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[Mad_Man_P]

This might sound harsh… But I am of the opinion that if anyone is stupid enough to buy bullshit… they deserve what they get… now, this might come off as horribly arrogant… but in fact i’m awarding everyone the assumtion that they know what they are doing, and therefor I hold them responsible for their own stupidity…

having said that… I do think we should be rid of those who sell bullshit to unfortunate people… for the same reason we don’t want heroin sold in stores…

And scientology is definatly bullshit…

[felix_dakat]

@Churro the Viscous

…so I’m posting this in Religion.

Previously, I thought Scientology was just a harmless religion, no worse than, say, Christianity or Islam, and possibly considerably better. I was under the impression that it was therapeutic and psychologically helpful, though probably not “true” in the conventional sense.

I’ve read a little bit about it, now, at xenu.net, which, I know, is probably a horribly biased cite, and shouldn’t be my main source of information regarding Scientology, but I’ve also learned something interesting about one of my Scientologist friends which furthers my fear/disgust with the church and my concern for her.

Let’s start at the beginning:
I was reading the intro on xenu.net. I read this thing about Sea Org, which is a Scientologist organization in which people are pretty much slaves. Don’t take my word for it; read about it yourself. Anyhow, people in the Sea Org sign contracts to serve the Sea Org for 1 Billion years. Yups.

One of my friends at school, Genny, is a Scientologist. She’s always talked about it as this helpful, thereaputic thing. I pretty much took her word for it. Then, when I read that stuff about Scientology, I got pretty concerned with her. I started talking to one of her friends about it, and she told me the following:

Towards the end of last school year, which would be around March or April, I think, Genny disappeared for a month or so. Nobody knew why. She didn’t tell anybody or give any warning, or even say bye. She just left. When she came back, a month later, it turned out she had signed up with the Sea Org, did labor for a little, and then got kicked out because she had previously done a drug which no member was supposed to have ever done. She referred to the labor she did as “fun”. She expressed no concern or remorse for the fact that she just ditched her friends. Apparently, complete disconnection with previous contacts is one of the policies, and that didn’t phase Genny at all. She signed the billion year contract, and, it seems to me, she would have willingly honored it (at least until she died) if it weren’t for the fact that she had done that drug.

So, now, I’m pretty much against that church. I see it as the closest thing to “evil” that I can think of. Should I?

Churro–

I have always found Scientology bizarre and unattractive. The remarkable thing is that seems to attract celebrities who seem to have other things going for them and you might expect to know better. I think they offer perks to people who who have achieved high profile status in the arts. They endoctrinate people into seeing the world in a literally sci-fi paranoid world-view. They encourage people to enter into dissociative states on the road to becoming “clear.” The process is very expensive.

I would expect that when one is endoctrinated thusly, there would always be the danger that an unmediated experience of reality would break through. You know, kind of like Sartre’s experience of the beingness of the tree in “La Nausée”. But, it seems that there are so many people walking around desensitized to life that a well organized cult like Scientology can easily recruit droves of people.

It doesn’t sound as if the experience provoked a round of serious reflection in your friend. Sadly , that suggests she may be at risk of other highly questionable involvements.

[Kriswest]

Hubbard started the thing as a bet or a dare… If he were still alive and not dead from being a drug user and an alcoholic, he would be laughing his ass of at the vast amount of human stupidity and gullibility.

[Carleas]

Yeah, Scientology is a well organized cult that recruits members and deploys them all over the world, many attaining fairly high office in US political institutions. But we’re currently under the reign of a Christian president, and being sold candidates for his replacement that profess equal Christian piety. Our currency and pledge of allegience refers to the Christian god, and an atheist can’t get a fair shot in court unless she swallows a pledge to tell the truth “so help you god”. Scientology sells books and classes, but Christianity has done the same stuff historically. They simply don’t need to as much nowadays because people give them money for nothing.

What’s significantly different that makes Scientology a scary cult and Christianity a benign belief? Numbers?

[Kriswest]

The objective is different I do believe. Numbers yea, but, the objective i think is different.

[Carleas]

Isn’t that just a claim that people couldn’t possibly believe what Scientology preaches? People do believe, and the peons are fervent. It’s no different from the early Catholic church, which still meddles in global politics regularly. I think it’s just as crazy to believe one as it is the other, and I think it’s a Christian bias in the US that leads to assuming that the people at the top of either group are more or less sincere as a rule.

[Cyrene]

@Carleas

Yeah, Scientology is a well organized cult that recruits members and deploys them all over the world, many attaining fairly high office in US political institutions. But we’re currently under the reign of a Christian president, and being sold candidates for his replacement that profess equal Christian piety. Our currency and pledge of allegience refers to the Christian god, and an atheist can’t get a fair shot in court unless she swallows a pledge to tell the truth “so help you god”. Scientology sells books and classes, but Christianity has done the same stuff historically. They simply don’t need to as much nowadays because people give them money for nothing.

What’s significantly different that makes Scientology a scary cult and Christianity a benign belief? Numbers?

They ride piggyback on the same mechanisms in the human brain, both scientology and christianity meet the criteria of ideas which are best passed on and remembered accurately from mind to mind, as in they both contain the same ontological violations of innate expectations which make them inherently attention-arresting, surprising, and memorable.

On top of the fact that they both massively attempt to sooth existential anxieties.

---

conceptually they couldn’t be further apart, but how and why they latch to human minds, they’re very very very similiar in that way.

Theres no way to tell the difference besides mainstream or off on the side. Side religions are cults, mainstream religion is religion.

[felix_dakat]

Yes, there are Christian cults that practice coersive methods similar to those practiced by Scientology. But there are other Christian groups that don’t. The methods of social control practiced by cult groups are not intrinsic to or limited to religious groups. Witness secular totalitarian government and fascist corporations. The Unitarians and the Quakers are among the most democratic organizations I know of.