Slashdot Mirror
Church of Scientology Enlisting Followers In Censorship
DrEnter writes "Apparently, the recent very public divorce of Katie Holmes and devout believer Tom Cruise is reflecting negatively on the Church of Scientology. Adding to this are other recent issues causing problems for 'church' leadership. In response, the 'church' has decided to encourage its followers to censor online chatter and comments about the 'church' and the divorce. This Yahoo blog post sums it up nicely. In short, they are encouraging members to complain about people posting negative comments about the 'church' as violating the Code of Conduct' in the posting venue. I can only imagine they are hoping these complaints will just be rubber-stamped and respected without investigation, but I think the campaign deserves a bit more attention."
Book 'em, Xenu!
--
Posting anonymously because the Church of Clams still uses vexatious lawsuits against their critics.
Call all your critics liars (and wife-beaters and child molesters if possible), send private detectives and Sea Org types to follow and harass them, sue them and anyone who supports them, cry religious persecution to the cops and govt officials, rinse, wash, repeat...
Read all about it, and more.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm glad Katie dumped his ass and is doing her best to protect Suri from that cult.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I think scientology is a pile of poo!
They need to shape language to suit their need. Good examples are "descrimination (aka choice) is bad" by the feminist movement. Also try "anti-Semitic" (which is used to strike fear into anyone who accuses/threatens anyone Jewish of anything be it right or wrong.
Scientlogists need to coin a similar term to strike fear into the general public.
Let me say first that I find Scientology repulsive and a particularly greasy form of pyramid scheme. However, compared to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic trinity, they are responsible for much less evil and far fewer deaths. Between those three religions you have tens of millions slaughtered in pointless wars over minor differences in doctrine. You have sexism that runs deep through the dogma of all three. You have churches who have officially sanctioned everything from genocide to sexually abusing children to slavery. This stuff isn't even in the distant past. I can find examples in the last century where each of these religions has committed terrible atrocities. Scientology is easy to hate because it is so ridiculous, so absurd, and generally unpopular. It's an easier target than Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. But if you really take a step back and look at the doctrine of those three faiths, they are equally as ridiculous.
It's not like the church you think doesn't need quotes is any more valid than this 'church' which you think needs quotes.
Talk about a mouse messin' with a gorilla! Go get 'em, boys!
How soon we nerds forget Scientology's war against the internet back in the day.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I am not a Scientologist and would never join a religion purported to be created on a bet.
The blog takes quotes from the Scientology post out of context. It talkes bout clicking on the report tag and what to write but ignores the this intermediary step;
4. Read the comment from people and pick the ones that fit the violation of the Code of Conduct.
Where the blog post states that the Scientologists are directed to report all anti-Scientology comments they are actually directed to report only the ones that really brear the Code of Conduct.
One final comment; Has the existence of this email been confirmed by an independent source? I would be suspect of anything reported by someone who has a bias against an organization without independent verification. That is one reason I generally don't read blogs; they have a tendency to be unverified and very biased..
Talk about a mouse messin' with a gorilla! Go get 'em, boys!
The beauty of this is you only need one jpeg image of the mask, rather than buying them by the container ship.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, there goes Tom's $1.00 donation to UNICEF this Halloween ...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They've done it before. They were pretty successful, too.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It obviously violates the Slashdot code of conduct.
It is not related to bitcoin or raspberry pi, it is not a dupe and has links to multiple articles that have a lot of text per page, requiring very few, if any, "next page" clicks. It might fool some that it has merit to be on slashdot by being a rather lame story that might appeal to people who like getting pissed at reading stories they don't consider "news for nerds", but I am sure you will agree that that alone is not enough.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
They are all religions.
We already did that. The internet won. The direct damage to the CoS was just a minor annoyance, but the social media saturation exposing so many of the sordid stories told by ex-members and leaked documents destroyed their reputation to the point that they are impossible to take seriously any more. It seriously hurt their recruitment efforts.
I'm a proud owner of the Xs4all & Karin Spaink vs. Scientology 1-0 shirt.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
No one I know or care about has talked to me about this outstanding and important event.
The censors got to all of them first, it seems.
I wonder what the cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster will look like in fifty years.... Dun dun dun....
The church of the Streisand effect
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The anons will really like this...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
the 'church' has decided to encourage its followers to censor online chatter and comments
Be careful about the word "censor". Only the government can censor.
If a non-governmental entity is engaging in something that you want to call "censorship", it is actually exercising its right to define and control its speech.
