Q. What is a cult? And how does someone know if the faith they are following is harmful?

A. The word cult has three definitions. First of all, it can simply be a group that loves something. When people refer to an "Elvis cult" or "The O.C. cult," they mean really devoted fans.

The second definition is that of a religion whose beliefs differ from the majority around them. In the Roman Empire, Christians were sometimes considered a cult because they worshiped Jesus rather than the Roman gods.

The third, and most commonly used definition, refers to a religious group that is:

1) Exclusive. They may say, "We're the only ones with the truth; everyone else is wrong; and if you leave our group your salvation is in danger."

2) Secretive. Certain teachings are not available to outsiders or they're presented only to certain members, sometimes after taking vows of confidentiality.

3) Authoritarian. A human leader expects total loyalty and unquestioned obedience.

I see the Islamic Cult as just a Cult, an evil cult where you believe or you are nothing but a target.

It was not always this way.
The Koran before Mohamed was a peaceful and intellectual doctrine of peace.

Then the pedophile, sociopath Mohamed came along and changed the way it was interpreted and forever doomed its followers to eternal hatred, fear, murder and draconian punishment.

This diseased cult will continue to grow, feeding on the distrust and rebellion against insane and immoral governments, until governments become fairer, more altruistic and morally driven.

I hold out little faith in this, so I can only look forward to a future of ever increasing fear, distrust, religious intolerance and the machinations of men striving through violence to increase their power and influence.

Sad times indeed

Sprintcyclist wrote on Apr 11^th, 2016 at 11:37am:


Alas, Sprint, that's not the definition of a cult. It is, however, the definition of liberalism: "do whatever you like as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else".

A cult is a hierarchical organization, built around a strong, usually charismatic, leader. Cults encourage members to see outsiders as dangerous and/or evil. They encourage members to proselytize and bring more members into the cult. Cults enforce obedience and involve themselves in all areas of their members lives. There are no secrets in a cult - the leadership must know everything about its members. Leaders of cults are usually paranoid about potential rivals, and hunt down powerful members.

The Hare Krishnas are indeed a cult, although they've softened over the last 2 decades. Their leader, Prabhubada, who died in the early 1970s, is immortalized in lifelike wax statues placed in every Krishna temple. This is common in a cult - leaders do not lose their power after death.

The most seemingly trivial details of members' lives are controlled, particularly around sex and family life. In the Krishnas, couples can only have sex a few times a year, and only then after chanting thousands of rounds of mantras. Only the missionary position is allowed, and only vaginal intercourse. Couples must be married, and those marriages must be approved. In the early days, members weren't allowed to get married at all. Chastity was crucial. After that, marriage partners were chosen for them. Today, they're given a bit more rope, but not a lot.

Islam is not a cult. There are certainly cults within Islam, and I believe ISIS is probably one. Islam lacks the central leadership, the insider/outsider group-think, and the restrictive practices. There are a few cult-like practices within Islam - the prayer times, the fasting, the rules around certain routines and rituals, but Islam is not organized like a cult. It is way too diverse to function as a cult, and there are too many competing groups, beliefs and practices.

The Hare Krishnas are a cult. Islam - in itself - is not.

1.  The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.

This quite accurately describes Islam which is a totalitarian ideology with a façade of religion. Its leader, Muhammad who is probably a myth, is proclaimed to be the perfect man whose example every Muslim should follow. Everything he supposedly did or expounded is considered perfect and cannot be challenged or changed upon threat of death. This idolatry, which Islam professes to decry, is exhibited in the total obeisance and repeated use of the expression “Peace Be Upon Him” – PBUH every time his name is even mentioned. Sharia, Islamic law, is derived from the Qur’an and the actions and sayings of Muhammad (taken from the sira and hadiths).

The supremacy (or arrogance) of the concept of Muhammad is that he is supposedly the last prophet – there can be no more prophets (this was in the sixth century in a very backward part of the world), and the extreme arrogance of the claimed statement by Muhammad, “Every prophet was sent to his nation but only I have been sent to all mankind.”

