Why is it ok to openly ridicule Scientologists?

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=mswas]
This kind of view is sort of ahistorical. The Church historically was the provider of most social services. Considering tithing to be some sort of bizarre racket is like thinking that taxes is some sort of bizarre racket.
[/quote]
They’re not? :eek: :slight_smile:

Point taken, historically. But at least one religion that didn’t exist in that time, Mormonism, is a strong proponent of tithing today. The concept hasn’t withered away. I don’t see the Pope saying, “We thank you for your past generosity, but God doesn’t need as much money as He used to. Why don’t you just cut back to 2% and we’ll be ever so grateful?”

62

[QUOTE=mswas]
[…]other religions are not?
[/QUOTE]
Where’d you get this idea?

63

Mormonism was similarly founded as a scam, but by a frequently-jailed con artist with an interest in having multiple women as well as a tenth of all his neighbors’ money. So? All prophets started as humans with their own stories and foibles before their Enlightenments, right?

Doesn’t matter. Religious beliefs are all ridiculous to some extent to those who don’t share them. Greed and fraud have been covered by the trappings of all sorts of religions. These guys aren’t anything new.

But to claim that a DC-8’s jet engines would function in the vacuum of space? That’s Hubbard the sf writer, not Hubbard the prophet, I hope.

64

[QUOTE=Musicat]
They’re not? :eek: :slight_smile: Point taken, historically. But at least one religion that didn’t exist in that time, Mormonism, is a strong proponent of tithing today. The concept hasn’t withered away. I don’t see the Pope saying, “We thank you for your past generosity, but God doesn’t need as much money as He used to. Why don’t you just cut back to 2% and we’ll be ever so grateful?”
[/QUOTE]

Mormonism also provides immense services for its adherents. Very few Americans know the sense of community that a Mormon does.

As for 1010011010 Try starting a pit thread about Jews similar to the one that we recently saw with Tom Cruise’s Scientology video and let us know how you make out with the Anti-Defamation League.

BTW, what does your name mean?

65

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
While pretty much every religion has some shameful things in its past, the crimes of Scientology are both perpetrated by its mainstream leadership and committed in modern times, when they should have known better.
[/quote]
As if other religions aren’t inflicting immense amounts of evil right now.

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
Wrong again. You could attend the Catholic Church for free. While donations were expected, they were never strictly necessary.
[/quote]
Who said anything about tithes ? I’m talking about such practices as condemning people as heretics/Jews/witches/whatever and killing them and taking their property. And indulgences. And how many people gave land or wealth to the church because they wanted to buy their way out of Hell ?

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
At the end of the day, Catholics, like every other mainstream sect, are and always have been more interested in saving your soul than taking your money. It’s idiocy to suggest otherwise, even if you don’t believe their metaphysical and moral teachings.
[/quote]
They sure do have lots of money for people who aren’t interested in it.

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
Hardly. Unless you grew up between Osama bin Laden and Fred Phelps. Which would explain a lot about your attitudes, frankly.
[/quote]
Now you are just denying reality. The elimination of all competitors has always been a core value of Christianity. And they’ve killed millions in search of that goal over the centuries.

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
Perhaps. Through getting their members elected, voting, and through lobbyists. But that’s just democracy in action. Operation Snow White was something far more sinister and dangerous.
[/quote]
It’s “more sinister” because they aren’t YOUR religion.

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
I notice that you skipped two of my points: That Scientology hides its metaphysics until it gets its hooks into you. And that they hide behind secular masks such as narconon. These are fairly unique and egregious offenses to Scientology.
[/QUOTE]
Neither is all that unique. Plenty of religions throughout history have had secretive teachings only allowed to the inner circle. And Christians push “Christian values” with a slapped-on non-religious front all the time.

[QUOTE=cmyk]
Also, Scientology doesn’t have a “God” so to speak. No higher being to answer to morally. This usually keeps other religions in check.
[/QUOTE]
Since when ? Basing morality on a God is nothing more than the absolute licence to commit any atrocity you feel like.

