Slashdot Mirror
Scientology vs. Panoussis Ruling
leto writes "The Swedish High Court upheld the ruling today in the case of Scientology
vs Panoussis, where Scientology accuses Panoussis of copyright
infringement of religious trade secrets. Panoussis believes the public should be warned against Scientology, and is therefore trying to legally publish various materials that would warn people against Scientology. He is the guy that submitted the secret OT's to the Swedish parliament, which caused quite a
diplomatic incident when the US interfered with the Swedish legal system because the Swedish Offentlighetsprincip then caused these documents to be available to everyone, but has also done other things as reported by slashdot such as protecting the
Flashback site as reported by slashdot before.
Having lost now means that apart from needing to pay the (minimal) damages of $2000 for copyright infringement, he needs to pay an additional $40,000 on legal costs for the Scientology lawyers, on top of the $150,000 of legal costs that were the results of the previous episodes in this court case.
There was a minority opinion from one of the judges. She regards the OTs to have been legally published, something Panoussis focussed on in this case, because in Europe, the right to 'fair use' depends on the texts having been published. Panoussis has already appealed to the Supreme Court.
Regardless of which party is right, this case shows clearly that anonymity is a right you need, to fight the denial of services practices that large institutions apply towards individuals in the current legal systems. Though Panoussis will disagree with me on this. He has always told me that if you believe in something, you should be willing to make the sacrifice, or as he put it, you need to defend freedom, and not take it for granted, but I can't
help but feel that it should not be necessary for one person to sacrifice his life for other people's freedom.
If we only had micropayments properly working, I'm sure he would be able to pay the legal costs from contributions all over the net.
More information can be found either
here,
here,
here and in the newsgroup
alt.religion.scientology
Panoussis's latest project is an advanced search engine to help locate information about Scientology at search.freewinds.cx."
Scientology Kills -- The Dead
Lisa McPherson -- An Unanswered Murder
Scientology Lies -- Good Rundown of Various Crimes
They have tactics that cause folks like me to post anonymously out of fear (I'd appreciate being moderated up, though). They have attacked free speech (especially anonymous speech) with tactics that may border on criminal, and while I don't particularly care about their weird beliefs, it's annoying to think of how much money they're extracting from empty-headed Hollyweird actors with their cult, but they have the right to believe that God is the nearest oil rig as far as I'm concerned.
jammer99@hushmail.com
"I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is!" - L. Ron Hubbard
I just finished reading an interesting book, called "The Jesus Mysteries" that presents strong, well-researched evidence (if in a somewhat tabloid style) that the Christian myths are heavily based on Greek Dionysus cult rituals, which themselves seem heavily based on Egyptian Osirus cult rituals.
According to the book, Christianity is a "new" face on a very, very old religion.
It's a good read.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I don't think that the murders had anything at all to do with atheism. They were politically motivated. It was all about power, not religious beliefs. I also think you're confused about agnostics. It doesn't mean they don't care. It just means that they don't believe there is any evidence to support or refute the existence of a deity.
Atheists don't direct the followers to murder fellow human beings, the philosophy does not have clean hands, as far as attrocities goes.
As near as I can tell, atheists don't do anything in the name of there (lack of) religious beliefs. They don't believe in religions, so they do things for more worldly reasons.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
This is sort of beside the point. Scientology should have the right to control the copying of their copyrighted documents.
Even copyrighted documents are allowed to be copied under certain circumstances. One of those is for the purpose of criticism or comment. That seems to fit the current case. The documents pretty much criticize themselves in the eyes of most rational people. Publishing them in their entirety seems warranted. Additionally, it could be argued that it was in the public interest that these documents be revealed, given what happens to people that find out too late about the Scientology "religion" and try to leave it.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Ok, I'm not entirely familiar with the reasons for these slaughters, but I don't recall atheism being part of it. Are you saying that Stalin and Pol Pot killed people because they believed in a god of some sort? Were Stalin and Pol Pot atheists?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Phrased like that, you could make any religious group sound like a bunch of whackjobs. Christians, Muslims, anyone at all I think. Face it, there is no real evidence of anyone's religious beliefs. That's why they are called faiths. Therefore it's quite easy to declare that any religious group is a bunch of whackjobs for believing something that there is no evidence of, and that's before you even get down to their individual rituals and texts for the really hilarious stuff.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
"(I'm sure some atheiests have committed an atrocity in the name of atheism at some point in history.)"
They have. To name a couple:
Stalin, 45 million.
Pol Pot, 10 million.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
you mispelled "evel" because I was thinking bad thoughts about you.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The Catholic church keeps an enormous amount of secrets. Some of these secrets are simply not well-known facts, like the whole Exorcism thing, but there are 2000 years of history, quashing heretical movements, absorbing others. They've been in the unique position of being the sole religious authority over much of Europe, being party to political fighting, mediation, and I'm sure they've had the privilege of documenting much of it.
As far as judging Scientology as an evil cult; if you've ever seen their "church" in Hollywood, (the actual town), with the Gold-lettered sign - it's as lavish as any medieval Catholic church, Orthodox church or Islamic Mosque. (though it IS rather bland, architecturally). Definately gold in them-thar hills. Someone's worshiping Mammon again.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You're the first Athiest I've met who agreed with the statement ("feverishly believes there is no God, and without a whipser of proof or any evidence whatsoever.")
As a Christian, I respect your blind faith in NO God, as you respect my blind faith in God.
(interesting, was it recklessness by which you decided to capitalize "God", and NOT capitalize "athiest"?)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
On MY property, yes, nobody else has a right to privacy or anonymity.
In PUBLIC property or forums, a person SHOULD have the right to anonymity. Whistleblowers and such have been killed.
I don't have a lot of details, it goes along with the history of the OLD Freemason organization, but some former Mason, back in the early 19th century, tried to publish a book containing secrets about the organization; secrets about a political power block, composed of Masonic members who were also senators and governors and judges. The power block was extensive, and you might say that they pretty much had control of the United States at that time.
Then, some unfortunate things started happening to this person, I believe attempts at his life, his house burned down, etc. When he tried to pursue justice on the matter in court, it was thrown out, the judge was a mason, the jurists were masons, the police were masons, etc. Very similar situation to people who tried to go up against the KKK. Somehow, he was able to get the word out, and there was a huge public backlash against the masons, and an Anti Mason political party was formed aimed (successfully) at breaking the political influence of the Masons in American politics.
Anonymity is absolutely necessary to maintain freedom against, not to sound overly dramatic, but large, powerful, secret organizations. It happens in real life, and it's a real threat.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Again, I submit to you, Stalin, was a Communist, and an essential element in the Communist philosophy is that religion is inherently a bad thing, the Science of man tells us that there is no God, the bible is false, and religion is nothing more than an evil plot to keep the masses "down", and therefore religion must not only be outlawed but vigorously eliminated, because it is the enemy of mankind.
Sure, there are interpretations of Communism that don't think that way. But let me note the persecution of the Falun Gong in China as a modern-day example.
Sure, what's driving the anti-religious zeal is political control, perhaps "payback" for making "the people" poor slaves for the past thousands of years, but in the end, there's no basic moral justification in the Athiest religion that says that "life is sacred" or has a value above other things. Not that having a moral justification has saved the diety-based religions from making the same mistakes (shouting about how terrible it is to kill a human being, then killing human beings).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Hey Taco!
Hows this for opposing your dogmatic mythological beliefs?
Pi != 3.
(referring to the biblical passage where Pi is defined as 3, thereby proving that the Bible contains at least one false statement, unless that guy's grain silo was a hexagon, which is not backed up by archeological evidence)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Oops, I did it again.
Downloaded your song.
And listened for free -
ooh baby baby,
you think I'm a putz,
that I'll pay 20 bucks,
I'm not that gullible.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"The real purpose of evolution" (hm. didn't know that natural processes had a "purpose") "is to create sentient engropy machines to change matter from one form to another."
So, basically, I'm here to convert beer into urine? Cool. I'm ready to go to church now!
Your other assertion: monotheism does not provide even a reasonable analogy of nature and reality - that depends on your interpretation. Christianity can be very existentialist.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
75 million years?
Obviously total bullshit because Hawaii itself is less than 5 million years old!!! (The oldest islands in the chain are about 5 million years, Hawaii is the youngest - )
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This is stuff that matters.
Because we're talking about a revolution here. Computers and Information Technology have brought a means with the potential to change human society in ways most people haven't even thought about.
It validates the notion that just about everything can be reduced to "information", and that information can be copied, stored and transmitted very cheaply and quickly, from any place in the world to any other. It challenges the human notions of physical property. It's particularly relevant in light of the American concept of "Free Speech". If Speech is Information, and Speech is Free, then Information should be free. But IP Laws, and Copyrights, and Trade Secrets are running counter to that notion.
Computers, Information, represent a revolution, a tidal change in a given direction. Hope for the future. People empowered when they were mere slaves before. IP Laws are counterrevolutionary. They represent the status quo. Resistance to the changes that could take place. We've seen the wonderful potential of the internet years ago, when it first started. Theoretically, you could get ANYTHING. But when it started to actually become technically feasible to get Copyrighted music on line, freely, and the bean counters started to get nervous, they knew they had to get their lawyers on the horn to start shoveling that toothpaste back into the tube. As a consequence, the internet may very well evolve into a vast collection of "this is my car, this is my dog" pages, pr0n, and Flash animations.
I think that's stuff that matters. And Nerds, being the custodians of the machines that make this revolution possible - probably give a crap what happens to the internet, and the coming revolution.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Being successful in Hollywood has a lot more to do with having a well-connected agent than anything else.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That's starting to sound SCARY.
.
Walt Disney? Sonny Bono? These are names that keep coming up in this whole Copyright law abuse debate. . . and to read that they were also involved with Scientology? It's starting to sound like a conspiracy alright. .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Oh yes there is. There is plenty of need to make fun of Tom Cruise. What is it, exactly that Tom Cruise DOES, anyway?
Tell me *that* wont be replaced by some crafty modelling at Pixar in 10 years. (the good thing being, the only actors that will be employed at that point, will be ones that can *act*)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
first, the guy was being sarcastic. Wow, it's a rare athiest that doesn't get sarcasm THAT obvious!
The Crusades were NOT about slaughtering people who didn't share the Catholic faith. It was about protecting Christian pilgrims to the holy land from bandits. Until it was later found that some of the "bandits" were sanctioned by the regional authorities at the time, and still attempting to protect the pilgrims from violence, it of course escalated into wholesale warfare, and the Catholic authorities believing that the only way to ensure the safety of the pilgrims was to militarily take control of the region. The Crusades were a lot more complicated than people think. However, I can't say the same thing about the Inquisition (for which, the Catholic church has officially apologised).
The statues in Afghanistan ARE being destroyed, not preserved, by a lunatic fringe of Islam called the Taliban which happens to be in control of the majority of Afghanistan, thanks to the support of the US Government, who was trying to get the Soviets out of there because they were afraid that the Soviets would be able to move their control Westward to Iran, Iraq, etc. It was about OIL. Oil is the God and national religion of the US. Not Christianity.
It's not tiding, it's "tithing" and translated from Hebrew, it means 10%. Not a lot to ask in return for the favor of existance and grace, for those that believe that.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
He's talking about Freemasonry from BEFORE it was reformed. Back in the 1800's there was a US political party called the Anti Masons, whose platform was removing Masonic influence from the American political process, such was the public outcry and backlash when the Masons unsuccessfully attempted to silence a former member who spoke out against the organization, and it's influences on American politics in that era.
