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Scientology Injunction Denied Against "Anonymous"
Anonymous writes "A circuit court judge has denied the Church of Scientology's second request for an injunction against protests by the internet group "Anonymous." The Church sought to prevent Anonymous from protesting on the birthday of the Church's leader, the late Ron L. Hubbard. The petition filed by the Church listed twenty-six individuals allegedly affiliated with Anonymous, but "accidentally" included others who merely work near the location of the first protests held in February and did not participate in them, such as a Starbucks employee. Furthermore, the Church failed to show that any of those listed actually committed any wrongdoing."
I win!
Get out there, show how fed up you are with these people. It's not hard to protest; just show up, wear a mask, and stand on the sidewalk.
~ C.
Give 'em enough of it and they will end up hanging themselves. I think they are their own worst enemy. They don't bother me.
Scientology is a cult, pure and simple. I always thought it would be a fascinating exercise to research the lobbying efforts that got them tax-free status in the US and Canada.
With nothing concrete for the CoS to attack, they will hopefully hang themselves and save us the trouble. I predict a swelling of Anonymous' ranks and copycat groups in the near future.
Anonymous protests of Scientology convinces those who are in with doubts to act on those doubts.
Eventually the Scilons can't keep it up and it'll collapse.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Yeah, all those ex-scientologists coming out of the woodwork telling their tales of abuse because they felt empowered by the actions of Anonymous sure don't mean a thing. The mounds of leaked documents and emails exposing the illegal conduct of the "church" aren't worthy of comment. Or exscientologykids.org popping up to tell the tales of the children of cult executives who grew up inside the organization is kind of a pointless story. And the massive amount of public awareness of all of those things, all as a direct result of Anonymous showing support to those trapped inside a horrific cult is just a bunch of hooey. Oh, yeah, and those who have gotten out of the cult as a direct result? Pshaw.
Yup, you're right, might as well not even try.
We're never going to give them up, never going to let them down.
Scientology's button pushing doesn't work so well when they can't find the machine the button's on.
An "injunction against protests"? In the US? Wow! They must have really touched a nerve. Keep it up!
Of course CoS had any sense at all they'd just ignore the whole thing until it blows over... but I'm counting on CoS to blow it way out of proportion. Which is exactly what Anonymous wants.
This could be an interesting showdown, especially if the protests continue to be disciplined and, well... funny!
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
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I would have a hunch, that the "Church" itself is causing the problems on the page. First The war starts. They impose there beliefs and pull web pages from Google. I have seen a few things that they have done to try and put "Anonymous" in a bad light. I wish I could find the link, and maybe someone out there knows it. It is of a group of protesters getting arrested. The "Church" said it was "Anonymous". This was quickly debunked they the comments around the article, and found that the pictures where taken from a real protest elsewhere, and not an "Anonymous" protest. All and all i think the "Church" is a bunch of bull and don't play fair with others.
I'm now prepared to get buried by the "Church" for my negative comments against them.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
In Germany, scientology is not called a church, but a company. I think the greed parameter built into scientology makes it a company. /AC
On a more serious note though one wonders how long before they flip completely and emulate Aum Shinrikyo or Jim Jones...
FBI etc keep a *close* eye on them.
Andy
The Church of Scientology. Hmph! How a religion can be invented so easily by someone who wakes up in the morning one day and just feels like making one up.
I am hereby inventing a new religion. My religion shall be called rice_burners_suck, and its adherents shall be called rice_burners_suckers. One important parameter of a religion is how many deities its adherents believe in. This is a religion of a unique type, where instead of zero, one, or multiple deities, the number of deities is negative one. This concept is often difficult for newcomers to grasp, since when counting anything, one must begin at one and proceed through the positive numbers. However, we believe that a person must work towards achieving faith in God, and believing that there is negative one of Him is part of achieving that faith.
Besides, if God can do anything, then He can choose to be counted in negative numbers.
You are aware of Operation Freakout, are you not? Wherein, among other criminal activities, Scientologists basically sent bomb threats to themselves with circumstantial evidence incriminating an author, Paulette Cooper, who wrote a book which was critical of the Church of Scientology?
I'm not saying that any or all of the death threats that the Scientologists are receiving are bogus, but there is already an established history of them attempting to manipulate the courts against people critical of them.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
On the other hand it is hard to decide whether some of the deaths caused by the cult are murder or manslaughter. I would say both groups have barbarians in their ranks.
Now excuse me, I have a couple of, uh, "cocktails" to prepare for Tom Cruise.
"The petition filed by the Church listed twenty-six individuals allegedly affiliated with Anonymous, but "accidentally" included others who merely work near the location of the first protests held in February and did not participate in them, such as a Starbucks employee. Furthermore, the Church failed to show that any of those listed actually committed any wrongdoing.""
OMG! I think I get it now!
RIAA is run by the church of scientology!
That explains everything!
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Why did the Scientology cult get the status of a church there? If you are an american, you should ask your politicians, what can be done to undo this error.
Hey folks... if you bother to read the article it explains how Scientologists are getting death threats from this group.
Good. The CoS is known to be involved in murder, torture and sexual abuse. Forget "non-violent" protest, get stuck in there.
Photograph them. Follow them. Follow them home and photograph them entering and leaving their houses. Keep shouting "Murderer!" at them, if you can. Harass them. Make their lives hell.
Don't waste your time griefing in Sadville, do it In Real Life. Make the CoS thoroughly miserable.
I'm not normally a summary-nazi, but it's L. Ron Hubbard. Not Ron L. Hubbard.
So are you protesting the church or the organization? If the former you are not allowed. If you don't agree with the church, don't participate it is that easy. If the latter then by all means, protest the organization but remember to separate the 2.
Are you stupid or drunk? It should be obvious by the context what exactly I'm protesting. If you're not capable of basic reading comprehension I'm not going to waste my time explaining it to you.
I will, however, waste my time insulting your intelligence. Because that's fun.
Yes, that's actually one of the things they do -they video tape everything and then comb through the footage looking for anything (identifying clothes, distinctive features, license plate numbers) they can use to identify their Suppressive Persons (ie their critics).
:-/
Posting anonymously to prevent an IRL karma hit.
And they usually don't apply lie-detectors on you.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I'm going to be polite and assume you meant "the religion or the organization". It would not be cool to protest Christianity, but it is PERFECTLY okay to protest Westboro Baptist Church. By the same vein, it's not cool even among Anons to insult Scientology itself - but the CHURCH of Scientology (as opposed to the Freezone)?
Omeg La. Rofl Leh.
It seems so loose nit that just about anyone could claim to be part of anonymous. It's hardly an organisation. More the name of a movement. A bit like Lolcat or rick-rolling or any of other countless memes.
>They're about one step above the average 4-channer.
Uhh... "Anonymous" IS a bunch of 4chan'ers. Or at least started there.
It's sometimes hard to seperate the two.
For example, protesting the Church of Mormon is to forget their holy book says that black people are black because of sin and they can become white with prayer. Freezone scilons are just that, free. They discard everything the church has to say about restricting freedoms and as such have a similar but yet distinctly different faith. Just like the sect of Mormonism founded by Joeseph Smith's relatives who broke with Brigham Young.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
"Denied, sir! You are the Mayor of Deniedsville! You are also teh suk. Get yourself a law degree, and a clue."
Baliff: "You've just been served!"
The court throw out the case because they couldn't prove that the individuals identified were explicitly connected to any illegal activities, not because they thought the activities were "OK".
Sydney protest footage here.
Actually, it is quite OK to mock the scientology "religion". It's even allowed to ridicule Christianity and Jesus.
There is nothing magical about religion that makes it exempt from attack and ridicule.
It is NOT good that you can't attack something because it is a "religion" and would ONLY for that reason deserve respect. People's deeply held beliefs are not OK just because they are deeply held beliefs, they can just as well be ridiculous, and wrong. The fact that you ridicule them isn't even necessarily respectless, not challenging people's delusions, and leaving them with these ridiculous beliefs can be much more respectless.
And before you ask, yes, I'm a religious man, and I wouldn't mind at all if you mocked and attacked my religion.
I'm not Christian, but I don't see much reason to attack Christianity as a whole. I do occasionally challenge some denominations and churches, or just single people's interpretation.
