There is a category of religiously inspired posts that creep me out and set of cult alarms. It contains that post about staring from Scientology and that Transcendental meditation stuff that while I found it interesting and perhaps useful doesn’t seem to belong on LW and now recently these Mormon posts abut growing organizations. shudder
What I’m about to say has been said before, but it bears repeating. What exactly about all this stuff is setting off cult alarms for you? I had a similar problem with those posts as well, until I actually went and questioned the cult alarm in my head (which was a gut reaction) and realized that it might not be a rational reaction. Just because some scary group does something does not make it a bad thing, even if they’re the only people that do it—reversed stupidity is not intelligence. And a number of those things suggested sound like good, self-improvement suggestions, which are free of religious baggage.
In general, when you’re creeped out by something, you should try to figure out why you’re being creeped out instead of merely accepting what the feeling suggests. Otherwise you could end up doing something bad that you wouldn’t have done if you’d thought it through. Which is of course the basic purpose of the teachings on this site.
I think we should be a little careful of using the word “cult” as a mental stop sign, since that does seem to be what’s happening here. We need to be a bit more careful about labeling something with all the bad connotations of a cult just because it has some of the properties of a cult—especially if it only seems to have the good properties. But… that doesn’t mean that this good cult property won’t lead to the bad cult property or properties that we don’t want. You should just be more explicit as to what and how, because I’m wavering back and forth on this article being a really, really good idea (the benefits of this plan are obvious!), and a really, really scary and bad idea (if I do it, it’ll make me become part of a groupthinky monster!).
The problem I have is that both sides in my own head seem to be influenced by their own clear cognitive biases—we have the cult attractor on one hand and the accidental negative connotations and stopsigny nature of the word “cult” on the other. So if you could semi-explicitly show why adopting the idea this article puts forth would lead to some specific serious negative consequences, that would clear up my own indecision and confusion.