After that, the Freemasons pretty much died out or went underground for around 50 years, and resurfaced as a reformed organization, less secret and dedicated mostly for charity work and precision go-kart driving.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
. . . or NASCAR's status as a sport?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I am a Christian, and I had never heard that Hitler was an Athiest. Stalin, yes. But not Hitler.
Of course there were also rumors about the SS leadership being involved in some Thor cult.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yes, she should have instead, lobbied the Indian government to create forced-abortion laws like the Chinese.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I thought that Scientology also had lost their tax exempt status in the US at one point, and then regained it, or there was a serious challenge to that status - and the overall rhetoric at the time was that Republican administrations were generally less likely to favor Co$, while Democrats rolled out the red carpet (due to the large campaign contributions from Co$, and other Hollywood actors and organizations).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The big difference between an acceptable faith and a ... let's say "secret society" is the secrets. Scientology is rife with secret. One could say it's based on secret. The Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) has quite a few secrets, and they aren't looked favorably upon by many Christians for this reason. The Roman Catholic Church to my knowledge doesn't have any secret doctrines. (And hey, give me specifics if they do.) Doctrines would be very hard to follow if they were secret. Catholics publish their doctrine in the Catechism which is available for believers and non-believers alike.
Also, major religions have stopped endorsing killing the non-believers. The Catholic Church has formally apologized for this behavior in the past. That's hard to do when an organization considers itself the Church of the Almighty God. (You may be able to tell that I have some affinity for the Roman Catholic Church, though I am not Catholic myself)
Scientology is dangerous, as in causing deaths. Their obsessions with their oddball practices of "auditing," learning the secrets of Scientology, and giving money to Scientology often destroy followers' lives. Does anyone else wonder why this church is the most litigious organization in the United States (and there are a lot of lawsuits in this country)?
I won't say that Scientology is an evil cult. I will merely say that Scientology is a dangerous, ligtigious, exploitative, secretive money pyramid organization that was founded by a mediocre science fiction writer in order to make money.
-the Pedro Picasso
--
--
(sourceCode == freeSpeech)
It is not unknown for a religion to possess "intellectual property"
For instance, several christian denominations vigerously enforce their copyrights on their translations of the bible.
The Worldwide Church of God, having disavowed one of their main religious texts, have (rather sucessfully) accused a splinter group (Philadelphia Church of God) of copyright infringement for continuing to distribute this text. (Mystery of the Ages)
Most of the protestant denominations were founded partly on a belief that clergy should not intercede between God and the individual worshipper-- thus literacy, and a widespread distribution of religious texts are both important.) At a more extreme level, the freedom of an individual to define their own relationship to God should not be impeded by intellectual property. (Despite this, the Supreme Court has recognized the copyrightability of divinely inspired texts)
However, almost diametrically opposed to this religious tenet is the so called "Mystery cult", in which religious secrets are gradually revealed to an initiate. This apparently is the basic model behind scientology.
It seems more like the INTERCAL of religions; something designed deliberately to be as perverse and bogus as technically possible and still (sort of) work.
The question is: would it be possible to design a belief system more bogus and implausible than Scientology, and yet make it somehow viable? Anybody care to take up the challenge? (Self-aware parody religions don't count.)
Now that Bush is in the Whitehouse, these people will be getting federal funds to brainwash the vulnerable^W^W^Whelp the needy. Bush, you see, believes that "faith-based" programmes are innately good, and has set up an Office of Faith-Based Action in the Whitehouse, to distribute a $7bn annual slush fund to religious charities. Now, because of this pesky thing called the Constitution, Bush cannot just give all the money to conservative Christian groups, but has to consider all religions equally. Which means that the Scienos will be waiting with their hands out to fund their already established "charity" programmes.
As for the Bible telling you how to kill homosexuals... that's just silly. Nowhere does the Bible even use a word meaning "homosexuals".
Then what does it mean in Leviticus when it says you're supposed to put to death any man who lays with another man?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
When the media does this to geeks, Hellmouth reigns. When trolls do it to religion, it's approved. See the contradiction?
America's religious conservative undercurrent is the main reason the media does this to geeks - and when trolls do it to religion, it's a reaction to this.
It's not contradiction, it's a returned favor.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Wasn't the main objection to the first non-Latin translation of the Bible, the terrifying idea that suddenly ANYONE could read the Bible instead of getting it spoonfed?
Similarly, the big thing that finally convinced me to leave the Christian church, was: I decided to actually READ the Bible. Leviticus convinced me it was written by a human - one who compulsively washed his hands 80 times a day, no doubt.
The Church of Scientology isn't as dumb as it looks - it knows the truth would drive people away, for the same reason Microsoft doesn't want people publishing benchmarks.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
While it might matter to some, its hardly news or while its news, it hardly matters.
It's here because it could be YOU. Scientology, the MPAA, it's all the same - say something Those With Silly Amounts of Money and Power would rather you didn't, and they'll find or buy laws that can be used as a blunt object upside your head.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Hubbard, a certifiable wacko, decided it was a great idea.
It IS a great idea. Religion's where the money's at, just ask Jerry Falwell.
I half considered starting a religion and changing my name to L. John Shepard.
I am told the device is a battery, a meter, and a couple wires attached to what looks like a coffee can.
L. Ron insisted that soup cans work the best. Wouldn't electrodes, or some kind of custom-manufactured, tight-tolerance handgrip be better? Nope. Hubbo's extensive knowledge of the scientific principles of the universe told him that Campbell's soup was the way to go.
The newer e-meters have variable gain, digital readout, and can cost in the low thousands - and they still hook up to Campbell's Clam Chowder. (Insert clam jokes here.)
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I have a friend who's brother was converted to JW, and my friend told me that JW's believe that Heaven only has room for 27,000 (or something like that) souls.. is this true?
If it is true, where do they get the number from? (Do they believe Heaven has a Fire Code, or what?)
Isn't it 144,000 for the 12,000 each from twelve tribes of Israel? It's in the Bible, in Revelation I think (it's been awhile). Jehovah's Witnesses aren't the only ones who have this belief, I've heard it from Nazarenes before.
Me, I think it's a hilarious concept: 144,000 out of the billions of people who've ever lived, that's it. Neither you, nor anyone you know, is gonna make it. Were these odds meant to impress us, make Heaven sound better because it's a VERY exclusive club, scare us into line, or make us shrug and say why bother?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
The way I understood it was that pretty much everything bad said against the Gnostics at the time was false made up by their 'rivals'. (is that the word?)
:-)
I kinda like the core belief of Gnosticism: that God went away after making the world, the God seen through the rest of the Old Testament is Jehovah, a poseur pretending to be God, and Jesus came to Earth to tell us about the REAL God. Rather clever way of dealing with the Bible's contuinity problems, if you ask me.
The mainstream Christians claimed that Gnostics ate babies.
And the Romans claimed it about the Christians.
Which makes it rather ironic that Christians now claim it about Wiccans. Selective memory is wonderful.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I'm not 100% comfortable myself with the bashing of religion around here, but on the other hand, I've seen too many people damaged by religion.
:-) Religion has tended to draw people into a state where they disbelieve what they see in favor of what they've been told - thus they gradually come to live in a world that bears no resemblance to reality. I've been there.
I've seen people who are genuinely helped out of a dark place in their life by religion, yes - but many more who are put in that dark place by religion. Many more who find religion a convenient excuse to do what they were gonna do anyway (like hate people and stay indoors). Many who use religion as a mind control device, so they can extract money, power, and allegiance from others - and MANY, MANY more who are victims of the above.
For religion to serve a useful purpose for us as human beings, it should enable us to become more than what we are, and I don't mean after we die. Instead it tends to make us LESS than we are - it tends to make us stop thinking, stop asking questions, and turn off the detectors in our head that light up when we hear bullshit and rhetoric. It gives people an irrefutable authority to do whatever they want - if they can find a way to say "but the Bible says" or "but God says" - often without even having to justify it to themselves the way the godless heathens have to do.
As I said, I'm not comfortable with dismissing religion out of hand. But the notion that religion is used in all of the ways I listed above to make this country and this world into a violent, crippled shadow of what it could be, is something that I feel needs to be whacked on the head at every chance.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Both belief systems preach non-violence.
Then they need to preach it a lot louder.
The fact that some leaders of some sects happened to support evil causes is not a reflection of what those belief systems stand for, but rather a reflection of how horrible those particular individuals were.
Which Bible did you read that wasn't filled with God-ordained mass slaughter, that didn't give explicit instructions on how to murder homosexuals? Which Koran did you read that didn't say God's word is to be spread by the sword if necessary - and that if you die killing infidels you get a free ticket to heaven? Which newspaper did you read that says the constant violence in the Middle East isn't for religious reasons? Which U2 album did you buy that says the war in Northern Ireland wasn't between Catholics and Protestants?
Which history books did you read where it wasn't a worldwide thing to burn witches?
Which United States do you live in (bear with me if you don't) that doesn't have so many beatings and murders because of people's race or sexuality or religion that we're now considering laws specifically dealing with hate-crimes? Which USA is it where racism, religious intolerance, and violent homophobia AREN'T justified on a mass scale by religious fundamentalism?
On which Earth can you honestly say all this shit is due to a few evil leaders of a few extremist sects, in past tense?
The peace-loving followers of these religions seem to be the minority sects.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
I'm sure some atheiests have committed an atrocity in the name of atheism at some point in history.)
Care to share?
During the Spanish War (1936-1939), Communists or Anarchists (I don't remember well) burned churches and convents. They also shot priests. The Catholic Church has recently recognised them (the executed) as martyrs. The revolutionaries thought them helpers of the military rebellion.
I think that Soviet repression of religions and the Chinese Cultural Revolution and invasion of Tibet could qualify as well.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I wanted to post the same thing but you were ahead of me. The clergy was either viciously excuted or sent to labour camps in Siberia. I have heard accounts of priests being fed to rats. Alive! Churches were ruined. Icons were destroyed. Books were burned.
Of course, one can argue that in the Soviet Union, communism became the official religion and all other religions had to be exterminated because they conflicted with what the communists preached. Stalin became the official god or messia or what have you. In 1953, when Stalin died, Khruschev came to power. For a while, sanity prevailed. Khruschev criticized "the cult of Stalin"!! But it didn't last long and Lenin, once again, became the official god. Did you hear about the Mausoleum? (pardon my spelling) Did you know that Lenin's body is still preserved there and is still available for all the faithful to see? (That was done contrary to Lenin's wishes -- he specifically said that he wanted to be buried but that didn't prevent the rabid communists from turning communism into an organized religion).
Anyway, back to the point -- atheism *can* become an organized religion. And it still is happenning in China.
Oh, and just to let you know that I'm not talking out of my ass -- I was born and in the Soviet Union and lived there for 15 years before I came to Canada.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Who were the congressmen who did this? Were they the same people responcible for DMCA and UCITA?
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
canonization?
Many thanks for the pointer; I just debunked a couple my dad sent me this morning, you'd think I'd have learned...
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
That said, I don't believe that there is or should EVER be any protection for doctrine as a trade secret. This is in flagrant violation of the first amendment's right to freedom of religion: I should be able to practice the exorcism of body thetans whether or not I'm a scientologist (I don't, but I should be able to if I wanted).
So, imho, scientology ultimately needs to decide one of two things:
Knowing what I know, it will probably ultimately go for #2 even though it wants to have its cake and eat it too.
_Deirdre
All religion is based on control. The money is a necessary expression of that control. So is the control of utterances and thought and the control of the exposure your primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Seen any good looking Taliban babes lately? Nor are you likely to...
/. ?