Scientology on the other hand, I mock completely. You can say dianetics is the basics of the religion, and the church is a seperate thing. I don't thing I have to tell you why I attack the church. So that leaves dianetics. I see no reason I couldn't mock it, it's just pseudoscientific psychological nonsense. It's a lot of stupid ideas and conclusions mixed with some interesting ideas. It's not worthy of respect just because it's claimed to be religious.
(I claim this post is a basic religious text of my religion, it represents my deeply held religious beliefs. It was directly inspired by God and therefor it's content is unchallengable religious dogma, and absolute TRUTH. You cannot deny it.)
I've been on the net since gopher was cool and I'll tell you that the Scientology virus is the *worst* infection it's ever gotten. The hell with RIAA or the MPAA, they've done nothing compared to the trampling of net ideals the Scientology jerks have done.
They started by taking down anon.penet.fi, and they've been getting worse every year. The hell with all their supposed abuses, and cult like activity. It's messing with the geek stuff that pisses me off.
Get off my f*ckn net! On my f*ckn net we don't tolerate: censorship, copyright abuse, trademark abuse, bogus DMCA notices, intimidating lawyer letters, or stripping our anonaminity for no good reason.
People have been scared to fight back for nearly 20 years. No more!
* Posting anon not because it's cool, but because these jerks still scare me enough not to use my nick.
No. Non-violent, lawful protest is the best way to go about it. If you start harassing members of the CoS personally, you are no better than they are and, more importantly, you would lose an important defence in court: that you have the right to peaceful protest. If that's all you are doing, legally they can't touch you.
As soon as you start harassing them, you lose that important benefit. This is why the protests were strictly peaceful and calm. If anything, a peaceful protest hurts them more because there's nothing they can do about it, and it looks to the world like the Scientologists are unable to defend their "Church"'s system from a bunch of people from the internet.
True, but they're above average. Also, while this started with *chans, it has indeed expanded beyond just them.
Because if you were a bit more "neutral" and at least had a look at the web sites of anonymous (enturbulation.org i think) you would have read that on their FAQ they EXPLICITLY require all protest to be peaceful and all remain on the legal side. If there is any death threat that can only be from idiot. Or maybe from the scientology itself , as they are known in the past to have sent THEMSELVES bomb threat, and PLANTED evidence at the home of an author (see paulette cooper WIKI operation freakout). Did I mention operation snowwhite (see wiki) ? I can only think of one things : you are a scientologist troll...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Photograph them. Follow them. Follow them home and photograph them entering and leaving their houses. Keep shouting "Murderer!" at them, if you can. Harass them. Make their lives hell.
For every one person you can find to do this, the CoS can find five who have many more years experience of behaving like this and getting away with it. And the people who the CoS find won't stop at following you home and photographing you.
Please don't be an idiot (or literally The Devils Advocate) and allow Scientology to continue their ludicrous claim of being a religion.
Without a clear disclaimer Religion and Scientology don't even belong in the same sentence, as a minimum it'd be bad grammar.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Eventually the Scilons can't keep it up and it'll collapse.
You can't know much about how religions work then..
Did you know for example that it now appears that early Christians, far from being blamed for Rome burning, weren't even considered relevant, and many 'confessed' and were punished simply in order to obtain their martyrdom?
This was a big deal for them, since it meant all sorts of rewards and stuff in heaven. Apparently the Roman administration weren't at all keen, but a confession is a confession, so they were executed.
The point is, religions, even really stupid ones, thrive on the kind of treatment that would make normal folk think twice about carrying on.
Yes, since that removes him from the CoS "soldiers" who appear to have moderated down various posts in the thread...
The only reason the Scientologists aren't getting away with it is that they're small fry; they don't have enough members infiltrated into the media and government to really do any big damage, like. . , throw national elections and start wars, for instance. --Not that they shouldn't be called out for what they are, mind you. Better to nip these things in the bud before they take over the universe. Too bad Christianity, Judaism and Islam weren't invented when there was an internet around to help out in the pruning. --Of course, if they had been knocked out of the game early, the PTB would simply have distributed some fliers with Buddha or somebody on a cross and warped all of his followers until they became the army of gun-toting lunatic sheep you need in order to keep the world inflamed.
This whole planet is like one giant cartoon show with bad punch lines and dead batteries in the channel flipper.
-FL
You are welcome on my lawn.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's actually L. Ron Hitler.
Please give me a list of the really "smart" ones, the ones based on truth and integrity, rather than lies, superstition and greed.
You got me..
Actually, note that I said really stupid ones. My default position is that all religions are stupid, or at the very least anachronistic in modern times. They served their purpose in prehistory (holding Egypt together for several millennia), but we just don't need such social control systems any more.
They persist because they give some people a means to power which otherwise they would not have, while to others they give a framework within which they can at least claim to understand the world/universe.
Both reasons provide more than enough motivation to disregard the reality, i.e that they are worshiping an imaginary friend, whose proof of existence, even if it were true, is only available via a process of chinese whispers from thousands of years ago.
The scienos operate their own prison and slave labor camp system, where their elite Sea Org members who step out of line get sent to be rehabilitated by labor at the RPF camps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_Project_Force . And though not all of their labor "rehab" projects keep them prisoner by lock and key, they often coerce their prisoners into staying by blackmail, using the massive files of confessions they accumulate via auditing sessions, and "freeloader's debt," where they get retroactively charged for all the auditing they received for free, which often amounts to tens of thousands of dollars worth.
In the 70's, they infiltrated the US government using over 5,000 of their agents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_snow_white.
Although this effort was uncovered, leading to their secret take-over by elements within the IRS who operate the whole racket for profit behind the scenes (which many people don't know about) their infiltration of France was successful to this day.
Earthlink is a front company for the Church of Scientology. So is Helio, the cell phone company. Google "Scientology front companies" for a shocking list; they are constantly trying to spy on and infiltrate and subvert whatever they can with no regards for ethics but the advancement of their own power.
Make sure you be careful: they have cameramen staked out at public transit locations to try to photograph people with their masks off; they'll try to match you by your clothing, identify you, and harass you to no end. Some guys in London found out the hard way. Their practice is always to stay under the threshold of proof. If they can throw a brick through your window and if you can't prove they did it, they'll do that.
They're planning on disrupting the protests with staged violence by anons. Make sure you catch it all on camera if you attend.
Religion also offer hope for people, especially regarding the afterlife. Also, most modern religions are based on the idea of charity/peace/social harmony/etc (some interpretations may vary from this). [/Devil's Advocate].
On the flip side of the coin, religion is also a powerful method of control (as you pointed out). Atheists are probably the most important element, as they provide a strong, effective safeguard against any exploitation. For this reason, I think that in a perfect world, religion and atheism shouldn't be in conflict. Moderate religion requires atheists (and moderate sensible theists should realise this), and moderate atheists have no natural quandary** with religion - science doesn't merit it's claims on their popularity.
** If there weren't mitigating factors, such as socially/legally enforced one-size-fits-all morality. YMMV.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Let's compare the bible and Battlefield Earth. One is a disjointed and confusing work of cult propaganda. The other is Battlefield Earth.
Scientology is a lightweight compared to Synanon in its heyday in the early 70's. It went from a respectable drug program to a wacky cult. Everyone was compelled to shave their head and they were also compelled to change sex partners every night and then the next day report on what it was like.
These are the people who put rattlesnakes in the LA DA's mailbox. I think the Synanon founder was sent to prison for attempted murder on that one.
They also at one time had over 100 attorneys working for them and would sue anyone just like Scientology. They even won a lawsuit for defamation or libel against Hurst Publishing. It had never been achieved before. They had a tactic where in lawsuits they would depose people for hours asking them stupid questions like "what has the consistancy of your stool been lately?"
Just wait. Scientology will eventually get nutty enough to do something similar to the rattlesnake bit and then they are done for.
where is the "FairGame" tag ?
Look. Some of us have been battling Scientology online since 1994. They are not the fucking rotary club. They are the largest cult in the world and they kill people. They extort their members for all the money they can get so as to finance lawsuits against anyone who points out that they are the largest cult in the world and that they kill people.
They were also the first ones to use the courts to try and get a web page taken down. Depending on who you ask, that may or may not be worse than the fact that they are the largest cult in the world and they kill people.
check out this firehose story, and click the + top left to give it your support so the /. editors write it up!
