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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!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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'm positive its a scam.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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."