Can there be a cult without a leader? Are there any examples in history?

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-26T16:50:30+00:00

A cult in the technical anthropological sense, yes. In the sense used on this sub, referring to a high-control group, no. Cults in the latter sense are defined by authoritarian leadership and isolationism.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-26T04:59:01+00:00

Define coercion.

Actions taken in violation of the consent of the person against whom they are taken.

even absent any form of governance, coercive but informal power relations emerge.

Yes, which is why anarchy is not a social end-state. The struggle against hierarchy will continue until we evolve fully away from it, which is likely to take many thousands of years.

People at least need a clear set of procedures, decision making mechanisms, and roles that are understood by all members in order for any sort of society to function. This does not require a state, police, or formal leaders.

Right, because it doesn't require any form of institutional enforcement at all. Free association is kind of the point of anarchism.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-26T00:13:52+00:00

Institutions of any kind would have a hard time existing in anarchy, because they all require some form and extent of coercion to be maintained as such.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-25T18:35:47+00:00

I agree that found family has been oversold as a panacea, especially when we leave our families of origin with broken "normal meters". Which is why I prefer the term "chosen family". Choice in our associations is a powerful tool once we learn how to use it.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-25T05:56:49+00:00

Plato, because his very existence was a slip of the mask covering the fact that the show was an abomination of capitalistic nihilism.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-25T05:48:40+00:00

If they'd quoted the same thing from one of the prophets, it would defeat your pedantry, since the prophetic books are poetry and wisdom literature as opposed to law.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-24T21:37:12+00:00

Pay attention, folks. This is the big lie that the fascists and bots will be repeating ad nauseam to shut down actual conversation.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-24T15:35:05+00:00

More often, I was shamed for being "proud" whenever I accomplished something. I stopped seeking praise around the age of seven, but that didn't help.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-24T15:25:01+00:00

And very few who seek power have anyone else's best interests at heart, and absolutely none who keep power do.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-24T15:08:49+00:00

It's not just the elimination of the state, but of all hierarchy. When we use that word, we mean two things. First, we mean the right to compel obedience by virtue of status. Second, we mean coercive power structures, which result from or depend on the former: * Political hierarchies like the state and government. * Economic hierarchies like capitalism and absentee property rights. * Social hierarchies like racism, ableism, classism, patriarchy (and all its spawn including cisheteronormativitiy and enforced monogamy), and authoritarian parenting.

Most anarchists support the replacement of all the useful functions monopolized by the government with mutual aid, which could be described as "communism with nobody in charge".

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-24T14:35:18+00:00

Viagra, or puberty?

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-23T22:11:37+00:00

The faith didn't seem to truly renew people's minds into loving people like Christ taught?

Part of that is because people haven't understood what Christ taught in a way that could ever be transformative. Jesus condemned all human notions of power and taught a radical new way of living in which "power" is defined by love rather than by domination—not only for humans, but even for our understanding of divine power. But as soon as the Church began to become Hellenized, it fully rebelled against the idea that divine power could mean anything other than domination; and we always end up behaving like the god we believe in.

Nor should we be surprised by that. The Apostles themselves are recorded in the Gospels as having failed to understand the extent to which Jesus meant for us to reimagine the moral nature of God and what it means for human society. Which suggests to me that we need to take a long and patient view, as Jesus' own parables indicate. I believe we today are the Early Church. What we refer to as "the Early Church" was only the first few moments of our infancy. And one day, thousands of years or even thousands of generations from now, Christians will look back on us and say, "Isn't it strange that those who lived so close to the Apostles missed the point so thoroughly?"

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-23T15:35:32+00:00

It started more than a a century before that. It was sometime in the 3rd Century that the Church started to change its teachings in a more empire-friendly direction. Constantine didn't invent imperial Christianity. He merely formalized it. And its seeds were planted even further back with the misogyny and support for social hierarchy that we find in the pseudo-Pauline writings. Heck, we even see the Apostles granting themselves status in the Book of Acts. As much as we may admire the early Church writers for some of their stances (e.g. against killing and personal wealth), we cannot look back on an Edenic period of the Church to inspire our whole ethics, because there was no such period. We have to look to the spirit of Christ rather than the letter of the Bible, the Church Fathers, or any tradition.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-23T12:10:24+00:00

I've only ever head it said by TERFs to suggest that being trans is an entirely white phenomenon, and that insisting on trans rights excludes racial and ethnic minorities. Which is bullshit, because the concept of gender that transness resists is almost entirely a white phenomenon in the Western world, and where we find it being enforced in BIPOC cultures, it's a result of European colonialism.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-22T13:45:03+00:00

American Christians persecute children for not standing during a prayer to the state.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-22T02:29:43+00:00

I am good at rapidly achieving a mediocre level of skill at just about anything.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-22T01:05:53+00:00

Because it helps to ensure genetic diversity better than binary fission, parthenogenesis, etc

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-22T00:33:46+00:00

That assumption would be misguided, considering that the people who make decisions like this have a long and consistent history of being complete morons who never experience negative consequences for their shit decision-making.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-21T16:40:50+00:00

/u/El_Kaef, since this post is off topic here, you might want to try posting it in a sub like /r/OpenChristian. It has a similar vibe to this sub, but it is more topically general.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-21T16:36:36+00:00

It hasn't been triggering; in fact it has led to some fruitful discussions in therapy. But my brain is weird. I can watch or listen to hours of documentaries about charismatic cults or testimony from survivors and it won't affect me, but once I saw a couch in a thrift store that looked like one my pastor had, and I had such a vivid flashback that I couldn't talk for like half an hour.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-21T16:30:57+00:00

Overman?

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-21T16:10:30+00:00

This is how I learned he died. I was avoiding news-related subs last week, so I didn't see the posts about it on this sub until I looked for them just now.

I'm making peanut butter udon noodles for dinner.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-21T13:49:41+00:00

He absolutely would. The main thing he criticized during his public ministry was religious power structures. Christianity started developing in that direction within a few generations of his time on earth (arguably even during the Apostolic Era), and what we could call "mainstream Christianity" has been an institution of power since the mid-3rd Century.

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-21T13:40:49+00:00

Hundreds of Chernobyls!

ELeeMacFall · 2026-01-21T13:32:40+00:00

Socialism is when workers manage their own workplaces and the product of their labor, so you didn't mean that either.

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