... and the Satinists are still slightly closer to God than the Scientologists. -Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.
But WTF is this doing on
While it might matter to some, its hardly news or while its news, it hardly matters.
In the Proximity to God Index today
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Scientologists and their fawning admiration of someone who was only slightly less honest/more devious than Charlie Manson, rub my fur the wrong way.
Luckily he's worm casings now so we'll never have to be subjected to more of those lousy Battlefield Earth books.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
--
Actually it's the other way around, local laws are superceded by EU laws. The issue here seems to be local and not EU law though.
I do wish Scientology was banned in the whole of Europe like it is in several countries. Americans may value freedom enough to let criminals have the freedom of psychologically murder people, but Europeans usually believe the well being of people comes above the rest.
And of course, as has been previously pointed out, Scientology has nothing to do with a religion. It is an international corporation (since it is designed for profit) that should be treated accordingly.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Remember, kids, Xenu says:
All your race are belong to us! You are on the way to supression. You have no chance to ascend, make your time!
Oh my god, it's been a long time since I've laughed that hard.
Operation Clambake needs to make up and sell T-shirts with that on it and sell them as a fund-raiser...
Jay (=
The real problem comes into what they DO. In particular, people who wish to leave scientology have their lives destroyed with private information obtained during the rituals of the "religion". People who attack scientology are "fair game" and can be harassed beyond their means by the great financial power of the "church". And these are only the despicable actions that are obvious in the daylight.
Do you honestly suggest that the Vatican would go to these lengths of harassment over their secret doctrines? Perhaps 300 years ago, but I really can't see them squandering any more of the little moral capital they have left on such things today. Most people now agree that such behavior is wrong, period, and no credible organization (note that I don't include governments in the category of "credible organizations") will get away with it. I myself left the catholic church, and no one ever revealed things that had been said in confession in order to make my life hell.
P.S. I can't recall any non-believers being killed by Bhuddists or other non-deistic religions. Care to back that up?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The core practice is talking about things
while attached to a fairly simple
skin resistance meter.
A good teacher is supposed to be able to
purge the effects of bad experiences.
The goal is "clear" which may take decades
and kilobucks.
Some fairly intelligent-seeming people swear
this helps them while others feel scammed.
How this became emeshed in a religion,
other people have explanations.
When I went to high school we had a project in religion class, students would group together and study a religion more carefully. Me and a friend chose Scientology, and went to visit them in Stockholm (capital of Sweden).
Our teacher was very concerned that we shouldn't listen to their lies.
We got to try the E-meter, which was basically a voltmeter which measured the voltage between your two hands.
Our teacher told us about another student who managed to manipulate the E-meter by putting different pressure on his hands depending on the nature of the questions asked, so he got zero effect on everything.
The stupid Scientologist hadn't seen anything like it, apparently he became quite startled, afraid even. Unfortunately for me, I couldn't do the same thing, so they grilled me with questions about school and which classes I didn't do well in. The moron "saw" on his E-meter that I didn't do well in some class, thing is, I had top marks in every subject.
Oh well, what shall we do with these stupids?
Concerning the stars, I guess they don't have to pay (as much) for the seminars and hopes to be "clear". Maybe it is status in it in Hollywood, I don't really know.
:wq!
How about the persecution of religious in the Soviet Union? An athiest state, torturing and murdering believers? Sounds like organized, religious persecution to me, and I'm a damn athiest.
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I'm lost as to what this case has to do with my rights online. Can someone explain?
Yes, I honestly believe the Vatican would do that. They've done worse in the past.
This is sort of beside the point. Scientology should have the right to control the copying of their copyrighted documents. (That's what the word obviously means.) But I sure don't think of them as good guys. I just don't think of any of the other religions as good guys either.
And I'm not sure that banning birth control isn't much worse than anything that Scientologists are plausably accused of.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Hubbard was ... fond of unpleasant stories. I don't know the truth, but I heard that he built dianetics (the original version) as the result of a bar room bet. Still, if you read "Typewriter in the Sky" or "Slaves of Sleep" you would have an idea of the unclean feeling he generated. Sort of like Phillip K. Dick during a depressive phase.
But to jump to "most science fiction writers dislike humanity", perhaps that says more about how you select your reading material than anything else. Or perhaps you form you ideas from movies.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I have no evidence, but the story that I heard placed it around 1940. 20 years ago I could have pinned it down closer than that, but I wasn't that interested, so I've forgotten the details, and the person who knew first hand is now dead. Sorry. Still, I believe that the actual wording of the bet was a bit different (which is why Dianetics came out first). I didn't know about the napkin.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's one of three main stories (but I forget the other two, because that's the spectacular one). No evidence that any particular one of them is true.
The Caliph may have given that order, but if so no verifiable record of it has survived. It may quite plausibly have been an accident.
Remember that war time propaganda should not be believed, even when it's centuries old.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sorry. I refuse to allow a religion to dictate my moral code. I'd prefer to not allow it to dictate the legal code under which I must live.
... but which? I know how I choose, but you must choose for yourself.
I respect religion in the same way that I respect a vicious dog. Say "nice doggie" while you search for a good rock or club.
That being said, atheists aren't generally any better. Usually they are actually just heretics from some branch of religion. And gnostics are frequently whacko, though some are the most enlightened people on the planet
Socrates is perhaps the best traditional exemplar of morality, but remember that all that we know of him comes through Plato, hardly a recommendation.
My favorite quasi-religious quote is based on a cartoon of Moses on the Mount:
Think for yourself, Smuck!
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Story I heard was it was Randal Garrett. Doesn't make much difference, and perhaps they were both there.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yeah. But you don't need to use any long excerpts to show that Scientology is silly. So that's no reason to publish the whole thing.
No. You don't have to let people read OT III in it's entirety. I never have and never will. (Well, actually I never got beyond the Dianetics book.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You obviously hasn't read anything about Scientology. They're a mad cult. May I recomend Operation Clambake? for you ? Good. Now, go read the OT documents. The scientology "religion" is crazy. Those documents SHOULD be public. Go read'em.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
I think you are referring to "Mission Easrth", Hubbard's "decalogy." Battlefield Earth was about Earth 1000 years after a gas-bombing by a race of ten-foot-tall psychiatrists. It was made into a highly-panned movie starring John Travolta.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Hollywood stars get suckered in because there's a specific branch of the Scientology organization devoted to recruiting them, in so far as I am aware.
>Seemingy intelligent people???
Well, I've never studied the topic at length, but one would assume that anyone who's managed to work his/her way up to the top of his/her industry, would wield some kind of intelligence.
Of course, I'm well aware that even intelligent people can hold a religious belief, but this is just a large crime syndicate out to get - not only money I'm afraid - but power to wield. Anyone reading up on CoS will see that after just a few minutes research!
Maybe these people have really low self-esteem, could that be it? They're already successful, so the 'go clear and you will be successful' speech shouldn't carry all too much weight on the rational listener. That's more for the stupid masses 'Go clear and you will be successful, just like $your_favourite_star.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Ah yes, the 'e-meter'. I'm told there's a little debunking going on right here, but I've only skimmed it myself.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
>The first thing they'll do is sneakily install a proxy filter on your PC, just to make sure you don't see anything that might change your mind.
Yeah, I've heard about that. Apparently someone - with a complete lack of morals, I might add - reverse-engineered the base product CyberSitter, and this in turn led to the decryption of the ScienoSitter lists. ;-)
Thanks for the factnet link, that's just too scary for words :-(
Belief is the currency of delusion.
...feel ashamed of being Swedish, but this is one such a time. This case and everything around it stinks.
Best of luck to Zenon, and let's all keep up the pressure on the crime syndicate of $cientology by whatever means available; hosting information, spreading the word, picketing, etc).
Not sure what more to say, it's just so damned depressing.
PS. Anyone know why all those Hollywood "stars" are suckered in? I've always wondered about. Seemingly intelligent people joining this alien-cult. It like status in it? I know why the crime syndicate wants rich and influencial members, but... Oh well..
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Homework assignment (due Monday) -
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, the Christians said it was 4,000 years old, and when science said they were wrong, they said science is wrong. But hey, noone's calling them looney and accusing them of selling garbage.
The difference between a cult and a religion is only in who believes it and how much power they have. And the church of scientology is going after that power.
"But my friend, the facts don't support your thesis."
"Well, so much the worse for facts"
Oh. I didn't mean to imply anything. Sorry. You are right "we" as atheists are all individuals. It's just easier to refer to the inclusive term. But you cannot have a cult of nothing; that is correct.
Lowmag.net
I agree. Assholes will be assholes, regardless of their situation.
But if they didn't use religion to control the masses, the situation they were in wouldn't allow them as much power to abuse.
Religious leaders were (and often still are) free to commit whatever excesses they wish and justify it by saving it was god's will.
So yes, I think the world as a whole would have suffered MUCH less without religion. It wouldn't be perfect because many of those assholes would have gravitated to other lines of work that allowed them to control people, but it would be better. If only because people kill politicians more readily than religious leaders.
Screaming FUD doesn't make it so.
> Do you really think that in the absense of religion things would have been any better?
Yes. Immensely. All the nasty things that happened without religion would still have happened, but the ones dependant on religion wouldn't have.
> Yes, religion does have power to influence people and at times that power has been abused,
At times? How is it good to have a corrupt power structure dictating to people how they should live their lives? Don't even bother trying to claim that religious leaders aren't corrupt. They try to convince people of obvious untruths (just read any holy book) and use that to control people.
If they had some grand truth, it would be evident without power structures and orders.
> There are many cases of religious institutions and religious people helping others.
Many religious people have helped others. Sure. But those people would have helped others without the whole organized religion.
Religions exist to gain power for the leaders. Helping people doesn't serve that, thus religions as a whole don't help people.
> While tithing is important in the mormon faith, it pales in comparison to the importance of the family.
What a lie. The mormon church is rapidly rising in the list of richest organizations in the world. They do that precisely because NOTHING is more important to them than tithing. You might be hard pressed to find an official who would ADMIT to thinking tithing is more important, but that's what the religion (like others) is all about, money, money, money. And I doubt they really care about how far anyone strays, as long as they keep tithing.
>> our religion-influenced government will take your children away
> I hardly think the mormon church has a significant influence over the government
The mormon church is no doubt the strongest government influence, in Utah. If they were larger, they'd be a stronger influence in more areas.
I don't want to sound patronizing, but... it's really obvious. If you weren't in a religion, you'd see what they're like.
If people really wanted to help others, they wouldn't invent this whole rigamarole of oddball beliefs and strict punishments, they'd just go help people. But they do create these religions, which means they're looking to do something other than help people.
Interesting idea. Perhaps when one clicks on the "topic icon" for a story, rather than merely bringing up a list of recent stories...above that list could be a summary of the topic, with links to related info (whether they're Slashdot backgrounder info or other sites). Look at the Slashcode and see if is already implemented...
Give credit where credit is due: people do stupid and violent things without the help of religion. Just because people are violent and stupid, that doesn't mean the all religions are bad. Do you think the people in your examples are actually following the central religious ( and very libertarian ) tenet "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"?
By your logic, you could list some accomplishments of Linux as:
Sheesh...
Beatiful analysis Mr. typical_geek.
and people holding similar beliefs today are held in very low esteem in enlightened circles. Just because Larry Wall made a useful and popular language doesn't mean that everything he thinks, believes, does or stands for is the same. It all has to be evaluated on the merits.
You are essentially making the same point as the author you are refuting: people should be judged on their individual acts, and so should the practitioners of various religions.
And as for the Christians, they have gone so far as to sanction rape, murder, war, and even genocide.
