this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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That's if you're including spiritual as non-religious.
Only 18% of people in that poll were described as neither (Atheist).
I believe he was getting at religion as the problem, not spirituality. If you look at the BITE model, which is used to determine if a group displays cult like behavior, both flat earthers and many religions fall into the category of cults. Spirituality does not, as it is not organized.
As someone who grew up in a part spiritual household I heavily disagree. Flat earthers and traditional spiritualists like Neo-Pagans, Wiccans, etc, have the exact same amount of organization, if flat earthers are a cult, then so are most spiritualist groups.
Most flat earthers aren't in some organized cult, they get their misinformation from Facebook posts and YouTube videos, with there being a couple of small actually organized groups. The exact same can be said about spiritualists, just generally they used to get their spiritual beliefs from books instead of the internet (though that's changed now for spiritualists too).
If anything, I'd bet there's more people in actually organized spiritualist groups than there are in actually organized flat earther groups.
Yes, that's still and organization. Wicca is a religion, by definition.
Also, cults do not have to be organized by a leader, they can simply be a loose group. The BITE model accounts for this.
I suppose what I was getting to is personal spirituality. Any group that is working to push/enforce their ideas and world view could easily become a cult. Flat earthers, yoga moms, whatever.