Everything eventually becomes a "cult" if you allow it to be untethered from reality. I used to believe as you do, then I watched science become a cult - "The Science". As rational, precise, and structured and science was, it still was not immune to a values takeover. "Cults" form in any philosophical structure that gains an intellectual monopoly. Early Islam flourished because the vast number of peoples conquered were not culturally Muslim. There was tension between Islam and the existing cultures of Persia and the Eastern Mediterranean, but Islam slowly gained a monopoly and shut it down. You don't ever provide an alternative structure that people can live and thrive under, because there is no "non-cult" cultural structure that we can all live under harmoniously. Without the dialectic; good/evil, life/death, us/them, tolerance/intolerance, etc., you only get meaningless pablum.