And the detail about varying levels of belief.
Emotional support from a caring ear is hardly cult like. “I have friends there” is hardly cult like.
Your hyperbole works well as a rhetorical strategy, but eliminates all the nuance I was trying to add. Just like as if I had said, “an occasional cookie doesn’t make one fat” and you had replied, “Chowing down on cookies and ice cream actually does make you fat”.
It might be true, but it is no responsive to the argument.
As I write this I’m be route to a family gathering that excites me not at all, but it will make certain members of my family happy. That’s not cult like, it’s making compromises to get along in the world.
You're only trying to add "nuance" because you're intimately familiar with organized religion. When you look at other cults, you say to yourself "obviously that's a cult because they're all zealots." But is that likely to be true? Probably not. Humans always have a wide variety of motivations for the things they do. I'm sure many people have joined cults because they're lonely or hungry.
As for your example with the homeless shelter, it would be a cult if you and the other members were part of the homeless shelter based off of a shared philosophy that was given to you from birth that involved practicing arcane rituals worshiping an ancient deity.
And rereading your very first response, I should have caught this earlier:
My arguments I haven’t once made the claim that these bigger religions aren’t cults; I haven’t made any claim in that department.
My claim are about why people attend. More specifically, that there is a wide variety of reasons that aren’t because they aren’t believers.
Adding this seems to betray your intent. While worship of a deity might be a practice of some cults, not every cult worships a deity. Conversely, not every religion that worships a deity could be a called a cult. You including it makes it the defining factor in your example above, beyond the standard common features present in many communities and organizations of people.
I think you did exactly that in the prior comment. You opined that if from birth the people serving or socializing in the homeless organization incorporated some sort of supernatural element it would be a cult. It feels to me like there is a prejudice against religion with your comments. Bear in mind, I am not criticizing an opposition to religion, just that religion on its face != cult. Narrowing it down to a single element dilutes the definition of a cult.
There is a far cry of difference between the Peoples Temple and the Branch Dravidian’s from the local Lutheran and Methodist churches down the street. The two former being commonly understood as a cult, where the two latter would not be commonly understood to be a cult. But all four had that “ancient deity” worship component, but two of them were unequivocally dangerous where two are essentially harmless organizations.
I think the main reason we don’t considered religions a cult has nothing to do with the behavior or the participants or their reasons for attendance. We generally consider cults to be small, which is incongruous with mainstream religion.