Slashdot Mirror
Scientologists In Row With BBC
CmdrGravy writes "The Church Of Scientology is currently engaged in a row with the BBC, a result of an investigation by reporter John Sweeney. Sweeney is investigating the Church Of Scientology, trying to judge changes in the organization over the last few years; He's trying to discover if they've moved away from the questionable practices and secrecy they have employed in the past. The conflict centers around a YouTube video posted by the scientologists. It shows Mr. Sweeney losing his temper with a scientology spokesman. Mr. Sweeney's outburst came at the end of a tour of a scientology exhibition which attempts to portray psychiatrists as evil nazi type torturers entitled 'Psychiatry: Industry of Death' which is both gruesome and utterly unconvincing. The BBC appears willing to stand behind its reporter, in spite of the pressure brought to bear by the scientologist organization."
Why is this in YRO? I guess you could make some weird case for my right to have the BBC pick on Scientology...
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
What makes you say that? The BBC have a lot of money and very, very good lawyers.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Why are wasting our time with a bunch of delusional cultists?
Their material calls that there's not a shred of "scientific" evidence that mental illnesses exist, instead it's all about the alien ghosts lord Xenu imprisoned.
I mean, for Christ's sake, people. Is there a limit to how ridiculous you can get?
Karma police, arrest this man. He talks in math. He buzzes like a fridge. He's like a detuned radio.
Bad driving: Industry of Death
Thousands of people die in car accidents each year. All of them drove facing the steering wheel and front windshield of the car [showing big charts on the presentation screen to show some convincing statistics].
The bottom line: we should drive facing the rear end of our cars.
---
But damn, I'd rather drive my car sitting backwards than believe some alien sci-fi story since they just discovered there are bad psychiatrists, like there are bad professionals in every area of life.
"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion." - L Ron Hubbard
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
To be precise, you'd spend about half a million to get to the point where they spring the space opera story on you. Once you've been suckered that far, there's a very strong psychological incentive to keep believing them, rather like the suckers who've fallen for the 419 scams.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Brainwashing and "disconnecting" people from your family doesn't float your boat, eh? Being swallowed by a cult is devastating for the families involved. So as long as these crazy people aren't hurting you you don't give a fuck, eh?
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Here's why:
A key belief and practice of the Church involved "auditing" via the "E-Meter". The "E-Meter" is a bargain-basement lie detector. It works on galvanic skin response; it can measure (crudely) fluctuations in your emotional state. It can't measure much past that. So one person holds these two "tin cans" while somebody else tries to make them respond enough to flinch the needle.
The person being "audited" is practicing how to be emotionally non-responsive to whatever is thrown at them - and that can involve verbal abuse, shouting, whatever.
This isn't controversial or something the "church" denies.
What most people don't think about is the flip side: what is being learned by the person NOT holding the tin cans? The one trying to trigger a response in the other?
Yup. You guessed it. They become masters (eventually) at "pressing people's buttons".
So anybody not used to this sort of thing or who isn't expecting it can be made to "blow up", sometimes spectacularly. And I'd bet good money that's exactly what they did to Sweeney and for exactly the reason they've used this incident: to portray any opponent as an out of control loose cannon, nutcase, etc.
Don't go up against these guys unless your self control is rock solid AND you understand this technique. Be ready to say something like "much as you might prefer otherwise, I'm not being "audited", I'm not standing here with tin cans in my hand looking like an idiot, you're not going to get me to blow up". Turn it back on 'em, they'll start foaming at the mouth. If a Rondroid is trying to get you pissed, ASSUME there's a camera pointing your way.
But they do have Tom Cruise, and that more than makes up for the rest.
I don't therefore I'm not.
As Sweeney pointed out, Scientologists' comparison of psychology to Nazism is disgusting. That's why I wish Godwin's Law could be extended to the beyond the [forum|usenet|chat] world. Abusive display at a conference? You loose!
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
Has Slashdot ever had a run in with Islam? Seems like people here are a lot more skeptical of the idea that Islam is a murderous cult than Scientology.
Whereas to me, as soon as the whole Satanic Verses controversy errupted, it was pretty clear that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with a modern liberal democracy, just like Scientology is. Hell, Christianity is incompatible if it's still based on the old testament, it's just that mainstream Christians seem to have deprecated those bits of the Bible since the Enlightenment.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Got the same impression. Poor guy. I mean, you should in that case simply turn of the camera and explain it during editing (after all, when cutting your tape you have full control of what goes on screen and what doesn't)... But I know that religious types (let's define religion broadly) can really pull the blood away from under your nails. Any exchange between a religous person and a sane person is inherently unfair. The religious person believes in things that are made up, in fairytales that are easily shown to be fiction. By nonetheless believing those they show that their mind is like ROM. It's litterally like talking to a brick wall. There is this part of them that parses enough of your sentences to generate an inadequate answer, but no information actually gets past their mental firewall.
