Former Scientologist: CoS Told Brin It Wanted Only "Good" Search Results

An anonymous reader writes "Former Scientologist at the highest level Geir Isene reveals that he was brought in to educate top Scientology officials about the Internet, and learned that they had met personally with Google's Sergey Brin (YouTube video), asking him if it were possible for the search giant to filter results so that only positive information about the church would be returned on the word 'Scientology.' You can imagine how that went over. Isene also says that he begged the church's officials to give him a full day to explain the Internet to them before they met with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had regularly criticized the church for its stands against Internet freedom. Apparently, the church is missing Isene's counsel, because just a few days ago, the EFF put the Church of Scientology into its 'Takedown Hall of Shame.' Last month Geir published his journey 'From Independent Scientologist to Just Me' under the GPL v3 license, recognising how being an open source advocate helped with that."

Comments

What amazes me most...

[HerculesMO]

Is that given recent exploits by Snowden who is making a name for himself by exposing governmental spying, people that leave the Church of Scientology are treated exactly the same way.

You leave your "religion" because it's a sham, and then you're harassed and attacked anywhere. Amazing.

Thankfully I gave up on religion at 13, I can't imagine being lured into a cult like this. That said, Scientologists are stupider than I thought.

I try to keep an open mind... but it's hard

[kannibal_klown]

OK, I try to keep an open mind and really don't care what people believe so long as A) they don't get into people's faces about it and B) the message is peaceful.

I don't even mind their big back-story about aliens and what-not. Ignoring the fact that a sci-fi writer wrote it, who's to say that's any more laughable than other stuff. And you could say that maybe he was just inspired by the spoken word or universal secrets to write his other stuff, which isn't that much more implausible than where many of the stories for the Bible came from.

But... in practice Scientology is making it quite hard to like or respect them. Between the lawsuits, making people's lives hell for leaving or speaking out against them, the pay-to-learn thing they have going on, etc it's hard for me to say "fine whatever"

And now this... sigh. It's just making it hard to respect you. I mean, lots of people HATE the Catholic church but you don't see them trying to stifle people's thoughts and comments about it.

Re:I try to keep an open mind... but it's hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Between the lawsuits, making people's lives hell for leaving or speaking out against them, the pay-to-learn thing they have going on, etc it's hard for me to say "fine whatever"

This.

It's not about the aliens. It is about the coercive tactics.

All religions have beliefs that sound strange to nonbelievers. I give it three minutes until a Scilon shill says something about the Xenu story being no sillier than Jesus in order to derail the story into a flamewar of Atheists vs Christians, instead of talking about a cult that has been at war with the Internet itself for almost 20 years.

Starting with a forged rmgroup message, moving on to a sporgery campaign of random text to flood out commentary on USENET, the compromise of anon.penet.fi (at the time, the Internet's most important anonymizing remailer), the Mickey Mouse Protection Act (named after noted Scilon Sonny Bono), the near-immediate application of the DMCA in order to out a critic, and of course the the 2001 DMCA attack against Slashdot itself, and black SEO activities too numerous to count, including this latest one against Bing.

Re:I try to keep an open mind... but it's hard

[jythie]

And that is the key point. Scientology is not widely mocked because of their belief, but because of their actions.

Re:CoS is a cult ...

[Entropius]

Dismissing their magic is very different than dismissing their potential for dirty tricks. That madman staggering toward you with a knife babbling about the New World Order and lizard people? He's still got a knife.

Re:CoS is a cult ...

[Dishevel]

I do not think L Ron meant to start a religion.
I think it started as a joke.
As more and more people started to believe, he made the religion crazier and crazier, but they just believed more.
So he charged the stupid money and got rich.
L Ron is my hero.

Re:CoS is a cult ...

[Cajun Hell]

We're somehow supposed to believe there's thousands of alien souls occupying us? This magic machine you have is going to cure my problems when it has no basis in science?

Seriously, just look at Tom Cruise and his claims that anti-depressants don't work. You think Katie Holmes went running away because of any other reason than the idiocy there?

*sigh* Wacky beliefs without any foundation in observations, is not what makes Scientology special. Mainstream religions make assertions that are no less crazy that the above.

What makes it special, is its specific behavior and techniques, not its paranormal beliefs. A "church" becomes a "cult" much like how a murderer becomes a "terrorist," by working within some narrow definitions that people decided are unusually bad, rather than mundanely bad.

Body Thetans don't exist and people who say they do are full of shit, but it's not any different sort of bullshit, than the son of a virgin feeling better a few days after his crucifixion, talking snakes, lake-of-fire-afterlife vs a different afterlife, and so on. If you happen to not enjoy the myths within Scientology that's cool, but that's not the right reason to hate 'em. Hate them because they're evil people.

Don't tell them "you're crazy if you believe that nonsense," tell them "fuck you, asshole." I know plenty of Christians who by definition (it's what makes them Christians) believe stuff that is just as wacked. But unlike Scientologists, these people mean well so they deserve a shitload of slack. Not everyone who is delusional, is a sociopath.