In regards to Mormonism being false and a cult. It is my personal belief that Jesus started a "Jewish cult" in the sense that the Jewish community did not accept Jesus' church as theirs and declared it false.
This theory holds up to the lipnis test of today's reality in that to be considered a "cult" by many mainstream Christian apologectics (Phoebe Ann) all one has to do is test the "cult notion" against popular opinion and you have the notion that any new belief system that people believe is not true or false is a cult.
So technically all religions, belief systems and theories according to Phoebe Ann and other Christian apologetics like her could have been considered cults at one point or another.
It could be said there are bad cults and good cults, by the modern definition of the word.
But, when one means a true cult, a Christian cult, they are really talking about legalistic groups which are of the spirit of the anti-christ. Cults are microcosms, ultimately, of macrocosms of tyrannies, such as one sees in totalitarian nations.
There are ultimately two ways: one way is by legalism, by "do this" and "do not do that". The other way is by faith, by grace working through faith.
True faith is only possible by the Spirit of God.
Of course, in reality, many groups have a mixture of the two, just as even the apostles started to go off to the circumcision group.
I have known Mormons I consider to be good Christians at heart, and so in truth.
The fact of the matter is there are many full blown legalistic cults who have abandoned salvation by grace through faith. Very many of these will preach "grace, grace, grace", but it is a cover, a lie. They preach "faith, faith, faith", but it is a lie.
And on top of those many lies required for such atrocious and hypocritical duplicity are, of course, many other wrong beliefs.
What I am saying is what anyone who has ever read the Gospels knows to be true: there are countless cults of all sizes in Christianity which are considered to not be cultist in beliefs by mainstream understanding -- but they are outrageously cultic.
In any cult, despite their false teachings, there may be saved Christians who live by the Spirit.
They think themselves different from the Mormons because their false teachings are secretly introduced, as the Apostle warned us about, and have been widely accepted. They are subtle, but dangerous deceptions.
Stalin, we might note, was considered globally by people to be a good man. He tricked the world. Hitler, even, was not taken for what he was as he was until he really started to show his true colors to everyone.
What matters is whether a person is obedient to the Holy Testimony of Christ.
People have shown over the millenia - as they abundantly show to this day - they will do just about anything to not obey the Testimony of Christ and yet still pretend to be followers of Christ.
