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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.
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.
Because they had a late start.
I think it is deplorable that you would say such a thing.
It is an insult to piles of poo everywhere.
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..
They've done it before. They were pretty successful, too.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That is only because Scientology is still young. Given time, I am sure they can kill as many people as good old fashioned cults have managed to.
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
Because any 'religion' with an eschatology that reads like (bad) science fiction is illegitimate and false. A true religion has an eschatology that reads like a dragons and wizards epic fantasy.
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.
The church of the Streisand effect
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
All those other religions had a 2000 year head start on Scientology, so the Scientologists are way behind in the killing and other stuff, but that is irrelevant. Scientology is not a religion by any reasonable definition of the term. They only use the word church in their name for tax-avoidance purposes and so that they can claim "religious persecution" if anyone tries to challenge their absurd nonsense.
Scientology is a lot of things -- scam, dangerous cult, organized crime -- but one thing it is not is a religion.
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 ----
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.
That is only because Scientology is still young. Given time, I am sure they can kill as many people as good old fashioned cults have managed to.
You do know that in the 20th century, the two godless societies of the former USSR and China killed many more people than the so called cults have throughout their entire history.
No, actually - any group with the power over a communication channel can censor. It doesn't have to be a government; it could just as readily be a broadcast network, a news paper, or even the self. All that is required is the ability to choose what may or may not be said. Censorship by any entitity, when there is a reasonable expectation of free communication, is egregious.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
The quote reiterate it's in name-only for those who otherwise might not understand. The 'Church' of Scientology is nothing more than a pyramid scheme formed under the auspicious of a religion so that it may enjoy tax breaks from the IRS. Pure and simple!
Life is not for the lazy.
It's not like the church you think doesn't need quotes is any more valid than this 'church' which you think needs quotes.
Well see, if you go to a 'church' you believe in silly things like Xenu dictator of the "Galactic Confederacy" who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of his people to Earth in a DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and killed them using hydrogen bombs.
But if you go to a church, you believe in completely unsilly and credible things like a god who created us to worship him, but is really going to throw most of us into a burning lake of fire to be tortured for ever and ever because he loves us unconditionally, and well... He really tried to prevent this from happening by lovingly being born of a virgin so he could sacrifice himself to himself so that we could be forgiven for our sins against him (which we've all comitted because someone ate a forbidden fruit a long time ago), and the he tried warn us by sending all kinds of really sane, down to earth people to tell us that this was going to happen. Oh, and no trace of him has ever been found. You believe all of this because other people told you, so it must be true.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
You would be wrong.
Stalin and Mao were the gods of their religion built around a cult of personality and unwavering faith in authority and righteousness.
The problem isn't religion, the problem is mankind.
True, but advocate eliminating the problem and suddenly you're the bad guy...
Blank until
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.
A cult != a charismatic "cult of personality" != a totalitarian movement != religion != "faith".
People are constantly trying to stick all of these on a continuum, mainly so they can tar anyone who isn't as atheist as them, but they all significantly differ in kind. Lumping them all together significantly reduces our understanding of the world and how people really are.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
I want to know why people keep claiming that these two got a divorce.
"Apparently, the recent very public divorce of...."
No divorce has been granted.
The same reason we refer to the vagina when we actually mean vulva.
Wait, that's probably not a good analogy on /.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
I think the trouble with being a critical thinker, or an atheist, or a humanist is that you're right.
And it's quite hard being right in the face of people who are wrong without sounding like a fuckwit.
People go "do you think the vast majority of the world is wrong?"
Well yes... I don't know how to say that nicely, but yes.
--Tim Minchin
Does anyone make *positive* comments about the Church on Slashdot?
Between those three religions you have tens of millions slaughtered in pointless wars over minor differences in doctrine.
Man, how many times have I seen this line trotted out? For a group of people who pride yourself on free thinking (I'm assuming you're an atheist here) you certainly seem to find it hard to come up with an original argument.
Religion has been the sole cause of zero wars. Even if you find some way to measure the relative import of the various causes, I doubt religion is up there. It's a popular way to rabble-rouse, to create an artificial divide between "us" and "them", much the same way the U.S. used "capitalism vs communism" in the cold war, or "democracy vs tyranny" in the current terrorism debate (no, they really don't hate your freedom, they hate your politics).
Some examples that are often given:
Crusades: Bear in mind that during this time, the Catholic church was not only a religion, but also the most powerful political entity in the west. The Muslims (or rather, the Seljuks - like the situation in the west, they were a political entity that was also officially Muslim) were expanding, and conquering territory previously held by the Catholics (including Jerusalem, which has actually conquered 400 years prior to the first crusade). The first crusades were territorial disputes between two empires who also happened to be different religions. They were motivated by land, though, not religion. Later crusades still included territorial reasons, but they were also used for political means, either to attack people who threatened the Pope's power, or to start a foreign war to prop up a weak Pope.
