because the born-again stuff made me think of Evangelicals, but I guess if you want to go deep into this I think there's actually a lot of unironical parallels. The singularity is kind of like the rapture for nerds, AI people get weirdly dualistic about uploading their minds to clouds, and the overlap between SV capitalism and Protestantism goes back to Weber. I think it was Charles Stross who also pointed to similarities bwetween Russian Orthodox Cosmism and Western sci-fi. Secular western people in particular get weirdly religious about AI, like some sort of psychological replacement
For that matter, it seems that the analogy is to Evangelicals, who aren't generally considered to be a cult. They're too numerous, and while they do have many charismatic leaders, a cult usually has one particular top leader.
They do, however, practice the zeal of the converted, which is I think what they really were aiming it. And that by itself would qualify as "cultlike" by some definitions.
