A woman I met during my time in SGI is still a friend of mine. Thankfully our relationship is MUCH more normal and healthy outside of the SGI structure, since I've been out for almost 2.5 years now.

We were hanging out recently when she posed a question to me about what she should do with her YWD district leader title. It led into a whole discussion about the SGI, of course. I told her about my experience of when I knew I wanted to leave, why and how it went down.

We also talked about the aspects of the org that made it culty: Ikeda worship, prescribed structures for meetings, rigid rules handed down from who knows where- lack of democracy, manipulation to keep her leadership role, etc.

Here's where logical fallacy #1 comes in:

Every time I tell her, "it's a cult," she says something like, "everything is a cult, even yoga is a cult" or "every church is a cult.

It's been a long time since I took a Logic class so I'm trying to remember: is her logical fallacy called a Red Herring?

Essentially, instead of addressing the issue at hand: SGI is a cult, and the implicit meaning is that "cults are bad", she just tries to point at something else and say "but they do it, too!"

If I have more free time later, I'll try to do some research on logical fallacies and post about them for discussion. Probably won't be able to do that anytime soon so if someone else feels so inclined, go for it.