Islam is the Arabic word meaning submission (to Muhammad’s “god” – Allah) and is derived from a word meaning peace. Muslims are those who have submitted. For Westerners, the clearest expression of that submission is the bowing down with the head on the ground in daily prayers. Total submission to Allah (or Muhammad) results in fatalism resulting in not taking responsibility for one’s actions. Muslims regularly rationalize their actions, or inactions, or events as InshAllah (also In Sha’ Allah) – “Allah’s will.”

The Qur’an is purported to be the exact word of Allah as transmitted to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel.  Therefore, it is not open for discussion, analysis, or critique, even though it contains grammatical and historical errors, is completely illogical in that surahs (chapters) are arranged based on length, not chronological context, there are parts which no one understands, and there are many contradictions. It was written in the poetic style of the desert, which is not fully translatable, and the Bedouins had little concern for chronology such as placing Moses and Jesus together in time.

Islam is a totalitarian ideology covering every aspect of life, is considered perfect, and calls for its imposition on everyone in the world whether they want it or not.

3.   Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).

There are five “pillars” of Islam: profession of faith, prayer, fasting during Ramadan, religious tax, and the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). [Jihad was almost a sixth pillar.] Every Muslim must pray five times a day. This repetition helps dominate a Muslim’s life, infusing his daily routine with Islam. It would be impossible to forget anything you deliberately do so often. Five times a day, every day, a Muslim must bow down and pray to Allah. The more effort a person expends for a cause, the more he is likely to believe and value it. This also helps make believers out of people who became Muslims through coercion.

4.  The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).

Every imaginable aspect of life is dictated by Islam from how to go to the bathroom, to all aspects of personal hygiene, how to place the feet to pray properly, what can and cannot be done including photography, television, drinking, eating pork, charging interest, gambling, playing stringed instruments, depicting animate life, the clothes to wear, and what women are permitted to do, what their testimony is worth, what they can inherit, how they can get to paradise, and that they can be beaten (or killed).

6.  The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.          

Islam is dualistic: humanity is divided into believers (that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the prophet of Allah) and kafirs (all non-Muslims or unbelievers). A kafir is hated, ignorant, evil, a liar, disgraced, unclean, cursed, a partner of Satan, and can be beheaded, enslaved, raped, mocked, confused, terrorized, deceived, annihilated, robbed, killed, crucified, plotted against, made war on and humiliated, and a Muslim cannot be his friend. [Each of these is from Islamic texts.]

Islam divides the world, which belongs to Allah, into the Dar al-Islam (land of submission) and the Dar al-Harb (land of war). That is that Islamic lands are good and the rest of the world should be subjugated. It is the duty of the faithful to gain control of any parts of the world that are not following Islamic law and establish sharia. It is a sin to let it be.

Islam must always be defended. This idea is a primary linchpin that gives justification for war with almost anybody. After the enemy is defeated, of course, Muslims are required to establish an Islamic state. Islamic writings teach the use of pretext to start wars. The use of pretext tends to make the West defenseless against the Islamic invasion now underway. Muslim terrorists are not naïve people. They are smart, educated, well-funded, and being used by a very clever ideology.

7.  The leader is not accountable to any authorities (unlike, for example, teachers, military commanders or ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations).

Muhammad was supposedly the perfect man, answerable only to Allah if anyone, but Allah seems to be an invention of Muhammad or whoever invented Muhammad. There is no central authority in Islam. Thus various imams, mullahs, ayatollahs, sheikhs, and other leaders often add their own interpretations to theocratic and political questions. Al Azhar University in Cairo is regarded as a top center of Sunni Islam and the supreme leader or ayatollah in Iran tries to represent Shiites, but there are still other groups: Alawites, Ismailis, Sufis, Druze, Deobandis, etc.

9.  The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.

The pressure to conform is intense starting with the affirmation that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger and then bowing down in complete submission five times a day in prayer. Not conforming brings great shame to a family, which is unacceptable in tribal societies. To criticize Islam is a death sentence and to in any way bring dishonor to a family is so critical that honor killing, mainly of women (mothers, daughters, sisters), is acceptable, even demanded. The psychological term for such behavior is brainwashing.

10.  Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group.

