Are you kidding? They are enormously entertaining, in a kind of cartoon villainish way, so long as you aren’t the one in their sights. 
I’ll take it.
My condolences. There seems to be more women involved than men, at least judging by their own brochures and my personal encounters with org members.
Sounds exactly like the experience several friends and acquaintances have had. Hubbard had a lovely term for new members - “raw meat”. There is massive amounts of documentation of Hubbard’s obsession with extracting money from the membership with a fervor born of being a penny-a-word pulp SF writer.
They’re just trying to get you “Up the Bridge” (Scientology has a lot of very mixed metaphors).
Hopefully they are out of it now. They are also notorious for getting member’s credit cards and maxing them out. A number of Scientologists have committed suicide due to ruining their financial lives paying “mandatory donations” for courses. And there’s always another course. “Dianetics” didn’t work? You need “New Era Dianetics”. You supposedly went “clear” but you’re still all fucked up? You need to come to the Sea Org for the “Purification Rundown”! (Sweating in a sauna for hours while taking near-lethal doses of niacin).
The original, only goal was “Clear”. But as people reached that and didn’t have any of the skills and powers Hubbard claimed they would achieve, he invented new levels to keep the money rolling. So the higher you go, the wackier it gets. The “OT” stuff happened once he was pretty far around the bend.
By the way, Beck can’t be blamed for getting into the stuff on his own - he’s second generation. I give them a pass.
I think a religion based on “science fiction themes” would be great, seeing as good sci-fi has a lot of reasoning, philosophy, and intelligent speculation of the unknown behind it.
But this… this is garbage! I tried reading some wiki pages on it last night. It’s not sci-fi at all. Go to the Space Opera article (ie, Scientology’s ‘Genesis’). Scroll down to chronology. Observe all the stuff that happened long before the Big Bang. Ok, that part is unscientific but still kind of epic. Now, click on the events themselves. It’s all about the thetans being put into amusement parks or trains and being shown gorillas or disheartening scenes or being told they’re worthless.
What the fuck are they smoking? In all the stretches of time, in the trillions of universes that have come and gone, the things to have left the greatest impression on our immortal thetans is fucking this? Read some of it, please do. I cannot summarize it all in my post.
L. Ron Hubbard must have literally been thinking, “what kind of shit can I make up, improvised on the spot, that will be so ridiculously ridiculous that these dumbasses will still believe it?”
What I find most ironic is that the basic principle of scientology is “psychology is bullshit.” Such a statement would tend to draw agreement from me. Yet what is the proposed alternative? It looks more like Freudian psychoanalysis than anything else.
I never heard that. I mean, they have their own brand of psychology. Obviouly they can’t consider the study of human behavior itself as bull, can they?
Yes, psychiatrists are major villains to Scientology. Remember Tom Cruise’s whole thing about antidepressants?
Psychiatry is bunk, maybe, not psychology. Two good reasons to maintain that:
(1) They are clearly selling an alternative to psychiatry/psychoanalysis, but focusing on your past life, not your infancy necessarily. Old wine in new skins. Isn’t “this isn’t a pyramid scheme” the first assurance that you would expect to hear from any pyramid scheme operator?
(2) I’d imagine that down the years, a good few of their members have been steered into psychiatric treatment for, well, being off-kilter enough to believe in Xenu and the 707s. Attacking the psychiatric industry is at least aligned with attacking deprogrammers.
Not true. In many countries Scientology is not classified as a religion, despite attempts at litigating its way into tax-exempt status there.
A handy list notes that, among other countries, Ireland, Switzerland, Canada, and Belgium reject the claim that Scientology is a religion.
He’s done the reading.
Thisis always amusing.
Yes, that episode is one of those I was thinking about when I wrote about Scientologists’ entertainment value. But rejecting psychiaty or psychology in toto is kind of rejecting the very concept of science. One might disagree with the conclusions that the leaders in a field have reached, without rejecting the whole field of study.
Unlike other religions, Scientology has a bad reputation for censoring those who speak out against it (even if it is a rather obvious scam). They have an insane legal team. Most other religions at least tolerate criticism without going crazy.
Scientology is very, very goofy and very, very evil.
Their ability to extort and deceive is unrivaled.
By that I take you mean, ‘how far you get when you try to run away before they catch you’.
I meant that you wouldn’t learn anything.
Odesio
The reason scientology is against medications for mental disabilities is because their founder refused to take his paranoid schizophrenia meds.
Although Hubby later recanted with a letter to the VA.
Unless you can name someone who persecutes scientology for turning people away from mainstream religion it seems more like a strawman than a parallel. Certainly all the opinions here suggest that scientology is persecuted for encouraging illegal and immoral acts, not because it takes converts from Catholicism.
To me this isn’t evidence of a scam per se. Most univerisities, colleges and private schools won’t share their teachings without money either. That doesn’t make them a scam.
But they do force them to remain, and that’s where the tenets of the church become immoral.
Many churches, such as the JWs, will ostracise ex-members. I have no real problem with that because both the ex-member and the current members have a right of freedom of association. But such churches would never dream of forcing people to remain by threat of violence, intimidation, litigation and so forth. There attitude is “You don’t believe any more? Then piss off and I never want to see you again”. The scientologist attitude is "You don’t believe any more? Then we;ll harass you to try to re-educate you, and if that fails you do leave we’ll destroy you emotionally and financially.
And that’s wrong because it is denying people the right to freedom of association.
But it does make them businesses, not religious organizations. As a religion it’s a scam, as a business it shouldn’t be receiving tax exemptions.
I couldn’t possibly agree with this
any more than I already do.
To that point, Mike freakin’ Wallace.
Yeah, there’s a difference between the understanding that comes with long practice, prayer and meditiation, and learning, and a “religion” that makes you pay for any significant knowledge (literally or metaphorically). This is the major reason why Gnosticism was declared heresy early in Christianity. It promised you a vague possibility of power/success/“teh reals secret wisdoms” - but you had to support your special guru, obey him, etc. And of course, once you had this supposed “secret knowledge”, you got to feel special that you were better than all the plebes around you.