;o)
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=573326 "Church of Scientology violates Federal Law"
You'd never guess who might be voting THAT one down
There is nothing magical about religion that makes it exempt from attack and ridicule.
It is NOT good that you can't attack something because it is a "religion" and would ONLY for that reason deserve respect. People's deeply held beliefs are not OK just because they are deeply held beliefs, they can just as well be ridiculous, and wrong. The fact that you ridicule them isn't even necessarily respectless, not challenging people's delusions, and leaving them with these ridiculous beliefs can be much more respectless.
I agree with your post. I assume you live in the US. Since the majority of the Slashdot seems to be there. I found it interesting because it touched an issue that is hot right now in The Netherlands. Where there is a law that makes an offense to mock religious belief. People are right now, trying to strike it down, but the "Christian parties" are against.
Since the prime minister of the country belongs to one of these Christian parties, it is still uncertain whether this will work out.
I found it quite funny to discover that, since it makes ridiculously hypocritical all the talk about having Mohammed in comic cartoons that took place in Europe. I mean, everybody was "pro" support for freedom of speech, but now two major political dutch parties (including the prime minister) seem to see this law as an entirely different story.
Funny, eh?
You can find a very detailed explanation here. Basically, questions like what is scientology, what is the e-meter, and last minute news about scientology, can be found there.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
You've given no compelling reason why these are sacred cows. Religions are, in addition to many other things, supposedly guides for life. Why is in "not cool" to attack this guidance being offered?
which makes them different from Hal Turner how?
Well, perhaps not that many. But if you look at their history of harassment of Paulette Cooper, the author, for whom Mary Sue Hubbard and her personnel got convicted for planting fake bomb threats to discredit Paulette, you get the idea of how far they will go. It's a bad game to play, because it lets them pretend that you really are evil for harassing them and plotting against them.
This troubles me about "Anonymous". Threatening a vindictive bully with vindictive bullying can just encourage them.
What are you calling the other group of "both groups"? Critics of Scientology? Or everyone else in the world?
Talking about the real stuff, not hokey "Crystals and Magic Mantras" crap.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
No, Anons stated goal is the exposure/downfall of Scientology as a business. More specifically the church itself and the Religious technology center.
They don't really give a damn if you want to believe in the bullshit. They just don't like how people have to pay to get to see the bullshit.
You mad
The anon raids are against the church as an organization, not individual members themselves. Anon offers no opinion on the actual belife,, they just don't like business side of the church.
You mad
One has been made into a bad movie, and the other has been made into a bad movie with John Travolta.
Up your nose with a rubber hose...
"The point is, religions, even really stupid ones, thrive on the kind of treatment that would make normal folk think twice about carrying on."
That's the "Us vs. Them" mentality that every good cult^H^H^H^Hreligion has to install in its members. Once they have that, they have something worth fighting for and the people feel a sense of power since they are now directly involved with the outcome of the world. The polarizing effect of this mentality thrives under criticism since everything you could possibly say negative about the cult^H^H^H^Hreligion is considered a natural part of what any infidel will say about it.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
The hope goes both ways, it'll also work for pacifying a populace by promising that by suffering they'll go to heaven, making them less likely to rectify that suffering (especially when it's caused by people in power).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Strange, the first thing that comes to my mind when reading "us vs them" is "Democrats and Republicans"...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I once used to agree with your view on religion as well. However your view lacks many other aspects that you really need to look at. Before you can throw religion to the curves maybe you should study religion a bit more from a sociology point of view. You will find that religion is not only empowering of the "leader" but empowering of the members. Check out the works of Weber. Yes it will be difficult to accept that religion is needed however that is where all the studies point.
Do what the British did and register yourself as a "jedi".
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Sheesh, I know they are one of the punching bags of /., and deservedly so, but can't you get the nutbag's name right?
It's L. Ron Hubbard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard
Wisdom... not following a religion completely made up by this Nebraska guy who we hardly even know. I find it difficult to follow a "church" that remains nothing more than the result of a bet between L. Ron Hubbard and Issac Asimov. Did L. Ron win the bet by creating a religion? Or did he create a cult? Is there a difference?
Well, it wouldn't be 'cool' in the James Dean/rockstar sense because it's so utterly overdone. Yawn. Protest christianity. It's such an utterly safe and mundane practice that doing it means nothing.
No christian churches label you an 'oppressive person' and send their office of special affairs after you. No christian churches will rile up their congregation over real or percieved insults. You won't see them screaming in the streets, holding signs that say 'death to those who insult christianity.'
You won't even get punched by a believer if you stand in front of a church screaming jesus was a zombie.
Protesting christianity is about as cool as yelling at the old dog laying in the corner because he dug a hole in the back yard. The offense you protest is barely worth mentioning and the dog isn't going to be affected by your protest enough to even get up.
Now, is it 'cool' to protest christianity, as in 'okay'? Sure. There's just no point.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Japan's history is replete with examples of Buddhist sects battling each other, including Zen Buddhism.
There's a pilgrimage around Shikoku visiting 88 numbered temples plus a dozen or two unnumbered temples (I did parts of it by bicycle a few years back). There are two temples claiming to be #30, with the government choosing one then the other depending on the political mood. Other temples have waged war with each other over the years (the pilgrimage started 1200 years ago, I think)
Infuriate left and right
Personally, I'd like to see ALL religions lose their tax write off. They have all become soo political that I don't understand why the religion of ? should enjoy tax benefits when others pay. If the donors don't get to write it off, I suspect funding for all religions might drop like a rock. I also think the churches should have to pay prop taxes etc. Most these "dream" churches have millions of bucks in property, buildings and in the case of the mega's, planes, schools, etc. Let them pay like for profit. I can't tell the difference between non-profit/for-profit anymore except a couple of "praise god's".
As another poster states, Buddhism and many of the other Indian and Far East religions would be up there for integrity and non-greed. I would have said Taoism which has less legacy in the stack and enables somewhat more open implementation and criticism. Many of the tribal animism religious frameworks lack the interfaces to express greed.
Depending on how one defines truth, lies or superstition, all of the major religions could be viewed as being deficient in the scientistic sense of cause and effect. I would argue that the sanctioned availability and relative accessibility of the entire runtime documentation set to the lay practitioner, combined with the freedom to implement appropriately localized versions without impediment from the issuing bureaucracy, would provide sufficient conditions for a religion to be considered truthful in practice.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
They served their purpose in prehistory [...], but we just don't need such social control systems any more.
;)
Yep, gotta love this enlightening age of ours where every one takes care of each others, politely circulates around with smiles and eager to help you if you have car troubles or need to know the time. Everyone has a meaningful life. No more social problems, poverty or hunger.
Funny thing is, it's after having a Scientologist boss (applying personality-crushing method in the workplace) that I realized that perhaps Christianity has a lot of bad in it's history, but also a lot of good. I rather have a Cristian neighbor, friend or boss than a scientologist any day.
Even many Agnostics (like me) has a life goal to amass money and power (big jobs), they evaluate life thru big houses and what you drive.
I think you are wrong saying "we just don't need such social control systems any more". Do you really think this is because of the way we teach kids in school and at home? Get out a little, try to get to the level of the poor, the lost, the uneducated and you might realize they are looking for meaning. Leaving churches pushes a lot of people into worst things like Scientology.
My father in law is a big religious man, extremely kind and generous, and often get exploited for it (never refusing to do an unpaid service), but he is a very good man at the core. A few years ago I would have laughed at him, but today I realize he does more to create a better world than I do. His values transfered into his daughter is why I am with her. (Even if I still hate to stand in church).
Truth is, their is good and bad everywhere, religious or not; life is what we make of it as a social group, and the current education system we have does not create a decent social environment.
Note that I am not offering any solutions, that's not for a few paragraph on a forum
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Annals_(Tacitus)/Book_15#44
although I'm not clear what he means by 'all who pleaded guilty', whether that refers to pleading guilty to setting to the fires or just pleading guilty to being a Christian.
Discordianism. WE at least know we're all full of shit, and revel in it.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
First off, Scientology isn't a Church. They charge admission, and they're a for-profit organization. They're not recognized as a real religion in Belgium, Russia, Canada, Greece, France, Germany, the United Kingdom. It's respected here in the US because anyone with enough money to purchase a free ride gets one in this society. CoS have loads of power.
