I sorta agree with this. But it's getting close to what apologists who read Kuhn say. I criticize Mormonism based on my own paradigm, and since nobody can escape their paradigm, it's all relative and Mormonism is just as valid as anything else.Physics Guy wrote:Sometimes people have habits and beliefs that are based on a different set of background assumptions than most people's, and maybe also on a different selection of which issues to ignore or to highlight. When it seems that this is true to a significant degree for some people, and that it must be the main reason why they think and behave as they do, that's when I think one starts to reach for the "cult" label
That we tend to reach for the "cult" label if people are too different is the knee-jerk version we should be critical of. We don't want to just slap the label "cult" on somebody because they are so different. If that's all it means, then the word is only about prejudice, and surely it can be used by the oddball with just as much validity to describe everyone else who to them, are the odd ones.
There would have to be a way to determine levels of resistance to outsiders and difficulty in re-wiring fundamental ways of looking at the world. For the term to be valid, there has to be appreciable magnitude of hostility towards others not simplistically reflected by the others towards them, and much deeper barriers to re-orient that hostility than is found generally in people.
It would be like, okay, to a schizophrenic, the psychiatrist is the crazy one. Their world is real to them as much as the doctor's world is real to the doctor. And so in this analogy, the word "cult" could only be meaningful if there is likewise a way to say, notwithstanding the doctor and the patient being confined to their own minds, we can still realistically say that the patient is the one who is ill.