All religions must have seemed strange or new in their day, considered cults and actively dangerous.
However, I think the Scienos will shoot themselves in the foot long before this happens. They will do something so over the top and outrageous that no amount of money will silence it. Lawsuits…er…ensue!
To survive, I think they would need a LARGE dose of time - ~100 years, long enough to rewrite their early history, as the LDS have done - see the revisions between the first and current versions of The Pearl of Great Price. (LDS isn’t alone in this, but as a newer religion it has a bigger “paper trail”.) Enough time passes and even the strange and new becomes ordinary and commonplace.
But really, it depends more on the ability of the Scienos to hide the stupider things they do than anything else.
Get back to me when you learn what you’re talking about.
Services provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not done on a pay per use basis as the Scientologists do it. Anyone is welcome to attend LDS worship services. And even members who are not paying their tithing may participate in the Sacrament (what other churches call Communion), may receive assistance from the Bishop’s Storehouse, and many other humanitarian efforts of the Church. Even the Temple Interview is done on a trust basis–the Bishop and Stake President ask the member questions and trust that the responses are true; they do not investigate the answer.
I don’t deny any of these things are true (in fact, I know they are), but I think you might be just a bit touchy on the subject.
It is also true that the LDS church itself is worth ~$30 billion (Cite ) US, mostly coming from tithes. I never said (nor, I think, implied) that the LDS is a pay per use service. (Note cite stays away from inflammatory sources, like the Tanner sites.)
What I am saying, flat out, is that LDS like other churchs and religions including the CoS make a good deal of cash from their adherents. Now, whether that is “pay per use” or whether that goes into a general kitty and is used for…what? $30 billion dollars worth of CTR rings or Storehouses or years supply setups or I Know My Church Is True t-shirtsor I don’t know what - maybe a goodish chunk of Nebraska the fact is that you, the believer are encouraged to give the organisation, the church, money. This is particularly true of LDS because you are pressued to give a statement saying that you tithed your bit to the bishop, and your tithing is part of what enables you to get your temple recommend. Thus, one could argue (though I’m not) that tithing in the LDS church IS a form of pay per use, however indirectly.
That is the particular reason I chose LDS as an example, as opposed to other churches who encourage tithing but aren’t as rigorous about it. Does it matter if you’re paying for an individual class, like in the CoS, or for the general fund of a church in general, like the LDS? The fact is, you are encouraged, one step short of ordered, to pay your tithe.
So I hope you’re ok with balancing on that fine bit of moral high ground between pay per use and social pressure, there. The fact is, I have less of a problem with LDS than most religions. At least they aren’t actively dangerous, like the CoS.
Well, I think you blew your comparison. Now if you had stipulated a Christian denomination that charges you to attend its services, then that would’ve worked, IMHO.
That being said, I like the idea you mention of
Where can I get some? And, not that I would actually wear one (11th Article of Faith, you know), but would there be some kind of T-shirt on the market taking a stab at the CofS? How about one taking a stab at the LDS (for a while there, I was considering getting one made with the 26 letters of the alphabet on it, one of them being formed by a yellow salamander, but I chickened out)?
I think it’s safe to say that most religions that have been around for awhile (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc.) were founded in times when superstition and credulity were the order of the day and there wasn’t a lot of critical scientific thinking going on. Miracles, angelic visitations, what have you – there was no reason to think any of it was bunk at the time. And by the time people got sophisticated enough to challenge the logic behind all this superstitious nonsense, the religions were already well enough established that they were able to continue on through sheer inertia if nothing else. Sure, there are plenty of people who convert to various relions every day, but I’d daresay that the majority of membership in these religions were either born into that religion or else converted from another religion (meaning they were already conditioned to accept the supersitions that form the basis of religion in general).
Religions that have popped up in the last hundred years or so (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) have a tougher time of it. There was still a lot of superstitious credulity (especially among the uneducated masses) back then, and even though these newer religions are viewed with extreme suspicion by many people today, they have still been around long enough to take on inertia of their own.
As for Scientology, aside from the fact that I don’t think they even really classify themselves as a religion, I suspect it has come upon the scene too late to ever become a mainstream religion. Two thousand years ago, it wasn’t that much of a hard sell to convince people that God created the universe, took the form of mortal man, and died for our sins. 150 years ago, it still wasn’t all that hard to convince people that God and Jesus appeared to a 14-year-old boy and that an angel directed him to find lost scriptures engraved on golden plates. Convincing people today, however, that what the Scientologists claim is true is too difficult for Scientology to ever gain enough inertia to become mainstream.
Ogden Utah (where my mother lives) is full of teenagers wearing them! (And CTR rings, as well.)
