I'm not sure that I'd consider most forms of animism or some ancient religious traditions as falling into that category. Often they were just into damage control and deity manipulation.
I would consider things like socialism, however, to be in that category. It's not a religion, but it runs around wearing a white garb as the economic savior of humanity and demands sacrifices in its name for the ultimate good. Many social advocates are in the same shoes: They preach one thing for the common good, but expect others to bear their burdens and be their sacrifices while often being slime themselves.
Don't much care if there's an anti-theist or anti-deist diatribe that's the fellow-traveller of the claim or not. You claim that the Good and that Justice are on your side, make sure you're not a zealot or pharisee.
I'd also say that we'd have to be careful in defining terms for others. We have a nifty term, "whitesplaining," || mansplaining. There's an awful lot of that same process done across almost any group boundary. When I was a fundie, I was often told by outsiders what my beliefs really were and what I had to believe to be true to what I believed; as a white male, I'm told what my beliefs really were and what my values and motivations are; as a heterosexual, ditto, but much less often.
I've been told what my opinions and values are as a Jew and how evil they were by people who simply couldn't be bothered to shut up and pay attention long enough to be told that this Irish-American boy was Xian. I guess that was "mus-splaining." I'm going to generalize all of those into "outsplaining"--having an outsider explain to somebody inside a group what that person must think as a member of that group.
So let's look at an example. If I were an axe murderer, having killed off the family I was after except for one of the kids, I wouldn't want somebody to gun me down or arrest me as I searched for that remaining not-yet-dead kid. Now, just what would the Golden Rule say? Do unto others as you would have others do unto you? Well, if I were that axe murderer (and even if I weren't) I certainly wouldn't want anybody to gun me down or arrest me, so by all means, the only appropriate thing for a Xian to do would be to turn the other cheek and let me find that kid and chop him to pieces. Hell, maybe I should go the extra mile and help him flush the tyke out for dismemberment. It's my Xian duty under the Golden Rule, right? (I'm assuming that the family, with the kid, are basically innocent and I'm just a homicidal maniac--perhaps delusional, perhaps racist, perhaps something else.)
Don't like that analogy? Fine. Let's define our terms first. I wouldn't want anybody to do anything bad to me, but I would want them to help me or at least not get in the way of doing good; they could certainly do good to me, I'd want that. So that's what I'm constrained by my understanding of the Golden Rule to do. But it gets down to what "good" and "bad" mean. In the case of the axe murderer, I seriously think I'd be doing something bad for the axe murderer by not stopping him. It would be doing good to keep him from hurting others. All things being equal, I'd wanted to be stopped from doing something I think is bad. That that might mean shooting him, possibly killing him. (My little X-o-meter is giving me a fuzzy reading on that last bit, but I'd like to think I'd rather be shot through the heart rather than to have a by-stander watch me kill an innocent kid with an axe).
I wouldn't dream of outsplaining to somebody what they must believe based upon some squishy label, whether given my private interpretation of the "Golden Rule" or of what "good" and "bad" were. That comes with a values system, and may be flexible. It works for all sorts of things. "As a Xian, you have to believe ..." or "As a progressive, you think ..." Outsplaining's common, it's offensive when done to anybody.
And when done to nobody in particular, it's just a strawman, but that's a different rant.
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