have people like that in power anymore, right?
Drug Free America Foundation
Drug addiction is hell for anyone who falls into its clutches, but especially for a young person. No one in their right mind would argue against this, and only a truly despicable institution would ever try to take advantage of young people trying to get clean. Enter the Drug Free America Foundation. Founded in 1976 by Mel Sembler, the Foundation operated on one simple idea. The idea that nothing gets people off drugs quicker than putting addicts in a violent, abusive cult, then hurting them until they break completely.
The St. Petersburg Times followed a 15-year-old through his “rehabilitation” with the Drug Free America Foundation, otherwise known as Straight Inc, and described it thus: “The methods, at least initially: No living at home. No talking to parents. No contact with anyone outside the program. No drugs. No cigarettes. No TV. No music. No reading. No school. And a daily onslaught of counselling sessions that often reduces a person to tears.” This typically went on for over a year, and by 1992, 50,000 children had gone through this attempted brainwashing. The program has since, thankfully, been shut down.
Raëlism
So, we’re very much going to be splitting hairs with this one because while Raëlism is technically atheist, it’s a very different kind of atheist than the others on this list. Raëlism, founded by Claude Vorilhon in the 1970s, is a religion in the sense that it tells its followers a creation myth, has dogma and religion and very much believes in the presence of a higher power, but what sets Raëlism apart from the others is the fact that it doesn’t believe that humanity was created by a God, but that we were put here by, sing it with me now, aliens!
Yup, Raëlism is a UFO religion that believes an alien race known as the Elohim created the world with hyper-advanced technology that’d be indistinguishable from magic – they also believe that all the established prophets of mainstream religion, your Jesus’, your Buddhas, etc, have all been Elohim/human hybrids spreading the gospel of our alien creators, and that Vorilhon (or Raël as he named himself), is the 40th and final. Yes, final, because he believes it’s his destiny to unite the world and use its scientific and technological advancements to create an age of peace.
Once that’s done, the Elohim will return to Earth, sharing their technology with us to create an eternal utopia. And all you have to do to help bring this utopia to life is live in Raël’s cult and let him have sex with you whenever he wants-oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s all just cult shit!