Slashdot Mirror
"Anonymous" Takes Scientology Protest to the Streets
This past Sunday members of the group "Anonymous" that has been running an attack on the church of Scientology took their battle from the tubes of the internet to the pavement of real life, staging a protest outside the central Phoenix Church of Scientology. "The protesters said they gathered Sunday in lieu of the birthday of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist once cared for by church staffers. Her 1995 death sparked media attention and a civil wrongful death suit against a branch of the Church of Scientology. A wrongful death suit by her family was a public-relations nightmare for the church for years until it was settled in 2004. The Church of Scientology declined to comment on the Phoenix protests. It did provide a news release calling members of Anonymous cyber-terrorists."
> Something must be retained from death to birth
Never mind proof, what indication do you even have of this other than your gut feeling?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
How do you take a balanced view of a religion that wont tell you it's beleifs before you've bought into it. Where did you get the information? How do you guarentee it's accurate.
Like the evil Lord Xenu and space ships that look like DC-9's?
From Wikipedia:
"The Galactic Confederacy's civilization was comparable to our own, with aliens "walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute" and using cars, trains and boats looking exactly the same as those "circa 1950, 1960" on Earth. Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of "renegades", he defeated the populace and the "Loyal Officers", a force for good that was opposed to Xenu. Then, with the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions[1] of his citizens together to paralyze them with injections of alcohol and glycol, under the pretense that they were being called for "income tax inspections". The kidnapped populace was loaded into spacecraft for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The spacecraft were identical to the Douglas DC-8 with the exception of having different engines."
The "origins" story of Scientology is total bunk that sounds like bad sci-fi written by a sleep-deprived crackhead. You can't even spin this as a parable like with Biblical accounts, etc. It's just plain trash that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.
Alchemist: Be Thou For the People
When you look at a religion, what's important is not how absurd the beliefs are (they all are otherwise it wouldn't be a religion). What matters is what the people (and especially high up in the hierarchy) do. And what the scientologists do is scary. Not that they have a monopoly on being scary, radical Islamists and especially the US radical Christians (that are no worse but have the power to do a lot more damage) scare the hell out of me as well.
The "origins" story of Scientology is total bunk that sounds like bad sci-fi written by a sleep-deprived crackhead. You can't even spin this as a parable like with Biblical accounts, etc. It's just plain trash that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.
I don't have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is a for-profit organisation masquerading as a religion, the secrecy, their aggressive legal tactics, their apparent refusal to ever apologise for any mistake they've made, and their underhand tactics to get and keep recruits.
Wait... Which religion are you talking about again?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Anonymous, eh? Cowards.
Funny that you mention that. Slashdot allows Anonymous Cowards to post precisely for the same reason: To protect them from retaliation.
He said he was an atheist; he never indicated that he was guided by reason/logic/scientific method.
Remember kids,
Atheist does not imply scientist/logician
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
It's a religion; therefore, I guarantee it isn't accurate.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Most religions(the Vatican notwithstanding) don't withhold their most sacred texts, and you can find the Bible or Qu'ran or Torah or whatever Hindus read on the Internet, usually posted by their most ardent followers. With Scientology, you can only find them on places like Operation Clambake. (Actually, for that matter, the Vatican mostly withholds texts of other religions...)
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Except by your method you are guaranteed to get an UNbalanced view. It's called sample bias. If you restrict your sample to only people who left the church, you are guaranteed to get a higher proportion of disgruntled (rightly or wrongly) views. After all, if you loved the church, you probably wouldn't have a reason to leave. Note this goes for many different types of groups. If you go to South Florida you would think that every Cuban despises Castro and communism. Of course, the Cubans who hate Castro the most have the biggest reason to leave, while those that love him stay in Cuba.
"Most religions(the Vatican notwithstanding) don't withhold their most sacred texts"
Before the Reformation and Gutenberg, getting a copy of the Holy Bible meant going to your local Catholic church, where the priests were more than happy to interpret it for you. Badly, I suspect.
To this day, IIRC, your Catholic priest would prefer you ask him what it means. And a careful reading of the New Testament could leave you with the impression that the Catholic Church is, in fact, not practicing Christianity.
And to be fair, neither are many if not most TV and other Evangelists. It's so simple, unless you're asking for money.
Written by a Christian. Trying to keep it simple.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It says a lot about Scientology - and actors - that so many actors buy into Scientology.
No. It just tells you about Scientology. And people I guess. But nothing about actors.
These are the actors from the very same tiny group of the overall population who also feel they should tell you how you should be voting, how the war against terrorism should be run, and why their opinions matter more than anyone else's do, and deserve more airtime (and make-up) than any "ordinary" citizen. The people who drop out of college, and even high school - and are proud of that fact!
No. Actors tell us how we should be voting because we keep asking them. We ask them how to dress, how to talk, where to eat, how to vote... we pay them to entertain us. They aren't special, and they aren't born thinking they are. We train them. We put them on TV, we interview them. We follow the minutia of their lives.
