Why is it ok to openly ridicule Scientologists?

Great Debates
141

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
:rolleyes: You have repeatedly said that religion is necessary to society; I’m pointing out that it’s not, and in fact is destructive to society. All over the world, the stronger religion is, the more dysfunctional society is. The claim that religion is just one of the standard false claims that the religious like to claim.
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Not necessary, intrinsic, your arguments rely upon the strawman of a society that was not dominated by religion. You try to separate notions of a civil society from religion, but for the first few thousand years of civilization’s existance, religion was ubiquitous. You have no basis for your statement about dysfunction and the presence of religion. Your argument always comes down to imperious proclamations. Saying, ‘It’s a fact!’, does not make it so, no matter how passionately you say it. Even secular society is built upon a foundation and structural framework of the religious societies that preceded it. You show little historical knowledge of the role of religion in society. You have this vague abstract theory, but you don’t know enough about say what Roman society was like before Christianity vs after Christianity. How much do you know about Arab societies prior to the life of Mohammed? Do you even know that Mohammed came onto the scene after a spate of poverty in the Arab lands due to the fact that Rome and Persia were at peace? The Arabs prospered off of Roman and Persian enmity because they were the mediators for Roman/Chinese trade. When Rome and Persia got along the trade went through Persia, and the Arabs languished. What role did religion play in the squalor of the Pre-Muslim Arabs?

You make these passionate declarations, but have nothing but hot air to back yourself up. I am not by any means an expert in religious history, but you don’t even test the level of my admittedly small knowledge base. You had nothing of insight to say about my example of the suppression of the Templars.

You have this broad sociological theory, but have no basis in sociology to back yourself up. This forum is supposed to be about fighting ignorance, not about empty bluster. In the three or four years I’ve been arguing with you, your argument has not matured discernably. You still show little more understanding of the argument you put so much passion into.

142

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
So ? He was an ignorant primitive, no matter how smart he was.
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You seem to be missing the point. I hardly that that we, living in this time & place in history, represent the epitome of enlightened thought and knowledge. You might think about that when you are making your sweeping declarations and believing yourself to have a fully realized understanding of…well, of anything. What will people understand or know 100, 500, or 1000 years from now that will make them dismiss us as ignorant primitives?

143

[QUOTE=mswas]
Back to the topic, compare these two statements:

Scientology are a bunch of violent wackos out to dominate the Earth.

Jews are a bunch of violent wackos out to dominate the Earth.

If you want to experiment and see which ones are fair game, go around and share these opinions with 50 people each out on the street. See what kind of response you get to each. Write the responses down and compare them at the end.

If you want to add a flourish. You can use a second sentence. “Something must be done!”
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And we can add “Nazis are a bunch of violent wackos out to dominate the Earth.”

The acceptability of any of these statements depend on evidence. If we really did drink the blood of Christian babies, the hatred might be merited. The problem was that the hatred came first, had no support, and the atrocities were believed incorrectly. Some people 65 years ago rejected evidence of the camps because of the attitude you’re espousing here.

144

[QUOTE=Kizarvexius]
Der Trihs, you speak of plausibility and rationality as if these were eternal absolutes. I’m sorry to break it to you, but they’re not. What seems perfectly obvious and logical to *you *will not necessarily be viewed as incontrovertible fact by every intelligent person. Aristotle famously dismissed the ethereal teachings of Plato and embraced the physical world as true reality, yet found a universe without a prime mover to be an unacceptable breach of logic. Many of the keenest minds to have graced the world’s stage have found there to be no fundamental conflict between a belief in the divine and the pursuit of reason. I have read no argument from you or any of the other religion bashers on this board that might even remotely tempt me to suspect that you have a superior point of view, let alone a monopoly on the truth.
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I might point out that Aristotle was wrong about lots of things, and devotion to his work delayed European science for centuries.

As for monopoly on the truth, I think you have it backwards. Very few atheists claim any sort of monopoly on the truth, but instead reach their conclusions based on reason, evidence, and in fact the lack of evidence for gods. It’s the religious who claim a monopoly. The fundamentalists claim it on the entire Bible, the liberals on a nubbin, but it is basically the same at heart. (I except the Dalai Lama, who said that if science contradicts Buddhism, then Buddhism must change. )

Religion lacks the idea that everything is up for grabs, which science has. 500 years ago it was perfectly reasonable to believe in creation and the garden of Eden and the Fall. Today it isn’t. Even religions that accept that there was no Eden, like the Catholics, still believe in the Fall, in fact they must for Jesus to be justifiable.

There are some (feeble, in my opinion) arguments for a week sort of God.There aren’t any good logical or evidence based arguments for the correctness of any particular religion, stronger than Deism, that is.

