Just about every time I start criticizing psychiatry, someone comes along and says “Are you a scientologist? You into that dianetics stuff, perchance?”
No. And let me tell you something about them and their loudly-touted opposition to psychiatry. They don’t put anything into grass-roots organizing; they don’t do any form of advocacy work. If you get involuntarily incarcerated in the loony bin, don’t bother calling the scientologists for help. Neither their voices nor their money is anywhere to be found when it comes to organizing psychiatric patients to have more of a say in treatment modalities and what kinds of programming gets funded and what our civil rights should be.
But when a sufficiently large and loud event actually comes off well, guess who shows up with very professional-looking signs and literature, acting as if they were, at a minimum, co-organizers and orchestrators of the big event?
I’d like to clear out their bull-baiting engrams with a good blast of hi-amp hi-voltage discharge the likes of which their coffee cans have never sparked. Put the theta in thetan. I’ll fucking thanatos their ass.
And yes, they just want the territory for themselves, to get to be the definers of what human misery is really all about (answer: come to us and pay us well and designate us as experts on the subject and we’ll fix it).
Although, to be fair, you don’t get taught that part until you’ve achieved a certain Operational Thetan level (i.e., until you have already invested an enormous amount of money and time into following the Scientologist path).
So they keep it a secret until you’re financially, emotionally and socially invested in the movement. That’s somehow better than saying it straight out?
A cynical person might say that Scientology’s hatred of psychiatry stems from the inability of Hubbard to get his theory of dianetics published in a reputable scientific journal (mostly psychiatric journals) and his forced reliance on sci-fi magazines to get the word out.
A cynical person with insight into Hubbard’s personal life might say that Scientolofy’s hatred of psychiatry stems from the tendency of psychiatrists to say that Hubbard had mental problems. I mean, he knew he was sane, and they said he wasn’t, so they must be evil liars, right?
Also from the rejection of Dianetics by the psychiatric establishment. He hoped he’d be accepted by them as the next Freud. Instead, they spotted him for the meglomaniacal nutbar he was.
This is what I don’t get: HOW does $cientology keep bringing in the dupes? i mean, the audience they target (young college students) have excellent access to the Internet. You can read all about the goofy underpinnings of $cientology-including the dubious record of L. Ron Hubbard (who had to be the biggest liar in history).
So how DO they keep attracting converts/dupes?
Well, South Park said it was way crazier IIRC, and I agree that it is somewhat crazier. But a big factor is how recently the religion was invented. Judaism is more plausible to many people than Mormonism because it happened much longer ago. Scientology was thought up even more recently than Mormonism, so seems even crazier. Somehow very old tales are given more respect than the more recent ones.
Except for the aliens I can’t see how Scientology is that much different than est or any of the new age self-help groups from the 70’s.
They’d lose tax exempt status, but it’d be easier to market that way. Of course you’d miss out on OT level 7 and the ability to fly and move things with your mind but they might get more converts that are sane.
That’s not what they’re interested in. They want converts who have all kinds of mental problems and can be persuaded that Scientology is the only way out. That way, Scientology can take all their money and make them work for a billion years.
By offering FREE personality tests that usually cost upwards of $100, you lucky person, you. And if you bring up all the goofy under-pinnings of Scientology and the dubious record of LRH, they tell you that it’s all lies made up by anti-scientologists. How does any cult gain converts? By preying on those with low self-esteem, depression issues, insecurities, etc.
I’d like to just interject and say another reason why Scientology is way crazier than most other deity-based religions is that the foundation is that of faith in an omniscient, omnipresent God. Once you buy into that, it’s easy to blow off the evidence presented by science, and just do what your ancestors have been doing for the last 2000 years or so. Even if you rejected any religion, you may find yourself choosing to believe that the universe created itself out of nothing, or by some supreme and incomprehensible being. Either of those options are hard to wrap your head around, but that’s what it comes down to for most.
With Scientology, all you have is some hack sci-fi author’s word, that an overlord from a civilization from another solar system fed-exed out millions of his sleeping victims on DC-8s to our planet millions of years ago, and after much ado, ended up as ghosts that seek out our minds/souls and give us schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, OCD, or Restless Leg Syndrome.