Here, I think, is the genuine distinction between a cult and a religion: around 100 years. When a cult can build up itself for a few generations, we consider it a “religion.” Before that, we excuse it as a hazardous danger to real religion.
The cult is a term that doesn’t allude to religion at everything except is applied to social development. Individuals have natural sentiments about how the word cult ought to be utilized, in any event, when an association or development meets the criteria of a different religion.
This may appear to be a ridiculing, skeptical excusal of the distinction, and henceforth of religion itself. Yet, I don’t mean it that way. For there are valid justifications to regard a gathering that can keep a dream of how to live across a few generations, ones that don’t have any significant bearing to groups that go back and forth inside a solitary age.
To begin with the clearest focuses, a gathering that gets by over generations can’t manage the cost of such a foolish, severe or hostile to social conduct that shocks us in cults. It can’t participate in mass self-destruction, obviously, nor is it liable to proceed if it recommends an amazingly unhealthy system. Also, it is probably going to self-destruct or draw upon itself cruel consideration by the political experts around it, on the off chance that it mistreats its individuals or takes part in assaults on an outsider. To turn into a religion, a gathering with a common vision of what God needs, or what makes human existence worth living, is consequently liable to build up an ethical quality similar as that of the general public around it — and for sure announce that ethical quality vital to what it needs to educate.