Oh really? I have a news flash for you: these same dirty deeds have also been sanctioned by various Males, Atheists, Barbarians, Persons between 5'11" and 6'4", certain Indian tribes, people wearing trenchcoats, and even some persons living in Africa - in short, the one thing in common is that we have a pattern of people with various attributes and affiliations committing atrocities. So where does the problem lie? Human fucking nature, that's where.
The point is that religion is a tool for manipulation of masses, whether it was the intention of its creators from the beginnig I just don't know
Actually, the point is that computers are a tool for manipulation of the masses, as are televisions, credit cards, governments, novels, and fortune cookies. Whether it was the intention of the creators of these things from the beginning I just don't know.
Which this or that,...
Which Bible did you read that didn't say "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", and that "there is no higher rule than this", or "thou shall not kill"?
All of the problems you mistakenly attribute to religion are, in fact, problems with human nature. Not a few evil leaders. Not a few extremists. Not religion. All of those putative "causes" could mysteriously vanish and we would still have the same atrocities committed using different justifications. Capiche?
There's *NOTHING* good in the world which can be attributed to religion, which could/would not have happened without it. But there are many bad things which nobody would have been driven to do without power-mad popes and other religious figures forcing them to do.
You're really naive if you believe that those people who murdered and committed other atrocities with religious justifications would have been kind and gentle human beings if only it weren't for religion. They would simply find another justification for being murderers or assholes. People have been wronging eachother long before there were bibles. We wouldn't be an inch closer to utopia if all religions disappeared.
It actually preceeds Jesus by many centuries.
True enough. But so do peace, love, and all things good. Sometimes we need to be reminded though.
The more religious stuff is studied, the more religions fall back behind the argument that God is deliberately hiding from any scientific testing. Kind of a funny god if you ask me.
Is that so? Then I bet you'd find it interesting that the more we study the physical universe, the stranger and more inexplicable it gets! At our current level of understanding, the universe is intrinsically probabilistic! Kind of a funny universe, if you ask me. And it's also nice to know that we have so much power over the universe that any time we observe experiments (such as the two slit experiment), we can force the universe to hide what it was doing and switch from wave behavior to particle behavior.
Now this is a bit tongue in cheek, but I think I make a point.
Also consider that Science proves absolutely nothing. We build models and that help us make more accurate predictions. But a difference in a measurement of one part in a zillion can invalidate the model in favor of a new model, complete with drastically different philosophical implications.
Furthermore, you can't even prove your own existence, much less anything else. The very best you can do is "I think, therefore I am". But that is good enough for most. But get this: to the best of our knowledge, any boundaries between you and the rest of the matter and energy in the universe are somewhat arbitrary, and you can think of the universe as a collective whole. Heck, people even write wave functions for the whole universe (which you are a part of). So when you say "I think, therefore I am", the universe itself can also lay claim to this same self awareness with the same validity that you do, since you are just a wrinkle in its fabric. So substitue "God" for "universe" and you have no more contradiction inherent in God's existence and awareness than in that of your existence/awareness or the laws of the universe itself. Now I'm not saying that this is necessarily true, but it is just as plausible as your own existence.
Nah, they don't all rely upon snake oil salesmen. And when you boil things down, a lot of them have the central tenet "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Nothing quacky about that. Makes perfect sense to me that the world would be a much better place if people followed that basic instruction. That instruction is pretty much the gist of Christianity, and the ancient texts quote Jesus as saying so.
Scientology, on the other hand, is not a religion, but rather a business based upon IP. Religions are open source. This distinction doesn't hinge upon whether any of the claims made are true or not - it's just a useful way to distinguish a religion (whose putative purpose is the betterment of mankind) and a business whose own founder joked about inventing his "religion" so that he could make money from it. You can make a distinction between the motives & intent of L. Ron Hubbard vs Jesus/Mohommad/Budda et al.
Actually, you can say all medicine is bogus, but you will be proven wrong
You can say that all medicines are harmful, and you would be right. They all have side effects and can cause harm, especially if used incorrectly. Same goes for the application of religions.
Whoever tagged your post as flamebait must be a scientologist, you were right on the money.
Thank God for freedom of thought is all I have to say!
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
A religion attempts to fulfill the spiritual needs of an individual. There is no concern beyond their spiritual welfare and the desire to help them to become a better person. This may mean accepting Jesus, becoming Enlightened, or whatever. While there may be fund-raising involved, it is usually intended stricly for the upkeep of religious structues and spiritual leaders or for the benefit of other people, such as for food for the homeless.
A "religion," or cult, mimics this behavior in an attempt to squeeze money, sexual favors, or adoration out of an individual. In such an organization there is frequently a leader or group of leaders who experience material gain at the expense of their followers. Followers are usually pressured into decisions that benefit the core of the cult at the expense of the common members, such as Scientology's alleged pressuring of its core office staff to avoid pregnancy and get abortions or the Branch Davidians' marriage of all women (including underage girls) to David Koresh.
While Religions are not immune to power-grabbing by selfish members, cults are often focused around this. Scientology has a nasty reputation for strong-arm tactics and its leaders have made somewhat worrisome statements in public before about enemies of the church needing to be "dealt with." Twice they've tried to defend in court their right to name enemies for constant harrasment under Freedom of Religion.
I realize that if you don't see religion as a positive thing, the distinction may be lost on you, but there is a significant difference between, say, Shinto or Islam and Scientology. A church shouldn't be run like a business, much less like a crime family. I don't know how much of the rumors are true, but the public actions that the church has taken are good indicators that they could be.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Oh, you mean the great statues of Buddha?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm not going to do your web searches for you. Look for the case of Lisa MacPherson, a scientologist who died under their 'medical care'. You might also look for info on the RAF, a scieno work contract (for a period of One Million Years) that effectively makes you their slave.
:) The question is, can you?
Any site that has accurate information on those things will probably also have reams of other accounts of what the clams have done members and ex-members, mentally, legally, financially, and physically.
I attack Scientology because it is evil, not because it is different. Believe me, I can distinguish the two cases.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Don't know if you noticed, but L. Ron Hubbard has put out about three or so novels since his death. If you look closely at the copyright page of these books, you'll see that they were written by the 'L. Ron Hubbard Foundation', or some such nonsense. There is a committee within scientology that is writing books in Hubbard's name. I don't think we'll ever be rid of that hack.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
There's a significant difference between Scientology and the other religions you mention. The other religions don't preach that their detractors can be lied to, sued, and destroyed in any way possible. That's one of the central themes of Scientology. The clams (*) have made frivolous lawsuits, threats, and occassional illegal activity (including killing a Judge's dog) into a refined art form. Because their religion *tells* them to.
:) If you want to have a belief system, make it self-consistent or be prepared for ridicule.
Scientology is evil. I can't make such a strong judgement against any of the other religions you've mentioned.
They also believe incredibly stupid things. And personally, I believe that mocking irrational religious beliefs is a hobby that every clear-thinking person should engage in.
(* -- 'Clams' are a derogatory term for scientologists. Its origin comes from another part of the 'church' scripture, in which Hubbard theorized that human beings evolved from clams. Folks, I could not make this up.)
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
"The REAL interesting part is how Hubbard, as a crappy sci-fi author, wrote an interesting backstory for his religion. Turns out, the reason you feel bad sometimes (mentally, although bad thoughts lead to bad physical condition) is because... well..I never get this part right, because its just dumb. Something about a Galactic Civil War, and all these alien people being imprisioned in a volcano on Earth (when it was just forming) and then having atom bombs (not thermonuclear weapons, mind you - we're talking Fat Man and Little Boy here, and these were aliens which could do FTL and lord knows what else) dropped on them. Their spirits came to become Man, or something like that, and the auditing process is supposed to release them."
Wow, you mean the bone-crushing vacuousness and resulting existential angst of modern life is really due to evil aliens. Hell, I feel a lot better now. Where's the salvation jar?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Bokononism!
"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies."
(hint: read Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Scientology tries to reach out to people and say: "Money is making your pyschic aura filthy. Give it to us. Now."
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
You've gotten a lot of skeptical replies - but I think it's because you're asking the wrong question.
The question I think you're really asking is not "how can" a religion "have" trade secrets, but why does a religion need trade secrets?
How can a religion have trade secrets? The same way anything has trade secrets.
Why does a "religion" believe it needs trade secrets? Because - unlike Sun worship, Pharaonic Egypt, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and most of the other faiths, I believe that Scientology was designed from the outset as a means for separating fools from their money.
Anything that exposes a potential sucker to the fact that he or she will pay about $300K to learn the story about "Xenu and the volcanoes in Hawaii" is a serious risk to the $cieno business plan.
To those who bash religion in response to the poster's original question - I'm not talking about whether or not other religions may have degenerated into means of separating fools from their money. I'm merely saying that they weren't intended as such when they started.
Agreed. And your point on Mother Teresa (i.e. as a representative of Catholicism) and birth control causing misery in India is well-taken.
On the other hand, ever since the Inquisition, the Catholic Church doesn't have "clear the planet" as a mandate, and a doctrine that those who don't sign up will be "disposed of quietly and without sorrow".
While Christianity does harm, it does so by at least intending to do well. (The road to hell is paved with good intentions :)
My concern with $cientology is that they appear - by their own actions, as well as their "church" policy memos - to intend grave harm. Thankfully, no court can put an information genie (be it DeCSS or OT3) back in the bottle, and as a result, the cult is now certain to fail in its goal of clearing the planet and disposing of the rest of us quietly and without sorrow.
Actually, wasn't it that you'd die of pneumonia?
(Hmm, it's been out for a few years now, where's the epidemic?)
>Writing of religious texts should definitely be for creating a better way of living.
Well.. I think the toplevel scientologists ARE living better.. or at least more comfortable. Ofcourse, as a mere follower it'll only make you poorer. On the other hand.. I just read the Xemu text posted by another user, and I found it so incredibly silly.. It made me laugh. And laughing more is a better way of living.
Cult.. Religion.. it's really all the same to me.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
And why not? There's probably some positive morals in Star Wars (Dark side is easier but will consume you etc..). No reason why Star Wars wouldn't be a holy book to some religion. Could be fun in countries that don't recognize atheism, like some islamic countries.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I was wondering that myself. Can i get a trade secret for something?
I also find it odd that a church would copyright its word, and make it hard for people to get to. Most religions want their word everywhere, hoping it will draw people in.
I don't believe that nearly anyone is asking Scientology to give up their copyright. We merely want to be able to quote selected things from their teachings. This is a perfectly legal and acceptible practice called "fair use." The Church of Scientology takes the position that quoting even a single sentence from these works should be illegal and not considered to be fair use.
The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
Actually, the earth has been scientifically dated at around 4.5 billion years. I don't know how old Hawaii is, but the ocean's seafloor and many of it's islands are absolutely no more than 200 million years. However, the oldest continental crust (dry land) is dated at around 3.8 billion years.
As disgusted as I am by my own country's kowtowing towards organized religion, the OBLIGATORY question of religion allows you to specify "none" as I recall. Though I do see your point - it's not a question you should have to answer.
But then, every country is backwards in some way. I.e. cryptography being illegal in France (and the wonderful domesticated pets known as ferrets also being illegal in france, as they are considered wild animals). My point is not to pick on France, but simply to state that EVERY country, being a large organization run by many people, some of whom are entirely self-serving, is backwards in some ways.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Since the farce of Scientology is illegal in Germany, wouldn't this guy be pretty well protected if he moved to Germany, and then continued to disseminate this crap from there? Although the EU laws cover all of the EU, don't local laws override that?
