The film maker Brett Hanover is no fan of Scientology. Working in close consultation with many ex-Scientologists and the folks over at Operation Clambake, he managed to put together an hour long film covering a young lady who had just achieved "Clear" status in Scientology. The movie is very slow and the story is dull, but according to this review and others like it I've read, the story does a good job of portraying what life is actually like for many Scientologists.
The author wanted people to watch this movie, so he released it free to the Web. So why didn't I link to it? Well, it's not on Google Video any more. Brett Hanover has apparently changed his mind. He's asking blog authors to remove entries about the movie (google cache is here). I hear he's also tried to get the movie pulled from Bit Torrent (I don't use BT, so I don't know if that's possible). If you go to his Web site, his "Films" link is also broken now. Seems that once the movie was released, the Scientologists weren't too happy about it. You can put two and two together on this one and I'm sure you'll reach the right answer. In the meantime, seems that archive.org still hosts the movie. Of course, you'll find the film deathly dull, but I think that was part of the point.
They will come after you next!
Including one (probably short-lived) link that appears to be a now-deleted blog entry, and then this.
(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scientology_references_in_popular_culture)
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
jdavidb on 2006-10-16T15:12:31
There's also Brett Hanover's Wikipedia contribution history.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
Ovid on 2006-10-16T15:13:36
Whoa. I actually knew about the investigators, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't aware it was public knowledge and I was afraid a friend of mine would get in trouble for sharing that. The story I heard is that basically they were having PIs follow him and his parents and the constant harrassment scared the heck out of them. From that blog entry, though, it sounds like a bit more may have happened. Of course, this is all conjecture and rumor, so let that disclaimer be out there.
And not just conjecture and rumor, but my personal opinion: Scientology has to be one of the more disgusting cults out there due to tactics like this. I'm a huge fan of freedom of religion, but what do you do when they bully, threaten and brainwash? Oh wait, that's not religion. That's organized religion
:( Re:Wikipedia still has some info
sigzero on 2006-10-16T16:02:54
That's organized religion
Not necessarily. Those are hallmarks of a "cult" but not necessarily a religion.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
Ovid on 2006-10-16T19:09:38
How do you define 'cult' and 'religion'? Someone (Heinlein, I think?) differentiated a cult as a religion where the majority of members have joined it and a religion as being something where the majority of people are born into it. By this criteria, perhaps Scientology only has to wait?
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
jdavidb on 2006-10-16T21:08:51
Several years back there was some kind of study about religion and those personality tests you see all the time (no, not the Scientology personality test
:) ). For the record, I think much of those "personality tests" may be hooey, so take this with a grain of salt: :) Anyway, they tested folks twice, asking them to describe themselves as they were now the first time, then asking them to describe themselves as they WANTED to be, in the future.
Now in any given group of people you usually have a wide distribution of the various personality types. And, of course, many people are unhappy with the way they live and want to change, so you had people in every category of the test, and then you had people in every category who wanted to move to other categories: introverted people who wanted to become extroverted, for example (I did this in high school). Or vice versa, or whatever.
Now, they found that in most mainstream religions (or maybe it was just Christian denominations, I'm not sure), this holds: in the Baptist church you've got people of all types, and a significant number of folks who want to become all the other types. Same for Methodist, Catholic, etc.
But in the "cults" they found something different: in the cults you were likely to find a broad distribution of personality types, but everybody wanted to change into the exact same personality category, which was usually the same as the personality of the cult founder.
Anyway, as I said, I'm not sure how much credibility I place in those tests, but this could actually be a pointer to some psychological mechanism that might actually be able to distinguish between a "religion" and a "cult." Myself, I'm a member of a very minority Christianity called the Church of Christ, or Churches of Christ, and we get branded "cult" a lot (usually by Baptists who think there's something repugnantly anti-Christ in our theology, even though the article of faith they detest so much is shared with the Catholic Church, of all people
:) ), so I dismissed all the labels long ago. (One of my most interesting discussions was with a Jehovah's Witness who, upon hearing I was a member of the Church of Christ said, "I thought you guys were a cult." Of course, many say the same thing about the JW's. Myself, I don't care for the labels either way. I'm more interested in truth.) The context I heard about this was actually about the Church of Christ. We have an offshoot that is usually definitely described as a cult, called the "Boston Church of Christ" or "International Church of Christ" (in fact sometimes we get called "cult" by people who know only of the ICoC and assume we are the same thing, which is annoying). Some church growth expert within the mainstream churches looked into the numerical successes the ICoC was having and thought at first their techniques might be a great idea, until he started running these personality profiles on people and discovered the ICoC showed the cultlike pattern instead of the mainstream religion pattern. Google can probably hunt down all of the details, and correct all the things I'm sure I've misremembered.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
Aristotle on 2006-10-17T12:12:54
That jibes with the criterion I heard and use: that in general, cults revolve around the person and personality of the founder himself.
Scientologists worship Hubbard.
Admittedly, this isn’t very well defined; trying to apply it to the major religions gets mired in a swamp of murky questions. F.ex., there’s little biblical evidence for Trinity, upon which depends whether Christianity is a cult by the letter of this criterion or not. Islam and (to some extent) Buddhism suffer similar confusions. Funnily enough, Paganism doesn’t. Neither does Judaism.
It’s a bit like porn – I know it when I see it. The research you describe would be helpful as an objective metric.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
sigzero on 2006-10-17T12:39:15
The "word" Trinity is never used in the Bible. There is ample evidence "of" a trinity in the Bible.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
Aristotle on 2006-10-17T12:58:55
I was not picking on words. There is ample evidence of Father and Son being separate entities.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
sigzero on 2006-10-17T13:03:14
There is ample evidence of the Holy Spirit being one as well. Although I would not use separate, I would say distinct.