For example, if the owner of a religious web blog wants to delete reader-submitted responses that attack their religion, it is crucially important that the owner be allowed to do so. Confused people may proclaim that it's "censorship", but that proclamation doesn't make it so.
In this case, people are submitting requests for certain posts to be deleted. The owners of those sites need absolute freedom to heed or ignore such requests. It's not helpful when confused people cry "censorship" when they see others exercising their freedoms.
Censor me you assholes. Go on, i dare you.
The entire thing is a huge scam designed to suck peoples wealth dry with a bunch of lies.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not nary two years ago I stood upon a roof top in Clearwater FL as a superhero of justice (network engineer) alongside my sidekick (general contractor) and peered (as we setup a Clearwire cell site) upon all those that had dedicated 1,000,000,000,000 years of their existence to serving the word of Mr. L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer of some modest renown. We, in aghast awe, watched as they boarded their numerous bus vehicles to travel far to partake in what we would call lunch. What manor of noontime evil feast, we could not imagine. For they looked grim and uninspired.
I bared my being to him at that time and allowed that for some short time in the early 80s I had once myself, this bastion of all that is right with network protocols, had fallen suspect to the siren cry of their teachings I related the trial and tribulations of having to buy their manuscripts and attend communication training (which, sadly, they did not impart the truth of a single RFC.)
Fortunately I escaped by the narrowest means of not having enough money to buy the next book. For ages (about 2 hours) I beat my brow over not having the manly integrity to fight through my engrams and discover the universal truths of the Xemu protocol (RFC-infinity) and thereby understand, just my laying the wires upon my tongue, the truth of every communication protocol in the universe.
But now that I've gone through deprogramming I'm much better.
Now just if we could get everyone that believes in sky faeries to take deprogramming.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Except Scientology isn't, its a pyramid/litigious scheme passed off as one..
At least a real religion has faith, these jokers only have cash and attorneys.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Bogus claims of network abuse to try and falsely get people disconnected have been standard practice since the first day that the first scientologist got online. It's a dangerous cult, folks.
Well, I don't know what they're worried about. Apparently, the church's office of special affairs feels that
people [are] start[ing] to spread false datum.
What's one small little bit of information, compared to the bullshit spewed by Hubbard. I read on some anti-scientology site a while back that Hubbard suggested that inventing a religion would be a better way to make money than writing fiction.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"The difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own." — Frank Zappa
They just didn't have the terms they needed to describe the spaceships and artificial alien insemination in Aramaic, so all we get are vague descriptions of "wheels with wings within wings and many glowing lights" and sudden miraculous virgin births.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
All religions have persecuted/persecute those who disagree. Scientology is no less credible than any other religion. Why does anyone care. If you are stupid enough to believe in witches, trolls, gods, jesuses, and gobblins, then why would you be reading web pages at all. Why not just pray to the lord jesus/god to implant the data in your mind? if you believe in this mumbo-jumbo, and won't do this, then I say you lack faith, and are not a real believer. If you can't trust in your faith, and prove the viability of your religion, then what's the point? Surely your jesuses or gods would not be vindictive enought to withold all that wonderful knowlege, just to create some 'test of faith', or any of the other usual excuses that nutters use, for the failure of their deities to actually do anything.
Let me say first that I find Hitler repulsive and a particularly horrible dictator. However, compared to Mao Zedong, he is responsible for much less evil and far fewer deaths. During Mao's reign 40 to 70 million died in pointless wars, political purges, suicides, and famine caused in large part by Mao and his policies. This stuff isn't even in the distant past. Mao was in power up to 1976, over 30 years of rule. Hitler is easy to hate because his acts were so ridiculous, so absurd, and generally unpopular. He's an easier target than Mao, but if you really take a step back and look at Mao, Hitler, and all the other brutal dictators of history, they are all equally evil embarrassing stains on human history.
It's not like they had a positive image beforehand.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Suppression of information is pointless.
If people want it to get out, it will.
I don't believe that "information wants to be free" prattle. Information does not want anything. People want information to be free.
The US government can't keep its behaviour secret. Hugely rich football players in the UK can't do it either. Various criminal regimes around the world are trying to keep secrets to stay in power. In the long run, they will fail too and end up in the dustbin of history where they belong. It just takes time.
