As a belief why is Scientology any less plausible than other supernatural beliefs?

Great Debates
21

Xenu’s warships were actually DC-8, I believe.

One main difference between mainstream religion and scientology is that many aspects of the Bible can be corroborated by other sources, well the Old Testament not so much. There are non-Christian accounts about Jesus, although it cannot be established whether he was divine, a charlatan, or otherwise convinced people that he could perform miracles and spoke for god.

Scientology on the other hand, has its mythos first told by a man who wrote fiction for a living, and has been quoted as saying he could create a religion and people would believe it.

Names like “Teegeeack” don’t help claims of respectability. Maybe if we find Xenu’s fossil, then we can all worship Saint Tom.

22

Religious, I’d say yes. Supernatural? Not IMO.

Not that I have any solid support; it’s just personal truthiness.

23

What of theological significance in the Bible or any other holy text has been corroborated by “other sources”? I don’t see many Muslim historians saying “Siva: Not my diety, but one heck of a Destroyer of Worlds, based on my astronomical observations.” I’m not aware of any Jewish historians who said “Jesus clearly rose from the dead, as my personal inspection of the wounds has convinced me, but that don’t make him no Son of G_d, now, so let’s not get carried away.”

24

It isn’t more deserving. It just strikes us - and by “us,” I mean people in this culture - as being sillier and weirder. There’s no way to prove that a virgin birth is more or less implausible [or pick another adjective] than dead alien souls in volcanoes or Athena bursting out of Zeus’s forehead - although I suppose the more supernatural elements there are in a story, the more inplausible it seems. The Jesus story includes “an omnipotent god exists” and “Jesus did a bunch of miraculous things.” The story about Xenu needs intelligent life in many solar systems to exist, along with thetans, intergalactic travel in ships that coincidentally look like something that exists on Earth, and so on. You can probably see why it strikes people as bizarre.

25

  1. The Bible as a whole contains a lot more weird shit than the existance of God and the miracles of Jesus. Ezekial’s chariot of fire comes to mind, the pillar of fire, manna from heaven and Jonah being swallowed by a whale . . .

  2. To someone who doesn’t have a lot of scientific knowledge, thetans aren’t that much weirder than mitochondria.

  3. There are a lot of people who already believe in many populated solar systems and intergalactic travel. Take a trip down to Roswell, New Mexico if you don’t believe me. More numerous are the people who have a vague notion that “we are not alone” that doesn’t extend to having witnessed UFO sighting but could certainly be called “believers” in alien life.

  4. A believer could argue that Xenu’s ship doesn’t look like a DC-8. Instead, a C-8 looks like Xenu’s ship. Like, we had some sort of soul memory, okay? We sort of remembered what flying machines looked like from back when we were transported on one as a frozen ghost, see. So, when we invented planes, we made them look like the ones we remembered from back then.

(I spent nearly five years among Creationists. From that experience, I can come up with an “explanation” for anything.)

26

A lack of evidence renders $cientology implausible. Where are these high level operating thetans with their superpowers? Why didn’t I curl up and die after I read about Xenu as an untrained non-clear?

27

I would think the main reason why Scientology is looked at as a cult vs a religion is that while religions like Christianity and Islam have a message, Scientology seems to exist more for itself than for others.

While most religions dont practice what they preach, they do preach tolerance, peace, love, etc… And while they do ask for donations, or tithes, they are not required. You can have any of the sacraments in a Catholic church and not pay a penny if you dont want to. You can ask a priest anything about your faith, and they will tell you… free. And while the Catholic church spends millions ever year in charities, I couldn’t find a cite for what Scientology spends.

Scientology preaches “clear” but charge you for the sessions, and continue to charge. I think in order to move from cult to religion they need to be more open and less greedy

28

…and even if all supernatural belief systems are by definition implausible, the simple act of inventing more of them is … stupid.

I draw much more amusement from the Church of Slack as a modern piece of performance art/“religion” than from $cientology.

The only plausible, quantifiable benefit of religions is that they serve as carriers of beneficial social and moral mores, memes and models. And in that regard, a number of established religions fail the test. Why invent new ones?

$cientology, as practiced, causes active harm.

I agree that over time, the supernatural mythologies become divorced from any real realities that spawned them, and over time the nature of the real, flesh-and-blood founders and such become lost/distorted …

The difference between $cientology and other systems is that $cientology lacks a useful moral core.

