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Scientology's Credibility Questioned Over Video Channel
stonyandcher writes to share that the Church of Scientology has come under fire for some items on their recently launched video channel. Most notably, claims have been leveled that dignitaries in one of their videos were faked and at least one of the people featured in the video is claiming their statements were taken out of context.
Bears' woodland sanitary habits
Pope's Nazi youth
Apple enthusiasts' devotion....
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Religious groups are well known for twisting the words of non-members to support the wacky claims. Some nut-case Christer fundies produced a movie that twisted the words of several well known Atheists.
What do you expect from groups that require that members first suspend disbelief and accept claims of 'eternal life'?
Blar.
did Scientology have credibility?
Besides among the easily duped?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Do they have any cool vids of Xenu and the starships? Volcanoes? That could rival the Sci-Fi Channel.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Prior to that screwup, they were a vast reservoir of credibility.
Anyone else smell the desperation?
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
I'm convinced that Tom Cruise is being faked as well. I mean, come on guy, you did Top Gun! Get some self respect.
...CoS has already been busted (albeit not overly publicly) for releasing a video compilation of death threats, hate mail, etc, which had said death threats in higher res than their supposed 'original' posting on youtube. Suss as....
(can't be screwed finding cites right now, worked for 26 hours straight, and now i'm plain out of it... little help?)
You're doing it wrong.
I'd be more surprised if the site launched and everyone found out it was entirely on the up-and-up.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
You say the Scientologists are lying by twisting words. I say all religions are lying when they sell their made-up crap as 'the truth'.
;)
Christian organizations don't have to abuse the courts, their lies are supported by the justice system. Try suing a church for lying about eternal life and miracles and the other absurd claims they make. Many local churches use social pressure, especially in small towns, to force people to comply or at least not to speak out against the bullshit.
I'm an atheist, by the way, so I'm sure you're hate me even more!
Blar.
Sounds to me like the Co$ is actually improving in their policies!
Compared to Operation Freakout or Operation Snow White faking a few dignitaries is extremely mild.
If you haven't heard about those operations by the Church of Scientology then they are well worth a read. Pretty scary stuff actually.
Seriously, if there is *anyone* here criticizing Scientology, but believing the quaran or the bible, you are hypocrites.
Scientology is no more ridiculous than christianity, islam, or judaism. OK, spaceships that look like DC3s, OK, that's weird, but no more so than virgin births, 5000 year old flat earth, talking snakes, noah's ark, or killing your first born.
Scientology shows questionable credibility? Get right out of town!
For an organisation that thinks we're all possessed by dead aliens using the ramblings of a drug addled hack who freely admitted he was in it for the money as the gospel, you can colour me shocked that they might have a somewhat warped view of the rest of the universe.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Various reasons. Their disgusting abuse of the legal system, for one. Their extortionary practices. The fact that they're a dangerous cult, and that several people have died in their care, and many more are suffering psychological abuse every day. Tom Cruise.
There are more reasons, if you want to go looking for them. Wikipedia is a good starting point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_controversies
Be warned. I have recorded all your names. Thou art but Thetans on the sleeve of humanity. Praise Xenu... and retain decent counsel.
I think it rather self-evident that this church will burn baby burn. They're not needing any help at all from the rest of us. They're doing quite well on their own! Just sit back, grab some marshmellows and get ready to roast!!
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
I don't give a fuck if you believe in Xenu or Jesus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but the Church Scientology lies to and steals from it's 'believers', and does horrible psychological damages to people and their familes. No mainstream religion is remotely as corrupt and sadistic.
Please read for a start:
http://www.exscientologykids.com/
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
We are the volcano Co$. You will pay for the crimes you have committed, just like your little thetan buddies. You think the first volcano was bad? Just wait. You are child killers and criminals who hide behind your little tax shelter. People are learning about Operation Snow White. People are learning about the claims that L Ron made - things like, "The easiest way to make a million dollars is to start a religion." People are learning about the women and children you have denied even basic medical care and left to be eaten by cockroaches. You will pay.
I'm going to have to go find a new religion to join now, I had o so much faith invested into Scientology.
I don't believe you, I'm here for a seat on the secret spaceship.
Newsflash - you are not important. Slashdot was not designed to serve you. You are not paying for it. Yet you still take time to complain. Weird, uh?
And if you're that keen on only seeing specific articles - there's a billion filters you can apply. Might want to use the full site. Or are you not nerd enough to figure out filter settings?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
"Make money. Make more money. Make others produce so as to make money . . . However you get them in or why, just do it." and "Make sure that lots of bodies move through the shop,"
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
It's been replaced by mouse and keyboard. Not as viscerally satisfying as chasing someone through the dark to inflict vicious wounds, but you can eat chips while you inflict vicious comments.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
"Written historical account". Given that pagan by definition means "of the country.", and in those times most people were illiterate, does it really surprise you that there was little written record to contradict what the Christians wrote? It's not like they have ever burned books or anything, either.
As a more direct rebuttal specifically to the Osiris resurrection thing, that was written in hieroglyphs. How else would we have known about it? It's not like there have been any native Egyptian speakers for a long, long time, so we had to learn about ancient Egypt through other methods.