Atrocities don’t disprove religion, they just disprove the contention that religious people are any better than people in general, and provide evidence that many people are sheep.

145

[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
You seem to be missing the point. I hardly that that we, living in this time & place in history, represent the epitome of enlightened thought and knowledge. You might think about that when you are making your sweeping declarations and believing yourself to have a fully realized understanding of…well, of anything. What will people understand or know 100, 500, or 1000 years from now that will make them dismiss us as ignorant primitives?
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There is a breakpoint of before science and after science. Aristotle and that crowd worked on pure reason without the concept of checking their ideas against reality, and so diverged from reality. I wouldn’t exactly call him an ignorant primitive but he was wrong about almost everything. Even the people who were right, like Democritus, were right by chance, not right from using the proper methodology.

On the other hand, Newton 320 years ago was correct for the right reasons. F=ma is still true under the right conditions. We’ll be judged as incomplete in 100 years, but not as ignorant.

1,000 years ago no one had the concept of testing the claims of religions against the real world. Today we do, and religion has come up short every time in predicts something at odds with science. We can’t tell if we have an invisible, weightless soul, we can’t tell if God invisibly twiddled a gene or two here and there to result in humans, but we can tell that Genesis is bull, and we can tell that there was no Davidic empire.

In the early 19th century ministers were heavily involved with science, because they were sure that science would confirm their beliefs. The conflict between science and religion began when science stubbornly refused to do this.

146

[QUOTE=Voyager]
Has anyone compared Scientology to the Shaver Mystery ?
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"Very little is reliably known about Shaver’s early life. He claimed to have worked at an automobile factory, where, in 1932, odd things began to occur. As Bruce Lanier Wright notes, Shaver “began to notice that one of the welding guns on his job site, ‘by some freak of its coil’s field atunements,’ was allowing him to read the thoughts of the men working around him.”

And so the legend of Christine is born. I knew Stephen King got that idea from somewhere.

147

[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
What will people understand or know 100, 500, or 1000 years from now that will make them dismiss us as ignorant primitives?
[/QUOTE]
What Voyager said: we will be judged incomplete, not ignorant. The scientific method, and the structured analytical methods we use to sift through available proposals about reality, will allow us to refine our worldview, and perhaps revolutionize it. But it will be the same basic set of tools that gets us there.

I mean, unless the scientific method is somehow overturned and revealed to be a sham, which is approximately as likely as my hair suddenly transmogrifying into ramen noodles, but the responsible thinker must allow for the possibility.

Barring that, we’ve been on the right track for a while now. We just need to stick to it.

148

I think two things keep folks from trashing religion as much as some other things: (At least in the US)

  1. Politeness.

Religion can be profoundly personal, deeply held belief, and is even considered by some folks to be part of the core makeup of their value system.

Out of common respect, I tread lightly were another person holds something in great value. I wouldn’t make fun of the horse-faced wife of a random male passerby, because I realise that he has deep emotional ties to her. (And I dont want to get slugged.)

  1. Religious freedom.

A considerable number of early settlers struggled with the suppression of their faiths in Old Europe. They gambled with their very lives to come to a land where they could worship in peace. This “right” became part of the American cultural value system so much so that it was included in the US Constitution. (Europe came to most of the same conclusions along a different path, I think.)

The gloves come off when Religion treads into Legislative processes, but otherwise most folks respect that “right” to worship as they please.

Scientology is too new to have any historical persecution periods it can point to for sympathy. It’s financial requirements smell like a scam to the cynical types among us, which doesn’t help in terms of public image, either.

If Scientology had been born three or four hundred years ago, and folks chased out of Europe like the Quakers were, it might be treated a little more gently. I dunno.

149

[QUOTE=Voyager]
I might point out that Aristotle was wrong about lots of things, and devotion to his work delayed European science for centuries.
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Naturally. Aristotle was wrong about a great many things, including (as you rightly point out) a grasp of the necessity for performing physical experimentation to test his conclusions. This need not detract, however, from history’s verdict that his was indeed a brilliant mind.

[QUOTE=Voyager]
As for monopoly on the truth, I think you have it backwards. Very few atheists claim any sort of monopoly on the truth, but instead reach their conclusions based on reason, evidence, and in fact the lack of evidence for gods. It’s the religious who claim a monopoly. The fundamentalists claim it on the entire Bible, the liberals on a nubbin, but it is basically the same at heart. (I except the Dalai Lama, who said that if science contradicts Buddhism, then Buddhism must change. )
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First point: I never claimed that religion has a monopoly on the truth, though I’m brutally aware that many fervent believers would insist that, in fact, they do. Second point: I don’t believe that anyone can claim to be absolutely right about anything. Third point: my comments were not directed at atheists in general, with whom I have no argument, but with those among the militant fringe who assert that all religions are lunacy and that religious persons are inherently insane or mentally deficient. This kind of intolerance has no place in a civil society.

