Excellent summary of the cult aspects of transgender ideology. I have shared this with someone who needs to read it as it's simple, supported with similar examples of cult practices, and to the point.
I suppose my feeling is that all cults are religions, but not all religions are cults. And I wonder whether a solid stable proven religion might be one of the best forms of defence against a more crackers cult…. At the end of the day, if you are atheist / agnostic and think all religions have it wrong then maybe you won’t see much difference. But if you think objective truth (and a best path) exists, then you will judge other religions and cults where you see them failing. And with cults, it’s not just how much truth / lies they contain, but how much control is exerted and manipulation used over their followers. So a mainstream Christian denomination isn’t a cult but some sub sets do end up behaving very like it. I do think gnostic type beliefs are particularly unstable because humans are not wise enough to be searching for meaning and truth only inside themselves with nothing else to act as a measuring standard.
It's weird to me when religious people use "it's a religion" as a critique. I agree that charismatic leaders, an emphasis on personal transformation, and the like can be cognitively distorting. And I most certainly agree that "ideas that defy observable reality, requiring faith over evidence" are bad. But with the sole exception of the ideology's *newness* (the first section here about recency, basically) everything on this list emphatically applies to your own recent conversion. (You certainly have gotten a lot of love-bombing in your comments of late!) I am all for seeing multiple points of view, and extreme skepticism about non-empirical claims, but your posting this *at this moment* makes it really hard not to think that you have simply slipped from a New Religious Movement to an Old Religious Movement, which has just about all the same problems.—Sorry, I am not trying to be snarky here, and I respect religious beliefs although I don't share them: but this is pretty stark coming from you, at this moment. I suppose your answer will be "but MY ideas denying observable reality and requiring faith over evidence are TRUE and theirs are NOT", but they would say the same in reverse. It's just a weird argument for you, particularly, to be making at this particular moment in your life.
Well, both Catholicism and Gender Identity theory *can* be defended philosophically, as proved by the fact that many philosophers have defended both (granting fewer the latter due to its newness, although I daresay more philosophers have defended it than had defended Christianity at a comparable age). To say that one can be defended philosophically and the other cannot is simply to reiterate that you, personally, find one true and one false. Is there any sense that you can give to "can be philosophically defended" that doesn't simply boil down to your judgment about the quality of the arguments? And, well, Edward Fesser would agree with you and Robin Dembroff would disagree, but why one should trust one judgment or the other is entirely down to what you find persuasive. There's no external criteria to appeal to here, at least that I can think of. Which is to say, all that you can do is have the substantive argument about truth or falsity, there's no appeal to a meta level of "can be defended". You believe or you don't; you can argue *that*.
For myself, as I said, I find neither persuasive, although there is a reduced, secularized version of each that I think has some merit, but neither is what their defenders believe.
But it seems worth acknowledging that you have nothing against cults as such, unless it's their novelty (and why novelty should be a point against something is a point that ought to be argued, not asserted); you just prefer yours to theirs (or your new one to your old one). To attack it for being a cult qua cult seems strange, given the rest of what you are posting these days.
Excellent summary of the cult aspects of transgender ideology. I have shared this with someone who needs to read it as it's simple, supported with similar examples of cult practices, and to the point.
Thank you! Glad it’s helpful 🙏
I suppose my feeling is that all cults are religions, but not all religions are cults. And I wonder whether a solid stable proven religion might be one of the best forms of defence against a more crackers cult…. At the end of the day, if you are atheist / agnostic and think all religions have it wrong then maybe you won’t see much difference. But if you think objective truth (and a best path) exists, then you will judge other religions and cults where you see them failing. And with cults, it’s not just how much truth / lies they contain, but how much control is exerted and manipulation used over their followers. So a mainstream Christian denomination isn’t a cult but some sub sets do end up behaving very like it. I do think gnostic type beliefs are particularly unstable because humans are not wise enough to be searching for meaning and truth only inside themselves with nothing else to act as a measuring standard.
Well said 🙏
It's weird to me when religious people use "it's a religion" as a critique. I agree that charismatic leaders, an emphasis on personal transformation, and the like can be cognitively distorting. And I most certainly agree that "ideas that defy observable reality, requiring faith over evidence" are bad. But with the sole exception of the ideology's *newness* (the first section here about recency, basically) everything on this list emphatically applies to your own recent conversion. (You certainly have gotten a lot of love-bombing in your comments of late!) I am all for seeing multiple points of view, and extreme skepticism about non-empirical claims, but your posting this *at this moment* makes it really hard not to think that you have simply slipped from a New Religious Movement to an Old Religious Movement, which has just about all the same problems.—Sorry, I am not trying to be snarky here, and I respect religious beliefs although I don't share them: but this is pretty stark coming from you, at this moment. I suppose your answer will be "but MY ideas denying observable reality and requiring faith over evidence are TRUE and theirs are NOT", but they would say the same in reverse. It's just a weird argument for you, particularly, to be making at this particular moment in your life.
Some religions are true. Some are false. Some can be defended philosophically and some can’t. That’s the difference.
Well, both Catholicism and Gender Identity theory *can* be defended philosophically, as proved by the fact that many philosophers have defended both (granting fewer the latter due to its newness, although I daresay more philosophers have defended it than had defended Christianity at a comparable age). To say that one can be defended philosophically and the other cannot is simply to reiterate that you, personally, find one true and one false. Is there any sense that you can give to "can be philosophically defended" that doesn't simply boil down to your judgment about the quality of the arguments? And, well, Edward Fesser would agree with you and Robin Dembroff would disagree, but why one should trust one judgment or the other is entirely down to what you find persuasive. There's no external criteria to appeal to here, at least that I can think of. Which is to say, all that you can do is have the substantive argument about truth or falsity, there's no appeal to a meta level of "can be defended". You believe or you don't; you can argue *that*.
For myself, as I said, I find neither persuasive, although there is a reduced, secularized version of each that I think has some merit, but neither is what their defenders believe.
But it seems worth acknowledging that you have nothing against cults as such, unless it's their novelty (and why novelty should be a point against something is a point that ought to be argued, not asserted); you just prefer yours to theirs (or your new one to your old one). To attack it for being a cult qua cult seems strange, given the rest of what you are posting these days.