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Wrong. She did not know what she was getting into. She was BORN into it. Her parents MADE her be a member. Her dad was the one who joined volutarily.
As for education, the fact that a few people actually go to college doesn't mean they don't discourage it. There were a few people she knew who went to college, but that was out of the very large number of people she knew. I've heard out east that it is more accepted than it is here in the midwest. In her congregation it was definately frowed upon.
As Squid said, it is indeed 144,000. I'm not sure of exactly what math and from what numbers they use, although Squid's reason rings a bell. You can easily get any number you want by manipulating any other number, so it's pretty ridiculous.
They also try to predict when the world will end with similar methods. It was supposed to end early last century, and when it didn't happen, they revised is for around 20 years later. Since it didn't happen then and they lost a LOT of their members because of it, they have now switched their official word for the end date to "soon". Her sister and dad literally don't save money because of this. It's surreal, to say the least.
There are plenty of copies around on the net. BFM is available from my site.
(But better not try today. Since my reports about Zenon's court case were just slashdotted, the server is currently a bit slow ;-)
Karin Spaink
also sued by Scientology over their so-called secret scriptures. But since the Dutch courts have ruled differently, I won: the pages are still available.
I write, therefore I am:
I write, therefore I am:
http://www.spaink.net/
On the assumption that you're being serious (probably wrong), the last thing that the so-called "Church of Scientology" wants is for anyone to have unrestricted access to their "sacred texts". There's no way their scam would work if their average recruit was exposed to that stuff before the CoS had a chance to properly brainwash them. They've got to slowly "introduce" them to these bizarre concepts (sucking money like the parasites they are), to make sure they can diffuse any tendencies toward critical thought.
There's plenty of stories out on the net about people's personal experiences with Scientology "brainwashing". They start out slow, with simple stuff with that people don't find very controversial.
A lot of their early programs resemble therapy sessions, where people babble about their lives & the host provides a sympathetic ear. In this manner, they build up a lot of trust & loyalty, as well as compiling information about individuals that they can use to manipulate (or in some cases, threaten) later on.
As people ascend to various "levels", they are gradually introduced to additional "secrets" (with the CoS extracting increasing levels of money at each level). They are encouraged to think in particular ways, all couched in psychobabble & increasingly spiritual references, to try and increase their emotional dependence on the CoS's teachings & reduce any critical thought.
People who still have some capacity for rational thought are usually weeded out at pretty low levels, and are left only with the impression that the programs were a little hokey. The people who go on would generally be described as vulnerable, or "cult-bait".
What's REALLY horrible is the self-reinforcing way that this process works - as people ascend in levels, they are encouraged to spend more time with other fellow "clears" (on of their term for a person who has been mentally trained to think "correctly"), and to either recruit or avoid disturbing non-clears. As their thought processes get weird, rational people naturally start avoiding them, so they are isolated both by the CoS & the society around them.
Of course, the fundamental reason that all of this works is because it's incremental - each step in the conversion is a very small change in thought which can be easily rationalized from any motivated person who is trying to reach a goal of "personal serenity" (pretty much what every religion/cult is offering). It all breaks down if the final teachings, the really far-out stuff about aliens from the destroyed-planet-turned-asteroid-belt, are available right up front for people to peruse w/o having been had their thoughts properly "guided & trained".
That's why the CoS emphasizes total control of this information, 'cause if it's easy for people to read that stuff before going to through the process, any CoS member would be laughed out of the room everytime they tried to recruit someone (whereupon the CoS wouldn't last too long...).
I think these are pretty standard thought-modification tactics, used by all sorts of cults, religions, political parties, governments, etc.
This may be the case. But other religions make their documents public and don't hide the stories that underly their faith. They are upfront and honest about them and allow their flocks to achieve faith in their own way. Scientology does NOT do this, they conceal and hide information and then indoctrinate, piece by piece over time. THAT is the bad part, not the content of their allegories, although I may find them weird. Note that the Bible and other legitimate religious texts are the collections of collective cultural knowledge and stories built up over the years. They document a set of cultural morality tales. In these cases, L Ron Hubbard wrote his own set of cultural creation myths, etc. about 50 years ago (whenever it was, it was this century in any case). You can believe them as you will - the issue here is the way in which the organization CoS hides, obfuscates, sues, brainwashes, etc. Practices that make cults out of religions.
But I believe you're mistaken if you believe that was L Ron Hubbard's goal. A moderately intelligent person could do just what I described. L Ron Hubbard was a nutcase, was embedded in the sci fi he wrote and I believe, like many in that realm, really disliked humanity as a whole. In other words, his religion was not created to produce a positive constructive influence to provide moral guidance to humanity, but rather was created to prove how he was so damned smart that he could make people genuinely believe the worst sort of sci-fi-babble drivel religion and defend it as if it was the absolute truth. He succeeded in creating a self-propagating organization with the craziest sort of religious mythos. And in his lunacy, I think that's what he wanted. I'm sure his Body Thetans are all laughing somewhere about it now. :)
WASHINGTON, DC.
The US Copyright Office has done it again. The 1998 patent request that gained a laugh on online geek zines was granted earlyer this week. Global Carbide, INC of Chicago, IL has recieved a patent on Catholocism. Whether or not they will go after Rome or local diasease a spokesperson said, 'We do not plan on going head-to-head with the Vatican in a legal strugle. Instead we will license The Body of Christ(tm) Holy Water(tm) and other IP to Catholics at a premium around the world.
No, that particular intellectual atrocity can't be laid at the Catholics' feet. You're probably thinking of the torture and murder of Hypatia of Alexandria.
When the Arabs sacked Alexandria in the seventh century AD, the question of the fate of the greatest library of the ancient world was left to one Caliph Omar. His decision must have sounded like the wisdom of Allah Himself to the soldiers with the torches: "If what is written in these books agrees with the Koran, they are not required; if it disagrees they are not desired. Destroy them."
Different instruments, different players, but the song remains the same.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Maybe. Could also be the the ones who invented algebra, too.
Could be, but I kinda doubt it.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
You are heir to thousands of year of Western culture (do the names Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Solomon, Moses, et al mean anything to you?), only by virture of wise Islamic scholars
Would these be the same wise Islamic scholars who torched the library at Alexandria?
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
No evidence that any particular one of them is true.
:(
Yeah, it's hard to compile an accurate history of civilization when assorted travelling religious freakshows keep burning your books.
Myself, I'm perfectly willing to believe that all three arson suspects (Julius Caesar, the Catholic patriarch Theophilus, and the Moslem caliph Omar of Damascus) had a hand in the downfall of Alexandrian scholasticism. If the dirty accusations floating around make even one modern-day fundamentalist politician think twice about his/her own place in history before striking a match... then the more blame the merrier.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
What is your definition of a "real" religion? Without sounding like a bigot, how can you claim one religion is any more valid than another?
Imagine my disappointment when I found a rant that's apparently about "hypocrisy", something entirely different.
The "American Rule", that in general each side bears its own costs in a lawsuit might have changed the financial impact of this case.
The other side is usually referred to in the United States as the "English Rule" (though it applies in many, many countries other than England). I don't recall the rule for Sweden, but for example in Germany, they have "loser pays" with limits on reimburisable fees and amounts that can be expended in a lawsuit. (My understanding is that courts set budgets for cases.) The amounts of money being attributed to attorneys fees here do not seem so high as they might be in the U.S., so there does seem to be some limit to the fees in this case.
Mind you, a copyright case is one of the few areas in US law where you can get your legal fees if you win. That puts sort of a bug in things because the same thing MIGHT have happened here.
I ... will ... go ... as ... slowly ... as ... I ... can.
Please understand, not all religions are trying to convert the whole world to an open text of beliefs. Christianity is an evangelical religion, generally trying to grow the body of believers. Judiasm, on the other hand, is perhaps better understood as trying to do so within a limited ethnic community.
However, religious power has often been framed in terms of secrets that make those who obtain them more powerful. Part of remaining powerful is to keep these secrets from others. Freemasonry operated on such a model. The higher you went, the more secrets you learned. George Washington was a high-ranking freemason, go visit the freemason's monument to him in Virginia (Arlington, I believe).
There are many more ancient cults that operated this way. The Greeks had a bunch of them about the time that Christianity was spreading. The Oracles of Delphi weren't in the business of trying to convert people. (Don't think of their real effect as being these vague predictions of various historical events, think of them as colonization coordinators who had a good act.)
Please remember, for most of human history, people have considered knowledge to be power, and not something to be shared. The "openness" gig is the new, strange one.
Both have David Touretzky as an adversary...David has written several essays exposing Scientology for the sham it is...and he hosts the DeCSS gallery at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/
Guess that's where he figured out how to take on mind controlling organizations that want to limit your freedom and your rights...
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
It's the heart of the matter. Scio's, top level ones, do not, NOT want the Xenu story spread about. That was what the Swedish case was about: stopping the Xenu story from becoming public. The U.S. mysteriously intervened in the internal affairs of Sweden to prevent the material, now a public court document there, from becoming public.
The Xenu/body thetan arc is the basis of all high-level Scientology, their Genesis. But you have to prove yourself over many years, and pay much money (in cash or time) to get access -- at which point you don't have much critical thought left.
The widespread leakage of the Xenu story is ruining their recruitment efforts and making them the laughing stocks they should have been always, if they had not used trade secret laws to hide the story.
The Scienos were the first attackers of internet freedoms, claiming defamation and copyright violations at every opportunity to shut critics the hell up. But every time they squeeze, the just make a bigger mess...
This Register story will tell all. Guarenteed goatsex free:l
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/17122.htm
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I think I'll take the Scientology "punishment". =)
You put punishment in quotes after talking about death. Anything short of death isn't a punishment? Is any modern behavior OK just because you can point to someone in history that did something worse? If a racist group goes around beating up black people, or burning down their homes, do we say "In the past (and someplaces even today) if they don't like the color of your skin they kill you. I'll take the neo nazi 'abuse' :)"
In modern western cultures, it is not acceptable to harrass, abuse, threaten, terrorize or otherwise punish someone for changing religions. Trying to underplay abuse because somewhere, sometimes it could have been worse would allow almost any level of horrific behavior. Its not a rational excuse.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
I think of a "religion" as a cult or sect using quasi-religious rituals, psychological tricks and other means to bring their followers to heel. The "religion" must suppress the individual personality with browbeating, hardship, menial tasks, repetition and isolation from the real world while all the while fleecing them for money.
The CoS does all of these things and more.
how can a religion have trade secrets???
Also, the authors of the bible, koran, and most other religious texts have been dead for quite a while, which means they're public domain.
HA! Let's see how the courts deal with the Second Coming.
It has a wonderful and comprehensive section on Scientology.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/
KFG
Despite seemingly rare acts of "good" by small parts of these organizations, you surely must concede that the the two main derivatives of Judaism (Islam, Christianae) are exceptionally violent belief systems.
The unabashed support of jihads even by the present day Islamic leaders is proof enough that Islam preaches violence.
And as for the Christians, they have gone so far as to sanction rape, murder, war, and even genocide.
Most people are good as individuals, and most core faiths do not preach evil beliefs natively.
What is ironic is that the greatest historical evils and the most common petty discriminations both sheath and justify themselves in religion.
I am sure that mostly all moslems are good people, and that Islam does not advocate evil.
The fact remains that their faith is being used by some to justify it, just as is the chistian faith.
The organized aspects of these religions are the potentially dangerous parts. When practiced privately at a level of organization no larger than a family, they are most pure. When integrated into governments or extra-governmental organizations they are most debased, and most vulnerable to abuse.