I was talking about the Catholic Church with someone the other day, and they were arguing that you can't condemn the religion as a whole. I maintain, however, that if the Pope gets to tell you you're not Catholic, it's organized enough to criticize as a whole.
What I think you CAN'T criticize is an individual's drive for spiritual growth. If their religion involves slandering people and destroying their lives (CoS) or protecting child molestors (Catholic Church), then please, criticize them. In other words, while the person's spiritual practice may be above reproach, the dogma is just a set of ideas and ideals just like any atheist would have. For example:
(I'm not really picking sides, just giving examples)
Religious - God says you should be nice to poor people
Nonreligious - The best interest of humanity dictates you should be nice to poor people
Religious - Abortion is wrong because God says so
Nonreligious - Abortion is wrong because it's unnatural to kill your own progeny
I think that what people call religious belief is just dogma. And atheists have dogma too. If dogma is above reproach, we are in a world of shit, my friend.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Funny; we have similar laws here in the Australian state of Victoria. Christians generally oppose them, largely because it has made it harder for them to state their reasonably-held opinions of Muslims. (I mean, if you believed in one God the Father, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, and who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, then surely you think Muslims are wrong, don't you?)
It's worth noting that free speech doesn't exist here except inasmuch as it's politically difficult to pass laws banning certain forms of speech. The state of Victoria has a charter of rights which merely states that the Parliament must consider such issues, and the Australian federal government has nothing even remotely similar.
Yet we join forces invading Iraq and Afghanistan saying we're giving them freedom.
This experience has cemented the view in my mind that there's no such thing as "god-given" or "constitutional" rights; the only rights we have are the ones we make sure we keep.
(To our credit, we were one of very few democracies that made it through the first half of the twentieth century without a disruption to the process — including changes of government (whichever party was in power in (September) 1914, 1917, 1940 and 1943 all lost the election); even the UK suspended elections.)
Look out!
It would not work. To be fair, people have failed to enforce this law for quite a while. The law itself is from the 1930s. In the 60s somebody had described God as a donkey or something, and how he had had sex with the donkey/God.
They tried to prosecute this guy, and failed. My point is that the very same people that so strongly defended people's right to mock Islamic faith, on the grounds that freedom of speech comes first, are right now trying to keep this law as valid.
The wikipedia has a good resume of the story but in dutch http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godslastering#Wet_inzake_smalende_godslastering_.281932.29/ and this is the google translation of it http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnl.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FGodslastering%23Wet_inzake_smalende_godslastering_.281932.29&langpair=nl%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8
They served their purpose in prehistory (holding Egypt together for several millennia), but we just don't need such social control systems any more.
I'm not so sure about that. Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms. The most basic (lie, cheat, steal)are easy enough. Some of the less obviously explained moral codes are both very important and not easy to explain the practicality thereof. (Envy, gluttony, etc.)
Humans are not fundamentally morally superior now as compared to 5,000 years ago. The only thing that has provably changed in that time is the societal indoctrination methods, and churches are the majority of those methods.
Churches, God, and Sin are ways of imposing codes of behavior that have been show to be successful over several millennia. The concepts of 'God' and 'Sin' are necessary to impose these codes of behavior, because you can't argue with God and you better do what he tells you.
If you were once again a child, or once again a teen, or once perhaps still are, how often do you recall arguing with your parents over some matter? That you were unconvinced by their stance?
They had at least two decades more of life experience than you to learn life lessons, and perhaps you might remember they were correct much more often than they were wrong.
But you still argued with them, because you didn't understand the value of their experience and you had to learn some of the same lessons the hard way, just as they did.
Well, assigning the most basic of these life lessons as commandments from God, with whom you may not argue, and who will punish you eternally for consistently failing to obey him, removes them from the 'negotiable' list completely. Do not lie. Do not steal. Do not murder. Don't try to screw your neighbors wife. Don't make babies with someone you're not committed to. Don't be envious, etc.
Any one of these things, when broken, will gain the perpetrator a momentary advantage that is plain for anyone to see. In the long run all are detrimental to both the perpetrator and the society around him. Convincing everyone that God would burn you in hell for eternity for doing any of them made folks decide that the momentary gain wasn't worth the fire.
Much less obvious is the long term benefit to society when everyone obeys these rules. Both explaining the full logic of why that is so, and getting the student to accept your and societie's experience is a damn near impossible task with an empty slate of a child or a hormone-driven teenager.
Further, there are countless adults who fail to grasp the utility of the religious rules and traditions we live by. If they are religious, they may yet follow the rules and their lives will be satisfactory, and their impact on society a net positive.
If they are not religious, and do not accept that those traditions and rules exist for reasons they do not grasp, then they will behave as they see fit- leaving ruin in their wake, as lessons learned hundreds or thousands of years ago are tossed out as the baby with the bathwater.
So, allow me to try to summarize if you've made it this far:
Religion is a way of passing down millennia of hard-learned lessons in a way that leaves no room for argument.
I would go into the lessons besides 'don't lie, cheat, murder or steal', except you might argue with me about those topics, proving my point while convincing yourself I'm anachronistic.
Western civilization lies atop a massive carefully-built structure of unnatural behaviors that enable the tremendous intellectual and material wealth we enjoy today.
That behavioral structure is so carefully crafted and re-enforced that we forget that it is unnatural, and in forgetting that, we disparage the tools with which it was carefully built and must be maintained.
We are not naturally better than folks 5,000 years ago. We are only better because of the methods our ancestors derived to make us internalize their hard-learned lessons early in life.
Incidentally I do believe in God, but that doesn't prevent me from seeing the anthropology.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
> Where there is a law that makes an offense to mock religious belief.
For a secretive cult like Scientology, that sort of thing is a two-edged sword. Basically, they only get the protection if they're willing to go to court and claim that they hold a particular tract as a religious belief. I'm sure you can think of which "stories" to start with...
c.
Log in or piss off.
Exactly, protesting Christianity has been in vogue of late.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Whenever I complain about lack of privacy in modern Europe, people have often said abuses like you describe would never happen, but if it did, OOOOHHH, there would be so much trouble, OOOOHHH, governments would fall OOOOHHH.
Well, when it became public that all European financial transactions logs were being leaked to the US. There was not that much of a big deal, there was a judicial order for it to stop (from Belgium's supreme court), they didn't stop, a point from which the issue was said to move to a "legal grey area".
I went to see the movie out of the curiosity of watching a train wreck. I never read the book, but, one part of the movie that I found sorta funny was how humans who barely knew how to work fire learned enough in flight simulators to fly combat in Harrier jets. For those of you who don't know the Harrier is the most difficult fighter to master mostly due to the complexity of its V/STOL nature. Also many critics regard it as being unstable and prone to breakdowns. It has the highest fatality/loss rate of any jet in the military with almost 1/3 of Harriers being lost to accidents. With over 45 fatalies in mostly noncombat conditions, the Harrier has been named by some as the Widow-maker.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Not the wacky California fake Zen, the real thing (which can be hard work). Greed is contrary to Zen. Lies are contrary to Zen. Superstition is contrary to Zen. Personal truth and integrity, and the search for direct perception of the core of things - that's Zen.
I would also add the Episcopalians, the Reform Jews, the Sufis, the Quakers and the Unitarians, all of which have a history of attracting very intelligent people, but Zen was the first.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Here are your two options with Christianity:
1. Eat the body and blood of (or be saved by faith in) a man that died and came back from the dead, and was born from a virgin, and the dad was some almighty creator who is also his son will bring you an eternal happy afterlife?
2. Spend eternity in hell suffering.
I'd say that such a world view is worth mocking just as much as the CoS.
You assume that these rules are compiled with the purpose of benefiting most of us. That is not necessarily true. Many religious rules (or civil laws) we have were written to, for instance, maintain status quo, which in many cases is nothing short of "Cleptocracy" (e.g. "I, the king/high priest, and my buddies will take as much as we can from you the peasants").
The book Collapse by Jared Diamond is filled with data about systems of belief being drafted with lots of different purposes.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
The case of wacko Jacko supports the Nation of Islam belief that white people were created from black people by a mad scientist.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
The reason I ask is, 'cause you kinda make a similar argument.
C'mon, this one's a no-brainer. Take the seven deadly sins for example.
Every single one of them, you're probably better off not doing.
