What is the difference between a religion and a cult?

[Sikeliot]

And where do we draw the line?

[Piccolo]

And where do we draw the line?

Cults are religious groups that are severely socially deviant. Cults can become regular religions if the wider society around them changes and they are no longer deviant. Christianity is a good example of this. Christianity would have been a cult in the eyes of the general Roman society because of certain practices such as refusing to pay homage to the emperor and the veneration of relics of saints (the Romans considered human remains to be extremely disgusting and abhorred the Christian practice of relic veneration).

Eventually, though, as Christianity spread Roman society changed and Christianity went from cult to religion, and eventually became the state religion of Rome under Theodosius the Great.

[Sakis]

"Cults" are just anathematized religions.

[Ctwentysevenj]

Not much difference, I say.

[Methmatician]

Cults don't need to be spiritual. Usually cults are very controlling of their members but the same could be said of the religions of today and the past. It's kind of like trying to define the difference between a language and a dialect.

[Arsen_]

Here are my definitions:

Religion is the prevailing mainstream cult.

Cult is a lost marginalized religion.

(Quite elegant definitions, aren't they?

[Daco Celtic]

Size/Critical mass and mainstream acceptance

[Dunai]

This is what comes to my mind when I think of a cult, I always found them more interesting than religions, which try to be so damn conventional, while themselves are based on fiction. At least cults can go unapologetically full loony tunes.

[sean]

Cult is a newspeak designation created to deride a specific religion. Cults tend to be smaller scale and have shorter histories. The only time we can accurately call a religion or organisation a cult is when all of their members are dead and there is no push back.

The thing about religion is that all of them are basically correct in their descriptions of the spiritual structure, and all of the gods are basically real in some sense. The question you should be asking is: which gods are real and which one isn't?