Its not a stab at the LDS, so far as I know, but a thing that teenagers are involved in that is LDS positive. Seen hats, too. And the abbreviated version on things, “IKMCIT”.
No, no, I was asking if there were any commercially-available t-shirts that actually take a stab at the LDS, an intelligent stab. I know that “IKMCIT” isn’t a stab.
I, for one, am hoping that the CTR jewelry fad passes into history soon.
Are you kidding? Have you heard some of the crap that comes out of Alley’s and Elfman’s mouth?
Jenna Elfman refused to help out an AIDS charity, because, “AIDS is a state of mind.”
They’re all batshit. Now Travolta, it seems, hasn’t done anything too wacky. But Elfman is loony tunes.
Okay, as for L. Ron being a fraud-there’s still some debate over that. I believe he was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, and he clearly had some serious sanity issues.
godzillatemple, no, they do indeed classify themselves as a religion-which is why they fought so damned hard for tax-exempt status.
It’s a ring with CTR on it. CTR stands for Choose The Right.
Glad you got the reference. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet so I figured I’d have 25 normal letters and perhaps the S made with a Salamander. All 26 letters would be Salamander Letters and I want the shirt to be perfect.
Shouldn’t that be a white salamander?
Not to be snarky or baiting, but I thought the letter (forged by Hoffman, or possibly an associate) spoke of a white salamander. I don’t recall any yellow salamander references.
I’ve literally been out in the woods for a week, so haven’t had a chance to respond. Anyhoo…
You and I both know a discussion about the bio. of the younger Joseph Smith btw. a believer and non-believer is pointless. I find the exercise distasteful these days. Suffice to say hiding behind the relative age of the evidence is an unconvincing rebuttal, and always will be.
Well, Brigham Young’s call to follow might have motivated some fence-sitters who believed in his status as a prophetic voice, etc. Others in regions where there was less of a fear of persecution might have answered that call for purely spiritual reasons, and so forth. I’m just not assuming everyone who chose to migrate to Salt Lake city and environs did so under mortal threat, and it’s a rather remarkable claim to make that they did.
Actually, we don’t both know that. I, for one, have had numerous fruitful discussions with non-LDS individuals on the topic.
Are you accusing me of hiding behind something or do you have a useful contribution to make to the issue?
And yet there’s the historical evidence of the persecutions, to include the extermination edict, against the early LDS. Whether you or I choose to assign a motivation to people fleeing for their lives has zero bearing on whether they had such a motive or not. I’m going to go with the obvious answer: government illegally orders people to be killed, people flee for their lives. Doesn’t seem to be a stretch in causation there.
Just mentioning a factoid.
Now, let’s look at the Scientologists for a moment. It appears that they’re now, or in the past, have been claiming governmental discrimination. Their complaints apparently boil down to the government attempting to get certain Scientologists to follow certain laws (such as don’t murder, don’t commit fraud, etc.). And their methodology for gaining new believers doesn’t seem to be preaching or anything similar; it’s apparently more a dazzle them with stuff they’re paying for and then up the price for more “dazzle.”
Oh, save it for another thread (perhaps in the Pit), chorpler.
But that tangent does help, perhaps, address the issue raised in the OP: Can Scientology become a mainstream religion?
Well, if enough people were to adopt Scientology, then yes it would be a mainstream religion. The actual question, then, is “How could it do that; what defines a religion as mainstream?”
So, what are the things that define something as mainstream? And, more to the point, how did the NRM (New Religious Movements) that have become more-or-less mainstream achieve that?
No, Scientology will not become a “mainstream” religion any time soon, and somebody put their finger on it earlier (I’m too lazy to go back and look it up): They need to rewrite their “theology” and their “church” history to make it acceptable to the U.S. consumer.
A couple of things in defense of the LDSaints:
Their migration to Utah did as much to settle the western U.S. (including my little corner of the West) as all the gold rushes, Oregon quests and railroad-building combined. Please don’t underestimate these people – they are fiercely proud of their tradition, and you have only to stand at Independence Rock and look west, as I have, to understand what they overcame to arrive in what must surely have looked like the Promised Land. They are justifiably proud of what Mormonism built, and if more than half of the families in America had the same values today’s Mormons have, the country would be better off.
Today’s Mormons understand that their founding theology is pretty hard for most people to accept, but (unlike the Baptists and Roman Catholics) they do not require adherents to blindly accept it lock, stock and barrel. Rather, it is a starting point for a person’s search for God and the Truth. Now, I’m sure Mormon leadership hopes most church members pretty much take everything at face value, because it makes for a lot less explaining. But any church that acknowledges (as most fundamentalist churches and the RC don’t) the need and even the desire of its communicants to question and search gets a crisp salute from even this cynical old atheist.