So there's an "evolutionary advantage" to behaving a certain way. Those individuals who behave "ethically" generally have an advantage over those who don't. Now some of those situations are debatable, like, for example, in the short term, if we're in the middle of a famine, there's an (at least in the short-term) advantage to me if I steal your dinner.
However, a community/population/tribe that behaves "ethically" has an ENORMOUS advantage over a tribe of sociopathic anarchists (for example). So those tribes that behave in a way that we'd call ethically, when they go to war with that hypothetical tribe of sociopathic anarchists they kick ass and take wallets.
Nothing mysterious here, just natural selection/evolution. There's no reason to assume that religion is necessary for a society to develop an ethical code.
Hold the train there, we might be "morally superior" to our ancestors from 3,000 years ago when armies would invade and slaughter entire populations (although I suspect that the residents of Dresden or Hiroshima or Fallujah might argue with you on that claim), how 'bout comparing ourselves to our pre-agriculture ancestors?
Pre-agriculture societies generally tend to have values more similar to what we'd call today "democratic values" like equality and freedom and all that good stuff. Plus, they generally won't do things like let someone die for lack of medical care if somebody lacks funds the way we will today.
I guess what I'm saying is, given the history of the 20th century, when 100 million humans were killed by other humans, (about 60% of them civilians to boot) you're on very shaky ground to assume that humans in our current form are "morally superior" to anything.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
My first introduction to their practices was a Time magazine article my friend dug up from 1991, when I was trying to figure out what they were all about. It won an award, and is worth a look for those folks to don't understand the vitriol. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,972865,00.html
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
Well there is Buddhism. As an Atheist I always thought of it as the only religion I could follow as it doesn't force you to believe in a creator.
You'd better substantiate how they "kill" people.
Limina.Log
"Religions are like farts. Yours is ok, but everybody else's stink." Paraphrased from something I heard a kid say while my parents were watching Picket Fences.
I'm confused, what I think you're saying is "People follow the rules more easily today because they think god is going to send them to hell"?
Well that doesn't make sense, I would say less people today believe in god than they did before. Although I would go on to say that we're morally better off now than we were back then. We don't stone people to death, we don't chop limbs off thieves, we don't have slavery anymore.
You also seem to assume that people are still afraid of the fire. I don't think that's true anymore, especially considering the church sex scandals. If the clergy isn't afraid of going to hell, then who still is? Plus think of all the religious people who end up cheating on their spouses, although what's morally wrong with having sex with multiple women? According to biblical moral codes it's a sin, but if my wife doesn't care that I have sex with the neighbors wife where's the harm?
I would say that religion was created to keep people in line (they were more easily afraid back then so when you told them they were going to hell for sinning they really believed it.) Although as a moral code for today it's no longer working. Especially considering that the pope just released a new list of sins, and the church is guilty of at least two of them (excessive wealth and widening the gap between the rich and the poor.)
No, you don't. You can easily have moral dogma without religious dogma. Didn't your parents ever tell you to do something "Because I said so!"
At a certain point, you do, because the person will outgrow "what Momma said", but people can also outgrow "what God said." So you'll need to understand in practical terms, anyway.
Envy and gluttony are easier to explain, I think, than lying, cheating, and stealing. Envy is just going to make you unhappy, or cause you to do something stupid, especially in the case of a woman, where there are plenty of women you could chase who aren't already in a relationship.
Gluttony is even easier -- if you are a glutton, you'll become fat, and you probably don't want to be fat -- if only out of vanity.
But what about lying? Or cheating? The only way this can work is if you can make a case for the Golden Rule, which is tricky. Since you seem to be talking about indoctrinating children, they're not going to get empathy until about age six or so.
And stealing only works because of the possibility of jail time -- again, without the Golden Rule.
Not at all. My parents did that to me, both as a child and as a teenager, and I turned out alright.
Now, they did start with saying it's "bad", but no connection was ever made with religion. The only things that they told me to do because God told me to were religious things -- my Bar-Mitzvah, for instance -- and even then, an alternate explanation was ready (tradition) in case I questioned the religion.
But seriously, even explaining the consequences to society is absurdly easy. "What if everyone littered?" And if they don't listen to you about that, they won't listen to you about God, either.
And considering how some of these lessons are no longer relevant -- and, indeed, some of them have been dropped completely -- I still don't see it.
One example: Pork is not kosher, perhaps because of certain -- worms, I think? -- which used to be a real problem. In the modern world, we can keep most of our food reasonably clean, so I see no reason to continue that tradition. But the problem is, since the only reason we got was "God said so," we don't really know if that was the reason -- so the only way to preserve that knowledge is to also preserve the ignorance ("The world is flat! ...Ok, it's round, but it's the center of the universe!") because, after all, who are you to decide what part of what God teaches is false?
And that's another problem with religion -- why not just pass down the lesson with the reason? After all, if you say "Do as I say because God said so, and no arguing," you've lost as soon as the person decides to argue -- which means that those who leave religion are almost certainly going to lose a few of those lessons.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You assume that these rules are compiled with the purpose of benefiting most of us. That is not necessarily true. Many religious rules (or civil laws) we have were written to, for instance, maintain status quo, which in many cases is nothing short of "Cleptocracy" (e.g. "I, the king/high priest, and my buddies will take as much as we can from you the peasants").
The book Collapse by Jared Diamond is filled with data about systems of belief being drafted with lots of different purposes.
Can you point out where I defended every religion, every where, at every time? Of course some of them are sh*t. A thinking adult should be able to discern which practices were a net benefit to society, and which practices just screwed the lay people.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
"Well, assigning the most basic of these life lessons as commandments from God, with whom you may not argue"
While you would look mad arguing with your imaginary deity, you can still do it.
The Church of Scientology's tallest building... an old skyscraper in Philadelphia, is the site being protested right now.
A good representation of every type of hipster art student in Philadelphia has shown up.
I live in the 13 story apartment tower next door in the pictures (where it says Deena's Shoes), so I get to hear shouting while I'm trying to eat my lunch and play XBOX.
* Largest hospital system in the country, accounting for over 20% of visits in 20 states. 5.4 million patients, 100 million visits (15 million of them emergency room). Includes some amusing trivia like "treats more AIDS patients in NYC than anyone else"
* Largest non-governmental primary/secondary education provider in country. Educates about 2.5 million students (including about 320k non-Catholic kids), many of them poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Routinely outperforms local public schools, but subsidized almost entirely from those donors, not from the public purse.
* 9th largest charity in country is closely affiliated
* Second largest donor to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, after government.
* Various other accomplishments which you could fill a book with. Universities, museums, immigrant rights lawyering, food banks, conservation programs, urban renewal, subsidized housing, child care, adoption, foster homes, yadda yadda yadda.
That's just the Catholic Church. Yeah, some of the property the Church owns is worth gazillions because it was cheap to buy stuff in downtown Chicago over a hundred years ago. And the Church certainly isn't immune to mismanaging money. But would you really want to spite them just to win a few points against Scientology? And, non-trivial question, if you successfully caused the donations to the Catholic Church to drop like a rock, are you willing to pay to educate those kids, patch up those patients, and feed those hungry? Because all of them are going to end up backstopped by public assistance, and the bill for that goes to you, not to me.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Judaism and Christianity are very much at odds with the idea. "Treat everyone as if they were God himself" was preached from the beginning in Genesis. (For example, that man is made in "God's image" is the reason given for the prohibition against murder.) It's taught in the Mosaic temple rites if you know where to look and you know how they differ from the Egyptian temple rights that Israel was used to. (In Egyptian temple rights, priests served the gods. In Israel's, they performed exactly the same actions, but to serve each other.) Jesus taught from the Jewish scriptures. When he said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me," it was a restatement of this universal, timeless principle. The story of the Good Samaritan was a forceful illustration of this to people who Just Did Not Get It, and is still very much in use today among people who try to.
In other words, in Judaism and Christianity, there is no "Us" and "Them" - only "Us". The fact that you have missed this - especially with regards to Christianity - tells me you don't know much about practicing Christians or Jews.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Well, not anymore, anyway. I seem to recall this thing called the Spanish Inquisition. Nowadays no one expects it, but at one time it was the "office of special affairs" for the most prominent Christian church.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms.
You have to explain moral codes in practical terms anyway - at least for the rest of us. Assuming the existence of a powerful/all-powerful entity who created/may have created the universe doesn't make that entity a moral authority anybody has to listen to. The entity could be an asshole for instance or there may be rules or facts that entity is unaware of.