This is the Xenu Leaflet answer. It's actually a bit more complicated than that. You can start by picking up a copy of an old Martin Gardner book called Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science -- it covers Hubbard's pre-Co$ work with a surprisingly gentle (but still scathing) review of the principles behind Dianetics.
.nl), so the "trade secret" thing has long gone out the window. It's pretty scary stuff.
The Xenu story seems to have come out of a drug-induced hallucination that Hubbard had while vacationing in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands (coincidentally enough a critical location in the weird, rambling OT III papers that the story was written up in).
What Dianetics is about is a slight plagiarism from Freud: the mind is divided into Analytical and Reactive sections. The Analytical mind is like a computer, perfectly logical; the Reactive mind is more like a trunk-trawler, scraping up and recording unconscious (often in-the-womb) memories ("engrams") and storing them as literal words, later to come back and haunt you (a couple of examples: Dad beats Mom and says "You've got to take it", fetus hears this and grows up to be a thief; Mom asks for an aspirin; when child grows up has a problem with rectal itching caused by the memory of the words "ass burn"). The point of Dianetics was to erase these "engrams" and "refile" them as ordinary memories; once this was done the patient was "Clear".
The thing is that most of Hubbard's "case studies" were clearly made up. Hubbard responded by turning around and creating a Dianetic religion -- Scientology. In Scientological terms, we are infested with the spirits of disgruntled dead people called Thetans; if we could get rid of all these (by clearing them, one at a time) we could become all powerful, with no reactive mind to speak of and no unclear thetans latching on to us and making their problems ours.
The church itself considers the concept of Scientology as a religion to be a front; it's really no more than a form of occult Freudianism with a reign of terror thrown in for good measure. (And believe me: if half of what is said is true, Nicole Kidman's life in the next couple of years is going to be a living hell.)
There's a lot more to it; I was never a church member myself, so most of what I know is from what I've read at places like www.xenu.net. The information is easy enough to get (even legally in a lot of places, especially
/Brian
ps To those of you scientologists reading this, while I do think your belief system is a crock, you have every right to believe it. There is such a thing as the Free Zone (www.fza.org) that specializes in keeping the flame burning (i.e. squirreling tech for reasons of conscience) without the hell that the Church puts its members through.
Your beliefs are not well understood because they're incomprehensible to anyone who decides to risk pneumonia and "freewheel through the implant" without the proper preparation.
/Brian
Read the evidence. If Ron believed what he created when he died, he sure didn't going into it. And there's evidence (not proof, mind you, it's somewhat circumstantial) that Xenu (or Xemu, or whatever you prefer to call him) was a drug-induced hallucination anyway.
This is sort of a sticky issue, if you ask me. The big problem Mr. Panoussis probably had was the fact that it's something of a battle of dueling principles, and if the principle in question is not black-letter law, that makes it all the harder for the court to take the plaintiff's side.
/Brian
Matt
offshoremp3s.com.
Names, please.
How come so many Scientologists and Scientology supporters have criminal records? How come so many of them are losers who are taking their personal frustration out on the critics of their crimes?
We have Founder L. Ron Hubbard with his criminal conviction for petty theft for passing bad checks and with a record of wife-beating and drug abuse, who died on psych drugs while hiding from the authorities. Not only did his ex-wife and his own son describe him as a "paranoid schizophrenic" but a judge even described the cult he founded as "paranoid and schizophrenic" and stated that this was a "reflection of its founder." Among his other crimes, L. Ron Hubbard was sentenced to four years of prison for fraud by a French court, but he remained a fugitive from this charge as well.
Hubbard was also a child abuser, who forced his son L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. to take phenobarbitol and who was fined $50 and sentenced to probation for abandoning his own daughter in a vehicle.
Theft conviction
Wife-beating and drug abuse
Death on psych drugs coroner report
Described as a "paranoid schizophrenic" by ex-wife
Described as a "paranoid, schizophrenic megalomaniac" by his own son
Described as "schizophrenic and paranoid" by judge
Convicted of fraud and sentenced to four years in prison
Fined and put on probation for abandoning his daughter in a vehicle
Forced his own son to take drugs
Then we have L. Ron Hubbard's third wife Mary Sue Hubbard, who was convicted of felonies and served jail time for helping her husband mastermind the biggest domestic espionage case in American history, involving burglarizing government offices routinely and committing other crimes. Even her own lawyers admitted that she had committed these crimes, as well as 11 other Scientologists who were convicted of crimes including felonies.
Sentencing memorandum describing crimes as "heinous and vicious"
Stipulation of evidence admitting to multiple felonies by Hubbard and other defendants
Next comes the President of the cult he founded, Heber Jentzsch, who has just recently skipped out on a million dollars bail for felonies in Spain, making him a fugitive from justice and persona non grata in all of Europe. A habitual liar, who constantly claims that his cult has eight million members, this criminal can be seen in handcuffs all around the net, and can accurately be described as a bail-jumping felon.
Heber Jentzsch Spanish criminal charges
That's funny, I thought they were caused by the fall of the Roman Empire.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Excuse me, but I got the impression that his point was not that these great thinkers were Westerners, but rather that the Islamic scholars of Istanbul and the Catholic monks of Ireland were almost soley responsible for the preservation of their works after the fall of Rome.
Were it not for those monks, all those great classical texts (which made the Renaissance possible) would probably have been lost forever.
Just a guess here, but the person who posted this probably just got done reading "How The Irish Saved Civilization", a very entertaining histroical book by Thomas Cahill, which focuses most of its emphasis on this very point.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
if they want to, that's their business. But since copyright is a legal abstraction, whether we want to allow them to is our business. I don't believe such copyrights should be allowed.
The Mormons and the Vatican, notably, have lots of secret doctrine and nobody freaks out about it on Slashdot.
Mormons are certifiable whackjobs (yes, way more than Roman Catholics) when it comes to their theology. I can see why they'd want to keep secrets, but there's no inherent reason we should respect that desire. In fact, the desire to keep secrets indicates to me that there must be a reason we should not allow it. I see no basis for an "organization-al right of privacy" to anywhere near the extent that individuals should expect.
What I find great about Scientology is that the whole thing was started on a bet (I think it was about $50, but it could have been substantially more). L. Ron Hubbard wrote the beginnings of Dianetics in a science fiction short story for a magazine. One of the characters followed its precepts, which he made up specifically for the story. Readers of the story started writing him saying that they had tried the few ideas presented and they found they worked for them, and asked if he could provide more information.
A friend of Hubbard found this funny (for obvious reasons), and Hubbard bet him that he could turn this into a religion, getting a good number of devout followers. His friend took him up on the bet, and Hubbard wrote the rest of Dianetics. Scientology was born, and the rest is history. {begin not getting sued by the church of scientology statement here} Or so I hear, I can't say I have to documentation handy. {end anti-litigation statement}
Regardless of its origins though, as long as a religion actually helps its followers in some way, and they truly believe in it, then who are we to judge it? I'm free to join or not join any cult or religion if I so choose. And I definately wouldn't join one that would sue me for talking about it's "trade secrets".
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Go to Clambake for a link to a free online version of "Bare-Faced Messiah", as well as lots of other interesting information about the Co$.
I wish they'd stop calling it a religion and start calling it what it really is : an association of capitalist mind purification specialists. I don't care whether it's scientology, solar temple, or something more tame like christianity and the hundreds of others; it's still brain-filler to patch up those black patches in your mind where intelligence is too weak to bridge over.
In a sense, capitalism is akin to religion since you feed bullshit to people in order to hide your own fallacies and still get paid and be happy. Religion feeds you more or less credible blurb that soothes the mind from its infinite existential questions, hide your faults and keep you happy. No matter how honest or crooked it may be, it still serves its purpose of filling your brain and making you feel good about yourself. So what if you just paid a 3k$ for some guy to tell you you're the "chosen one", you walk out feeling radiant and full of self-confidence. Faith has its place in the world, just not in my life.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I agree with the fact this looks like bashing but most of the people here actually attack Scientology itself. ... hey! what's this ? In France, during a long suit involving the contacts between the Scientology and some politician, all the files "poof" disappeared... and they were not even using Windows ! ;-).
Why ?
Well, Scientology has an easy life and too few problems, even though most of us only know about it what the media brought to them.
And let's see : lots of money, private towns,.. and
There are too many people who protect this "religion" and too many others, like me, who claim the right to have their files public.
Or it means they are not a Religion but something much more obscure.
BTW, they lack martyrs, their adepts have nothing but their "chiefs" (or whatever to call them) whose example to follow.
Now, this won't prevent me to thank God for whatever, nor to watch Face Off or MI:2 who are played by excellent though Scientologists actors.
So : no : This is not about Religion, this is about obscurantism (but I agree this also looks mass-[flam|troll]ing
And, finally, even if I greatly appreciate Larry Wall and if I am myself a Christian, I think that his name has not much to do in such a thread.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Thats why BATTLEFIELD EARTH sucked!
Can someone please explain what this scientology is all about? I followed most of the links given but got no answer, so can some one just do the explaining in simple terms?
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Hitler was a Catholic. He made that fact clear in his private diaries. He made prayers to Jesus mandatory in all German schools.
I know he sent Catholics to the prison camps. They didn't follow his particular brand of Catholocism, so in his eyes they weren't real Catholics. That fact alone makes him a traditional Christian.
The idea that Hitler was an Atheist is a myth that was invented by Christians. Christians are masters of revisonist history. If they don't like a provable historical fact, simply believe that it never happened and *POOF* it never did. It goes hand in hand with beliving silly things like Genesis and virgin births.
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Technoli
I don't think anyone sane is arguing that copyright be abolished (which, of course, doesn't stop a lot of that talk from being tossed around Slashdot). But we should fight for anonymity and sane limitations on copyright because of this - they're the tools that are needed to allow a whistleblower like Panoussis to expose wrongdoing without being punished by a wealthy and vicious adversary.
Is it clear now?
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
One thing though that's important to remember is that the Old Testament and the Gospels written by Hebrews are/were the product of a Hebrew thought process, which has largely disappeared, to be replaced by a Hellenic thought process. Hebrew thought/writing often uses allegory and symbolism. Hellenic thought focuses on truth, and logic. To say that what happened in those works actually did happen as described (as fundamentalists are wont to do) is to apply Hellenic thought to Hebrew thought. It is thus very unlikely that the resulting interpretation woud fail all logic.
For instance, Genesis can be viewed as an allegory of the Mesopotamian civilizations that preceded Judaism. Adam symbolizes a "first city". Some people left the city (forced out, possibly) and founded a new city (Eve). Cain and Abel could be two cities that went to war.
As for the second reference made, some have conjectured that Yahoshua ben Joseph (known to the world as Jesus Christ) and his disciples were members of a secret ultra-Orthodox society (the Nasoreans/Qumranians) and that references to raising the dead, turning water into wine, etc. are references to him bringing in members for an uprising against the Romans.
Of course, Christianity is the weakest religion because it is the only one whose theology depends entirely on an event that happened some 1,978 years ago in a Roman province. Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism, et al. do not have this weakness. They are based on a gradual evolution of thought.
The definition of what constitutes a secret in Masonic circles is up to each individual Grand Lodge. The Unified Grand Lodge of England, like many others, have taken the view that the only secrets are the means of recognition (handshakes, passwords, and such).
The secrets of a Master Mason aren't that difficult to figure out. I myself am a member of one of the "appendant orders", but I know the password of a Master Mason (it starts with an M).
