How About That There Scientology

[Xittenn]

Hi! So like I lead a rather sheltered life, I have no television and do not read newspapers and I generally avoid anything that goes beyond my immediate existence. I love science and maths and this is why I am here, because I feel like I have a place to be able to express myself inside of a community that is relevant.

 

I have in the past joked around with friends about the idea of starting a religion that was founded on science. I have pondered on what such a religion would be and how it wouldn't simply be another facility for education or a reason to hold weekly tech conventions and/or seminars. The details of this are rather irrelevant and I will end this with lambskin chaps and dancing in a marble palace Dragnet style!

 

So I have passed by this place downtown Vancouver(on Homer and Granville I think) and it has its front up, SCIENTOLOGY sumthin' sumthin' ..... I remember when I was in my teens thinking hey maybe I can join in and see what's happenin'. I have come to understand that this is essentially a very bad idea and that I should stay away no matter how sexy Tom Cruz appears in his films. Why? What, in a nutshell without me actually having to research these guys and actually gaze upon their existence, do these guys stand for? Who is Xemu and why is he my Daddy? Is there a Scientology heaven and hell? What are the handful of basics I should know about these guys?

 

Edited April 1, 2011 by Xittenn

[Marat]

I actually went to the trouble once of investigating, quite sceptically, what Scientology had to offer, and I was not impressed. First, it seems to rely quite heavily on the notion that words people hear subconsciously during moments of stress when they are unconscious can have a profoundly negative influence on their psychiatric health, and that the effect of these words should be diminished by various psychological techniques. But the great flaw with this theory is that people very rarely hear negative comments when they are in an unconscious state, and yet Scientology seems based on the assumption that this happens all the time, which is why it is so important to remove these depressive messages (called 'endgrams'). For example, I have only been unconscious a very few times in my life during operative procedures, so I doubt that the present state of my psychological health can be very well explained by what I may have heard on those few occasions. I would agree with them, however, that negative comments heard during emergencies and critical moments in my life when I was conscious do seem to have a certain power, and whenever I hear those exact same phrases again I sense their disturbing power. But I'm not sure why deprogramming them would be so important to psychological health.

 

The other, more fundamental error of Scientology seems to be its assumption that the whole point of life is to transform yourself into some sort of positively-programmed, manically upbeat, machine for achieving material success, no matter what this transformation costs in terms of removing the deeper, darker, more introspective aspects of your consciousness. A valuable person in my view is someone who has a keen appreciation for the tragic nature of the human condition, a person who feels the negative poetry of human fate, not a perpetually grinning robot who has extinguished everything negative from his mind so he can make that sale.

[Xittenn]

Oh wow! That actually sounds like something I would thoroughly enjoy. I rather despise my so called 'condition' and although I will always have an appreciation for its existence, and I do enjoy those sad moments on occasion, I would much rather be an upbeat money motivated machine. This is not a very good argument against, in my opinion. I wasn't really looking at putting the whole ideal down, I was really just interested in the message and to be informed. I'm a little surprised no one had much to say about this. I guess I'll just remain generally ignorant because honestly I really can't be bothered to read any information on this matter myself, I have better things to do like compile Salome \o/

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

The biggest reason Scientology has a bad name is their tendency to sue absolutely anyone who disagrees with them, to use various nefarious measures to silence critics, and to demand large sums of money to advance in the religion. The upper-level followers of Scientology reportedly have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn how to be a good Scientologist.

 

Several Scientology members (including L. Ron Hubbard's wife) have been convicted of fraud and conspiracy, including cases in which the Church of Scientology stole federal government documents while defending itself against tax claims from the IRS, and one in which Scientologists tried to get a prominent Scientology critic falsely imprisoned or committed to a mental institution.

[John Cuthber]

At the risk of being sued, I think the common consensus is that they are a weird cult.

Here's an example of their belief.

"According to Scientology, when a person dies — or, in Scientology terms, when a thetan abandons its physical body — they go to a "landing station" on the planet Venus, where the thetan is re-implanted and told lies about its past life and its next life. The Venusians take the thetan, "capsule" it, and send it back to Earth to be dumped into the ocean off the coast of California. "

 

from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thetan

[Xittenn]

Well the issues that Cap' has brought up are pretty distasteful. The ideas of Thetans are really no different from any other religion, maybe a little weird. I can think of much more fantastical reveries in other religions that are still to this day practised and given much respect.

 

Myself I have my own thoughts on these matters and they really aren't so different. I kind of see the universe as being something that is so organized and so well balanced that it is hard to imagine that it is not an extension of a culmination of organized activity in and of itself. I believe that outside of our singularity that we have probably been initiated by a higher conscious. Where the Thetans are concerned I often have dreamed of other lives and times and events and time between lives and it often seems very real. It has never involved Venus however or California and I have never observed anything to suggest conscious overseeing us in our immediate vicinity.

 

I don't know, I like to keep an open mind because I would honestly like to be part of a community that had an established set of beliefs that reflected me as a person. Scientology is obviously not it, even if it does contain some of the ideas that I may value. Whether or not they should be perceived as a social threat, I honestly can't see them being any more a threat than any other currently practised religion. For me I think this is really to bad that it wasn't something more fundamental and something more incorporating. Maybe this does reflect who they are as people though. What has been stated so far makes me think of children and how they like to indulge in their fantasies and how often these fantasies are a reflection of survival instinct; they are the centres of who they are.

[Marat]

There are also rumors that Scientology tries to drain money out of its members by exploitative practices, inducing them to pay more and more for sessions designed to remove their psychopathological 'engrams' to render themselves 'all clear.' It is also worth noting that most of the highly unusual theories about psychology which Scientology presents come from L. Ron Hubbard's very brief period of working in a low-ranking position in a Navy psychiatric hospital, rather from any sophisticated psychiatric research by academically-qualified experts. Finally, after having attended a few of their meetings just out of curiosity, I came away with the impression that most people who belong to that group are relatively uneducated failures in life who are desperately seeking some other institution to join which can validate their existence.

[Xittenn]

You just described 90% of the global human population :/

[John Cuthber]

You just described 90% of the global human population :/

 

 

So it's a very good business strategy.

[Genecks]

I'm aware of the thread's creation date.

 

Besides that...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

[Xittenn]

I'm aware of the thread's creation date.

 

Besides that...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

 

The thread was not intended in anyway to complement other threads or to be in and of itself a maker of April Fools! My hair is not significantly red enough for me to be considered ginger and as such I lack a certain devious nature. I am also not that imaginative and I think my only successful attempts at such ruse has involved convincing a large number of individuals that another has died and also that there was an imminent lay off in progress :/

 

I think viewing science as a religion, and as a fundamentally and finitely so, answer to existence that somehow embodies a set of rules that when defined substantiates us all, is certainly lacking. I think adopting science as a religion would be a social movement that would be marked by the taking on of ideas that are open to expansion and revision as progression is made by the adopting body.

 

Taking the more prominent role of most religions in dealing with death, Science can say something that we may be able to reinterpret and reinvent and even if it doesn't satisfy our need for closure it can evaluate and adopt coping strategies that are ethical and productive. We die! Why do we die? Is it good that we die? I don't feel it is ... What are we going to do about this here thing called death? Ummmm ... let's make stuff that will delay its onset \o/ Ok sounds good, the opposing body will do a study and present their case on why delaying the onset of death is bad You bastards I hope you fail -.o

 

If people lived like this and adopted the practice of investigation into their lifestyle and into their ideologies and this was organized socially I think we would both have the benefits of what is now religion and the benefits of what is now science!

Edited April 4, 2011 by Xittenn