Religious rules have utility in social control all right - but that isn't a good thing. The world you describe is a pretty horrible one to me, where the ancients (prophets, believers, old social norms) have it figured it out as good as we are ever going to get. I see there is little or no room for social progress in your world.
Yes, and I obeyed since they were bigger than me, at least until I was out of their sight, after which I promptly ignored their words. You aren't bigger than me, so I would not bother even pretending to obey.
Anyway, this message chain is stupid. People usually behave because they have social instincts, with empathy and submitting to pack leader as the most important ones. Trying to derive moral codes is simply an attempt to rationalize the resulting behavior, to make it seem noble, rather than what it actually is: merely obeying your instincts.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That's only the half of it... You also have the clergy subtly teaching the congregation to trust the authority figures and what they say (preach), thus ingraining a sheeple mentality, not only into the congregation, but into society at large too. This is why the majority of the normal folk in the USA thinks:
[terrorist threats are everywhere*] = [gov't can be excluded from law to "protect us"]
( * Interestingly, this also comes from the gov't...)
So when the gov't starts to erode laws that protect the people's freedom(s), the sheeple look the other way, (heck, they'll support the gov't in doing it!) rather than carrying on.
(IMO) Religion is one of the top reasons critical thinking is less evident in the general population... (another being television, specifically news media)
Will draft for food...
>Churches, God, and Sin are ways of imposing codes of behavior that have
>been show to be successful over several millennia. The concepts of
>'God' and 'Sin' are necessary to impose these codes of behavior
The truth is that religion and morality have nothing to do with one another and never have. If they did, this would be a very different world considering how common religion is, and how uncommon morality is. Religions give lip service to morality, but the truth is it never goes any further than that.
If you consider most of the violence that's going on in the world right now, it is led by religious men preaching that murder and mayhem are good things. You can say that they don't represent the "true meaning" of their religion, or that their religion is different than your religion, but they are representative of how religion is practiced in the real world.
It's easy to be a saint in a rich country with police that *enforce* the law, when you don't really have a choice, and in those places you often see holy men positioning themselves as defending public morality (although what they consider public morality is often ridiculous). In regions of the world that are chaotic on the other hand, holy men are always the first to rally a mob and start some violence.
This is true of Islam, and of Christianity. No one who has studied any European history could claim that Christianity has promoted morality, or that it has ever been about anything more than power.
The true source of morality is reason, and the true source of public order is the law and the police force to enforce it. Without those two things, everything goes lord of the flies pretty quickly, whatever your religion is.
Buddhism?
Looking at the earlier post or the article summary would indicate that the other group calls themself "anonymous".
Very few religions are based on "lies". Many may be based on "falsehoods", but that's something else entirely.
You'll note that I did not include "atheism" in that list, not because it's not a religion, but because it is based on neither truth nor integrity, but rather arrogance and rebellishness.
For a secretive cult like Scientology, that sort of thing is a two-edged sword
we could start with
that should rile up the Christian Fundamentalists quit a bit
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Even a cleptocracy is preferable to chaos. It's easier to deal with a specific group of greedy bastards who maintain a body of laws (however imperfect) than what Hobbes referred to as the state of nature.
Dontcha think that maybe its a problem that alot of health care is done on the basis of a donation? Personally, I'd like to see health care as a citizen's right, like most other westernized countries.
Suffering will exist with or without religion.
M'personal spiritual beliefs compel me to try to ease some of that for those around me, while acknowledging that I can't save the world from suffering. No control freaks needed.
"Religion" does NOT have to be a power-mongering scam....
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
But if you have to be a thinking adult to determine what is a net benefit and what screws the lay people, then what purpose does the religion have? Your original argument seemed to be that they were sets of rules that thinking adults simply did not make this determination, rather accepting it as a net benefit because God cannot be argued with.
So, apply for tax status as a nonprofit and/or charitable organization.
Reserving a special tax category for churches places the government in the position of having to determine what is and what is not a legitimate church. A violation of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, IMHO. If a church cannot operate its charities as a nonprofit, then the tax code needs to be modified for all such organizations regardless of whether they profess beliefs in rocks, trees, space aliens, or imaginary old men with white beards.
Have gnu, will travel.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
I converted from atheism to Buddhism.
Boycott shampoo! Demand the REAL poo!
Not every agnostic evaluates their lives through money and wealth, they just see it as a means to freedom.
Cute, but registering as a pantheist or pandeist would be much more fun.
Oh heavens. Is that what they did in the movie?
I'm not enough of a masochist to willingly endure seeing Battlefield Earth as a movie. Experience has taught me many times there are amazingly few books that turn out even as good as the book. One strange example was a short story turned into a good short film "An occurence at Owl Creek Bridge". Then are the things where they really do use the book as the script (eg. The Last Unicorn and to a much lesser degree Harry Potter books). These are noteworthy exceptions. Usually things get bastardized in horrific ways (sigh... The Firm anyone or for a much more tragic SciFi example Starship Troopers).
But Battlefield Earth was clearly something that wasn't going to turn out good as a movie.
In essence, the entire concept was automated, accelerating training in a wide variety of subjects, not just flight simulators. A more worthy movie based parallel would be the accelerated, automated learning of physical fighting styles in the Matrix. If I remember correctly, the humans started being weasels in the sense that once they got going learning stuff they kept absorbing more and more and pestering their masters to get access to more and more stuff (in more subjects) ostensibly to help them do their job but really because they started figuring out they could probably eventually rebel if they were prepared.
Isn't that a bit like saying we aren't fundamentally more educated today compared to 5,000 years ago, that the only thing that has changed is societal indoctrination methods and schools are the majority of those methods. You are saying that if you took away social structures, human beings would revert to some primal morality, so there's a presumption that there are two things here -- humans and society -- that are basically distinct and separate, humans are "natural" and society and therefore morality is external and "unnatural". Perhaps this is an artifact of your religious commitment to the idea of basically sinful humanity, but I think this distinction is a flawed one.
You've said humans haven't changed, society has. But humans are fundamentally social animals, and we have been for hundreds of thousands of years. Isn't it strange to speak of "unnatural" society when the tools to interact with other humans and form bonds -- language, empathy, etc. -- are built into our genes? How much more natural can it get? Unlike most other animals, a human infant is helpless at birth, and can't survive without the intervention and co-operation of its parents, and where we find rare cases of infants being raised outside of human society (feral children), we find that they aren't even recognizably human. So to ask the question "What would humans be without society?" is to fantasize about a radically different creature that could not and does not exist, like saying "What if lions didn't live in a pride?" Well, they wouldn't be lions then. If I can give a completely ridiculous analogy, it is also like asking "What if humans didn't have heads?" and pointing out how terrible this would be because then we couldn't eat. This is true, among other things, but it doesn't point to the inherent unnaturalness of human heads.
But if we should accept the naturalness and benefit of society and religion, we must also accept that secularization is yet another natural moral development, going one step beyond what religion can offer. There are two apparently competing claims here, and we must dissolve the antagonism. On one hand, there is no doubt that religion prevents some people from being immoral in some respects, but at the same time, religion enables certain immoral actions that can only be corrected by the broader, deeper morality of the secular paradigm. At least one way of resolving this apparent disagreement is by pointing out that there is a developmental logic in both the personal and social domains such that the traditional religious moral structure is appropriate, and perhaps at some point they graduate beyond that to a superior secular alternative, which is superior in the sense that it preserves what is right its predecessor and builds on it to correct its errors.
"It's Dot Com!"
I met Paulette Cooper in the mid-'80s after she wrote an article about COS for Reader's Digest. The Scientologists made her life miserable, and even my tangential association with her led to problems for me that, I suspect, were caused by the COS. The harassment and persecution of her would be called terrorism today.
That's not guaranteed
Christians are people too, and come in all flavors. Punching you for that kind of behavior would be against most of their principles...but people don't always follow their principles.
https://www.facebook.com/digitizeicm -- Show your support for the digitization of the Iron County Miner newspaper archiv
And decent poetry! If you'd like to really charm a date, the "Song of Solomon" is some pretty hot material, even if it is a bit risque for a first date.
wasn't your point that religious rules are great because they are accepted without reason? now you are telling us that we should use our heads and determine which ones are usefull to society? Great contradiction.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
The church IS the organization.
