Don't take this the wrong way because I was raised differently and don't believe in just one God that has so many different religions and ways to worship him.
In my eyes, organized religion can be taken as a form of a cult. It appears to me that one person will stand up in front of a group of people and preach his words that he has written to the ones who sit there and listen to him. They will use the name of God to make you believe it is wrong to have sex before marriage, have an abortion, drink or even smoke. They will put the fear of some unknown being in your head that if you do any of these things you are dammed for hell. Is this not a cult in some ways? In certain ways, this is a form of brainwashing the public into doing as they say and believing as they are told to believe.
What is a cult leader? He is very much like a preacher. He will get a group of people and brainwash them into following him and doing as he commands.Take for example the cult in Waco Texas and how this one man was able to persuade so many people to take their own lives in the name of God. The only different between him and a preacher is the fact these people were living on his land under his care. A preacher does basically the same in a building, but the people are free to leave when the service is over.
I personally, don't see much difference in the way we look at this. They are both preaching to you to persuade you to think like they think and to believe in what they have told you to believe in. I feel that beliefs should be free and we should form our own beliefs without being preached to and told what we should believe in or not. My mom is American Indian and I was raised to believe in the spirits and the Gods of the land, air, rain, sky, moon, star, mountains, seas and basically all of nature. We need to respect all around us and live a clean healthy life and not take too much that we can't use and leave the rest for others who need it.