They don't force themselves on us. WE chase them. Sure, at this point its become a bit symbiotic, they use the fact we can't get enough of them to further inflate their value and the activists among them spread their views, but the fundamental issue is US. If we the public could stop caring about them... if we treated them like any other professional like a bricklayer, electrictian, IT admin, PHB, or whatever, the constant media coverage would vanish. E!TV would go away. Tabloids would print something else. Etc.
So... bottom line. Actors are regular people who after spending years in the spotlight often develop some ego issues. But its we the public that first manufacture and then nurture their defective personalities. The industry surrounding them from the media circus, to the agents and publicists exists because -we- demand it.
Now, scientology KNOWS the public is obsessed with celebrity. So they court celebrities. They literally wine and dine them, and then take them back home to (mind) fuck. The CoS wants big prime-time A-list scientologists as evangilists, and they'll do or pay whatever it takes to seduce them. Plus, once solidly hooked, they have considerable funds and assets for the church to get its fingers into to fund its next celebrity acquisition, its legal battles, and so on.
So again, if we the public could stop obsessing over celebrities, CoS would lose interest in converting them. Or, more accurately, its interest would drop to the same level it has in converting the rest of us.
And if you are looking for meaning, God is a crutch.
Now, there are other religions that are esoteric, but most of them don't pretend to also be scientific, and most of them don't have a ladder of charging you cold hard cash to get them. There are Buddhist teachings that the lamas will only teach you if you're a sincere Buddhist, and there are teachings that only make sense if you've spent a few years meditating and will otherwise distract you from the more important practices. There are Yoga positions that you really really shouldn't try unless you've been doing yoga for a long time, and any clueful teacher will tell you not to try them because you'll just tear your shoulder blade muscles. But the price isn't cash, it's practice. And there are mountains that guides won't take you to if you don't have the experience and physical strength to climb them safely - those guys *will* charge you money, but you've still got to have the skills, and they'll be happy to show you *pictures* of the mountains and recommend that you climb some smaller mountains first. Scientology doesn't want you to see the pictures of Xenu The Evil Space Alien and His DC9 Fleet until *after* your bank account's been tapped.
There are also other religions and similar types of groups that want cash up front. Transcendental Meditation wants whatever their current fee is to give you an initiation and your own personal secret mantra (which is picked from a simple list, not actually customized for you), plus you've got to offer fruit and flowers to their guru and his gods (not to the Maharishi, who just died this week, but to his teacher.) But they'll still tell you what it's about.
There are many religions and preachers that teach that you should give some fraction of your money to the church - some of them want it to help feed the poor, while others of them want it so the preacher can have a big house and a Learjet, and some of them teach about loving God and your neighbors while others mostly teach about Prosperity and how You can get it if you just Believe hard enough. Some of them are Christians, some of them are New Agers, some of them are Buddhists, and you'd think you could pretty much tell which kind are sincere, but a lot of people go in for the bogus ones anyway. (That's of course separate from whether the groups ask for some money to fix the church building's roof or pay the meeting-hall's rent or hire a full-time preacher at a not-very-high salary; if you're going to have an institution you're going to have institutional expenses.)
The price of Scientology auditing is a lot higher than the cost of office space and training volunteer quack psychiatrists to listen to you. And even if they keep some of their teachings secret until you've had the training you need to understand them, that doesn't mean they need to keep their organizational structure or finances hidden.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I am not a physicist, but as I understand it, contemporary physics considers the dimension of time as having come into existence at the big bang along with the familiar dimensions of space. If so, "before the big bang" is a meaningless phrase.
Yes, that's weird and hard to comprehend, and outside what human brains are built to grasp. But so is much of physics; the human brain can't really get a handle on the particle/wave duality, relativity, or quantum tunneling, either. The best most of us can do is represent it symbolically with mathematics - and few enough of us can do that.
Anyway, as counterintuitive as it is, "what was there before the big bang" may be as meaningless of a question as "how far do I have to walk on the earth before I get to the end?" We don't need religion to explain what was before the big bang for the same reason we don't need religion to explain what's past the edge of the (flat) Earth.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Let me guess... the IQ test was designed and administered by Scientology?
Hard to believe anyone who is literate and not a scientologist modded this "I never really thought of myself as a victim." post down.Even if it was by an Anon Cow.This kind of story is the REASON for Anon Cows.
Pissed? Bitter? Damn straight I am. I belong to a flying saucer religion that CAN'T get tax free status. Diff is; Subgenii pull the wool over their OWN eyes and know it.
Hard to tolerate carnies like Elron Hoover who couldn't even write decent Sci-Fi being the bleedin'Jesus of a Tax free scam when he doesn't even amount to a wart on J.R.Bob Dobbs ass.
Somebody mod that poor Anon Cow up.I don't give a damn how you mod me.I got eternal slack.
Scinustology casualties got a fucked up life. Give em a little slack you pink bastards!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
There are plenty of ex-members of a given religion who do not feel threatened by leaving it. I myself was baptized Catholic when I was younger, but though I don't feel much respect for the policies of that particular church, I don't feel overly threatened by it either.
The stories of many who have left Scientology are quite different, and rather chilling.
So yeah, of those that left, many would likely be disillusioned. But it's like leaving the mob, it takes a lot of guts to do so, and overall it can be a pretty dangerous proposition.