I believe you meant to say "beliefs" and instead typed "church".
The Church of Scientology is complete and utter garbage -- all of it.
The BELIEFS of Scientology? Also garbage -- but people can believe garbage if they want. Millions, billions of people believe all kinds of crazy things and call them religion. That's no big deal.
It's just when those crazy beliefs are used to justify awful abuses of people and of the law that it becomes a problem.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
OK
http://www.whyaretheydead.net/
I have a simple rule that I hold above all others. Always tell the truth. Religion claims to be the truth but won't back it up beyond saying you have to believe without proof.
If religion (any religion out of the thousands that exist or have existed) is a lie then it breaks rule number one and breaking that rule cancels out any other benefit it might have. Use all the long words and persuasive arguments you like but unless you can prove what you say is the truth you are pushing a lie. True or false, which is it?
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
You're a pretty clear thinker and have a decent grasp of some of the effects of religion, but I think you're incorrect in this statement, which presents this as the raison d'etre of religion
I strongly, strongly recommend you look up and read "Religion Explained" by Pascal Boyer. I think you'd get a lot out of it - I'd say I learned more from that book than from any other five or six books I've read in the last decade.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
They are finally told what Scientology is all about, then die of uproarious laughter?
Those would be the people who block traffic on Highway 52 so that their brothers and sisters leaving the meeting at the Chisholm Baptist church may exit the parking lot?
Or any number of similar behaviors from members of other Christian church members.
Seems a bit us vs them to me.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
For the record, you're mixing up a range of disparate incidents. The Christians most definitely were blamed by the imperial administration for the fire of Rome in 64 CE -- and, it is always possible, correctly. (Look, I'll even cite a source: Tacitus Annals 15.44.)
I'm willing to believe there were incidents of Christians fessing up just to become martyrs (in principle; since you don't cite any proximate sources I feel no obligation to think about it much), but only decades or centuries later, and certainly not in connection with that incident.
And what on earth do you mean by "it now appears"? Is there new evidence?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But they have occasionally been used to harass Muslim women; I think the case I saw in the press a few years ago was in or near Detroit (not surprising, since that's a heavily Muslim-immigrant area.) Of course, police don't hassle people for wearing ski masks there in the winter time...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The Islamic Council of Victoria sued a Christian group over things they said during a service; I don't know what the Muslims wanted to get out of it, but apparently five years later the result an agreement that everything was all happiness and roses. I'm not aware of any other attempt to sue under this law, but in this particular case the law was much more divisive then just letting religious people speak; after the Islamic Council began to sue Catch the Fire Ministries, various Christian groups turned up to Muslim services to try and find any possible cause for them to sue in response.
On the other hand, under federal law Albert Langer was sent to jail for describing a way to vote in federal elections that was valid at the time.
Look out!
David Weber? like Armageddon Reef
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
I would like to see you go try that outside of a babtist church in the south. Pictures would be appreciated.
I'm not so sure about that. Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms
You're making a common mistake in assuming that ancient gods were the same as the modern single god thing.
Gods back then were, by and large, manifestations of natural forces. You could be a right barstard, but if you paid tribute, it was all cool. There was no 'moral control', it was a means of helping the society cope with the world around them.
It's only modern delusionists (oh sorry, I meant religious types) who see god as in watching our every move and damning us if we do anything wrong.
This always struck me as odd when I was a kids. I mean, he creates the universe in all its vastness, oversees the creation and destruction of entire galaxies, but he's going to get pissed if I want to have sex before I'm married, or want to have sex with a woman someone else married? I'm sorry, but that doesn't make sense.
Sure, the other guy might get annoyed, but what would god care? Assuming he existed that is. Sounds pretty insignificant on the cosmic scale to me.
I blame Von Braun.
You can't take the sky from me...
Of course its a different issue. The Mohammad cartoons didn't offend the those in charge, thus they are free speech.
Why don't you wise up and compile your own religion from scratch?
You can include Jesus, Abraham, and even Mohammad, and you can even throw in a few other names of people who aren't very common knowledge, but I'll leave that kind of research to you.
There are plenty of people worldwide who don't use store bought religion. By labeling them wrongfully, you're being just as offensive as the "religions" you dislike.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
All I want to do is respond with tl;dr, but that was actually interesting so thanks.
655321
I don't know about the other westernized countries you're talking about, but in the United States, rights are special things, not granted by the government. We see rights as given to us by our Creator... oops, sorry, I forgot I shouldn't say that... we see rights as natural things, like sunlight. Now, a government can come along and block out our sunlight, a la Mr. Burns, but that is an infringement on our sunlight; the government does not actually provide sunlight.
So, if the government were to disappear, Americans would still have their natural rights. We would have our right to free speech, to bear arms, to freely associate, etc. But if the government provided health care, and said government disappeared, so would the health care.
(I know, not all Americans see rights as I have described. I have used this as a rhetorical device.)
Dark Reflection
You are welcome on my lawn.
Maybe so, but it also helps to turn it into something I can communicate, and maybe convince others of.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I know there are a million of these, but this one is actually is pretty funny... (maybe not highest prodcution quality but it's pretty well cut the further you get along)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SJWj4i5HVU
A kleptocracy is not preferable to chaos. Kleptocracy is stable and can last indefinately, while chaos is highly unstable. Any time chaos occurs, it quickly breaks down into some form of order, as it easy for thinking people to make order out of chaos. Therefore, there is certainty hope for change. I'd much rather pick brief chaos followed by hope rather than be stuck in a kleptocracy my whole life.
where is it written that you can't argue with God? People say it, but I recall in the book of Job, that he does in fact argue with God. Abraham bargains with God to save the city where Lot lives. Read your bible before you start pontificating. I'm just using the Bible as an example because I come from a Western, specifically evangelical Christian upbringing. Context matters to me, but it's other people that say you can't argue with God.
Sure, you can argue with God, but will that really work out? I rarely even win arguments with myself!
... or have a heart attack when they realize how much money they pissed away finding out.
Well if the US experience with "flag burning" is any indication. Expect the number of Mohamed-like cartoons about Christianity and the number of Christian tasteless jokes to explode to the stratosphere. That's what happened with the American Flag in the US, once idiots like Pat Buchanan wanted to ban "flag burning", everybody who disagreed with him burned, peed on, and shit on -- theirs. And then, when they ran out of American flags to burn, they started making little mock-up copies of the Constitution so they could do the same to it (which ironically, also seemed to upset the Pat Buchanan idiots -- even more).
>And atheists have dogma too.
"And some atheists have dogma too" there fixed for you.
I note that in your example of nonreligious dogma, the abortion example was quite contrived: 'unnatural' isn't much of a justification!
So apparently it isn't that easy to find nonreligions dogma..
Happened to be in London yesterday and grabbed a few shots of the protest. http://gallery.amphetamine.org.uk/v/Scientology+Protest_+London+2008-03-15/
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
I was going to partly agree with you - as I recalled that the vast majority of people have such paltry IQs and couldn't reason their way out of a wet bag. For them - yeah, maybe they do need some artificial emotionally based fairy-tale construct to constrain their behaviours as adults.
But then I completely convinced myself you are totally wrong, mostly with my second argument below:
> Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms.
EVERYTHING can be derived from one single easily understandable principle - "You are free to do what you want, except for those things which would trample someone else's freedoms." All our 'morals' and rules are derived in a way as to maximize happiness in the world, starting from that one point. The ultimate expression of our "basic morals", our principles, is our Constitution (I'm Canadian, and I fucking love that puppy, the people who wrote it took the best balance of ideas from everywhere as of 1982. I would rather a court case be tried in Canada than anywhere else in the whole world.)
I would agree that it does take some logical reasoning abilities that a decent fraction of people *might* not have. However, you'd agree that 4 year olds don't have deadly sharp logical reasoning skills just yet, not really complicated ones, so please read on:
> Religion is a way of passing down millennia of hard-learned lessons in a way that leaves no room for argument.
When western parents teach a 2-6 year old what is right and what is wrong, do they immediately and primarily use religion? No. It's flat out plain "correct and discipline", with a basic explanation as to why they can't do what they want to. There's no religion involved at all. When young adults are moulded in school, is the primary tool religion? No, heck religion isn't even ALLOWED in there.
