Ok, how was it made? Let's follow the trail...

Research

What is a cult...Well (ha ha ha) here are the 200ish? some signs that you are in (or not in) a cult (click on the '+' if you actually want to see them all):

Conversion

Step 2 is to condense and mush the notes into questions, good, bad, or indifferent. I ended up with 138 of these. Again, click the '+' to see them all.

Reduction

Step 3 was to drag back and forth and back again over the questions, removing redundant ones, and merging similar ones. This got me down to about 93 questions. Sadly I didn't think to save a copy at this point. I did print the questions out though for peer review and mockery however. Such as:

• Does your group fundraise?
• Do they say they are not a cult?

Answering

Next I answered every question as indicative of a cult. This led to about 90+% answered yes. Which is no good btw...So I rewrote a bunch of them to have no as the 'proper' answer. Now the balance is nearer to 60-40.

• Does your leader have a supernatural link? - YES
• Is your leader charismatic? - YES
• Are there any rituals/ceremonies? - YES
• Are there secrets that the general public cant know? - YES

Ranking

Step 5 was to rank each question between 1 and 5 (or 8 or 10) based on how important it is to being a sign of a cult. Or to discribe it differently:

• 1 = not indicadive of a cult
• 2 = not really
• 3 = possibly yeah
• 4 = definietly something there
• 5 = RED FLAG!!!
• 8 = no questions asked, definitely
• 10 = no questions asked, definitely x 1000

Categorizing

Step 6: Now most signs of cults are divided into different categories/quality/topics. The signs revolve around the leader and their leadership style, the beliefs of the cult, tolerance of contrary ideas and critizism, how the cult operates, and the control of the members.

So I took each of the 90 odd questions and decided if they covered the territory of one of these 5 areas. So any single question could possibly cover up to 5 categories. Yes this could mean that something is weighted up to 5x, but it seems to turn out that they are major indications anyways, so it really didn't matter.

This also eliminated a dozen or so questions that did not affect any of the categories :)

Standardizing

Alright, so how do you compare a score of 98 for leadership, with a score of 47 for tolerance?

Simple, as it turns out...I added up the maximum possible values of all the answers that affect each category/quality/topic and then I can simply use percentages.

Weighing

Now we are getting close. But do we really consider that a group not auditing it's budget equal with worshipping someone as the second coming? No.

So we weight each quality.

• 1 = Could be a cult, could be lazy.
• 2 = Probably a cult, but is it dangerous?
• 3 = Uhh guys, I see red flags all over the place...
• 4 = There is absolutely NOTHING good about this situation.

Coloring

Now we pretty everything up...and make a convienient 1-10 scale.