Scientology

[technodad]

So, the Supreme Court have said that Scientology is a real religion and you can legally get married in a church.

uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/idUKBRE9BA0CQ20131211?irpc=932

So, what do people think about this?

Er... Islam teaches that the penalty for apostasy is death. And people we know in the UK will not be following that teaching, but it is followed elsewhere.

And Christians burned other Christians at the stake.

What you mean is, we don't do that any more. Much. In the UK.

Actually, I do agree with you to a degree, Niminy.

Obviously, I think both Scientology & Christianity are not true - but, CofE, at least does have an integrity that's lacking in Scientology.

I think they are all about money & I bet the higher echelons don't believe the nonsense they spout for a moment.

I am also a bit surprised that it's been classed as a religion. I thought religions were all about the supernatural, but apparently not.

But, fine, if people want to get married in their chapels, they should be able to.

Well I have no time for Scientology, but you can die now for leaving Islam and Christians used to torture and burn people for not believing.

I'm afraid I think this holds up a very uncomfortable mirror to people who follow mainstream religions, and i am not surprised they don't like it.

I would really like to see Humanist weddings now - like they have in Scotland.

Well, yes there are certain fundamentalist Christians who like nothing better than telling people they are going to hell. But generally you can find a Christian church where you won't be brainwashed in such a way. I take your point that historically mainstream religions can be oppressive too. But Scientology seems to want to keep the lid on exactly what goes on behind closed doors and it's pretty sinister.

I think most of us here would agree that Scientology is dodgy. It's any time someone tries to make a definition for cult versus religion it kind of falls apart. It's probably impossible.

But Scientology seems to want to keep the lid on exactly what goes on behind closed doors and it's pretty sinister.

The Roman Catholic Church puts a lot of effort into keeping a lid on what goes on behind the Vatican's closed doors. It's got a lot more money than the Scientologists, too.

Scientology is incredibly dodgy of course and I am not saying in any way its a good thing.

I do wonder what the appeal is.

Does anyone know? I read once that Scientology was invented by Hubbard as a bet, that he could design a religion based on what he had seen and thought about in the existing religions.

That would make Scientology synthetic, if you like- nature-identical, rather than naturally occurring.

Is it just an urban myth? (The story about the bet, not Scientology) ?

I almost accidentally joined Scientology once.

I was about 21 and an extremely stunning young man asked me if I wanted to come and have a free personality test. I'd have followed him anywhere, so said yes and we went to a room above a pub that they'd reserved. Can't remember much about the test, but I bought the book "Dianetics", signed something and promised to be somewhere on another date & went home feeling a bit bemused.

Read the book and thought, "Oh, my goodness.....total nutters" and that was the end of that.

I don't know if that's true, BoB, but I read that somewhere too. Would not surprise me. Making money off people's gullibility is the easiest thing in the world to do.

Certainly it is, hettie. What interests me though is that if Scientology was designed to mimic "naturally occurring" religions (if you see what I mean) , it's not surprising that we can't tell the difference when we analyse it rationally. And it's also not surprising that even so, people who follow naturally occurring religions feel uneasy.

Given that there were 45 million years between the dinosaurs dying out and humans evolving into humans, you could argue that Scientology and people evolving from lizards or whatever makes more sense than any of the other religions.

We weren't the first species here. We know that.

Yes....sorry, I see what you mean now. Agreed.

Hettie I had the same experience as you. There used to be a Scientology shop on Tottenham Court Road in London and I went in once and did a personality test. They pointed out exactly what was wrong with me and how Scientology could put it right.

Also, when my eldest was about 7, I enrolled him in an after-school handwriting class in a tuition centre on Finchley Road. He went for ages before we realised that it was run by Scientologists.

I think what marks $cientology out as different is that it was cynically invented as Ron L Hubbard's get rich quick scheme, literally scrawled on the back of a fag packet and he admitted as much before he died. It's not a religion, it is a cult. And yes, I have encountered real $cientologists.

While accepting that lots of shitty and inhumane things have been done in the name of religion, the core principles of most religions are do with some sort of spiritual self improvement involving better treatment of fellow human beings, and the role of humanity in the cosmos and were usually founded with the best of intentions even if they may have been misguided. It is usually only later as the original impetus wears off and people forget the original point, that religions become riddled with the problems of wealth accumulation and power and control. The idea of god was to explain something otherwise inexplicable, to externalise and rationalise certain feelings and experiences of humans. It wasn't started off as a deliberate cynical ploy to control and extract wealth (even though it may have done that in certain circumstances).

I'm not religious btw.

That's a very good post Strawberry.

Yes, I broadly agree, wild, except I think Christianity wasn't entirely about spiritual self-improvement, but about being on the right side when the apocalypse happened. Jesus was very apocalyptic.

wild you know I am not entirely sure that's right. Of course I agree that scientology was invented as a synthetic religion. I'm just not so sure about what you say about the genesis of naturally occurring religions.

I think many religions were founded in a time of great fear and hardship, and were to do with placating the unseen forces that governed whether or not you died of hunger- sun gods and mountain gods and the like. Later we got religions founded on being part of the right tribe, so for instance, we see that in much of what we read in the Old Testament. Look at Elijah for a good example of "my god is better than Baal and I can prove it".

Modern Christianity stresses more palatable aspects, but if we are talking about the founding of that religion, then things were very different. If you read the whole of the bible without skipping the awkward bits, there is a lot more threat in there than we currently focus on, even in the New Testament, and even more so in other writings that were not selected by Athanasius to be part of the core biblical canon.

There used to be a Scientology shop on Tottenham Court Road in London and I went in once and did a personality test. They pointed out exactly what was wrong with me and how Scientology could put it right.

So quite similar to the way that Christianity tells us we're all sinners and how faith in Jesus is the only thing that will redeem us then?

HowardTJMoon, are you a Moonie ?

Out of interest, in the "natural" vs "synthetic" religion scale where would you place Mormonism?

Mormons self-identify as Christians and believe in the bible. But also believe in the Book of Mormon.

Interesting. I don't know very much about it, but I would say that it is a graft onto a natural rootstock of a modern synthetic variant. So a loganberry, a hybrid in fact.

Nope, I'm not a moonie. I'm an atheist. I just find it fascinating the reasons why some religions are held up as being ok while others are looked down on.

I really have no love for Scientology. A good friend of mine ended up killing himself after his Scientologist parents made it very hard for him to get proper psychiatric help for his mental health problems. But many of the criticisms being levelled here seem to be applicable to many more religions than just Scientology.

For me, this whole issue highlights the fundamental problems that result when the law is forced to weigh up whether a particular religion is a "real" one or not. If no religion was afforded special favours simply for being a religion then this would all be moot. But as there are substantial benefits for an organisation to gain a label of being a religion, eg by allowing them to ignore sex discrimination laws, affording them charitable status, gaining them special privileges etc, then these problems will continue.