What Is A Cult? Does Sathya Sai Baba Preside Over A Servile, Worldwide Cult?

 

At 'Call For Media and Government Investigation of Sathya Sai Baba', see the article:

What Is A Cult? Does Sathya Sai Baba Preside Over A Servile, Worldwide Cult?

Posted by Barry Pittard on March 21, 2011 

QUOTES 

"Is the Sathya Sai Organization a cult?  It is a fair question.  No careless use of terms will serve us well. We might also enquire – perhaps of our own selves, more than anyone else, whether there are significant cultic elements in those institutions we may too readily deem ‘mainstream’ or liveable-with, or somehow ‘rational’, ‘normal’, and so forth...

...Perhaps it is our human readiness to come up with answers, and structures and tenets that traps instead of frees us. Perhaps we need, first, to posit, for the sake of argument or simply the fun of it, that we are trapped in our ‘verities’ and ‘solutions’. I short, to see what the trap might look like – before we can ever hope to see what the freedom might look like. It may be that, after searching self-scrutiny, any significant freedom that may be glimpsed may be too much for us to bear… 

Here is a possible useful, and very brief, attempt at getting to a definition of a cult…"