If they suppress one blog because of some stupid judge, others will pop up somewhere else. If they invent some automated system to look for references, someone will invent an automated system to flood the internet with such references and their system will bog down. It will get out there if people care...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
As the cults fall one by one, including the whore of Babylon itself aka the Catholic church, we maybe finally rid ourselves of the WORST human conception EVER, Religion.
I suggest we replace all churches with community aquariums.
I was there on Usenet when the whole thing started. They were not successful when measured against the huge amount of information that became available that cast Scientology in a bad light, and that made some of the worst of its nonsense well-known to people on (what eventually became) the web. On top of that, the people kicking off the church attempts to mitigate the problem were grossly incompetent and had no real understanding of the forum they were working with. They seemed to have no clue they were playing an impossible game of whack-a-mole, or that the harder they tried to censor, the more it pissed people off. People on the Net are kind of interested in free speech and being able to discuss whatever the hell they want on public forums. Other than using their usual litigious practices to shamefully hassle a handful of people, they may as well have called it the Church of Streisand for all the good their attempts really did.
Does anyone make *positive* comments about the Church on Slashdot?
He's quite tweet active on the issue.
Of course I suspect he is just envious that there is another organization even more toxic than Fox News.
Ahhh... but they have faith in that cash and those attorneys.
Justly placed too. cuz cash and lawyers can get shit done.
Why doesn't someone post all the secret Scientology crap there?
>At least a real religion has faith, these jokers only have cash and attorneys.
I have two things to say to that. ... but I am sure they are different today (* cough *)
1. How much money do you think the Vatican has?
2. Read about Galileo. make sure you get the bit where the Pope and Co threatened to rip his arms out of their sockets on a torture rack for stating the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Thankfully, they only threw him in prison for the rest of his life and forced him to make a public statement declaring himself as a fraud and a heretic. It took that ass-backward cult several hundred years to accept what was bleedingly obvious. What a charming bunch
Should I start on Muhammad and his paedophilia next?
DonÂt ever use a religion as an argument against Scientology. Religions have an abysmal track record...
I was going to say "sad, little monkeys," but then I realized that would be insulting to monkeys.
Let's see if they can mod me into oblivion.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Except Scientology isn't, its a pyramid/litigious scheme passed off as one..
At least a real religion has faith, these jokers only have cash and attorneys.
Beyond idiotic. Throwing the word "faith" out as if it represents any value of logical thought. Christianity was the Scientology of its time, only difference is that it has had 2000 years to gain significance. Either disbelieve all religions, or accept that Scientology is as legit as all stories of magic that came before it.
You are right, but I want to point out that Wired magazine is frequently inaccurate, more interested in hype than reality, and shouldn't be linked to for the attention. Here are some other links.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well yeah, there's millions of hotel rooms all over the world.
No, really, they weren't successful. That's according to Jurian Massena, who was Scientology's first webmaster and who left the cult when he found out that the people on the "other side" of that Usenet warfare were pretty nice people and the cult had been lying about them. (I met him about 10 years ago: he was speaking to student groups about cults and their dangers, having broken free of one himself.)
Most of us who jumped into that battle were protecting turf and free speech, and some of us were trying to block spam. (The cult sent 1/2 Terabyte of randomized, forged spam to the Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology in about six months, and reman the worst Usenet spammers in history.)
We tracked them, we got their sock puppets kicked off ISP's, and eventually we got standard Usenet behavior changed to include the IP address of the sending host. We are the people who invented the word spam, and our battles with Scientology, while not lethal to the cult, helped establish political freedom of speech in the growing web. ISP's learned not to take cash and cashier's checks for modem access without any verifiable address because they *will* be abused by spammers and scammers, so the Scientologists actually gave us a great inoculation against even worse dangers. They were so clearly unacceptable that a lot of ISP's at the time finally enacted real policies against obvious abuse by their own customers, and they were so lawyer equipped that the ISP's did it *carefully*..
In a weird way, I'm grateful that they were so very offensive and so abusive so fast. It brought *enormous* publicity to their critics at the time and helped expose the cult's inner secrets and abuses in a way that convicting Mary Sue Hubbard for faking bomb threats against Paulette Cooper did not.
Consider yourself all reported.
L.Ron Hubard is the best sci-fi writer in the world. No other writer can convince stupid people that fiction is real like this guy did. ROFLMA.
Doesn't that imply that some things reflect positively on the "church?"
I love how I never heard about any divorce, and this is the first Scientology news I've heard in a long time.
Infidels! Join the One True Church (Canada) before it is too late!
