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I'm Hannah. I'm Sruti. And welcome to Redhanded and before we get going, if you haven't bought a ticket for our UK tour, what are you doing?

Exactly. Who are you? Why are you listening? That's the end of that.

Link for the tickets will be in the episode descriptions for the foreseeable future. So that's where you can find them. Or you can follow us on Instagram and I will be swiping up on every story because it makes me really happy that I can do that now.

So, enough of that. Let's go on with it. Welcome my Redhanded friends. We've got another cult this week. And over the last week, I've got very into what differentiates a religion from a cult.

I've got no interest in being crucified upon absolutely 100% intended for my own personal views on Jesus or being fair-gamed by scientists. But there are a lot of parallels you can draw between accepted religions and what we would classify as cults.

Obviously, we've discussed a few cults on the show before but we've never explicitly broken down what makes a cult on this show before. So here we go.

A cult is generally defined as a formal religious veneration, an assistant of religious beliefs that has a body of adherence.

Cults are regarded as unorthodox or spurious with a great devotion to a person or an idea where they do differ from accepted religions. And how they make themselves stand out is that the general public and or government officials

view the group as having potential to do harm. The most famous paper on this topic was published in the early 80s by Robert J. Lichten, who is a psychiatrist and at the time he was teaching at Harvard Medical School.

The paper was called cult formation and if you've looked into cults even a little bit, you will have come across it.

So basically this paper outlined three characteristics of destructive cults destructive as important word.

Number one, charismatic leader who has no meaningful accountability and is the only source of authority within the group.

Number two, a brainwashing process that causes members to act against their own best interest.

And number three, exploitation of group members in a sexual, economic or some other way.

I think this is the key thing with the difference between a religion and a cult. Obviously my own personal views on religion aside.

I do think there is a fundamental difference in the sense that you can be part of a religion and still be a full functioning well rounded, of course, member of society.

If you're on a cult, you have to be a part of that cult and not be a part of anything else. I think that's the key thing.

It's kind of all consuming in a way.

Exactly. Now more recently, ten warning signs have been added to the cult checklist and they are absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.

No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry, no meaningful financial disclosure, fear of the outside world, impending apocalypse, etc.

No legitimate reason to leave, former members relating similar stories with abuse, and there are records of abuses by the cult leader.

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