But hey, why let the facts stand in the way of your chosen God, right? He's infallible, and if anyone that believes in him says anything about him, it must be true!
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I lol'd a Jonestown, Waco, and all the others.
Well all those cults like to hole up in their little compound off out of our way.
This cult likes to convert celebrities and use them to evangelize their cult, spread itself across the country, and litigate anyone who tries to slow their acquisition of money.
Basically, Scientology has a much greater chance of affecting me or someone I know than any of those other cults. Mainly because those other cults were actually "cults" run by some crazy messiah-delusion leader, while Scientology is a deliberate scheme for accruing vast amounts of wealth and power in the guise of a cult.
The enemies of Democracy are
The fact is that none of these pagan religion concepts existed before 100AD. There is no written historical account for these concepts before this time (such as mithras was born of a virgin, or osiris was ressurected). All pagan religions reference these concepts in written history after the birth of Christ.
They were talking about the sacrament of communion as far back as 2500 BC: (from Wikipedia)
Since the ancient Nilotics believed that humans were whatever they eat, this sacrament was, by extension, able to make them celestial and immortal. The doctrine of the eucharist ultimately has its roots in prehistoric (symbolic) cannibalism, whose practitioners believed that the virtues and powers of the eaten would thus be absorbed by the eater. This phenomenon has been described throughout the world. One of the oldest of the Pyramid Texts is the Unas[14] from the 6th Dynasty (circa 2500 BC). It shows that the original ideology of Egypt commingled with Osirian concepts. Although ultimately given a high place in heaven by order of Osiris, Unas is at first an enemy of the gods and his ancestors, whom he hunts, lassoes, kills, cooks, and eats so that their powers may become his own. This was written at a time when the eating of parents and gods was a laudable ceremony, and this emphasizes how hard it must have been to stamp out the older order of cannibalism. "He eats men, he feeds on the gods...he cooks them in his fiery cauldrons. He eats their words of power, he swallows their spirits.... He eats the wisdom of every god, his period of life is eternity.... Their soul is in his body, their spirits are within him." A parallel passage is found in the Pyramid Text of Pepi II, who is said to have "seizeth those who are a follower of Set...he breaketh their heads, he cutteth off their haunches, he teareth out their intestines, he diggeth out their hearts, he drinketh copiously of their blood!" (line 531, ff). Although crude, this was a core concept, the conviction that one could receive immortality by eating the flesh and blood of a god who had died
"recently launched video channel"
I can see it now. 24 hours of John Travolta, Kristy Allie, and Tom Cruise movies....
Sounds like a winner!
Some things for you to consider:
The concept of resurrection is at least as old as writing. Does this automatically mean the account of Jesus being resurrected is copied from those fables?
Few writings from the past contradicting Christianity exist. Does this mean that any surviving writings are automatically true?
There was a mystery cult that existed around the same time as early Christianity that has many similarities to Christianity. Does this mean that Christianity copied Mithraism, or Mithraism copied Christianity?
Christians have, in the past, destroyed information that they found distasteful or contradictory to their beliefs. Does this automatically invalidate their beliefs, or does it just mean there have been assholes in the Christian faith? (Law of the Universal Distribution of Assholes)
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
There must be some reverse psychology going on here! Everyone, mod me down!
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
Scientology and the Internet explains the history.
In brief:
- attacks on USENET involving forged rmgroups in 1995.
- attacks on USENET involving Hipcrime-style spam for many years since then.
- legal attacks that resulted in the compromise of every user of the anon.penet.fi anonymous remailer in 1996.
- Angry about copyright term extensions? What we jokingly refer to as the 1998 Mickey Mouse Protection Act was passed into law as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. By a staggering coincidence, Sonny Bono was a Scilon.
- Angry about the DMCA? The Mickey Moust Protection Act wasn't enough of a legal club, and guess who was one of the first organizations to use it in mid-1999?
- And guess who was behind the DMCA attacks against Google in 2002.
- And last but not least, guess who was behind the DMCA attack against Slashdot itself in 2001.
Sorry you haven't been paying attention for the past decade, dude, but this is news for nerds, and it is stuff that matters.
Because they're like SCO, except more vile and heinous, and at a personal level.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I have never heard of a real religion that gets upset when anybody exposes the beliefs of that religion.
Includes screenshots & research. http://forums.enturbulation.org/showthread.php?t=5085&page=4
If you think the "church" is evil as well. check out Operation Reconnect.
You can also find out why we protest.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
You hit the nail on the head. Authenticity does not equal veracity. However, it is a prerequisite. Anabaptists claimed that their religion is the one started by the apostles. Catholicism claims the same thing - however, evidence discredits Anabaptism in favor of Catholicism.
analysis over historical records regarding the New Testament can only confirm us that the words in them were actually what the man called Jesus said - and not an invention made by a group of fanboys. But from that to affirming that Jesus is the son of God, that is up to the believer.
In other words, we cannot confirm that religion is true based only on ancient manuscripts - however, we CAN confirm that a religion is NOT true based on ancient manuscripts, if they disprove what the religion claims.
In the particular case of Scientology, physical evidence disproves Scientology's numerous claims - starting with the e-meter.