A Muslim is not supposed to be friends with non-Muslims. This extends to family if members are not Muslims. This in-gathering is seen in Jamaat ul Fuqra, Muslim terrorist training camps, communes of primarily black American-born Muslims. They have established more than 35 of these “Jamaats” in 22 states and Canada.

11.  The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

Under Islam, it is a holy requirement that the whole world should be brought under Islam. There can be no “peace” until everyone is a Muslim. [This is a bad joke since even if the Muslims could gain power, they would fight among themselves.] This dates from the Qur’an and has been repeated regularly over the centuries. Ibn Khaldun reiterated it in the 15th Century: “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the (Muslim) mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force... Islam is under obligation to gain power over nations.” This is echoed in the writings of Sayyid Qutb and other Muslim writers and to the present with Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

15.  The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.

Islam is a total ideology of submission to Allah (or Muhammad). Muslims are the only acceptable people. All others are kafirs, of no value. The reprisals are strong for even thinking against Islam, blasphemy, or daring to leave, apostasy. The penalty for both is death.

Islam seems to fit the ICSA criteria for a cult. Since Allah is deemed to be unknowable, Islam seems to better fit as the cult of Muhammad. Muslims refer to Allah, but they seem to have deified Muhammad. Everything is about Muhammad. One strong indication of this is that the Sacred Law is not the law of Allah but the Sacred Law of Muhammad. Throughout the Qur’an, it is “Allah and his Messenger,” but sometimes it is just the Messenger. In Reliance of the Traveller [‘Umdat al-Salik from the 14th Century], a Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law updated and certified by Al Azhar in 1991, it is stated it rather clearly. Allah sent Muhammad, “the Qurayshite unlettered prophet, to deliver His inspired message to the entire world, Arabs and non-Arabs, jinn and mankind, superseding and abrogating all previous religious systems with the Prophet’s Sacred Law, except for the provisions of them that the new revelation explicitly reconfirmed. Allah has favored him above all the other prophets and made him the highest of mankind, rejecting anyone’s attesting to the divine oneness by saying ‘There is no god but Allah,’ unless they also attest to the Prophet by saying ‘Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.’ He has obliged men and jinn to believe everything the Prophet has informed us concerning this world and the next, and does not accept anyone’s faith unless they believe in what he has told us will happen after death.”

The interesting aspect of the Cult of Muhammad is that he probably never existed. Muhammad was born two hundred years after his birth. That is the conclusion of Norbert Pressburg in his book What the Modern Martyr Should Know [a good companion work to Robert Spencer’s Did Muhammad Exist?]  Pressburg establishes that there is no record of any Muhammad from the seventh century – all of it dates from the eighth and ninth centuries. Also the word “muhamad” is a gerund, meaning “the praised one” [often referring to Christ], and could not possibly be understood as a name. The birth of Islam took a long time. Christendom had split off from Judaism. At that time there were considerable differences in the Christian world over the real role of Jesus. The Arab Christians (Arabs were really the people of Greater Syria and Mesopotamia [Iraq] not the Bedouins of the desert of the Arabian Peninsula) had their own views of Christianity and eventually separated themselves from Greek Christianity. However, they needed their own holy book and prophet. Over hundreds of years, the Aramaic liturgical book, the Qeryan, a Christian book, was transformed into the Islamic Qur’an when Jesus lost his special status. There were many authors of the new book with different political agendas and often with limited understanding of the languages involved. This separation was seen coming in the sixth and seventh centuries but did not take place until the eighth and ninth centuries. The traditions of that first two hundred years of Islam are mostly mythical or as Pressburg suggests, “tales from the East.” What we now know as Islam was not completed until the twelfth or even the thirteenth century.[The Qur’an was not printed until 1802 in Russia.] By the third Islamic century (the 900s), Islam had transformed into “an excessive personality cult,” now the trademark of Islam and what they had been so strongly against in the beginning.




That is the Cult of Muhammad.

Usually for people of a more, shall we say, simple mind or low of intellect to be precise.

Karnal wrote on Apr 11^th, 2016 at 2:37pm:


Incorrect. You just make yourself look even more stupid by acting like a child with your silly matty nonsense. Yet you still are incorrect. As usual. Do some research and post maturely if at all possible next time dear and someone may actually take you seriously.