I'm not going to break down the semantics, but I'd say there's a bit of a gap between, say, The Methodist Church and the Branch Davidians or the Peoples Temple.

I'm not familiar with either, but is it a bit like the difference between early adopters and the casual users?

No. Not at all. I suggest looking up the groups on Wikipedia to get a feel for what I'm talking about.

Usually people distinguish a cult from a mainstream religion based on the level of control that the movement exerts over its members.

Don't mainstream religions exert a lot of control over some of their members too? I'm not very comfortable with fundamentalists of any religion...

I'm not defending Scientology, but the line between "cult" and "religion" seems a bit blurry.

Most categories in sociology are blurry, because human beings are blurry things. This may help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociological_classifications_of...

That's very interesting, thanks. It seems to treat the classifications as a timeline of a religion (from birth/cult to establishment/religion), and not by control or whatnot...

If you click through to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_religious_movement#Charisma... , it goes into some detail that doesn't explicitly talk about control, but if you're familiar with summaries of psychology literature, it's stated pretty baldly.

You can also think of it in terms of 1 Corinthians 13:11. Maturity, and the turning of generations, does something to an organization. Christianity began as an apocalypse cult, after all, promising hope of the afterlife for the downtrodden; it wasn't until Constantine was converted that it started to learn how to be a state religion; and not until Martin Luther and Henry VII did it learn to be just a religion. (The exile into Babylon and the dissolution of the Caliphate had similar effects on Judaism and Islam.)

In other words, they were forced to let go of their control simply because of historical circumstance. Straight through World War 2, the Vatican continued to exert a very strong influence on European nations... because the Pope was everyone's ambassador, even if he could no longer threaten excommunication with meaningful clout.

Scientology has not had these experiences. It is young and not officially descended from any known religion, so "sect" would be an incorrect term except in cases where you consider the entire whole of Judaism or Christianity a sect. It is dominated by personality cults, from the original of L. Ron Hubbard to its scheme of hooking celebrities to be spokespersons.

It's absolutely a grey line. Keep in mind that branches of mainstream religions sometimes go off in cultish directions -- often focusing on a charismatic figure.

Religions exert as much control as they can. Christianity used to be much more powerful in the West and controlled everything, as Islam does in some countries. Churches don't give up control willingly, it's taken away from them by external factors..

As someone who is building a religion in his spare time, I must say that I don't see something intrinsic to religion which says "they must exert as much control as they can" and "they don't give up control willingly," just as I don't see something intrinsic to government which says "they must form sprawling bureaucracies."

With that said, there may be a feedback-theory reason why these things often connect. In the case of governments, for example, bureaucracy allows you to marshal much vaster quantities of resources, especially for your military: so as we look for a positive feedback loop, the most successful governments were probably bureaucracies. (Yes, I would also classify evolution by natural selection as a feedback theory.)

It may therefore be the case that there is a competition for a limited believership and the religions which control their believers most tend to grow themselves in this competition. If you want an interesting perspective on what Anonymous is doing, it is trying to increase the cost of religious control, to the point where the feedback goes from positive to negative. If each exertion of control (however that is defined) tends to lose believers rather than gain them, then religions will either have to adapt to a policy of less-control, or else will naturally die out due to negative feedback.

And whether they use that control to induce their members to perform illegal acts or provide personally-harmfully large amounts of money to the church.

Not to mention the fact that Scientology (the study of science?) is chock full of ridiculOus BS. Hell, at least some of the mainstream religions have a bit of history to back them up (i.e., Jesus did actually exist, whether or not you believe him to be the son of God).

They're both ridiculous to non-believers. We're just more used to one than the other. I'm sure if Scientology were to be a mainstream thing for a couple of hundreds of years, people would be willing to talk about Hubbard's space DC10s the same way we talk about the virgin birth or the splitting of the sea, with a sort of benign incredulity at what kinds of silly magics people believe in.

Absolutely not. I don't really like any religions, but cult is still a special distinction.