John Sweeney, I support you 100% on this one. This whole incident probably says more about Scientology than about you.
To be fair, having watched the footage on youtube, including some of the other exchanges between the two guys - I can understand why he was shouting. Personally I would have 'lost it' and dragged the guy to the top of a small cliff long before this guy did - and probably made him give me an impromptu display of his scientologists ability to fly. Weeeee! The scientology guy should have been a politician. He was having a go at the other reporter at one point for calling scientology a cult when actually the guy was just saying "Some people say that L. Ron started a cult" ... instead of responding to the question the guy got mad! Both as bad as each other ...
John Sweeney writes about his "harassment" (supposedly at the hands of the Church of Scientology), but this pales in comparison to that experienced by dissenters or those who bad-mouth other religions. As we've discovered in the last year, even publishing a drawing of Mohammed can lead to death threats and street protests the world over. Even writing, performing, or publishing a poem about Jesus, a character from "The Bible", can lead to prosecution and snitchery in the UK, a supposedly developed country. Note that in the linked case, Bakewell was "reported to the DPP by the National Viewers and Listeners Association."
Tu Quoque is not a valid argument you know, even when it's true. Actually the case you linked to is the end of a centuries old battle by liberals against Christian limits on free speech. I can't prejudge it, but my guess is that the liberals will eventually win and blasphemy laws will at some point be abolished entirely or neutered to the point where they are no threat.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The difference is that most nutty Protestant sects do not become as large and rich as the Church of Scientology, and they also have to keep some sort of attachment to a nominally Christian approach. They also have the problem that their followers do tend to be socially mobile - the fact of going to Church shows they want to "better" themselves - and with social mobility comes exposure to more educated people who may guide them towards mainstream Christianity. Scientology, on the other hand, is not a bizarre offshoot of a mainstream religion and there is no central tendency for its followers to gravitate back to.
There is too with cults an interesting anti-intellectual tendency. If you want to make authoritative pronouncements in, say, the Catholic or Episcopalian churches, you are probably fluent in NT Greek and can read the NT in the original. Cults contain less educated people, so they will do things like take a particular English translation of the Bible as being authoritative and solve the problem that way. Extreme cults can get a following from rich people who do not want to invest the time and effort needed to become familiar with, say, the Bible or the Pali texts. You can join something like - oh, say Kabbalah - and say pretty well anything in public without looking ridiculous, while a Hollywood actor who tries to sound knowledgeable about the Bible had better know his or her stuff because there are so many well informed people listening. A religion that does not let its sacred texts get out too much is at an advantage in this respect.
As a part time student of religious sociology, it's a pity I won't be around in 50 years to see if Scientology, like Mormonism before it, is evolving into a mainstream religion and gradually losing its bizarre baggage.
Pining for the fjords
Ahh, wishful thinking. How quaint.
It really saddens me to rain on your utopian dream, but "it would work if we _all_ did X" _never_ worked. Never worked, doesn't work, never will.
By the same token, yeah, it would stop spam if we _all_ didn't buy that stuff, but there'll always be some idiots who do. Yeah, it would stop stock scams dead if we all didn't rush to buy hyped-through-spam stocks, but there'll always be some "smart" guys who think they can beat the system and do their own buying and selling just before it crashes. (It has been already proved to never work, but, hey, there's one born every minute anyway.) Yeah, it would stop unethical business practices dead if we all stopped buying from and investing in unethical companies, but, let's face it, you're a minority there; the majority just buys from whoever sells the cheapest, invests in whoever promises the most gain, and would even deal with the mafia perfectly happily. Etc.
And so it is with this kind of fucked-up cults too. Wishful "if we all started boycotting them" thinking won't work, because there'll always be a minority, no matter how small, who are fucked-up in the head and need some exotic, non-mainstream religion to give meaning to their fucked-up lives. And a cult doesn't really need billions of members to be profitable. If only as few as those who buy from spam links are also gullible enough to join your cult, you're already a rich guy. It's that simple.
So you'd literally need to get _everyone_ to join in your boycott for it to work. Not just "more", but literally "all".
In other words, the "allmighty buck" isn't that allmighty at all when it comes to righteous causes. And it tends to work against you every time.