[QUOTE=mswas]
Cite? Got an example of the church burning cities to the ground?
[/QUOTE]
To quote your own assertion, “the Catholic church was essentially the Federal Government of Europe”. How many people died and how many cities were leveled in the name of Catholicism or Protestantism ?

[QUOTE=mswas]
To hate on the church historically really is to just hate civilization as a whole.
[/quote]
:rolleyes: The Church was not "civilization as a whole. It was a parasite upon it.

[QUOTE=mswas]
history of human rule is a history of cruelty in the name of stability. No Monarchy, Religious authority, Imperial Government, Nation-State or Corporation has operated any differently. Yet people act like there is something special about religion that makes people crueler.
[/quote]
Belief in God and the afterlife. And the psychotic level tendency of believers to outright ignore reality.

[QUOTE=mswas]
I maintain that I think Christianity served as a curb to people’s natural cruelty as opposed to encouraging it.
[/quote]
Garbage. Religion is and always has been a major source of cruelty, and an excuse for it.

[QUOTE=mswas]
The Romans and their conquered tribes that made up Christendom were constantly slaughtering one another before the evolution to the church. We owe a debt to Christianity for inculcating the idea that we need to be nice to people even if they are from a different tribe.
[/QUOTE]
“Kill the heretic” isn’t being nice to people of a different tribe. And Christians have slaughtered one another with great enthusiasm.

66

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
To quote your own assertion, “the Catholic church was essentially the Federal Government of Europe”. How many people died and how many cities were leveled in the name of Catholicism or Protestantism ?
[/quote]

Well if you were to be bitching about the history of civil organization, your argument would have more merit, but laying the whole of human atrocity at the foot of religion is just well over simplistic.

With all due respect, you need to go read a book about history after Rome.

You ignore reality in your quest to hate religion, what’s the difference?

Asserting things without any sort of historical consciousness to back something up doesn’t make your argument stronger. Again, do a little bit of research into how people were living. Arguing that human cruelty is the special provenance of religion is well just plain ignorant.

I don’t know why I try with you but I continue to do so. Jesus came up with a very difficult ideal, and ‘kill the heretic’ wasn’t a major component of it. How it was implemented by the people since then is a different story. As long as you don’t understand what religion is and what it does, you won’t really have a valid opinion on the subject. You think that from your modern bourgeois reality you are entitled to judge the beliefs of those who had nothing better to choose from, who were living in a much more wild law of the jungle type scenario. The Roman Empire prior to Christianity was pretty vicious, as were the German tribes, The Celts and well just about everyone. The idea of a separation of religion from the rest of everything is a relatively new concept, one that the people of the time couldn’t even conceive. So you are railing against the human condition but thinking you are fighting religion. The idea that one should act in any way other than their immediate self-interest is a religious concept. Just because you can apply it because of the relatively modern innovation that we know of as atheism, doesn’t really help describe the state of mankind in any meaningful way. It’s just a clever gloss for you to hate people without needing to really justify your emotional outrage with any sort of rational content.

“But they killed people!” isn’t a reasonable argument. We all need food, we all need hunting grounds or farm land, the same as any other organism. The ONLY difference is in the level of sophisticiation in terms of organization and abstract cognition. If you showed even the slightest sign of understanding that, your arguments would be far more worthwhile.

67

[QUOTE=Musicat]
Not like respectable mainstream Christianity, which only asks for 10% of everything you earn. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
Other than the Latter-Day Saints (I"ll stay away from the question of ‘are they a Christian denomination,’ but the intensity of that debate certainly indicates that they’re not part of mainstream Christianity), any other denominations that specifically expect 10%?

I’ve been a member of Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches at various times, and been a regular attendee at Baptist, Methodist, and Church of God churches at various other times. I don’t recall anyone ever laying a “you really should be giving 10%” trip on their congregants.

