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One person's religion is another person's cult.

Man is the religious animal. He is the only one that's got true religion, several of them.

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

A cult is a religion with no political power.

You can look at anything as a cult. Churches are cults in their own way.

Religion is man's attempt to bind himself back to a relationship with God.

I suspect that a substantial fraction of human problems in the world today, not just cults, result from the mismatch between the current environment and the environment in which we evolved.

Many cults start off with high ideals that get corrupted by leaders or their board of advisors who become power-hungry and dominate and control members' lives. No group with high ideals starts off as a 'cult'; they become one when their errant ways are exposed.

When people leave cults, they don't know that they left a cult.