LRH was a failure in life, a con man, amoral, a liar and a cheat and a mediocre writer. He even joked that a good way to make money would be to invent a religion. He viewed religion as a racket, and he invented $cientology, a racket.

One value of $cientology is that it effectively identifies the subset of celebrities who the most stupid and/narcissistic of their group.

$cientology isn’t any less plausible than any other supernatural system of belief; it is redundant, easily identified as a cult, and its founder is easily identified as a lira, con man, fake.

$cientology is demonstrably false, from its beginnings. It’s best to nip this one in the bud.

29

You mean the Church of the SubGenius?

30

Woah, slow down. I’m not saying that he existed without a doubt, or that there is a great body of evidence, but the number of independent accounts there are certainly greater than those for Scientology, which equal zero. At no time did I say that anyone besides Christians think he was divine.

Wikipedia’s page here is pretty decent. Check out the links on the bottom, many of them are obviously biased but some scholarly pages are there. The subsections on Tacitus et al. are pretty interesting, even if it seems to be grasping for straws at times.

31

True, true. There’s lots of weird shit in Christianity, Judaism and Scientology that I don’t know anything about.

I would guess that a lot of people who don’t know about mitochondria still find thetans weird.

Sure. Maybe my post was unclear. I was giving reasons and examples of why Scientology strikes people as more implausible than Christianity. Not why it “really” is.

32

My point was that it sounds weird to us because it’s new. If it manages to survive as a religion for a millinia or two, it will seem every bit as plausible as the myths of Christianity do to belivers today. Of course, the skeptics will always roll their eyes, but like P.T. Barnum said, there’s a sucker born every minute.

No prophet is accepted in his own land, or so the saying goes. You’re more likely to believe in a “saint” who lived far away and a long time ago than you are in Fred down the street. Scientology is still in the uncomfortable stage of “That Fred guy ain’t no saint-- bastard owes me twenty bucks!” Given time and distance, it could grow into something more.

33

Except it’s not so much their theological beliefs as their morals, their methods of “medicine” and their doctrine of harassment and abuse.

34

“Doctrine”? Please! It’s a way of life! :wink:

35

Scientology leaves the vast majority of its followers broke. Even the Mormons don’t do that. For that reason, Scientology is a business. The only members of Scientology who enjoy financial success are the entertainment people (and Scientology’s own lawyers, of course) and their success probably has little to do with the creeds of Scientology itself. My suspicion is that, before they acheived success in Hollywood, they revealed some dammaging information, at the demand of the Scientologists who hold back that information–blackmail. There’s a thread in this message board where Dave is videotaping some Scientologists and instead of answering his questions, they just ask him what horrible things he’s done in his past.

I think that’s why Scientology’s world headquarters is in (East) Hollywood, and why, when you walk down Hollywood Blvd., every few blocks you pass some Scientology building (many of them are fronts, with names that don’t reveal their connection Scientology). They try to draw in wanna-be film actors, who haven’t yet made it. Then, if they make it, they’ve got the goods on them.

So it’s not about plausibility; I suppose the ressurection of Christ is just as inplausible as Zenu and all that Scientology stuff. But you don’t have to go broke to be a Christian–Catholic, Protestent, Orthodox, or Coptic, ect. The Mormons ask for a 10% tithe, but if you can’t afford that, they won’t reject you. To be a Scientologist, however, you’ve got to pony up the cash.

When critics ask questions about the crimes that Scientology as an organization has committed, they just get these counter-questions. What they really should be asking is: "Why do I have to pay so much money to be a Scientologist, when the Catholic church (for instance) will accept me for nothing?

36

There were certainly times in the history of the Catholic church where the ennobled and wealthy - superstars of their day - could purchase papal indulgencies.

To the Catholics, the Anglicans must have appeared at times as whackos, fundamentalists and heretics, and even today there is still a schism.

To the Anglicans, Catholics appeared exactly the same.

Both of these Christian groupings practiced tithing, and often it was neither voluntary, nor necessarily affordable. The last case in England of a tithe court took place as recently as the 1940’s where a local See demanded payment from farmers who had been suffering several years of poor harvest and were in no position to pay.

The church seized tithe debtors belongings such as cattle and attempted to then auction them off, which made a precarious position even worse.

Tithe riots have taken place fairly regualarly since medieval times, and were just one of the reasons that Quakers left for America - why would they want to pay tithes to support a state church that did not carry their faith ?

