Concerns regarding cults and heresies are constantly being raised. One of the most powerful tools they use to control people is "guilt." When messages such as "You are a sinner" and "If you leave the leader, you will perish" are repeated, followers doubt their own judgment and eventually come to cling to the leader's words. On the surface, they use traditional religious language regarding "sin, repentance, punishment, and atonement", but in reality, their structure is completely distorted. Thomas Aquinas's reflections on sin, which he discusses in detail in the 'Summa Theologica', reveal their fictitious nature.
Cults divert people's gaze from God and fix it on leaders and the community, causing them to drift away from God and reason. Pieter Bruegel's *The Parable of the Blind Leading the Blind*, depicting a blind guide leading a blind man into a pit. A victim who has been reduced from a free personality to a manipulated object
For Thomas, sin is not merely a violation of social norms but signifies a rejection of reason and the eternal law, which are the supreme rules that should govern humanity, and a departure from the 'order of reason'.
However, in cults, the standard of sin changes insidiously. Outwardly, they speak of the will of God, the will of the Virgin Mary, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but in reality, the leader's commands and the group's rules become the absolute standard. Cults brand everything that violates these rules as disobedience, apostasy, and unbelief, defining it as sin. Victims suffer from unnecessary guilt for violating arbitrary rules set by the manipulator and come to trust the manipulator's voice more than their own rational judgment.
Thomas views sin as stemming from 'disordered self-love', placing its root in human free will. Sin is not a coerced act but the result of the misuse of free will; therefore, it is possible to hold individuals morally responsible. Sin is established only when a free person deliberately defies the order of reason.
However, cults condemn even unconscious fears or instinctive emotional fluctuations that a believer cannot control as mortal sins. The leader instills shame by continuously criticizing the victim, saying, “You are inherently wretched,” and darkens the victim’s reason by projecting images of hell and destruction onto their imagination. At some point, the victim is pushed into a psychological state where they feel they have no choice but to act in the way directed.
However, defining the natural emotional turmoil of followers as an act of atonement and turning them into 'emotional slaves' is a grave insult to human free will. This is because if the will did not consent to a 'chosen act' derived by reason, a sin cannot be established. Rather, the act of a leader who systematically destroys the freedom of others to bind them under their own power is, in itself, a grave sin that most clearly reveals rebellion against God's order.
Cults that impose distorted guilt… Destroying human reason while creating 'emotional slaves'.
Only discerning faith is the path to true happiness… We must reclaim grace and freedom through reflection and repentance. The Dual Structure of Sin: Departure from God and Conversion to Creature
Thomas understands sin in the tension between “separation from God” and “disordered conversion to the creature. Sin is not merely the act of committing a bad deed, but an internal diversion of direction in which one turns one’s back on God, the ultimate goal, and replaces that place with limited good (pleasure, wealth, honor, power, etc.).
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