Dear Eduardo,
First of all thank you for improving my English. I may have misused the idiomatic meaning of the expression and I stand corrected, but I think you got the gist of what I was trying to say. Anyway as to your reply:
:In a nutshell, I tend to agree with the Sociological-Psychological viewpoint and I reject Orthodoxy as a legitimate component for definining a religious cult due to an understanding that there actually is no such thing within the early Christian history. There were competing schools of thought regarding Jesus and his nature and the scriptures and what has come to be defined as orthodox is merely the history written by the winners of these controversies.
As you may have noticed in my last post, I wrote that I don't depend on the orthodoxy argument in calling the witnesses a cult, and that I consider it rather useless from my point of view (I'm not a believer any longer).
The problem is with the term 'cult' itself, and you seem to agree that the other (sociological and psychological criteria are met - at least to a large extent). Also, you seem to depend too much on refuting the first two criteria, which I think are useless and confusing indeed.
Here are the conclusions from the site you directed me to. I like the overall analysis which is very fair at times, but the conclusions seem to run counter to the preceding agruments:
Th fact that Jehovah's Witnesses are not a cult may be difficult to swallow for opposers and for former members who have been hurt in some way by individual Jehovah's Witnesses or by the Organization. And no doubt, persons with their own agendas to promote will continue to claim that Jehovah's Witnesses are a cult. But these claims do not change the situation. Anyone who does look at Witnesses objectively will, I believe, reach the same conclusion.
This is rather hypocritical. The author accuses ex-JWs of promoting agendas while revealing his own agenda in the very next paragraph:
And yet, as pointed out above, there are several aspects of Jehovah's Witnesses, that are cultic, some to a very mild degree and a few that are seriously disconcerting. These points need to be addressed and all Witnesses should be especially interested to strive to reform these areas not only due to outside criticism but for the betterment of the Organizaton and the worldwide association of Jehovah's Witnesses.
This is a laughable conclusion which supports my observation about the amount of wishful thinking involved. Jehovah's Witnesses should "strive to reform these areas" (psychological and sociological) where they are cultic? Hello? Does this come from an expert on JWs?
The average JW won't even read this, because s/he is too brainwashed to do this. The expert who wrote it should know that taking initiative to implement reforms in such a high-control cultic group as Jehovah's witnesses qualifies for disfellowhiping and social exclusion, even if the Jw in question overcomes the psychological manipulation and tries to follow the advice given in this paragraph.
To sum it up, JWs are a high-control group, oftentimes emotionally and sometimes physically harmful. They discourage participation in many important areas of social life too. If you don't want to call it a 'cult' because you don't recognize the orthodox truth criterion - you're free to do it, but at this stage we're only arguing over the emotional bias of the word.
Cheers,
Pole
