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"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."
Scientology likes suing people for libel. Let's turn the tables on that. Maybe members of Anonymous should sue Scientology for libel for making accusations of terrorism.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
This was happening all over the world. According to wikinews (last time I checked), there were 9200 participants worldwide (although sadly, only 40 here in Nashville).
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
Anonymous, eh? Cowards.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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
The video that they forced off of YouTube can, thanks to Gawker, be found here.
... I get a little frightened that people around me think like that. You may be able to argue that it's little different than Christianity or Islam but what I really fear are the people who are part of Sea Org or offshore from the states and may have given up their rights as a civilian & American to have some sort of special standing in this group.
... why are there so few publications attacking Scientology? There is definitely something scary about a very powerful organization and if they have people dumping money into them, I do not doubt they are capable of silencing anyone (unfortunately, even Slashdot).
As a non-scientologist, this is scary. Possibly the most scary part of it is the editing. I have no problem with people having convictions but when he talks about "fightin' the fight" and "people needing them" and "people depending on them"
Whatever the case, I will not ever affiliate myself with a Scientologist and after reading Have You Lived Before This Life, I will do everything in my power to convince those that I know and love to avoid Scientology.
The thing that concerns me about Scientology is that after reading some books by Hubbard about it, I have found very little criticism of it. A book & some articles with the most notable one being Time Magazine. It seems like such an easy target. It takes seconds to find books criticizing Catholics or Muslims
My work here is dung.
Anon doesnt have an issue with the religious views of the church. They have an issue with the church itself which is why in one of there recent videos they talk about the "Free Zone" (People who follow the beliefs of the religion but are not affiliated with Scientology) which they have no issues with.
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.
Here you go sir. http://www.flickr.com/photos/23637168@N05/sets/72157603887577097/
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Interestingly, it's not the beliefs of Scientology that were being protested--if you read through some of the more recent Anonymous releases, you'll note that they emphasize that it's the organization that calls itself the Church of Scientology that's being protested, on account of its practices.
Anonymous has explicitly noted that the "Free Zone"--that is, the Scientologists outside the organization--are just fine and dandy.
O'course, the "Free Zone" doesn't charge for its teaching...
But I don't think the antagonism against psychiatry is what you think it is--I think it's more a control structure (given that the auditing, in essence, imparts a codependent relationship between the auditee and the auditor (and by extension, the CoS)). Also worth noting is that the founder, Mr. Hubbard, had a very distinct antipathy towards the profession, and which created certain aspects of Scientology specifically to counter standard psychiatric practice.
I would note that, while not a member per se of Anonymous, I do think that their efforts against Scientology are a good thing, and were carried out remarkably peacefully and with remarkably good organization.
(I've also heard there's more planned for 3/15--beware the Ides of March!)
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
I don't know man. It sounds legit.
THL phish sticks
Wait... Which religion are you talking about again?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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.
True, but there is one major difference between the confessional and an auditing session:
The regulations of the Catholic church are very strict that what is said in the confessional -stays- in the confessional under all circumstances (except for a -very- restricted few).
The Church of Scientology -says- that what is said stays confidential, but routinely uses any information obtained during an audit as either a method of coercing the auditee to take more auditing sessions, to refrain from leaving the Church of Scientology, or to attack the ex-Scientologist when they have left with blackmail, or ruining their reputation in the community.
This has been documented by nearly every ex-scientologist--sometimes, all three instances.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Yes, I believe they call it politics.
[This comment is no longer available due to a copyright claim by the Church of Scientology International]
Your linked-to video voiceless surprised me. I didn't expect to cry.
Years and years ago, I was heavily involved with the Co$. I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I thought I had the ultimate answer to everything and I was willing to fight for that with my life.
I endured grueling 12+ hour workdays and virtually no pay for a chance to save the world. I practiced how to lie effectively (they call them TRs) and due to my "get it done" attitude, shortly had an office in the International Administration Headquarters in Hollywood, the Flag Command Bureau, as a member of the Sea Org. I had a nice office with a window seat overlooking downtown Hollywood, and I wore a uniform that looked sharp and military, with epaulets on my shoulder!
It's hard to explain just how intoxicating it is to think you have the 100% right answer to all the world's problems. And, as a die-hard Scientologist, that's exactly what you think you have. You can create a beautiful world free of drug abuse, crime, insanity, and war. You just have to apply the tech.
You are on the side of freedom, of knowledge, of truth, of unlimited personal power. And anybody who gets in your way needs to be shut up and rendered powerless by any means necessary. It's that simple!
