In search of happiness, fulfillment and meaning

A month short of two years ago, I blogged about the difference between a religion and a cult, in which I referred to the old joke:

Question: What's the difference between a religion and a cult?
Answer: 200 years

As I quoted there,

Cults don’t come out of nowhere; they fill a vacuum, for individuals and, as we’ve seen, for society at large. Even Christianity itself proliferated most widely as a result of a similar vacuum: the relative decline of state religious observance, and political hegemony, in the Roman Empire.

Yep, when it began, Christianity was a cult.

A middle-aged writer, who grew up in a cult when she was a kid, writes in The New Yorker about her experiences that point out how complicated it is to understand cults, and why people are drawn to them.  She writes there:

But, to be fair, the notion that U.F.O.s are going to take you to live on Venus is not obviously crazier than the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, not to mention the unscientific beliefs put forth by other mainstream religions. Sheer popularity and longevity can do a lot to render odd convictions reassuringly familiar.

A longevity of 200 years can easily mainstream a cult into a religion.

She writes, "There will always be people in search of what cults have to offer—structure, solidarity, a kind of hope."

Such a search leads people to all kinds of cults and leaders.  Like Rajneesh.

Or, like this latest one, which sounds way bizarre:

It was called “collateral” — nude photos and other embarrassing material that female members of an upstate New York self-improvement group turned over to their “masters” to ensure obedience, silence and sexual fealty to the organization’s spiritual leader, Keith Raniere.
Now some former members of the group, NXIVM, are poised to break their vow of silence for the first time by testifying against Raniere, who has been compared to a cult leader.

These included educated, professional, women.  "The women are instead described as “independent, smart, curious adults” in search of “happiness, fulfillment and meaning.”

I suspect that we will witness the rise of cults along with a diminishing status of mainstream religions.  People know well about religions for them to submit to religious leaders en masse as we humans once did.  However, as technological challenges, in particular, make us angst-filled beings who are compelled to worry about our existence, cults will step up to provide "structure, solidarity, a kind of hope."

I suppose we have a choice: Understand our mortality and deal with it in our daily lives, or follow the orders from a cult or a religious leader, who claims to know the truth but does not.  A long time ago, I decided to understand my creation and death on my own terms, however difficult the task is.  To quote the Nobelist Steven Weinberg, again:

Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God