Have you ever been involved with a cult

[lestatdark]

Orca_Azure said:

lestatdark said:

Orca_Azure said:
Actually, I ran into a bunch of Wicca in the wood once. It was midnight (i was leaving a friends house and trying to go through the forest as a shortcut. forest is about a mile thick). Anyways, i come into this opening and there are a bunch of people in white robes. Now at first i thought this was some racist gang or something so i nearly shit myself from fear.

anyways i stumbled upon them and thought I was seriously going to be either gang attacked or shot. Well, they invited me into their camp fire and told me to sit down. I actually remember peeing myself a little because there were about 8 of them. Anyways, they all praised the Earth god and i did as well because i wasn't about to offend these wackos. Anyways, an hour later their meeting ended and i ran like hell out of there.

They called me a brother so i guess i was in a cult.

Can you care to elaborate how Wicca is a cult? 

Oh and from your description, the group you stumbled was a derivative branch of Wicca in which they praise Cernunnos, the god of stags, earth and the hunt.

But really, I just want you to elaborate on how is it a cult, as it's a recognized worldwide religion based on ancient celtic rituals and beliefs, which has over 50 million believers and followers all around the world. I'm one of them. 

Even the most generous estimates put the number of Wiccans in the 1-5 million followers range. I searched high and low and found nothing that even closely resembled 50 milion. If you mean to put them in the same group with every other neopagan religion in the world, then perhaps the number would be higher.

Considering their name derives from the word "witch cult" and the word witchcraft seems to be popular within the group, I can only venture to guess that the people believe in something that the rest of the world does not. While each religion has their belief in various dieties and whatnot, the Wicca practices are what concern me most. It isn't often that you come across a group of people believing in realworld magicks and dancing around circles in the woods. I wouldn't knock any religion for their beliefs, but when one straight up says they believe in magic, I cannot ask for anything more but for them to prove it.

As for the very meaning of the word cult- it refers to a group whose beliefs or practices could be, reasonably or unreasonably, considered strange. Perhaps magic was believed more in the middle ages, but in today's society you would be hard pressed to find many people (apart from those already associated with the group) to openly state they believe in magic.

Witch cults and Wicca are two different things, even though the two derive from the same stem. 

While witch cults practice what you called real world magicks, Wicca believe more in the healing powers of nature, meditation ans self-consciouness. In this aspect we're no different from budhism and other forms of meditation. And while some of the things we do, are consider the be "magickal", they closely resemble homeopathy techniques more than some otherworldy non-sensical thing. 

We do believe in different deities, which stem from beliefs that came from pagan times, and yes we do have rituals that involve chanting and dancing, but they're no different than what most religions do as well.