68

[QUOTE=mswas]
Back in the day the Catholic church was essentially the Federal Government of Europe. To hate on the church historically really is to just hate civilization as a whole.
[/QUOTE]

Maybe so, but when the Church, any church, is the government, the government sucks. In the course of all the Church’s Crusades, hordes of Christians and Muslims were killed for no good reason. Some governments were run into bankruptcy, in the mad drive to kill Muslims. During the Inquisitions, the Jews that weren’t driven out of Catholic Europe were tortured and/or killed. They didn’t quite kill all the Lutherans, but they tried. That, my friends, is not civilization.

69

[QUOTE=RTFirefly]
Other than the Latter-Day Saints…any other denominations that specifically expect 10%?

I’ve been a member of Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches at various times, and been a regular attendee at Baptist, Methodist, and Church of God churches at various other times. I don’t recall anyone ever laying a “you really should be giving 10%” trip on their congregants.
[/QUOTE]
I have attended Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Quakers and non-denominational protestant churches and I attended Lutheran and “Christian” grade schools. IIRC, all said God wants 10% according to the Bible and the only way to get it to him (as goat sacrifices are no longer tolerated) is to give it to the church. I’m sure it was usually ignored as unenforceable as well as too burdensome for many.

Not having seen the inside of any of these churches for 40 years or more, I can’t say if it is still preached. Maybe God has mellowed out and no longer bellows about such things.

Malachi 3:10. "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts…

Definition of Tithe

Here’s a discussion about whether Christians should tithe, with many biblical references to the subject.

70

[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]

But to claim that a DC-8’s jet engines would function in the vacuum of space? That’s Hubbard the sf writer, not Hubbard the prophet, I hope.
[/QUOTE]

Hubbard wrote for Astounding, and Campbell would never let that claptrap in. So go wash your mouth out with soap. :slight_smile: He didn’t even let things like that into Unknown. I’ve read a lot of Hubbard’s pre-loon sf, and some of it was fairly good.

BTW, Scientology didn’t start as a religion. It started as Dianetics, a science, and only became a religion to keep Elron out of the clink. Another reason that ridiculing it is fine.

71

[QUOTE=dropzone]
Knowing more than a few airplane whackkos, that would be ESPECIALLY Travoltologists. (John-boy is a gen-u-wine jet pilot, therefore an aerocraft whackko of the first water. I’m looking for the pics I saw in, maybe, The Sun of him smooching his boyfriend goodbye on the stairs of his 737. I cannot link to the eBay listing of an ex-Travolta DeHavilland Viper I almost bid on few years back. C’mon, the top bid was $25K at the time! Could YOU resist trying to scare up the money? I’d KILL for one of those, though I’d draw the line at paying for it.)
[/QUOTE]
you’re thinking of the De Havilland Vampire he use to own. I believe it is the oldest flying military jet in the world. Pretty neat but you have to land with full power and about 90 degrees of flaps because of the centrifugal engine. Saw it at Oshkosh a couple of years ago.

And he doesn’t own a 737, it’s a 707. Not to be confused with the venerable DC8.

But to the thread. As has already been stated, Scientology is a money scamming business with a viscous streak if it’s challenged. Germany is seeking to ban it. And the premise that other religions aren’t attacked is a strawman of biblical proportions on this board.

72

We can ridicule Scientology 'cos there’s not enough people that believe it.

I ridicule Christians, Mormons, Muslims, whatever. It’s not acceptable to do that in public 'cos there’s a critical mass of people who honestly buy into those beliefs.

In the future Scientology will probably be the same.

After a certain point there’s so many people who buy into this crap that creeps into everyday life, there’s always someone in the chain who can stop or spin stories that go against there beliefs. Scientology’s not there yet, but they’re getting there – and scarily there’ actively trying to get there by targeting ‘influential’ people.

[QUOTE=mswas]
As for 1010011010 … BTW, what does your name
mean?
[/QUOTE]

It’s the binary representation for 666.

73

[QUOTE=mswas]
The Cathar’s were essentially the Scientologists of their day. Preaching that they should work to make the human race extinct.
[/QUOTE]
So they should all be killed? Christ, I don’t like Scientology, but if the government ordered all Scientologists to renounce their beliefs or be burned alive, I’m coming in on Scientology’s side.