Tithing the Irish peasants to the Anglican Church was particularly resented

Scientology is no differant to the Medieval Christian church in many ways in this regard, except that it does not use state law to compel payment, and chooses other methods instead.

37

Weird? You think all that is weird? You haven’t seen weird until you start exploring Tantra.

Paracelsus (1493-1541) studied alchemy and then applied it to medicine. He was not the first. Taoism in China and the Siddha tradition of Tantrism in India were doing similar things based on their esoteric theories of the body. This is how mercury was first used in medicine. Actually, medicinal use of mercury originated even earlier than the Tantric texts, in Ayurvedic texts like the Caraka Samhita dating from the 2nd century CE. Cite: David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 52.

It was believed that mercury could lead to immortality. There are legends of Taoist alchemists who, er, nearly attainted immortality by taking doses of mercury internally. Their bodies remained incorruptible after death as proof of mercury’s preservative powers. Sadly for them, they were blissfully unaware of its toxicity. A Burmese legend of the 11th century relates how two youths found the body of an alchemist “who had died during the final stages of his experiments.” A monk told them to bring the body back to the monastery and roast it. It was only for the king to eat “so that he will become a mighty man of endeavor and protect the country from its enemies.” He went down the hill to invite the king to dinner. But while he was away the two youths saw the roasted body shining like gold in the dark and giving out a sweet flavor, they yearned to taste the strange flesh and said “Let us take just a bite each,” but it tasted so good they kept eating greedily until they ate it all up. Then the older brother said “Let us enjoy ourselves” and picked up the monastery from its foundations and turned it upside down. The younger brother said “Is that all you can do?” and picked up a huge rock and placed it in the path. When the monk came back up with the king and saw the upside down monastery and huge rock in the path, he said “Alas, Lord King, I fear my boys have eaten the roasted alchemist, and unless they are quickly apprehended they will rebel against you.” (Maung Htin Aung, Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism, p. 68-69, quoted in White, p. 48-49)

Talk about weird.

38

You can find the same things in a number of Christian churches. I know of a local Christian church which requires that you give them 50% of your assets when you join and if you fall behind on your 10% weekly tithe, they will expel you from membership.
I also know any number of sects which eschew modern medicine in favor of faith healing or herbal remedies. Lastly, I’m sure that you’ve heard many stories of just the kind of harassment that Scientologists are guilty of coming from “good Christian people.” It’s nothing new.

My point is this: there will always be a small percentage of the public (let’s put it at 2% for shits-and-giggles) that will seek out these kinds of religious practices. All Scientology is doing is seeking to get a portion of that 2%. They’re not going to get the skeptics-- I doubt if they even put much effort into it. Their “target audience” is the credulous of which there is a small, but constant, supply. The credulous come in all races and both sexes, and( luckily for the cults) all income ranges.

39

Tell that to Clearwater Fla, they practially run the town.

40

This thread is degenerating into confusion because people don’t recognize one simple fact:

The group is not the religion!

For example, I could claim that Christianity is a hate-filled cult that preaches death and eternal hellfire for homosexuals, Jews, Muslims, and most other identifiable groups. I could make my case much stronger than the case against Scientology because I would only quote the words of the Christian groups themselves, as opposed to disaffected former members and the inherently suspect Federal Government. Anyone who doubts my argument would have to face the fact that Jack Chick, Fred Phelps, and everyone in the Christian Identity and Dominion movements damned well claim to be Christian, and to speak for all true Christians.

Of course, such an argument would be something worse than trolling, especially coming from someone who knows better. Every Doper here would pummel me into the ground for making it, largely because most of us know Christians who would give all those loons a good kick in the ass. (Thank you, Barry Goldwater. ;)) Those individuals and groups do not define the faith of Christianity, any more than any other group or individual can define any other faith.

So it is with Scientology. The ‘Church’ of Scientology, which is about as religious as any other criminal organization, does not define Scientology. It merely uses it as a bait, a con, and a shelter. It does not define Scientology for all of the Free Zone Scientologists, who practice their faith outside the CoS. The Free Zoners are no more bizarre in their beliefs than any other relgious person.

That distinction gives us some hope for sensibly defining what a cult is. A cult is an organization that engages in abusive, controlling behavior. A cult is the same thing as an abusive parent or partner in terms of what it does to its victims, and the victims end up going through the same things abused kids or partners do. Going from that definition, we see that the professed faith of a group is irrelevant and merely confuses the issue. Behavior is all that counts.