I argue that religion is NOT the primary method of teaching morals and right and wrong to the young of the modern western world.*
Religion is a relic from a bygone era, that is kept around SOLELY via a few of humankind's greatest weaknesses - weaknesses that are themselves a relic that probably served us well when we were apes and Neanderthals.
(*) There might be exceptions in more in the fundie parts of the USA, but most westerners don't grow up in the Religious heartlands of the US, they're an *exception*.
If you believe Dawkins then the most common religions have rules that help them propagate. Essentially they are diseases of the mind.
Though most of the rules are about allowing people inside the religion off common sense morality. E.g. as an atheist I'd would consider raiding a peaceful nextdoor tribe for slaves and gold to be morally wrong. But the Quran and the Old Testament are full of the 'good guys' doing just that. What's really is sad is that when people question the morality of it, the religious leaders explain that God wills it. In Latin 'Deus vult' is how the Pope launched the crusades, which were theoretically about liberating lands invaded by the Muslims. In practice the crusaders at least once attacked lightly defended Christian cities when the Muslim ones proved too tough a target. None of this really bothered them of course, since the Pope had given them a pardon for any sins they committed. Some believed they would go to paradise if they died fighting.
Actually, the more you read about the crusades, the more they remind you of the more noxious versions of Islam, where pretty much any atrocity is allowed in Jihad and you go to paradise when you die.
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;
I rather have a Cristian neighbor, friend or boss than a scientologist any day.
;)
Christianity - not as bad as Scientology. Not exactly a ringing endorsement is it
Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms.
Even with a belief in God, you must still explain moral codes. Why is it that a religion says stealing is wrong, but other things aren't wrong? Why is it that all these religions which all supposedly base their morality on God come up with sometimes completely different answers? Why is it when someone bases their morals on the Bible, they cherry pick (so homosexuality is wrong, but they don't stone people to death for working on Sunday)?
In all cases, a person must have some method - independent of the concept of God - of judging right from wrong.
"God says so" isn't an explanation.
Now sure, I see your point that religion can be used to control people with little room for negotiation. The flaw is however is that those in charge of the religion are just as fallable as those people you are trying to control.
Yes, without religion an individual might decide through reason and evidence that perhaps working on Sunday shouldn't be punishable by death. But with religion, that individual can reach a position of authority, and declare whatever he likes to be wrong because that's what God supposedly says. God is far from non-negotiable - on the contrary, people not only argue with it, they outright declare for themselves what God supposedly thinks.
We now have a system to keep the population in control - it's called the law, and we also allow people to debate what those laws should be based on reason and evidence. The problem is that religion sticks around like a sore thumb, allowing people to support or challenge laws simply based on what they claim their religion says.
Given how common violence and murder was in the past, it's not clear religion did a better job. The rise of secularism in places like Europe has not been accompanied by a rise in crime.
We still have blasphemy laws in the UK too (solely for Christianity), though thankfully the Government now looks like it is finally going to repeal them.
People refer to it as a dead law anyway, but it's not clear that anything's happened since it was last used (in the 70s) that would mean it's now dead - we're not talking one of those laws that hasn't been used in centuries. Also, people are still today using it to try to bring prosecutions against people (e.g., against the BBC for showing Jerry Springer The Opera) so there are issues such as the cost of legal defence, and the chilling effect where threat of prosecution causes people to self-censor.
That might be true in some contexts, but not others. Try being a US Politician who criticises Christianity, versus one who criticises Scientology. Consider the support for teaching Creationism in schools, versus the support for teaching Scientology beliefs as fact in school. Consider the stigma (especially in the US) of identifying as an atheist, versus someone who doesn't believe in Xenu. Consider the controversy that in the US the pledge shouldn't have included "under god", whilst only a crackpot would suggest it should be reworded to suit Scientologists. Consider in the UK that atheists arguing against prayers in state schools are labelled as being un-British and wanting to destroy religion, yet it is accepted to criticise Scientology, even when they go nowhere near schools with young children. Consider that most of the arguments against people criticising Scientology apply to all religions ("It's a religion, you can't criticise their beliefs!")
What you are referring to is the reaction of the believers themselves - but amongst the general population, criticising and ridiculing Scientology seems far more acceptable than doing so for Christianity.
And although they are a minority of Christians as a whole (though not necessarily fewer that Scientologists in absolute numbers), there are (at least here in the UK) Christian organisations that will get offended over perceived threats when you offend their religion, and even try to make legal threats against you.
I think it's a fine justification, if that's what you believe. I know people who do believe that cutting yourself up is to be avoided at almost all costs. I suppose unnatural is bad wording.
As for non-religious dogma:
1. Patriotism
2. Social Policy
3. Economic Policy
4. Foreign Policy
5. General Life Values (what is important in life? Money? Stability? Freedom of expression?
Not all religious people have dogma, either. In composition, the word "some" in that context is an empty word, because that's what the sentence already meant. But I appreciate your desire for specificity.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I agree that atheism hasn't the same organized structure as atheists, but you've taken what I said out of context. I'm saying that if you can't attack a dogmatic belief such as "god created the earth in seven days," you can't attack a dogmatic belief such as "black people are inferior."
Neither has any basis in any fact, and is the result of being taught rote memorization of bullshit. Retort?
Please stop stalking me, bro.
The word is indeed "mass," for what it's worth.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I didn't mean to quote someone else, by the way.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
>>"And some atheists have dogma too" there fixed for you.
> In composition, the word "some" in that context is an empty word, because that's what the sentence already meant. But I appreciate your desire for specificity.
I thought that saying 'atheists have' meant 'all atheists have' not 'some' but English is my second language, so I probably made a mistake..
Religion says you don't have to fix your suffering, after death everything will be fine. A world view that doesn't include a (pleasant) afterlife creates a much stronger incentive to improve the conditions.
Especially slaves are much easier to subdue with religion, religion tells them that they'll be rewarded if they keep suffering and punished if they free themselves by killing their master, even if they can defeat the master. Without religion their only choice for improvement would be to get rid of the master and if they have a chance they're more likely to take it.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Uhh, yeah.
Evangelists: who are they preaching to?
Them
Fred Phelps: who does he hate?
Them <fill in the blank>'s
Jews: Who do Jews(and Muslims for that matter) call the "satan"?
Them(a "satan" is an adversary, or an "opposite" since they don't believe in the Devil, per se)
Christians: Why do they need a Satan?(capital "S" meaning "The Debbil")
To create a "Them"
These are only a few of hundreds of examples I could give you where this mentality is created and encouraged.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Go kill yourself.
Hear, hear. The Freezoners tend to be pretty decent people. Most of them got into Scientology because they actually believed Scientology's promise about how "our goal is a world without war, crime and insanity." And most of them get out because they catch on that the Church of Scientology isn't living up to those lofty goals. Those who still practice the belief system after they get out of the organization generally do so in a general moral, socially positive way, trying to keep true to "Hubbard's ideals". So what if the evidence shows that L. Ron Hubbard himself didn't live up to "Hubbard's ideals"? It wouldn't be the first time that someone trying to live up to a role model did far better than the role model actually did.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
Max Weber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber
He was one of the first to notice that the assumed trends of religion were actually the complete opposite. AKA The number of people attending churches has increased significantly instead of decreasing as everyone believed.
Well, I should have been more specific. People tend to interpret however they feel like it, but generally, if you don't say all or some, it's a toss-up. So you weren't wrong to make sure I meant what you thought I meant. As someone who also speaks two languages (Spanish being my second), I'd like to congratulate you on your excellent spelling and grammar. I couldn't tell it was your second language.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Kindly note that I never claimed they didn't. I asked for substantiation. Get a grip.
Limina.Log
Even stable forms of Government don't last forever and bad forms of Government incite revolution. After a revolution a single form of Government replaces the old one and typically the new form of Government is more progressive than the old one. When a society is in chaos a push towards order often takes the form of battling warlords, each attempting to overpower the other and the region lives in constant conflict than can stretch out for decades (think Africa). If one warlord finally seizes power the new nation typically becomes a dictatorship with the supreme ruler taking as he pleases. Looking at the last few thousand years of human history societies tends to progress in jumps from chaos into regimented order then relaxing into a more liberal society, falling into decadence then collapsing. In the chain of societal progress a chaotic society doesn't jump from chaos into a democracy, it moves from chaos to a dictatorship.