I'm not trying to be edgy or anything but what is the actual tangible difference between a cult and a religion other than the number of people who believe in it? Is there a clear definition?

I have managed to work the history of Scientology into a number of answers on this sub!

Were there any non-Afrikaner apartheid supporters in South Africa before 1994? In which L. Ron Hubbard's attempts to support apartheid and his general all-around-racism are discussed. (Of course the Official Stance is that this rabid pro-apartheid racist was in fact an enlightened fighter for Black rights. Uh-huh.)

Were cults and New Age movements as prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s America as television depicts them to be? In which the rise and fall of Scientology is explored through such exciting things as exploding volcano TV ads, endorsements from washed up American footballers, and the rise of the Internet.

In the novel 1984, the Oceanian regime enforced "Newspeak" in order to limit a person's ability to think and articulate "subversive" concepts. Were there any actual totalitarian regimes that attempted to exert the same or similar control over language? In which I break down in 6 Easy Steps how Hubbard's approach to remolding language to remold the Scientologist mind aligns with the language used in 1984. Big Brother Karin Pouw is always watching!

By the way, my two cents on the cult/religion difference boils down to whether a group is high-control (which can be determined in more detail through Hassan's BITE model linked elsewhere in this thread). The Catholic Church itself is not a cult, for example, because it is way too big for the Pope to have any direct control over individual people's lives. Millions of Catholics live life in very low-control religious environments. But! Individual congregations within larger bodies like the Catholic Church can absolutely develop into cults. Leaders of smaller Church communities can establish cult-like control over their members. Calling all religions cults is silly because most religious people do not live in a high-control environment, but any religion has the seeds within it to develop cults within itself. It's appropriate to call an entire religion a cult only when it's small enough to consistently apply high-control techniques on its members. There are also non-religious cults.

This is a meta question targeting the way weekly themes tag questions, not sure if it's best put here or in a separate thread, but: I'm guessing the tag is just automatically added to anything where the word exists in the question title? I've noticed in the past this can result in some pretty goofy tagging. Today alone we have this question and this one, which are tagged despite asking about culture.

I dunno if it's really a big enough deal to care, since worst case scenario it might confuse a few passerbys, but figured I'd bring it up all the same.

(A quick fix for this might be to have the bot search for the entire word separated by white space, but not sure that would work in all cases.)