74

[QUOTE=AskNott]
Maybe so, but when the Church, any church, is the government, the government sucks. In the course of all the Church’s Crusades, hordes of Christians and Muslims were killed for no good reason. Some governments were run into bankruptcy, in the mad drive to kill Muslims. During the Inquisitions, the Jews that weren’t driven out of Catholic Europe were tortured and/or killed. They didn’t quite kill all the Lutherans, but they tried. That, my friends, is not civilization.
[/QUOTE]

Well, that’s just silly. The Crusades accomplished plenty. They eased the military pressure on the Byzantine Empire and established strategic principalities in the Eastern Mediterranean. They are described as “short-lived” but that’s a relative term. Some lasted longer than the United States has. They also removed many of the most violent nobles from Europe. None of that is particularly Christian, or even necessarily admirable, but Foreign Policy is often like that.

Christianity was never really a cult, I don’t think. Cults, as has been pointed out, are hidden, revealing their actual doctrines only to people who have become members and been brainwashed. The Catholic Church doesn’t put nonbelieving family members on “Disconnect,” either.

75

[QUOTE=AskNott]
Maybe so, but when the Church, any church, is the government, the government sucks. In the course of all the Church’s Crusades, hordes of Christians and Muslims were killed for no good reason. Some governments were run into bankruptcy, in the mad drive to kill Muslims. During the Inquisitions, the Jews that weren’t driven out of Catholic Europe were tortured and/or killed. They didn’t quite kill all the Lutherans, but they tried. That, my friends, is not civilization.
[/QUOTE]

Well, I’m trying to puzzle through this very complex issue, but I think it’s important to remember the historical basis of history. Certainly, a church run state today was bad, but to say it was bad then is to assume that there was some sort of available alternative, which there wasn’t. There was an evolution of governance from the power of the church which was essentially stopped on October 13, 1307 when their standing army was crushed by the King of France. This was the beginning of the rise of secular power as opposed to ecclesiastical power. From this point on the great Monarchies of Europe became stronger and stronger until the American revolution disposed of Monarchy as the main form of government in the West. I see Civilization as a work in progress, not something to be judged purely by modern standards. Yes, one nation went to war with others, and there was tyranny, no doubt, I am not arguing for a return to the Catholic church, but I am arguing that states in general have done the same. The Catholic church never dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, they didn’t roll tanks across France, or Iraq. They did not kill millions in Vietnam. I agree that our system is better, but there is still a lot of blame to go around.

It’s easy to come out against violent suppression of a heresy. It’s easy to take the ‘thou shalt not kill’ stance, but one must try to understand the alternative. What if this death cult had received a greater prominence in Europe? What then? If Scientologists got the power to start going violent, they probably should be opposed by violent means.

saoirse The Christian church was a hidden cult for many years while they were illegal in Rome.

76

[QUOTE=mswas]
Well if you were to be bitching about the history of civil organization, your argument would have more merit, but laying the whole of human atrocity at the foot of religion is just well over simplistic.
[/quote]
And I did no such thing. You, on the other hand, are trying to say that the catholic Church was the foundation of European civilization, while at the same time not responsible for any of the nasty things done by that civilization. Typical.

[QUOTE=mswas]
You ignore reality in your quest to hate religion, what’s the difference?
[/quote]
That I’m not ignoring reality. I’m paying attention to it. Religion is evil, stupid and destructive and deserves to be hated. The fact that that offends your fantasies about religion being good is irrelevant.

[QUOTE=mswas]
Arguing that human cruelty is the special provenance of religion is well just plain ignorant.
[/quote]
The “special provenance” ? No. Is it the worst thing there is, when it comes to cruelty ? Yes. Religion is the source of incredible cruelty and ruthlessness all over the world to this day.

[QUOTE=mswas]
Jesus came up with a very difficult ideal, and ‘kill the heretic’ wasn’t a major component of it. How it was implemented by the people since then is a different story.
[/quote]
It’s the story that matters. Why should I care for the assertions of a dead Jewish scam artist/lunatic, over what his followers have actually done ?