^C/^V
They didn't even bother to censor all the reviews of "Battlefield Earth" why would they start now?
It's just another bad science fiction story, scientology that is...
I know of no such war, at least within Christianity and Judaism. I'm no expert on Islam so I'll let them speak for themselves.
A lot of times religion was a proxy for tribal warfare. But it's more like different tribes had different religions. But it wasn't like the Irish were dying to defend papal infallibility by and large.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Scientology has/requires faith too. Do you think they have proof of Xenu? You have trust and have faith in Him.
Hollywood liberal wierdos....
Posting as anonymous coward.....please don't hurt me Tom Cruise.
While I applaud what you claim to have done, you did not invent the word spam.
Church of Scientology, long time nemisis of the Four Channel Army is now trying to censor the internet????
CHARGE DEM LAZERZ!!!!
Scientology is a pseudo-cult practised by people following the Science Fiction author Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. He was dirt poor before he managed to brainwash people into believing his shit. Once he got them to start paying him money for nothing, his financial problems were over. After he died, the money could have stopped, except that others took over (they wanted to suck people into giving them money too). The "censor police" are those who have given a lot and don't want to look stupid for having done so. Personally I liked Isaac Asimov better. The foundation series is much better. Perhaps the Scientology kids could switch to reading the Foundation series. Any half-reasonable bookstore carries it, and it costs a crapload less then 'Hubbards stuff. "All Hail Harry Seldon". Oh, and replace the word "Thetan" with "Zebulon" ...even the terms are more cool-sounding.
Well, why not? When the majority of USians seriously believe fairy tales about a magical carpenter and demand that society be structured around them, anything goes. Scientology is no more ridiculous (could anything be more ridiculous?) than other mainstream western religions.
"Apparently, the recent very public divorce of Katie Holmes and devout believer Tom Cruise is reflecting negatively on the Church of Scientology."
More negatively than the deaths Scientology has caused? That must have been some breakup.
I love how the word church is repeatedly surrounded by quotes in this article, as if to say that scientology does not deserve to call their churches churches. Oh it's a religion just the same. Nothing special about the old ones, other than more delusions of grandeur.
It's the pseudo-science called Dianetics "tech" and accompanying scams:
Training courses = Bait and Switch
Auditing = Gold Brick Scam
Front Groups = Pyramid Scam
IAS (Ideal Org/Library Donations) = Boiler Room Scam
Members blissfully perform these scams without knowing that's what they are, and when they figure it out they stay in because of the Concorde Fallacy or Sunk Cost Fallacy
The US is the world's most religious "developed" country. If you look at, say, Denmark which does not have separation of church and state (it is in fact officially a Christian country) religiosity is much lower... which is a good thing.
Now, it would be unfair to judge the founders by anything other than their historical context, but it appears that they were in fact wrong on this particular issue.
Pop scientology alt.support.ex-cult into Google groups search for some good creepy laughs. It's a shame it only goes back 4 years, the early 2000's saw many a scientology recruiter trolling that group.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
"Real religion" wins oxymoron of the aeon
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Do you blame USSR and China for what they did?
Religion is defined by faith.
Any appeal to authority is ultimately an appeal to faith in said authority. "It must be right, because such-and-such said so."
So authoritarianism is inherently religious (based on faith), even if devoid of the trappings we associate with "traditional" religion, e.g. the supernatural.
What makes the supernatural in turn inherently religious (based on faith) is that nothing can be known about it from evidence, and so any opinions on it must be based on faith, and whoever you have faith in (as in, whoever's word you take as 'gospel truth'), you are taking to be an authority.
If you have faith only in things that come to you directly by some sort of inspiration, then you are simply taking yourself as the authority of your own religion.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Actually the word we came up with was "sporgery", for "spam forgery". I was a victim until I learned how to use PGP to sign my postings. What the $cienos did was to hoover up thousands of postings from white power, neonazi and other hate newsgroups per day, strip the headers and repost them with headers from legitimate critics' posts, so as to make it look like we were spamming the group with racist rants. Most of us learned to filter them out by not replying to them, and only looking at posts that had a PGP signature. Of course, they tried to "sporge" those too, but they didn't work (for obvious reasons).
They were also big at one time on teams of Usenet posters all using the same name (kind of the opposite of sock puppets). It was easy to figure out that 4 or 5 different people were using the same account to post from, given wildly different posting styles and differing levels of English capability, usually on the same day.