[QUOTE=Voyager]
Religion lacks the idea that everything is up for grabs, which science has. 500 years ago it was perfectly reasonable to believe in creation and the garden of Eden and the Fall. Today it isn’t. Even religions that accept that there was no Eden, like the Catholics, still believe in the Fall, in fact they must for Jesus to be justifiable.

There are some (feeble, in my opinion) arguments for a week sort of God.There aren’t any good logical or evidence based arguments for the correctness of any particular religion, stronger than Deism, that is.
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Your points are logical, relevant, and respectfully stated, for which I thank you. As a counter I assert only that the existence of God is a question that is impossible to prove one way or another.

[QUOTE=Voyager]
Atrocities don’t disprove religion, they just disprove the contention that religious people are any better than people in general, and provide evidence that many people are sheep.
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I agree wholeheartedly.

150

[QUOTE=Kizarvexius]

First point: I never claimed that religion has a monopoly on the truth, though I’m brutally aware that many fervent believers would insist that, in fact, they do. Second point: I don’t believe that anyone can claim to be absolutely right about anything. Third point: my comments were not directed at atheists in general, with whom I have no argument, but with those among the militant fringe who assert that all religions are lunacy and that religious persons are inherently insane or mentally deficient. This kind of intolerance has no place in a civil society.

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DerTrihs does say many nasty things about religion, but I’ve not ever noticed him claiming a monopoly on the truth, which you charged him with. You indeed did not claim such a monopoly either, but I thought your charge ironic because of the claim to the truth of many religions.

I think some people go overboard in attacking religion due to bad experiences in the past, and due to the free pass much religion more sane than Fred Phelps gets. People being deaf to rational argument (no one around here falls into this class) sometimes inspire yelling. I try not to.

Still, I think the claim that the act of belief is irrational (which is a valid one, I think) has often led to the strawman claim that those who say this claim believers are insane. Loving someone is irrational, but does not (usually) demonstrate insanity. The very act of faith, so important to most religions, is an irrational one, and I think most people would agree. I’ve found this a very touchy subject, since many believers use very different thought and problem solving processes depending on if they are in religious mode or secular mode.

The first question is, which God? Some potential instantiations of the word God can be proven impossible. Some can be proven to be possible, up to the level that we usually associate with non-mathematical proofs. The lack of contemporary evidence of any god in the historical record is a good argument, I think, for disbelief.

151

So is the existence of elves.

152

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
So is the existence of elves.
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Nonsense. Ever had a box of Keebler cookies? Proof enough for me.
(All hail the Flying Spaghetti Elf.)

153

[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
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 obscenely untalented sf writer, not Hubbard the prophet, I hope.
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Fixed that for you.

154

Remarkably high-volume seller for being so untalented, though.

Incidentally, I may have written the above post in too much haste. Wiki’s picture of one of Xenu’s spaceshipsshows no engine, and includes the caption quote

He apparently did think of the issue, but not to the extent of noticing that DC-8’s have no propellers. That does make one wonder how he was so sure they weren’t 707’s, though.

155

[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
Remarkably high-volume seller for being so untalented, though.
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Scientology buys the books to inflate sales figures. Not that rare a tactic.

156

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Fixed that for you.
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In the future, find some other way to express your sarcasm than by modifying text inside the Quote box, as that is prohibited on the SDMB.

(I recognize that it was a shot at Hubbard, not at ElvisL1ves, but it is a bright line rule.)

[ /Moderating ]

157

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Scientology buys the books to inflate sales figures. Not that rare a tactic.
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Is this really true?
ps Bright Line rule? I don’t think so T’n’D

158

[QUOTE=Sevastopol]
Is this really true?
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There were widespread reports, when Battlefield Earth came out, of people going into bookstores and buying ten or fifteen copies. Then there were reports of Waldenbooks and Borders locations receiving shipments of BE with their own retail stickers already on the book jackets, implying the Scientologists were buying the books, then boxing them right back up to fill orders. Battlefield Earth might be the only book in history to sell more copies than were printed. snerk

159

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Fixed that for you.
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Have you read Hubbard’s 1940s SF? He frequently scored highest in the AnLab, got lots of positive comments in the letters column, was on the cover of Astounding and Unknown. Ever read Typewriter in the Sky? You can’t judge his abilities by his later stuff, which I’d be surprised if he even wrote.

160

[QUOTE=JohnnieEnigma]
It’s not a religion. It’s a cult.
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In America it has the charitable status of a religion.