But, something just wasn't quite right. No matter how hard I tried, I could never quite do enough, or do it right enough. I had trouble getting the books and tapes to fully make sense to me. When I disagreed with what I read, I was sent to endless word clearing where we looked up every single word in the dictionary, one by one to try to find the "MU" or "Mis-Understood [word]". I had trouble getting up on time in the morning. I got sick from time to time, which is proof that I was "PTS" and needed ethics handling. I went through endless "ethics conditions" despite my very, very best intentions. They were very careful to keep me convinced that the problem was me.
It's hard to explain how frustrating it was, to be surrounded by people who are apparently "getting it" and not being able to be one of them, despite having a tested genius IQ, and being able to read just about anything *ELSE* just one time and get it immediately. I thought there was something wrong with ME. I often cried before going to sleep at night.
They had the tech, but who could explain me? When I got to work, I got lots and lots done. I was routinely commended for job well done, for quality work, for "stellar levels of production". It seemed that, when I worked, everything I touched turned to gold. Yet I couldn't make the most amazing technology in the world just make sense to me. I could read a book on mathematics, or aeronautics, or software, and turn right around and do it without any problem. (which is their test for comprehension: can you read it, and APPLY the result immediately?) But I couldn't do the same with Scientology. Something was wrong with me.
So began my fall from greatness. Slowly, surely, over months and years, I lost all my former glory. My job title drifted from the international scale on down through the organization until I finally ended up at the very, very, very bottom.
The RPF.
AKA the Rehabilitation Project Force. It's like prison for Scientologists. You are a bad, bad, dude, or something is very, very wrong with you.
You have exactly 7 hours to sleep in a crowded, slummy, cockroach infested triple-bunk in the basement. You wear black jump suits with colored arm bands. You eat only left overs. You get 1/4 the pay of normal staff. You perform grueling, hard, disgusting work from the time you get up until "personal enhancement time", where you have 2.5 hours of time to read Scientology books and tapes until bed time. You are not permitted to talk to staff "in good standing", though they are free to bark orders at you. You are not permitted to walk. (No kidding!) You must run everywhere you go, and if you are ever caught walking you are made to do push-ups or worse. You must be c
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.
I believe you mean DC-8's -- but without the propellers...
Oops! The DC-8 was and is a pure jet aircraft. No propellers.
Good catch dude, in addition to be being a bad writer a crook and racist, L Ron Hubbard was also ignorant of airplane propulsion. That's it! The whole sick structure will now collapse.
By the way, the racism link would probably comes as a surprise to all the Hollywood stars who donate to Scientology.
http://www.solitarytrees.net/racism/deny.htm
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 SCIENTIFIC METHOD
Background: The Church of Scientology successfully threatened Slashdot into removing a post containing the text of a copyrighted "holy" text, and further links to the text.
Hypothesis: The Catholic Church wants to suppress its own holy text, the New American Bible. The NAB is the officially authorized translation of the Bible for use by Catholics in the United States.
Conjecture: If a Slashdot poster posts an excerpt from the NAB, along with a link to the full text, the Catholic Church will threaten Slashdot, and Slashdot will remove the post.
Experiment: I am posting the first 10 verses from the book of Genesis, Chapter One.
1 1 In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 2 the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. 3 Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw how good the light was. God then separated the light from the darkness. 5 3 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." Thus evening came, and morning followed--the first day. 6 Then God said, "Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters, to separate one body of water from the other." And so it happened: 7 God made the dome, and it separated the water above the dome from the water below it. 8 God called the dome "the sky." Evening came, and morning followed--the second day. 9 Then God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered into a single basin, so that the dry land may appear." And so it happened: the water under the sky was gathered into its basin, and the dry land appeared. 10 God called the dry land "the earth," and the basin of the water he called "the sea." God saw how good it was.
The full text of the NAB is available at http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/
Wait for priests to show up with their three chief weapons, fear, suspense, a fanatical devotion to the Pope... Can we come in again?
*crosses fingers*
I dare anyone to reproduce this experiment and get a different result than I did.
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
That is completely wrong, and likely an attempt to Karma whore with a quick uninformed search.
That is just a classification, 'Sruti' essentially means those scriptures that have been passed down directly from God to man, while 'Smriti' would be collected ancient wisdom.
There are a number of books holy to Hindu faith, primarily the Gita, the Vedas, and the Upanishads.
~IAA Hindu