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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.
...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.
No.
You forget: there's a sucker born every minute. And those suckers will continue to buy penis enlargement products from poorly written emails, and give their remaining money to Scientology.
A lot of these people also feel that the criticism and "attacks" on Scientology only *validate* it. How do you argue with that?
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
Most christian churches do not charge their members thousands of dollars on compulsive seminaries. Tithing is voluntary, last time I looked.
No sig for the moment.
Be warned. I have recorded all your names. Thou art but Thetans on the sleeve of humanity. Praise Xenu... and retain decent counsel.
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)
Wouldn't it be mad if the penis enlargment companies were owned by the COS or a subsidiary?
"Nietzsche is God" - Logic
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most christian churches do not charge their members thousands of dollars on compulsive seminaries. Tithing is voluntary, last time I looked.
Answer honestly. If the CoS suddenly decided to go donation only would you agree they are now a religion or would you move the goalposts?
"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.
And the guys protesting against them firmly support the free-zone (scientology without having to pay or be a member of the CoS), which they believe IS a valid religion, because it does none of the above.
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
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
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.
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