There definitely were religious wars between Buddhist sects in the middle ages, not to mention that Japanese sect that used nerve gas a few years ago. These incidents do seem to be less frequent and involve fewer killings than the ones arising from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, but they do happen. I think the difference is not deism or non-deism, but rather that the Buddha's works are very clearly against violence. A murderous Christian is a bad Christian, but he can find scripture to quote out of context in support of his actions. It's very hard to see how a murderous Buddhist could fail to notice that he was a bad Buddhist...
The story of Scientology being formed on a bet between Heinlein and Hubbard makes for a great story, but it's not so clear-cut. Several people of the science fiction community witnessed comments by Hubbard to the effect of "the way to make real money is to form a religion", so I have no doubt of Hubbard's aims. Still yet, it's unlikely that the bet occurred between the two. You may want to read the full write-up at:
l ein_bet.html
http://www.urbanlegends.com/religion/hubbard_hein
Personally I'm an atheist, but I have no problems with people believing in most religions. But the CoS? No way.
Y'know, I don't have a whisper of proof or evidence for the nonexistence of a lot of things.
For example, I have an old furnace chimney that my new furnace doesn't use. I don't have a whisper of evidence or proof that a pixie hasn't taken up residence in it. Yet, if you asked me, I'd tell you I'm sure that there are no pixies are in my old furnace chimney.
To hell with all of you! I don't need to read anymore of this nonsense!
My name isn't really Jenny....
Hubbard insisted that his "clinic" (Scientology) only be called a "religion" for tax-exemption status and protection against practicing medicine without a liscence. At the time this was done, Scientologists thought it was a clever joke, and laughed every time someone had to put on a "clerical collar" to show the IRS. They even set aside an empty closet at every franchise and called it a "chapel:" other than keeping brooms and mops in it, the "chapel" is never used. Scientology has no religious veneration; it has no gods; it does not pray to anything or any one; it performs no religious rites. Scientology exists only to con money out of the gullible. A Google search on the key words "religion angle" +Hubbard will link to a letter written by Hubbard that explains exactly why he fraudulently called his sinister, criminal business a "church / religion."
I've heard it speculated that the Inquisition was actually organised to track down and interrogate those contacted by superhuman agencies (which our technological society would categorise as extraterrestrial aliens, but which earlier people called "angels"/"demons" or things like the "wee people"/"elves"/"faerie" -- an archetype which recurs in many cultures), sort of like a mediaeval X Files conspiracy.
Whether or not there's any truth in that story, I've heard from a number of sources that the Vatican Archives contains the world's largest collection of pornography, going all the way back to Greek and Roman works.
- Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. try to reach out to people and say: "Here, these are our religious documents. Use them and you'll be a better person." And if people disagree, they don't sue them for doing so, they just label them an non-believer of that religion.
Yes.Then, as history teaches us, the next step is usually to kill the non-believer. I have no doubt that the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, for example, would have greatly preferred to be sued.
The fact is that you can sling mud at any organization of believers whether it's Scientologist, Baptists or even Atheists (I'm sure some atheiests have committed an atrocity in the name of atheism at some point in history.) Another fact is that Scientologies oddball practices of "auditting" and so forth does actually accomplish something. It can effectively train you not to respond emotionally to situations. It may not be the best method for achieving this kind of self-control, but some people really need this discipline (observably, many of them post to Slashdot), and Scientology might actually help those people.
Also, if an organization wants to copyright their material or mark it as a trade secret, that's their business. The Mormons and the Vatican, notably, have lots of secret doctrine and nobody freaks out about it on Slashdot. Nobody rants endlessly because the Urantia Foundation holds a copyright on the Urantia Book (another Third Testament of the Bible that came out in the early 1900's, in case you're not keeping up.)
No doubt this discussion is going to degenerate into a sectarian He sayeth/She sayeth/It sayeth flame war, but the point I'm trying to make is that making categorical statements about religion and trying to sort religions into "acceptable faiths" and "evil cults" is just a waste of bandwidth.
Believe what you want and shut up. I believe I'll have another beer.
There have been variants on Christianity (Gnosticism) that were similarly secretive - and variants of Christianity today that are similarly big business. It gets hard to draw the line. In fact I'm surprised we don't see MORE religious movements with tiered architectures, where you don't learn the truth about the universe until you pass a certain level.
As to the definition of a cult: seems to me the only dependable definition of cult is how many people follow it. Is it out to make money? Sure, lots of religions are - it's a great way to keep the temple in good repair, ministers have to eat, and so on. Does it harm people? All religions can harm people if they become fixated on it, just like bowling can harm people if they neglect real life for it, and "harmful" cults can still manage to accidentally help people.
Put it like this: If any of Earth's religions really had a metaphorical red phone to God in the office somewhere, I figure it'd be pretty obvious: their organization would be a model of efficiency (with an all-powerful being saying "do it this way" why wouldn't it?), no one would get away with stealing so much as a paperclip from the office supply cabinet (red phone rings, "it's God, so-and-so is pilfering stuff, and he keeps a Penthouse in the safe in his office, combination 16-33-54, check if you don't believe me"), church laws never need to be amended, and for some reason the church's members are always waiting at the hospital BEFORE one of their friends is in a car accident and is brought in. No religion on Earth has outwardly visible signs of having God's home phone number, though many CLAIM to.
Which means, from any vantage point outside a religion, they all start out with a roughly equal chance of being right - and for them to be of value, it's what they tell us about OURSELVES that's important.
Which means basically ALL religions are cults - if one is, all are, since they're all written by flawed humans and susceptible to corruption. The only difference in grade is whether the organizational aspect of the cult is actively seeking to defraud people, or whether they actually believe what they're saying. Not that this really makes a fundamental difference in the amount of damage they can cause.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
The minute a 'church' can have its assets taken, it also means that any other organization can have its assets taken for similar reasons. M$ is a big bad company, can I post Windows XP on my site and say that I'm just doing it to expose their hypocracy?
The better analogy would be, if you found a hole or a trojan in a Microsoft product and you had to publish a substantial decompiled piece of their code (or actual source code) to illustrate it, MS would be able to use copyright law to destroy you and squelch that information.
Fair use is when copyright protection stops and freedom of speech begins. Fair use is a provision that exists because sometimes you HAVE to include a piece of someone else's work in order to make your point. And this is such a case: the only way to properly show the insanity of Scientology is to let people read OT III in its entirety.
This is NO different than the shrinkwrap laws that allow companies to specify that you cannot post benchmarks of their software. Just because a company might be harmed by what you say about them, doesn't mean they get to clean fish on the Constitution!
(Yes, fair use gets talked about a lot around here, usually regarding ways in which one may use a CD. The idea is, if you have to copy it in order to listen to it or watch it, like taping a show because you won't be home, or decrypting a DVD so you can watch it on Linux, or copying a CD to tape for your car, you should be able to do it. Usually, though, "fair use" is like "make no law" and "due process": a couple of meaningless words everybody ignores in court cases.)
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
That depends entirely on whether the religion is exoteric (reaching out) or esoteric (restricted to the initiated). Unless you want to argue that cults are esoteric and relgions are exoteric, but that is 'argument by definition,' a backdoor by which to bring the connotation, 'cults are evil, religions are good,' into play.
Why would Scientology try to 'patent' their way of religion.They're not. They are merely asserting the copyright (!=patent) which automatically arises by virtue of the authorship of these documents. Admitedly, they are doing this with a purpose for which copyright was not originally intended (ie to mitigate the 'free rider' externality), but rather to stifle adverse publicity. Crafty people, those lawyers. It's times like that where 'freedom of speech' guarantees reveal their necessity (of course crafty lawyers can twist those to evil purposes as well). Further, I'm far from convinced that Christian, Islamic or even Buddhist ministries, if faced with virulent criticism, would not avail themselves of the legal opportunity the defendant presented to the CoS.
Karin Spaink
I write, therefore I am:
I write, therefore I am:
http://www.spaink.net/
Stop arguing among ourselves and set up a fund to help the poor guy pay the legal fees!!
Anyone?
There was this fellow named Josef Stalin (not his real name, it was Iosif Vissonariovich Dzhugashvili [pardon my crappy transliteration], which is a Georgian name), lived in the old Soviet Union. Fairly important fellow over there, IIRC. He had these notions about Jews, rather akin to Hitler's, but without the "Master Race" crap. I don't think we'll *ever* know how many of them he killed (not personally, mind) but I've heard estimates as high as 54 million. Word has it that he killed them in large part because they *weren't* atheists - that their religion was a threat to the atheist ideals of the Soviet Union. History calls this massive organized murder "The Pogroms", and they were a very major part of Stalin's domestic policy, along with collectivization and the endless series of Five-Year Plans.
Being of a religious or an atheist bent doesn't automatically qualify or disqualify anyone from committing crimes against humanity.
Chris Tembreull
Web Developer, NEC Systems, Inc.
Chris Tembreull
"My karma just ran over your dogma."
There are small "non standard" or occultist groups that are not cults. There can be large traditional churches that are cults. There can be non religious groups that still fit the definition of cults as control groups. (OT For the record I think that the first group of disciples around jesus constituted a cult by many of the (real, not your) sociological describers of cults.)
I understand why someone in a cult group would want to play sophist games to make the word "cult" meaningless because it lets them duck the real issues of their behavior. But why is it so popular with other people? Is it just a fun game where you think you've won an argument by refusing any common language to hold the discussion in? Mental masturbation? Identifying with "outsiders" and not wanting to admit that some outsider groups are just not as healthy as others? What?
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
I'll explain it to you. A religion can't have trade secrets. Not under swedish law anyway. The United States is behind this court. Read on.
What happened in Sweden was this:
Some guy published the book.
The book then found itself into a public institution and became a public document.
I don't know how, but my guess is that it had to do with the court that Panoussis was holding.
In Sweden there is a constitutional law called "Offentlighetsprincipen", i.e. "the Principle of Openness", which dictates that all documents (including letters, email, everything) held by the public institutions can be read by any citizen upon request. The only exceptions (and there are few) are for military safety reasons, or to protect witnesses, etc.
So, if you are a journalist, you get access to the mailboxes of all government officials among other things.
At this point in time, you could also read the whole Scientology bible, because it had been made public. Under swedish law this is fully legal, no matter what the copyright laws say.
The next thing that happened was that a bunch of people from Washington, congressmen and others, all of them from the scientology church, went directly to the government of Sweden and put serious pressure on them to stop the bible from being read. This was reported in all the newspapers and our prime minister spoke about how the united states was threatening to take Sweden to court for neglecting IP rights, they were going to boycott Sweden in the UN for neglecting freedom of religion and a lot of other things.
Our prime minister admitted that it was dubious under our consitution to prevent the Scientology bible from being read, but that the pressure from the US was too strong and would have serious consequences for Sweden, if we didn't follow suit. It was "nobody cares about Scientology anyway, and we don't want to lose any trade benefits, so let's do what they say.."
This whole court was then arranged to fit Americas needs.
It is the biggest political shame that Sweden has had to deal with for many, many years, if you ask me. Because the principle of openness is the best law we have in Sweden, bar none. It is the only law people really like, because it is essentially a non-control, anti-government law. It has practically made corruption impossible for parliament members..
This story is a great example how America can easily get smaller countries around the world to do their errands.
Will code a sig generator for food
This text is not the posters original work. The original is for a leaflet found at Operation Clambake's Web site here
Burn Hollywood Burn
Umm, a great many religions have used this model of of secrecy. Scientology is just the first religion to charge money for secrets.
The Catholic Church had secret orders, certain Jesuits took a secret fourth oath. Islam has like the sufis mystic sects that aren't interested in sharing their knowledge. Juadiasm has kabbalists. The freemasons, as mentioned above, don't care to have their secrets shared with outsiders either. Only a Mormon can enter a Mormon temple once it has been "sealed".