It was an interesting time, and I (virtually) met some interesting people.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
If the internet is populated with pondlife who can't remember even as recently as 2008, CoS has nothing to fear.
Project Chanology achieved almost nothing.
It brought to the attention of the US media that there are thousands of law-breakers in the world who don't like Scientology. Do you really think that was progress?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Christian doctrine is about making humans more empathetic and forgiving (do unto others as you would have them do unto you).
Unless you're gay. Or a woman (Catholic church). Or living in war-torn Africa.
Christianity is also about control and bigotry. It's not as bad as Scientology, but it is very much a platform for discrimination, anti-science and hate.
The money in traditional religions is a side effect, not the end-goal.
Now while i don't subscribe to any of them, there is a difference between why they exist.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It is an excuse to bilk money out of people, not a belief. They should be outlawed and eradicated. Completely.
Furthermore, I have faith in NO ONE so don't put words in my mouth.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Then came a little thing called /b/, and it all went downhill for the supposed-religion.
Great Intellect...
Don't you think that's a little reductive?
This is a dead end, because this implies everyone who accepts any kind of authority is doing so on faith. Even atheists and skeptics acknowledge authorities; the logical fallacy you're thinking of is "appeal to unsuitable authority," and the first person to state this fallacy was a catholic scholastic, Thomas Aquinas.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
On the day I learned not only was beck a member but has been since a child so he's full on crazy devoted. Danny masters on, his brother too. I think the worst was finding out Brody from mall rats (Jason lee aka earl) was one too. It really makes you wonder just how stupid and egotistical some celebs are.
Even for Scientology this is beyond stupid. The ones that are left have stayed away from reading about the cult on the Internet. This letter is to a small group, but if it gets out to the rest of their members and they do it too, the cult will collapse overnight.
It's interesting that you would single out this particular cult for adding the apostrophes. I've never seen this same treatment of the Westboro Baptist "church', or, for that matter, any other church.
Ignorance will only bother a person when they realize they are ignorant. You don't, as is obvious by your post. If you ever decide to walk out of the cave and look around, you will probably become first physically ill. After your eyes adjust, you will start to feel better. As you begin to see, you will know how wonderful the world really is, and you will despise the time you spent in the cave.
People have been trying to seal off the entrance for a very long time, and at the rate things are progressing you don't have much time left to get out.
Those words probably make no sense to you. I sincerely hope people like you would wake up and start trying to get out, instead of being content to live in a cave.
Those words are not as much a metaphor as you initially think.
By the way, I freely admit my ignorance. I don't know nearly as much as I should, and continually seek the truth. The task is extremely difficult since people want us in the cave.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
There are plenty of ways to lambaste scientologists (with all of the ways graciously provided directly by them), but this? Yeah sure, the divorce of a Hollywood couple is so unusual, I can see how that would reflect negatively on any group associated with it.
Nazis started down this long path to oblivion. have a nice trip . the only good one of you is a dead one of you.
Of course they want it tax free. I want my donations to be tax free. I don't want the level of church service available to me to be lessened by the amount of a tax. I already paid income tax.
A long time ago, it was decided that churches (and other non-profits*) provided social utility. As long as that holds true, an argument can be made for tax exception.
Of course, my church has a lay ministry, and doesn't hire clergy. (I suspect those that do have to pay income tax.)
*(Yes, there are for-profit churches; not many, but their income is taxable.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
"Ron Paul has spoken at a bunch of their functions, actually".
Just what hidden very powerful vested interests decided to disappear Ron Paul from the media?
Religion is defined by faith.
Don't you think that's a little reductive?
I don't see why "reductive" has to be a bad thing, but beside that point: how else would you define it? Religion isn't synonymous with morality or ethics, as some would make it out; there are rationalistic moral or ethical systems as well, and religions make all kinds of factual claims about the origins and structure of reality too. Religion isn't synonymous with ritual either, as there are all kinds of secular rituals people observe all the time, from morning tea to Superbowl Sunday. Religion isn't synonymous with philosophy either, though I would argue that they are on the same level of abstraction and have a similar domain and range, but their methodologies are really quite antithetical (yes, despite the existence of plenty of religious philosophers; people are capable of doublethink).
What all religions have in common is the assertion of things, not only without reason, and not necessarily always against reason, but with the claim that reason is unnecessary: "Just believe it, because I say it's it's true", or at least "I just believe it, because I know it's true".
Any appeal to authority is ultimately an appeal to faith in said authority. "It must be right, because such-and-such said so."
