Broke: “I’m a prescriptivist, and I think the best language is what I learned in school as a child"
Woke: “I’m a descriptivist, and I think anything goes, I’ll respect anything that I can understand"
Bespoke: “I’m a prescriptivist, and I think we should be engineering new language to shift our culture in alignment with our ethical values”

When you’re looking at the validity of a linguistic shift, I don’t think it behooves us to uncritically accept whatever the current culture is. That’s centrism and it makes us weak to fascist manipulation of our language. Which is exactly what the Christians did to the word “cult”.

The Christians noticed that other religions are more likely to use the word “cult” than they are, because the word has a stronger history in paganism, and because these other religions didn’t have big connective organisations like the Vatican. So the Christians created a link between cults, Satanism, and religious abuse. And to be fair, there was a lot of religious abuse happening at the time. Still is. And most of it is Christian. But mainstream scientists could be fooled into thinking pagan religious abuse is somehow different from Christian religious abuse, and thus creating a field of study around so-called “cultic” abuse. And that legitimisation of the Satanic Panic, via epistemic vandalism of mainstream science, is why people think cult means abuse.

I’m a pagan, and lately I’ve been hanging out with some Christians and taking mental notes. They’ve got love bombing. They pressure members to give testimony about how Jesus helped them. They encourage people to give them money, so they can go set up missions in Africa. They use music and AI generated sermons to hype people up on endorphins so they become malleable. They induce seizure-like states as a form of religious experience. I see what the people in charge are doing to them. So no, I’m not going to buy any Satanic Panic propaganda that cults are uniquely pagan and inherently abusive. This shit is epidemic and systemic.

We need to fight back against these powerful and bigoted organisations changing our very means of communication to indoctrinate us.