When people think new religion they often think cult. When they think cult, they think bad. I’d like to change your mind on both new religion and cult. Because some people see IPA as a kind of new religion, I’d like you to be excited about new religion and see the word cult in a more neutral way.
Definitions are going to be one of the tools I’m going to use to change your mind.
Why am I doing this? Because IPA is not a cult in any negative way, shape or form. The basis of fellowship is in the sovereignty of every human being (man, woman, homo sapien, homo homo sapien, etc.) to do what ever they want to do. Pretty radical I know. And like every group, we have rules. Having rules doesn’t mean the rules are bad for you. I think the rules are pretty good and I follow them myself, so I’m not afraid to take on the ignorance that would call IPA a cult in the old negative sense.
I am going to change your mind by saying religion can be defined in many different ways(1) and that cult can be defined in many different ways(2). The words can be defined in different ways because each word carries with it a set of ideas and we can play with the ideas in the set to create new definitions.
Let’s start with a popular understanding, or definition, of the word religion:
religion is the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.
From this definition we can see a set of ideas to include: belief, worship, control, power, god.
So belief is related to religion.
Worship is related to religion.
Control is related to religion.
Power is related to religion.
God is related to religion.
Now let’s look at the word cult. Here is what I think is what most people think of when they think cult: a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.
From this definition we have this set of ideas: small, group, people, religious, beliefs, practices, what others think, strange, sinister.
First I’m going to take the word I think evokes the most emotion in the definitions and play with them.
In religion, the most emotional word is God. So, in my definition we’re going to lower the priority of god on the basis that god can’t be proven or confirmed in the same way that we can confirm a belief, worship, control or power. In fact there is not much we can really say about “god” without making a claim that can’t be substantiated. The lack of being able to confirm something means we can’t question or investigate it, which means we have to take someone’s word for it with no proof. This is clear way to hijack the mind of a human being without consent. Since I’m not interested in that kind of hijacking, it makes sense to lower the priority of God in the definition of religion.
This leaves the concepts of belief, worship, power, and control to be discussed. All of these words imply something that you believe in, something you worship, something involving power, and something you have control over. Before in the old definition God was the one doing the controlling. But since we’ve lowered the priority of God, next in line for doing the doing would be you. What do you have control over? Available technology. Available technology includes your body, your mind, and objects in the environment via your body and mind and any tools you create. I can condense all of left over concepts into the idea of “what you decide to do”. This turns our new definition of religion to be what you decide to do with available technology.
Ok, so we have a new definition of religion with God essentially removed. This is not to say that we can’t work with ideas of the divine. It just means those ideas are not necessarily front and center. Trust me. You can still have all the holy ghost goosebumps. And you can still call them holy ghost goosebumps…and if you don’t know what holy ghost goosebumps, you can think about the goosebumps you get when you listen to really moving music…and if music doesn’t move you, I’ll be ready to perform an exorcism on you 🙂
The most emotional word in cult is sinister. Strange is a close second, but strange can be easily dismissed as the unfamiliar and unfamiliar doesn’t necessarily mean bad. Sinister however does mean bad. What can we do with this? We can just take it out. That’s right. We can just take it out. Cult is rooted in the world culture and culture is not necessarily sinister. So we can just take it out.
To give another reason we can take it out is because we changed the definition of religion. Our definition of religion no longer includes ideas that outright have the capacity to hijack the human mind. Since we took out the ability of religion to outright hijack the human mind, we remove the ability of cult to outright hijack the human mind. Since we can easily consider an outright hijacking of the human mind sinister, and since we removed the hijacking. We removed the sinister component of the the word cult.
Many seem to see IPA as a new religion. Fine. I take it to be my responsibility to update your idea of new religion such that you can see that IPA in a new light. In this new light IPA is actually safer than the classic religions since it does not include any outright mind hijacking elements. Religion is what you do with available technology. The technology we work with is the body, the mind, the environment and the tools we make to shape it. If you want to find new ways to work with self, other, and the environment, IPA is worth getting to know.
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(1) Other definitions can be found in Religion, The Basics, by Malory Nye,http://web.pdx.edu/~tothm/religion/Definitions.htm, and the internet search “define: religion”.
(2) Other definitions for cult the internet seard “define: cult”, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult, https://www.yourdictionary.com/cult.
Inner Peace Arts 