What you need isn't self-righteous boycotts, what you need is laws and courts of law. You already have laws saying that (A) small excerpts _do_ fall under fair use, even if scientology doesn't like it, and (B) once they've made themselves a public figure, they can't really stop other people from talking about them, or even ridiculling them, and (C) they aren't supposed to use lawsuits just to silence their critics. See that those laws are applied. That's really the only realistic, working solution.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is a recent development - in April the European court of human rights decided that it was against EU law for Russia to deny Scientology religeon status - a judgement that applies to all EU member states including the UK and Germany (who have previously been quite outspoken against it).
Reading the details of the case, it seems the Russian situation was quite different from that in the UK or Germany, in that an unregistered church is legally prevented from doing several things that could be considered necessary to running a church (e.g., "renting premises for religious ceremonies and worship" or "receiving and disseminating religious literature") which can be performed legally in the UK and Germany without being a registered church. Because of this factor, refusal to register effectively constituted banning them from spreading their beliefs, which is (IMO) unacceptable unless done in full view of the world, with proper democratic process (rather than via beurocracy as was done here). Not considering them a religion in (say) the UK simply means that they do not acquire a number of taxation benefits that they might otherwise be entitled to. I don't think this would be considered a violation of their human rights.
I'd be very careful about what you read into the conclusions drawn in the "case law" section of the article you link to, BTW. Wikipedia has a strong scientology community, and in this case I believe they have rendered the article rather biased. As an example:
The decision of the Human Rights Court in the Moscow Church of Scientology case mandates that States cannot intervene arbitrarily into religious matters and are strictly prohibited from evaluating or reinterpreting the internal validity of religious beliefs genuinely held by individual believers or religious communities like Scientology.
This is introduced as an interpretation of the court's conclusion that "the autonomous existence of religious communities is indispensable for pluralism in a democratic society and is thus an issue at the very heart of the protection which Article 9 affords. The State's duty of neutrality and impartiality, as defined in the Court's case-law, is incompatible with any power on the State's part to assess the legitimacy of religious beliefs." While it is a valid interpretation of the last sentence, if taken out of context, I'd say the previous sentence (and sentences earlier in the paragraph) limit the scope of the "incompatibility" noted by the court to matters which relate to article 9.
Specifically, article 9 states "Everyone has the right [...] either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance."
Also worth considering is that the court did not consider any public health issues in making this decision (because the basis of the decision that the Russian government made against Scientology was not made on those grounds), but article 9's scope is "subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society [...] for the protection of public [...] health". This means that the courts decision is not incompatible with one where a country introduces a law preventing religious practices that are considered psychologically harmful, for instance.
Intelligent Design.
Care to explain why we waste our time with that kind of delusion? Because the head honchos just happen to follow a religion that supports it?
It might seem unrelated, but I see a parallel. One claims that there's no mental illness and it's all some deity (or, if I remember right, its enemies) messing with your inner alien. The other one claims that, since you can't prove every single step taken from the beginning of the universe to the world as we know it now, it's all a bunch of fabrications and we should instead rely on magic detailed in some old book. Both call science bollocks and we should instead rely on some magical fabrication of some kinda god.
Could you point out the difference to me?
Religion is something wonderful, and if people need it for their inner peace and 'cause they got nothing better to do, ok, have fun. But don't mess with my life, and most of all, don't mess with science, dammit! Religion has no room in science. Science is about disproving things, not blind faith in them!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But they are (as far as I'm aware), the only religion to insist that you have to pay in order to gain access to their sacred texts. And the only religion to believe that we all came here on Douglas DC-8's. I'd be interested to see how large a planet would have to be to support 178 billion people. No wonder Xenu decided to nuke the whole damned lot of them.
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do." -- S.H. Roberts
(Hope I got the wording and attribution right -- I had to rely on Google.)
> ..actually quite impressive, were it not coming from a religion.
Because... It isn't coming from a religion. Scientology isn't a religion. Its a profit oriented company disguised as religion. I'm actually quite suprised there are not more of them, considering how easy it seems for the scientologists (and in fact most other religions) to leverage religion laws and make money out of it.
I sincerely don't think any of the scientologists believe in any of the stories about Xenu and his hidden star ships, the same way FSM people dont believe in their flying spaghetti monster. What they both have in common is that they emulate the patterns of real religions to the point when they are reckognized as one under the law. They differ in that the FSM community is in this game for fun, and Scientology for money, and..... for some kind of... I don't know, PURE EVIL!
You are aware that the BBC, in practice, is independant of government influence? Having said that, if it came to war with scientology everyone would back it. It's a national institution and the only people who have anything bad to say about it are license-dodgers who watch it anyway.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
The big difference between islam and the "church" of scientology is that the latter is an organization, not a belief system. When people talk about scientology, the usually mean the CoS, but in reality, that's conflating two distinct things: there's scientologists who're not part of the CoS (the so-called "free zone").
