Am I in a Cult‪?‬ THE WONDER: Science-Based Paganism

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S3E33 TRANSCRIPT:
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Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark.
Yucca: And I'm the other one, Yucca.
Mark: And today we are going to talk about cults.
Yucca: right.
Mark: Of the things that when people choose an alternative spiritual path, one of the things that their friends and family will sometimes start to get really worried about is, oh dear, have they entered some kind of a cult? So we're gonna talk about what cults are and about what naturalistic paganism generally is.
And atheopaganism specifically, and then talk about why, what we're doing does not really meet those, those criteria for what a cult is.
Yucca: right.
Mark: This, we, we were talking about this before the recording. If you have a family member that is really concerned that you've gone off the deep end into some terrible culty situation, you could consider having them listen to this episode.
Yucca: Right. Yeah. And at the end, we're also gonna talk a little bit about recovering from some of those kind of religious traumas that, that can come along with having been in a cult situation or things that have happened in, in mainstream religions that we wouldn't necessarily think of as a cult, but still might have some of those really abusive behaviors.
Mark: That's right. One thing that you'll notice when we go over the indicators that a group of any kind has attributes of a cult is that many of them apply squarely to various denominations of mainstream religions. So you know, the word cult gets Bandi about to U be used for little splinter groups or for new religious movements, but that's not really fair.
The kinds of. The kinds of problematic behaviors and factors that go into Colt behavior really also include some very large institutions that have been around for a very long time.
Yucca: Right. And these are things that can come along with groups that aren't necessarily just religious groups. Right? These are any time that you have. A structure in which you can have somebody who has power over dominating over somebody else. A lot of these, these risks come up. So,
Mark: There are PTA associations that are dominated by, you know, one or a handful of people who cannot be questioned and run the show. And they're cult-like.
Yucca: Yeah. Well, we're gonna get ahead of ourselves a little bit. Why don't we start off with, so, you know, what do we do? What is this? Atheopagan what's naturalistic, paganism or paganism in general,
Mark: Sure. Sure. Well, naturalistic paganism is the big category, right? And athe paganism is a single denomination within that big category. So if you think about it, like there's Christianity, which is a whole big, huge thing. And then down underneath that there's Catholicism and Mormonism and all the various Protestant religions and so forth.
So that's kind of a similar sort of, you know, taxonomic relationship between naturalistic, paganism and Ethiopia paganism. So that leads us to ask the question. All right, then. Well, what is naturalism? What is naturalistic paganism? So we'll start with naturalism. Naturalism is a philosophical position.
It is the position that all things in the universe are made of matter and energy and that they follow physical laws. And there is nothing supernatural.
Yucca: right. Everything is natural.
Mark: Yes,
Yucca: This is all nature,
Mark: all nature. And it all follows physical laws and nobody gets to break the physical laws. Now we may.
Yucca: of it.
Mark: That's right. We may not understand all of the physical laws right now, but to our knowledge, nothing out there is able to break physical laws. And what that does is it excludes certain kinds of supernatural beliefs like beliefs in gods and ghosts, souls, and spirits, those kinds of things.
They just really don't hold up in an evidential based evidentiary based critically thinking way of looking at