I think that religions and cults are part of the same continuum. Consider a population of people that hold a set of religious beliefs. The size of this population can change in two ways. The population can increase "vertically" though parents raising their children to hold those beliefs and decrease vertically through people dying. It can increase "horizontally" through people converting from other beliefs or non-beliefs, and decrease vertically through people converting out of the religion. I think that religious populations with a high vertical flow are traditional religions and those with a high horizontal flow are cults.
As people don't often change their core beliefs, the main gain of members of an established religion will be from new children being born to people of that religion and the main losses will be to members dying. New religions will only get going if they can attract lots of converts, and the main way to do this will be focusing on vulnerable people whose emotional needs are not being met by more established beliefs. In the early phases, the cult gains converts by being "virulent" as it will benefit by being as unlike the established religions as possible in some way or other. (Cults will thus flourish in places and times of great societal stress as under these conditions there will be many more people under stresses that can't be alleviated by the prevailing religion and who might hope that novel beliefs might help.) As the supply of vulnerable people is rather small under normal conditions, cults will only transition to being established religions with large numbers of members by slowing their growth and relying on demographics. The virulence of the beliefs will thus fall with time as people who are born into the religion will be more likely to leave if it's not relatively mild. In the long run, the religion will fade into mythology as this is the ultimately mild and harmless form of religion: nobody converts from one mythology to another as nobody considers that they're mutually exclusive. If religions are viruses of the mind, then cults are like ebola, Christianity like the common cold, and mythologies are like the fossil retroviruses in our junk DNA. Rich _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