Both the Church of Latter Day Saints and the masons have taken legal action against people who attempt to share their secrets with others. The Catholic Church has largely given up on secrets, but I'm sure that you had a very short life expectancy if you tried to reveal them during the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
Scientology is just a modern religion, designed to operate under our economic system, where everything has a price.
The question of whether it is true or false is irrelevant. What is so sad is that Scientology is afraid of people knowing the story.
Look at Chrisianity. It has a totally unbelievable story about a dead guy getting better a few days later. But as crazy as it is, they don't try to hide their belief; they shout it out with conviction. Why are Scientologists so lacking in that conviction? Have they no pride? Why do they fear exposure?
The answer is that their meme-complex is so fucked up, that it can't contain it's own reproductive code. Stereotypical religeons rely on hooks to entice people to want to believe in them (e.g. You will be rewarded in The Afterlife), but Scientology is so wacko, that even the dogma itself isn't enough to get people to come over, so they have to rely on a bootstrap process to implant the meme: hard-sell indoctrination through their cult.
The whole thing just reeks of poor craftsmanship. If this Hubbard guy were any good, he would have written a religeon that used the proven hook method. Instead, he invented something that is utterly clumsy compared even dinosaurs that are thousands of years old. I don't mind people experimenting with new religeous inventions, but a good craftsman knows when he's made a winner, and when he has a piece of shit. Scientology should have been scrapped as a failure long before it was ever brought to market.
How can anyone respect such mediocrity? It's the Windows of religeons; it can't compete on its merits within its own realm, so the creators have to work outside the conventional system just to proliferate it. That's fucking pathetic.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Bare Faced Messiah OCRed version.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
So, uh, wouldn't he hold himself in contempt for hot sharing (being a "scholar" and all)? (of course, he's dead, but you'd think the "religion" would follow His words...
Snapshot:
" The Church of Scientology (or: CoS; or: Co$, as some of their opponents call it) sells its followers expensive courses which, if students study them carefully, are supposed to set them free ('clear' them). A former Scientology member, Steven Fishman, was brought before court because he committed several crimes in order to get the money to pay for these courses. Scientology urged him to get the money any which way he could. According to Fishman, they also assigned him to kill somebody, and failing that, ordered him to commit suicide. In an interview for Time Magazine, Fishman relayed those stories and blamed Scientology for his crimes. Scientology sued him for slander."
Because all religions are charlatanistic businesses designed to rip off the easily duped masses by turning over large amounts of money and control over your daily lives to self-appointed know-it-alls who will make your life better, I promise. See also "communism".
You're writing this hateful troll on a weblog powered by Perl, a language written by a devout Christian. The main tome of the Perl language, the Camel book, is filled with Biblical allusions (as well as Tolkien allusions). This weblog started at a Christian college.
You are heir to thousands of year of Western culture (do the names Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Solomon, Moses, et al mean anything to you?), only by virture of wise Islamic scholars and wise Irish monks, who copied and preserved all the ancient literature they could during Europes dark ages.
And now, because of a few well known con artists, you're painting the spiritual lives of billions of people and thousands of years of history with that that same dirty brush.
When the media does this to geeks, Hellmouth reigns. When trolls do it to religion, it's approved. See the contradiction?
If you want my personal feelings, Sceintology is a close-minded UFO space cult group with asperations of world domination. Their logic is severly contraditory. For example, a Scienologiest will say he acts "for the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics." There are (I think) seven dynamics ranging from God to family, civilization, etc. However, to a Scientologist, the "greatest number of dynamics" is ALWAYS scientology. Sceintology *IS* the most ethical group of the planet. If you help advance sceintology, you are ethical. If you do not help advance sceintology, you are a "wog." If you hinder Scientology, IN ANY WAY (speak out against them, tell your Scientologist daughter that L. Ron Hubbard lied, etc...) then you will be caught up in the Scientology fair game policy, which states, and I quote:
Furthermore, this group is TOTALLY against free speech (though they say they're members have total spritual freedom). The internet keeps the RTC (Religios Technology Center, the "head" of Sceintology) having fits at night. I mean, a group of people who have nothing better to do that post the Church's material on-line!
Is what these people are doing illegal? Maybe, maybe not. The Church of Scientology has called it's secrets its copyrights and it's trade secret and is trying to get the protection of both. However, court documents have shown that the copyrights to the documents may have been fraudently obtained, and that the trade secret documents are no longer trade secret because they have been published. You can order a copy of the NOTS pack from the Swiss pariliment! The church vehemently denies all of this.
Anyway. I ranted. The Church of Scientology is EVIL. Some of the things they do make Microsoft look like Strawberry Shortcake.
Man, I hope they don't find my address. I'd expect to have a group of Scientologist outside my house yelling that I'm a religous bigot who commits crimes on the internet. They do this. I'm serious.
Who is Xemu?
I'm going to tell you a story. Are you sitting comfortably? Right, then I'll begin.
Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xemu. Xemu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack.
Now Xemu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were over-populated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.
Xemu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyse them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).
These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralysed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xemu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.
The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).
After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".
When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.
As for Xemu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xemu is still alive today.
That is the end of the story. And so today everyone is full of these clusters of souls called "body thetans". And if we are to be a free soul then we have to remove all these "body thetans" and pay lots of money to do so. And the only reason people believe in God and Christ was because it was in the film their body thetans saw 75 million years ago.
Well what did you think of that story?
What? You thought it was a stupid story?
Well so do we. Unfortunately this stupid story is the core belief in the religion known as Scientology.* If people knew about this story then most people would never get involved in it. This story is told to you when you reach one of their secret levels called OT III. After that you are supposed to telepathically communicate with these body thetans to make them go away. You have to pay a lot of money to get to this level and do this (or you have to work very hard for the organisation on extremely low pay for many years).
We are telling you this story as a warning. If you become involved with Scientology then we would like you to do so with your eyes open and fully aware of the sort of material it contains.
Part of the first page of the secret OT III document in L. Ron Hubbard's own handwriting
And so the great Scientology monolith smashes another dissenter.
.se).
Am I surprised?
Of course not. It seems that they use a vast proportion of their earnings (read: money ripped off from gullible/vulnerable people) to sue those who speak out against them.
Dave Touretzky (of the DeCSS descrambler gallery) has a lot of information available on these guys - somewhat more valuable, considering it's not in Swedish (what's with the link above, Michael? Please reply to this message, and tell me what percentage of the daily hits are from
And I'd recommend reading Bare Faced Messiah by Russell Miller. Unfortunately, I can't find any online retailer still willing to sell this book - the link is to used copies of early, expensive editions.
Xenu's not Unix
"And one other thing, even with the comical insanity, it wasn't a bad place to work. The reason I left was because the company was seized by the IRS for failure to pay payroll taxes."
IRS to Scientology: No, you don't understand. You owe us a million dollars!!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I find it fascinating that the same group who is lambasting Hubbard was, just a few days ago, giggling about how cool it's be to get Jedi acknowledged as an actual religion.
The arguement that all religions are cult to some degree is fairly weak, IMO. I've learned quite a bit about Jehova's witnesses since my gf used to be one of them. I myself was raised Lutheran.
In Jehova's Witness (JW) world, they control you on several fronts. You can't have friends outside the religion. You are STRONGLY discouraged from pursuing post secondary education, arguably to make you dependant on the JW network of members if times get rough, which can happen when all you have is a low paying part time job. They take up most of your time, there are four "services" per week.
Most importantly, you can be kicked out for a number of reasons: pre-marital sex (the big one for them), smoking (I think), even voting I beleive. If you get kicked out, coupled with rule #1 from above, you have NOTHING left. When my gf left the religion (before she met me) because she didn't beleive it, she was suicidal for quite a while. She had no friends, and her parents didn't talk to her for a year. Normally if you formally leave, no one, not even your parents, can talk to you EVER AGAIN. I don't know how she made it.
My religious experience was far different. Church once a week. I had more friends outside of church than inside, who were in other religions or none at all. There was no such thing as being kicked out of the church. You could be "forgiven" for anything. Sure, part of religion is "indoctrination", but it's nothing like the mind control you see in cults.
There are books out there that have rules to determine whether a religion is cult or not. Most involve mind control, money control (which JW's don't really have), and culture control of your person. Usually if a religion meets a certain number of the rules it is considered cult.
Scientology fits most of the rules I know of. Most religions were created with good intentions, even though many have been perverted into forms of control, but scientology was always evil. It was always a for-profit venture.
Remember, kids, Xenu says: All your race are belong to us! You are on the way to supression. You have no chance to ascend, make your time!
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
[pink beam of light]
A number of years ago, I worked as a programmer for a very small company which was owned and operated by scientologists. There were only about eight employees and half of us were normal. It was really comical sometimes.
For example, no one could have an arguement about any subject without reaching for this giant tome with a giant S on it (like the schilling spice S or the suzuki S). The four inch thick book somehow had guidelines for how to have an arguement.
When I arrived, I received a piece of paper with a story. The story was all about this thing called the Apollo. It went on and on about the apollo's bow, stern, engine room, and bridge. About how and when it left port and other nautical attributes of apollo. The first mention of apollo had an asterisk with a footnote, which most people don't read. At the end, they ask you what apollo is. My response was that apollo was obviously a boat. Their resonse was that it's wasn't just a boat, it was L Ron Hubbard's yacht. And since I didn't read the footnote explaining that, I obviously understood exactly 0% of the document. Huh?
At one point, they sent a (normal) co-worker to clearwater florida which is where the Org is. They gave her what amounted to brain-washing sessions. They would make ridiculous statements. And when she argued with them, they would respond with, "No, you don't understand." Because, obviously, if you understood, you would agree with them. So, I believe that you owe me a million dollars. "No I don't!" No you don't understand, you owe me a million dollars.
I once asked the VP of the company (a scientologist, the nuttiest of the bunch), "according to scientology, what happens to you when you die?" She went on a 15 minute lecture on how I was not prepared to understand that information because I had not attained a sufficient spiritual level or something and then finished with, "so for instance, if I told you that you go to the filling station in the clouds to get your memories erased, you wouldn't understand." She's right, I don't understand.
One of the programmers (a scientologist) got a cold at one point. He was firmly convinced that the reason he had a cold was because people were thinking bad thoughts about him.
It's my personal opinion that scientology is a scam. They advertise clearly non-christian ideology while using christian symbols. They use their monitary resources to engage in what can only be described as legal terrorism. They prey on people by promising them spiritual fulfillment while draining their bank accounts. And while some (even most) scientologists may really believe in their religion and have other people's interests at heart, I believe there are a lot of very power evel forces operating within their organization.
And one other thing, even with the comical insanity, it wasn't a bad place to work. The reason I left was because the company was seized by the IRS for failure to pay payroll taxes.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
It's a mistake to make the claim you're implying. It's the reverse of the ad-hominem argument. It is undeniable that Richard Wagner wrote some terrific music, but some of his personal beliefs (particularly his anti-semitism) were dead wrong and people holding similar beliefs today are held in very low esteem in enlightened circles. Just because Larry Wall made a useful and popular language doesn't mean that everything he thinks, believes, does or stands for is the same. It all has to be evaluated on the merits.
If you have any argument about the merits of the work vs. the merits of the person, look at Wednesday's Harlan Ellison thread. The guy has an ego the size of New York City, and it really makes him lose sympathy. That doesn't mean that his work is bad or his cause unjust... nor does it mean that a sympathetic person's work is good, nor their causes worthy.
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Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist