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I don't see how environmentalism or for that matter meditation itself is creepy.
What's creepy about Hare Krishnas is the zoned out sleep deprived look on the faces (edit: I am speaking of the local ones, from experience), and the whole obsession with the writings of the leader thing, and weirdly specific rituals. Now that environmentalism and meditation are fairly mainstream, you don't have to put up with the creepy stuff if you want to be around people who share your interests in environmentalism and meditation. You have less creepy alternatives. You can go to a local Yoga class, that manages to have same number of people attending as the local Khrishna hangout, despite not trying nearly as hard to find new recruits. You can join a normal environmentalist group.
The difference is, of course, in extent. For example, putting up a portrait of the founder at every workplace (or perhaps in a handbook, or the like) would be something that a cult leader would do in a cult, but what a corporation would seldom ever do because doing so would be counter-productive.
edit: actually. What do you think makes joining a cult worse than joining a club, getting a job, and so on? Now, what ever that is, it makes it harder to get new recruits, and requires more dedication.
Which goes to show how far into the zeitgeist they've penetrated. Go back to the 1960s when the cult panic and popular image of cults was being set, and things were quite different. One of the papers discusses a major lawsuit accusing the Hare Krishnas of 'brainwashing' a teen girl when she ran away from home and stayed with some Krishnas; the precipitating event was her parents getting angry about her meditating in front of a little shrine, and ripping it out and burning it (and then chaining her to the toilet for a while). To people back then, 'tune in, turn on, drop out' sounds less like a life choice than a threat...
Well, I can hardly argue against your anecdotal experiences.
Supreme Court - jurists or cultists? Film at 11. We report, you decide.
I don't even know what 'weirdly specific' would mean. Rituals are generally followed in precise detail, right down to the exact repetitive wording and special garments like Mormon underpants; that's pretty much what distinguishes rituals from normal activities. Accepting Eucharist at mass? Ritual. Filling out a form at the DMV? Not ritual.
Hmm, where was one to find yoga back then... Ah yes, also in cults. Ashrams in particular did a lot of yoga. Interesting that you no longer have to go to an ashram or fly to India if you want to do yoga. It's almost like... these cult activities have been somehow normalized or assimilated into the mainstream...
And where did these environmentalist groups come from?
Really? That seems incredibly common. Aside from the obvious examples of many (all?) government offices like post offices including portraits of their supreme leader - I mean, President - you can also go into places like Walmart and see the manager's portrait up on the wall.
Personally? I think it's mostly competition from the bigger cults. Just like it's hard to start up a business or nonprofit.
That doesn't even make sense as an answer. Rest likewise doesn't seem in any way contradictory to the point I am making, but is posed as such.
Of course it makes sense. As I've already claimed, cults are not engaged in some sort of predatory 'brainwashing' where they exploit cognitive flaws to just moneypump people with their ultra-advanced psychological techniques: they offer value in return for value received, just like businesses need to offer value to their customers, and nonprofits need to offer some sort of value to their funders. And these cults have plenty of established competition, so it makes sense that they'd usually fail. Just like businesses and nonprofits have huge mortality rates.
I've given counter-examples and criticized your claims. Seems contradictory to me.
The question was, "What do you think makes joining a cult worse than joining a club, getting a job, and so on?" . How is competition from other cults impacting the decision to join a cult - any cult?
Well, I know of one cult that provides value in form of the nice fuzzy feeling of being able - through a very little effort - to see various things that, say, top physicists can not see. Except this feeling is attained entirely through self deception, unbeknown to the individuals, and arguing that it is providing value is akin to arguing that a scam which sells fake gold for the cheap is providing value.
(Then there's of course Janestown, and so on and so forth)
Exactly as I said, pressure from other cults: direct retaliation (like the legal system endorsing your kidnapping), opportunity costs, lack of subsidies, regulatory capture being used against you, the risk of joining a small new organization... Many of the reasons that apply to not joining a startup and instead working at Microsoft can be tweaked to apply to small cults vs big cults.
You know what's even more awesome than self-deception? Sliming people you don't like as cults, when your ideas about what a cult is aren't even right in the first place. Sweet delicious meta-contrarianism.
True, it's not as good a racket as Singer getting paid tons of money to testify about how awful cults are and how powerful their deceptions are - but it's a lot less work and more convenient.
I said, joining a cult. I didn't say, joining a small cult, I didn't say, joining a big cult, I said, joining a cult.
Well, a scam then, if you don't like me to call it a cult. It is my honest opinion that the value arises through the self deception, which goes against the intent of individual, and is of lesser value compared to what the individual is expecting to get.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize I was supposed to interpret that as meaninglessly general as possible, rather than, you know, be about the topic of my post or the topic of the previous comments.
Why do all organizations and religions in particular exist? That's a tough question which I'm afraid I have no quick answer to, but the right answer looks like 'all sorts of reasons'.
I wasn't around in the 60s and wasn't aware for any of the 70s, but... Environmentalism seems qualitatively different from everything else here. Is there some baggage to this beyond, say, conservation, or assigning plants and animals some moral weight, that is intended here?
Something may have seemed weirder in the past because it was weirder back then.
I suspect few modern Christians would sign up for AD 200 Christianity.
Not really, aside from the standard observation that you can just as easily play the 'find cult markers' game with environmental groups like Greenpeace or ELF. Cleansing rituals like recycling, intense devotion to charismatic leaders, studies of founding texts like Silent Spring, self-abnegating life choices, donating funds to the movement, sacralization of unusual objects like owls or bugs, food taboos ('GMOs'), and so on and so forth.