Ireland: I'm just going to quote Wikipedia here, because it says it much more clearly and succinctly than I do:
For example, there is a common perception of The Troubles in Northern Ireland as a religious conflict, as one side (Nationalists) was predominantly composed of Catholics and the other (Unionists) of Protestants. However, the more fundamental cause is the attachment of Northern Ireland to either the Republic of Ireland or the United Kingdom and while religion played a role as a cultural marker, the conflict was in fact ethnic or nationalistic rather than religious in nature.[3] Since the native Irish were mostly Catholic and the later British-sponsored immigrants were mainly Protestant, the terms become shorthand for the two cultures, but it is inaccurate to describe the conflict as a religious one.[3]
Palestine: Again, I'll start with a quote from wikipedia, although this is about only a particular incident, rather than the hostilities as a whole:
The Shaw Commission found that the fundamental cause of the violence "....is the Arab feeling of animosity and hostility towards the Jews consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future."
Beyond that, the U.N. created the nation of Israel by decree, and basically forced the current occupants of that to make way for Jewish immigrants. Again, while the opposing factions are both of different religions, the primary causes for conflict are territoriality and political sovereignty, not religion.
Al Qaeda and Islamic Terrorism: This one actually has the best case for it being a religious war, as one of Al Qaeda's stated missions is the construction of a worldwide Islamic Caliphate. However, their other stated mission is the ending of foreign influence (notably American) in Islamic countries. It has been argued that without the United State's continual meddling in Middle Eastern politics, Al Qaeda might never have formed, or at least, not have attracted the influence it has. At best, this is an issue of both religion and political sovereignty.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
What makes Stalinism and Maoism a religion? They aren't spiritual, they have no creation story, no afterlife, and they make scant demands on faith. Maoism has no scientistic dogma that I'm aware of, and while could Stalinism demand the obedience of scientists, the actual dogma they were supposed to support was arbitrary and could change on a whim.
Neither Stalinism and Maoism has a consistent set of beliefs about the cosmos, aside from a belief in the historical imperative of Communism, and even that was deeply shaded by both Mao's and Stalin's rejection of world revolution as an ideological goal. Just because people are forced to memorize the Little Red Book, this does not make that book "religious," particularly when that book is full of expositions on humanist and materialist philosophy. If Mao's writings are religious, then so are Hegel's.
There's also the little problem of Stalinism and Maoism lacking a God or Gods, or having novel rituals for the dead, rituals for marriage or birth. And then there's also the problem that nobody actually believes in either of these anymore, even in the course of their own lifetime. Religions aren't a fad, they don't just burn into popularity over the course of a decade and then suddenly disappear, leaving even the believers bewildered and in denial. That's just not what a religion is. That's sort of the biggest case against these being a religion -- what little people did believe of them, they accepted on account of constant, terrible coercion. Once the threat disappeared, so did all the mental furniture. Religions don't work like that, people accept religion freely and without duress, given the definitions of these within the prevailing cultural hegemony. (This is actually a pretty good reason to believe Scientology isn't a religion, either.)
There are plenty of reasons to hate Maoism and Stalinism without tarring it as religious, and plenty of reasons to hate religion without tarring it by association with the Great Leap Forward. Your use of the terminology is overkill.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
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.
Doesn't that imply that some things reflect positively on the "church?"
The vast majority of religious sects DO burn out in one or two generations following the death of their prophet. There are probably over 100 thousand cults and sects right now and the majority of them are less than a hundred years old. They rise and fall, mutate, evolve, and spawn spontaneously from the minds of prophets. Only a handful of religions stick around for the long haul, and most of them branch, merge and change radically over time.
Religion does not have to have a specific set of beliefs about the cosmos, or particular classes of rituals, morality or even a belief in the supernatural. Each one will have different dogmas that focus on different things.
Again, deities are not required for religion. Many faiths do not venerate gods. And in the case of Mao (more than Stalin or Lenin, but they did get some of this as well) the prophet is deified and worshiped.
You can not honestly claim that religion is accepted freely and without duress. For millennium conversion at the point of a sword was the standard operating procedure. Children are brainwashed before they have formed independent thought. People at the end of their rope are offered the illusion of salvation while in a compromised and impressionable mental state. And individuals converted by the inordinate amount of influence by spouses and lovers.
Religion is fundamentally a memetic complex that takes advantage of the mental illness of faith to infect and compromise the minds of a population. Another defining characteristic is that the complex changes thought processes and behaviors of its hosts to propagate itself and resist competitive memes even if it is harmful to the host or the population to which it belongs. This often results in faith so strong that ignorance and acceptance of objectively wrong (both logically and morally) behaviors becomes routine. Religion is a virus of the mind and the prophet of every religion is patient zero.
Both Maoism and Stalinism have exactly those characteristics. There is no fundamental difference between the non-magical irrational faith and devotion and magical irrational faith and devotion.
"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.
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."
No, I believe it because it's written in the Bible, and the bible is the infallable word of God, so must be true.
(And yes, there are irony tags around that, it's a failed attempt at parody. I say "failed", as it's not a humerous distortion, it's exactly what some christains say.)
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