This is a dead end, because this implies everyone who accepts any kind of authority is doing so on faith. Even atheists and skeptics acknowledge authorities; the logical fallacy you're thinking of is "appeal to unsuitable authority," and the first person to state this fallacy was a catholic scholastic, Thomas Aquinas.
Atheists and skeptics acknowledge "authorities" in a different sense than in the logical fallacy of appealing to authority. We may point at some notable figure as the source of our belief, trust them to have good reasons for their claims, and defer to them for more in-depth explanation of those reasons. For example, I believe lots of scientific facts because I have read about them in what I consider to be reputable sources, and if questioned on them beyond my own ability to defend them I would defer to those sources for further argument. I might make a claim about black holes, point to Stephen Hawking as my source for that information, and defer to the paper of his which I read it in for a full defense of that claim. But I would never say "Stephen Hawking said so, therefore it is true", and only that is an appeal to authority. "I don't really know, but I trust Hawking to get it right, here's his paper if you want to argue the point with him further, let me know how that goes" is not.
Any appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, though I wouldn't put it past a religious thinker like Aquinas to qualify that with "unsuitable" (much like the Chinese constitution guarantees all kinds of rights, so long as they don't 'threaten the stability of the state' or some such catch-all nonsense excuse).
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
"Christian doctrine is about making humans more empathetic and forgiving"
..
Christopher Hitchens would disagree with that (God Is Not Great). For the clearist description of the evolution of religion I've ever read see The Golden Bough. So, ElRon was just in a long line of fraudsters, only he modernized the stuff through the use of cod-technical sounding phrased borrowed from US army manuals and the introduction of the E-Meter. A reading of the scriptures guaranteed to bring on a severe case of cognitiave dissonance. I've never seen so many acronyms in the one document, even the acronyms have acronyms. Sometimes whole paragraphs are nothing but a bunch of acronyms.
From: The Technical Bulletins
of
Dianetics and Scientology
"1st dynamic, A/Chief, automaticity, bank, Clear, de-contaminating, F/N, HCO, MEST, mocking, OT, O.T., OT1, S.P., TA, T.A, wog"
The E-Meter, basically a galvanomitor that measured skin resistance, and used as a crude lie-detector. The results of such 'auditing` sessions being later-on used to black-mail members into compliance. Christianity has confession, so I guess they're not so much differrent after all.
You're all brainwashed. Tom has a master's degree from a Scientology university. He did his thesis on the evils of psychiatry. So, he knows much more about this stuff than we do. He even has superpowers. If you get hurt in a car accident, don't call for a doctor, call for Super Tom.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
The same reason we refer to the vagina when we actually mean vulva. /.
Wait, that's probably not a good analogy on
To quote Bluto "Holy Sh*t!!!!!" - I just looked up vulva on Wikipedia!
Well I guess I should say made the mistake of looking up vulva....only believe me it was no mistake in the first place and well lets just start by saying I didn't do much reading.... Geez, after spitting out my coffee, I kid you not I seriously had to double check that I hadn't been redirected to Jimmy's Bomis site instead... but then I realised as there were none of Jimmy's "lesbian strip-poker threesomes" as the NY puts it that no I must have still been on porno^h^h^h^h^h wikipediaI. That article could be the * of the month article....
The summary of the collage entitled "Vulva_Diversity.jpg" is hilarious example with serious and non-serious entries intermixed:
# Female_abdomen_frontal_view.jpg (first row, left)
# Rasur.jpg (first row, center)
# Pubes.jpg (first row, right)
# Human.jpg (second row, left)
# Landing_Strip.jpg (second row, center)
# Hot_pants.jpg (second row, right)
Peter Klashorst, your a sick puppie!
Jimmy if your reading this can you ensure that next time your updating one of your sites that you pick the right one as I thought you'd reduced all that NSFW, NSFS stuff from Wikipedia as part of trying to white wash your porn past.... not that I'm complaining mind you re the actual content itself but your acting like Bill Gates and Steve Jobbs denying they were hackers... oh wait they did....
"Scientology sucks Katie's arse and Tom Cruise due to play bender in upcoming Futurama^h film...." - there back on topic ;-)
A post with porn, bill gates, steve jobs and scientology. hmmm I'm not sure now if I'll now be modded up or down. More likely I'll have an unfortunate accident with a car tomorrow when I'm crossing the road.
Slashdotters will never forget that Scientology made it personal.