[QUOTE=mswas]
You think that from your modern bourgeois reality you are entitled to judge the beliefs of those who had nothing better to choose from, who were living in a much more wild law of the jungle type scenario. The Roman Empire prior to Christianity was pretty vicious, as were the German tribes, The Celts and well just about everyone.
[/quote]
And they and their successors were vicious AFTERWARDS as well; worse, if anything.

[QUOTE=mswas]
“But they killed people!” isn’t a reasonable argument.
[/QUOTE]
Considering that killing people for no good reason makes you a bad person, yes it does. And considering that the original claim was that Scientology is bad because it’s killed people, it also matters that other religions have and do.

77

Der Trihs I don’t think the Catholic church is simply good. My opinion isnt so much an inversion of yours, but way lateral to it. There is no point in arguing with you, you cannot tell the difference between your opinion and facts, so I shall bother you no longer.

78

[QUOTE=Musicat]
I have attended Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Quakers and non-denominational protestant churches and I attended Lutheran and “Christian” grade schools. IIRC, all said God wants 10% according to the Bible and the only way to get it to him (as goat sacrifices are no longer tolerated) is to give it to the church. I’m sure it was usually ignored as unenforceable as well as too burdensome for many.

Not having seen the inside of any of these churches for 40 years or more, I can’t say if it is still preached. Maybe God has mellowed out and no longer bellows about such things.
[/quote]
Perhaps it’s the non-overlap of our time periods, or just different churches, but I had a very different experience than you during the past 40 years.

Anyway, the fundament of the Protestant Reformation was the taking seriously of all the stuff Paul said about being saved by grace - being dead to the Law, but alive to Christ. The discussion at your link seems to go into this at some length, from my quick scan. And tithing is from the Torah - part of that Law that Paul said Christians have died to, and that Luther and his successors agreed with Paul about. So I personally find it hard to see how a Protestant denomination can lay down the Law, so to speak, about tithing.

79

Hey, I never said it works all the time. Because wherever you go, there’s going to be people who are looking for a place to vent their hate. I can only speak for christianity (because that’s all I really know), and basing morals on those outlined by the teachings of Jesus actually makes a lot of sense whether you’re a believer or not. Things like ‘Turn the other cheek’, ‘Treat your neighbor as you’d like to be treated’, and ‘Love your enemies’ doesn’t leave much of a license for being an asshole, or slaughtering heretics. The principles are sound, it’s the righteous haters that fuck it all up.

When a follower uses God as an excuse for some fucked up shit they do, you might think religion is to blame. But truly, if religion didn’t exist, they’d just find some other way to hate, and act on it.

I’m with you on this though: Righteous Hate is the worst kind.

80

[QUOTE=cmyk]
Hey, I never said it works all the time. Because wherever you go, there’s going to be people who are looking for a place to vent their hate.
[/quote]
And far more of them when religion is involved, especially Christianity and it’s relatives.

[QUOTE=cmyk]
Things like ‘Turn the other cheek’, ‘Treat your neighbor as you’d like to be treated’, and ‘Love your enemies’ doesn’t leave much of a license for being an asshole, or slaughtering heretics.
[/quote]
Of course they do, in context with the rest of Christian mythology. After all, wouldn’t you want to be saved from Hell ? Saving people from an infinite punishment justifies ANYTHING you do to them, no matter how horrible. So, you are loving your enemies and trating them as you would want to be treated by torturing them until they confess faith in Christ, by destroying their non-Christian and therefore Hellbound cultures, by killing the heretics that might contaminate them and send them to Hell too, and so on.

[QUOTE=cmyk]
When a follower uses God as an excuse for some fucked up shit they do, you might think religion is to blame. But truly, if religion didn’t exist, they’d just find some other way to hate, and act on it.
[/quote]
I see no reason to believe that. Not when religion provides so many motives for hate that simply wouldn’t exist without it. You are simply making the standard religious apologetic claim that religion doesn’t affect people, as long as the effect is a bad one.

It’s just the standard claim that religion deserves all the credit done by anyone even loosely associated with it, but none of the blame for evils committed by it’s followers even when they say they are doing that evil in it’s name and have no other motivation.