So comparing the CoS and islam is comparing apples with oranges. What would make sense would be to compare the CoS and, say, al-Quaeda; both of these are murderous cults trying to advance political goals with a "might makes right" approach that completely casts aside any kind of moral or ethical considerations. Same for those who involved in the whole "let's-kill-Rushdie" thing, of course, but those are still distinct from islam as such - they're just a bunch of loonies. Dangerous loonies, yes, but still...
As for scientology as a *belief* system, it's batshit crazy, of course (aliens were brought to Earth millions of years ago in DC-8s, stuffed into volcanoes and blown up with atom bombs, and anyone who tries to remember this will die of pneumonia? wtf?), but not *per se* dangerous than other religious dogma. I personally think it's even crazier than christian, jewish or islamic dogma, for example, although those are pretty crazy as well already, but believing in it does not automatically make you a bad person.
But the belief system doesn't matter, anyway. The CoS is an evil cult because it does evil things, not because of what it believes - or claims to believe, since scientological dogma is just used as a tool of control, anyway. The CoS has never been about anything except power and money, without regard for anyone or anything standing in the way. That's what makes them evil and dangerous.
Well, actually, every Prime Minister since at least Churchhill has disliked the BBC for political reasons, but that's a sign they're doing something right politically. And I doubt the British government wouldn't come kick the shit out of Scientology if it tried to push down the BBC.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
>Neither Scotland, England nor Wales are countries. They don't exist.
That would be news to the countries called England, Wales and Scotland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I'll admit that the Jimmy Swaggarts and Jerry Falwells of the world certainly don't give Christianity a very good image. If you blast them in the press, though, they don't try to destroy you personally or professionally. They live life under enough of a microscope that they can't get away with quite that much.
Scientology is not open. It's secretive and dark (the non-GPL'ed "religion"). If you write about them, they may sue you for copyright infringement (since L. Ron's books were originally published as bad sci-fi). Their temples are labyrinths according to a friend who went in for a "stress test".
It's pretty scary and their ability to manipulate the system makes it moreso.
Regards, Ian
I absolutely agree 100%, and I say that as a religious person. It just doesn't make economic sense to absolve an organization of their tax liabilities just because they're religious in nature, and I totally fail to see how holding religions accountable for common tax obligations interferes with the free practice of religion. Even charities don't get that kind of free pass.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
They apparently believe in statistics. I went into a center in Worcester MA in the late 70s to see what they would do. They gave me a not-too-long "Free Personality Test", went and scored it, then came back with the results. They showed me a line graph, with connected points (!) illustrating my score on each of about 9 things. Of course, a first question would be how can you rate 9 distinctly different attributes on one scale? You probably can't, so if you bother to look at the Y axis, you see that it was a Z-scale - or normed values. So it merely shows you where you fall in a group for each of those things, regardless of the actual units. But the really cool trick was that besides being all normed values, the Y-axis was scaled to your results' high and low, not +-3z or full scale. So they circle the lowest point, and tell you they have a course to "fix" that. Only $495 or something like that. Great! I can fix the worst thing in my life for a few hundred bucks! Sounds great! But guess what? In a scaled Y-axis, there's always going to be another "low" that magically appears, and well, shouldn't you just go and fix that one too? Repeat ad nauseum, ad bankruptcy.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
It doesn't appear to me that the BBC reporter 'lost it' at all -- it seems like he's using the same shouting technique on the Scientologist that the Scientologist was trying to use on him. Shouting, appearing angry, then stopping and asking if he understands in an effort to shock your opponent into listening while at the same time appearing reasonable. I'm not saying the BBC guy wasn't angry, but it seemed like he was in control of himself. Rational but loud.
steampunk web design
Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, has been for many years a very tolerant country, where different faiths have coexisted.
The fluke bombs by extremists do not make a whole country a nest of jihadists. They are nut jobs like Timothy McVeigh or some other of that ilk.
You also have Turkey, a secular country, and Malaysia, a Muslim country that accepts diversity (you can see girls wearing mini-skirts, beauty pageants and casinos, all normally associated with non-mulsim behaviour).
And we had Iraq of course, which was a hineous dictatorship, but that can't be accussed of promoting Islamism, as anyone bothered to check the facts knew before Bush and Blair started their little crussade.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
the only people who have anything bad to say about it are license-dodgers who watch it anyway
I do not watch TV and do not have a license (as I do not require one to not watch TV). Regardless, I am constantly harrassed by BBC Licensing to buy a license.
Having said that I would still back them in a war against 'scientology'.