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 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?
The Church of Scientology has made it difficult to criticize them, because they tend to send the lawyers after anyone who does (generally on grounds of copyright infringement). Most people here would consider it a right to criticize, as a subset of the right to freedom of expression.
I guess this is sort of peripheral to that, but still...
And being attacked for criticizing Scientology is something that could have happened to you. For, let's say, talking bad about those Sons-of-a-Bitch here on Slashdot.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
"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.
I think it's kind of ironic that if you want to look at the downside of Scientology, you only need to look at their celebrity converts. E.g. Tom Cruise going increasingly off the rails now he's not allowed to see his shrink or take prescription drugs, or John Travolta forced to deny his homosexuality. If they weren't Scientologists, you get the impression they'd be happier. Richer too probably.
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;
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.
I wouldn't bother to speculate on the sexuality of those unknownst to me, but I can assure you that I see 'scientology' as one sinister (expletive) organisation. By what I see, it takes the basic principle of every 'addictive' in most every religion - namely, the prize of being 'chosen' over others, our reluctance to actually think, and our weakness to calls to authority (most will obey the orders of a cell phone for lord's sake) - and use it as a means to the common goal of most all, save the most primitive, religions - your money.
Remember: If they want to succeed in engendering an 'elite appeal', they depend on you to see them as the elite.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
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
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.
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.
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.
You're misstating Intelligent Design -- it's not quite the same thing as Christian Creationism, at least in its minimalist form. ID claims not to be a strictly Christian (or otherwise religion-centric) position, or otherwise indicative of any particular "old book" to be used in determining how the universe came about; instead, it argues (quite strictly) that probability is so firmly against the universe ending up the way it is now that some entity (with the individual entity being unspecified) must have taken actions encouraging it to be created as it did (with the actions also being unspecified). Anything beyond that is not Intelligent Design, but ID+something else. (Intelligent Design in this base form is quite vulnerable to many-universes theory in combination with the anthropic principal, and I've used that argument successfully in discussion with an intellectually honest opponent).
It would be consistent with ID, for instance, for me to state that our universe reached its present state via general laws of cause and effect, but with physical constants intentionally tweaked (either as a once-off or via an iterative process) with an eye to permitting life. There are circumstances (ie. our universe being a simulation) where such tweaking of constants is feasible.
Getting back towards topic -- IDers are generally fairly harmless, except when they try to corrupt widely used educational materials and/or laws to support their positions. Scientologists may operate on a smaller scale -- but their impact on victims' lives is unquestionably far more severe than that of those who support (strictly) Intelligent Design (as opposed to one of the Creationist religions which benefits from concessions made under the Intelligent Design banner -- in that situation, impact is obviously case-by-case).
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."