Things that make you go hmmm......

• You get a ready-made extended family when you join the cult. Sometimes, you move into their living quarters upon joining, and really get an all-encompassing community. Or you just spend all of your spare time at the temple or center or meeting hall, only associating with other members, who are your new circle of friends

• New members are expected to hand over their minds, their wills, their lives, and sometimes even their souls, to the group. (And, often, also their credit cards, checkbooks, and the deed to their house.) This is often masked as surrendering to God or Jesus or "the Will of God", but since God isn't around to issue new orders, the cult will do it for Him. It's just like when the TV evangelist tells you to give your money to God, he instructs you to make the check out to his church, not God

• The idea of surrender is confused in a cult. There is a phenomenon of surrender in real religious or spiritual training, but it gets distorted in a cult and gets turned into something like servile obedience to a dictatorial master.

• It just seems like there are always a few cult members around who giggle a lot, and proclaim that it's all so wonderful. "Praise the Lord! Sing hallelujah! Glory be! Thank you Jesus! It's a Miracle!" (or something similar) is their standard response to everything. It's like a giggly hysteria or mania. Those people have shut down their logical thinking minds for the duration, in trade for group acceptance and a world of spiritual make-believe.

• The cult is self-absorbed.

That is, the cult is the most important thing in the lives of the cult members. Sometimes, it is their entire life.

Faithful members will tell you that the cult has given them a whole new life, but that new life is often nothing more than working for free all of the time to raise money for the cult, and recruit new members for the cult. Sometimes, cult members live together and have few social contacts besides other cult members. And all they talk about is the cult.

• Aggressive Recruiting.

Cult members work hard at getting more members. That, and fund-raising, are often the major activities of the cult

• No Humor.

Try telling jokes about the leader and the church. If the members go ballistic on you, you are involved with a bunch of religious fanatics. ("Screech!!! That's NOT funny!") Jokes about other stuff don't count -- the jokes must specifically poke fun at the leader and his church and the church's beliefs. Some humorless cults pretend to have a lot of humor by laughing and joking all of the time about everything except the leader and the cult.

Alan Watts said that his definition of sanity was the ability to come off it. If you can poke fun at someone's foibles and get him to laugh and come off it, then he's okay. On the other hand, if he just says exactly the same thing again, but twice as loud, because you were apparently too deaf to hear it the first time, and couldn't understand his genius, then you have a problem on your hands.

• You must change your beliefs to conform to the group's beliefs.

The price of admission to the club is that you must come to believe what they believe. You must also be ready and willing to change your beliefs in an instant, whenever the leader expounds some new doctrine.

This one is so obvious that it is easy to overlook. At first glance, you might think, "Isn't that what all religions demand? That you believe what they believe?" Well yes, it is, more or less. But imagine the opposite. If you have a group that does not demand that you change your beliefs to conform to the group's beliefs, then that is very un-cult-like behavior. So it is still relevant.

In addition, there is the issue of variability. Cult leaders tend to make up new doctrines whenever they feel like it, while established churches may take centuries to modify their beliefs.

There is also the issue of how much you must conform. Most mainstream religions are tolerant of members who have diverse or differing beliefs on some issues. But cults demand great conformity, and can be very unforgiving of any deviation from standard dogma. So it's a matter of degree.

• Dishonesty, Deceit, Denial, and Falsification

Cults are dishonest in many areas:

• they practice deceptive recruiting,
• they are hypocritical,
• they lie about the faults or shortcomings of the leader or leaders,
• they lie about the real nature of the group,
• they lie about the real goals and purposes of the group,
• they lie about what they have done in the past,
• and they lie about their finances.

• Secrecy supports cult-like behavior, as we saw in the Life Force group, where the hierarchy was maintained through limiting access to information. Secrecy functions not only to cover up unethical activities from outside eyes, but also to increase authoritarian control over the larger group. By promoting the idea that the leader or the in-group have special information and expertise, they remove themselves from criticism and justify the exclusion of others from the decision-making process.

In the case of religious cults the special information and expertise is described as divine inspiration or enlightenment. The cult leader's presumed higher state precludes lower beings from judging his or her actions. Similar claims are made in government where special knowledge of the enemy or secret technical information is said to justify decisions that would otherwise be objected to on moral or even practical grounds.