Every cult is based on embracing the infallibility of the cult leader. This asshole is usually a charismatic (to some) narcissist, a person who can never be wrong, will kill to prove that, and who rewards any follower who swears undying loyalty to them with an assurance of (usually transactional) love. For the most part.

The cult leader, being infallible, doesn’t need a reason to throw somebody out of the cult, but for the most part, they tolerate cult members who are undyingly loyal.

For anybody who does not go along with a cult leader’s infallible, indisputable so-called lies, taking a self-described moral stand in the name of some asshole abstraction, like “truth”, there is only death. If apostates, heretics, dissidents and critics are not always killed by the leader, and made grim examples of, the spirit of questioning and undermining authority grows like a poisonous weed in the cult. The death inflicted on the questioner is usually spiritual, the hated apostate may never be spoken to, or of, again. Within the cult, this is the functional equivalent of death by physical killing.

 The sting of death is the absence of the person you loved, absolute and eternal, silence that can never again be broken with a laugh or anything else.  With death all possibility for a better mutual future, for reconciliation, for greater understanding and peace is crushed into bitter dust. The bitterness of willfully annihilated love is impossible to describe, though many of us know well the awful taste of it.