Monotheism?
davorg on 2006-10-17T13:50:17
You should read Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion". He has a very funny section on the linguistic knots that christians get themselves tied up in when trying to prove that they can believe in the trinity and still claim their religion is monotheistic:-)
Polytheism to monotheism to atheism. You know it makes sense.Re:Monotheism?
chromatic on 2006-10-17T17:19:23
Polytheism to monotheism to atheism. You know it makes sense.... except, historically speaking, the evidence from the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews does not support that line of thought. (Then again, try believing anything but Manichaeanism these days; people will look at you as if you'd grown a fifth leg.)
Re:Monotheism?
Ovid on 2006-10-18T14:01:39
If I recall correctly, it was via Asimov's research that I found out that early Jews, prior to the Babylonian captivity, were regarded as henotheists (belief in many gods with only one being worth of worship). After the captivity, they had settled on a religious structure very similar to the Babylonian dualist Mazda/Aingru-mainu belief structure (I could be misspelling that). Thus, there's at least an appearance of the Hewbrew people deciding to incorporate large portions of the Zoroastrian faith into their religion -- and the similarities between some Old Testament and Zorostrian beliefs are remarkable and this supports the idea that the former borrowed from the latter.
In short, they are one of many cultures which started with many gods, only to see them fall, one by one.
Re:Monotheism?
chromatic on 2006-10-18T16:17:16
My reading of the history suggests that Zoroastrianism was the borrower -- especially if you take the conservative dating of the book of Job to at least 960 BCE, if not earlier. If so, it's the nature of syncretic polytheism to elevate the idea of a powerful local or tribal deity into a place of power within a crowded pantheon.
Still, I repeat, it's amazingly difficult not to read the Manicheanist zeitgeist backwards into history. Maybe it's unfair to characterize post-Enlightenment western scholarship as willfully blind, but I really do suspect any research that posits that its dominant theodicean worldview was ever and always primary.
Then again, try to have a discussion on the nature of evil without invoking a watered-down Milton these days.
Re:Monotheism?
pudge on 2006-10-18T07:24:42
Dawkins was on Colbert tonight. Yawn. He hasn't a single good argument. His arguments are basically of the form "we can't fit God into our human logic so therefore God doesn't exist" (though he concedes he cannot disprove God, of course, but he goes right up to that precipice and looks over it) and Douglas Adams skewered that philosophy pretty well in the opening to HHGTTG (though, himself an atheist, I am not sure if he realizes it, or if he thought he was actually making a good point against God's existence).
That we cannot fit God into our human logic is not evidence against God's existence; on the contrary, if God did fit into our human logic, that would be evidence against God's existence.
Dawkin's arrogance on the issue is pretty off-putting too, especially since his argument is far too weak to actually be arrogant about (not that many Christian apologists do not have off-putting arrogance as well). Like his comeback to Colbert, "who 'just did' God then?" That's not an argument, since God is often defined by theists as "the uncaused cause."
Colbert (himself a theist) responds, "God is outside of time" (not the best response, but it'll do) and Dawkins comes back, "that's facile; you can get away with that, and you can explain anything." That's no argument either, and it's also what all generally accepted scientific theories about the origin of the universe do *anyway*, since there's no scientific explanation for what caused the Big Bang. Explain the universe as having "just happened," get away with that, and you can explain anything! Talk about question-begging.
(Of course, Hawking is trying to explain that away, devoting much of his life to the problem, but he is not meeting any real success.)
Re:Monotheism?
davorg on 2006-10-18T11:30:50
I haven't seen the Colbert interview yet, but I've been keeping up with most of Dawkins' recent press appearances via his web site.
But you're an intelligent man Pudge and I'm sure that you'll realise that it's impossible to summarise a serious and intellectual book in a few minutes on an entertainment programme. For more serious discussion of Dawkins' views try the NY Academy of Science podcast. There's also a selection of readings from the book that was recorded at Cambridge University. Or, of course, you could try reading the book itself.
Of course, Dawkins admits that it's impossible to categorically disprove the existance of god, but but that doesn't mean that god must exist. It's also impossible to disprove the existance of Thor, Russell's teapot or the Flying Spaghetti Monster - but no-one seriously believes in those.
What Dawkins does do is to a) demonstrate that god is unnecessary to explain anything that we currently see in the universe and b) attack (and, to my mind successfully discredit) many of the popular "proofs" for the existance of god.
Please don't jump to conclusions based on one brief interview. Read the book and then decide what you think of it.
Re:Monotheism?
sigzero on 2006-10-18T13:42:15
I could demonstrate that as well. It doesn't mean he or I am right about it. It does mean that what he supposes is what fits some peoples way of thinking. Isn't that how it all works? I can site many scientist that will demonstrate that there is support for "some" kind of intelligent design as well. So?
Re:Monotheism?
pudge on 2006-10-18T15:44:51
Of course, Dawkins admits that it's impossible to categorically disprove the existance of god, but but that doesn't mean that god must exist.
I never implied that, of course.
What Dawkins does do is to a) demonstrate that god is unnecessary to explain anything that we currently see in the universe
Well, anything that is currently possible to explain. He can't, of course, explain the origin of the universe without God, or even scientifically theorize it, without succumbing to logical fallacy (everything we know of is explainable without God, therefore, the origin of the universe is explainable without God!). Again, not even Hawking has been able to show the origin of the universe is explainable without God, despite many years of his life devoted to it.
Not that this proves God exists. But the evidence weighs in favor of a supernatural explanation (by definition, since it seems unlikely that nature as we know it possibly could have created the universe). Someday this may change, but it is simply unreasonable and unscientific to assume it will change.
and b) attack (and, to my mind successfully discredit) many of the popular "proofs" for the existance of god.
But not all of them. And my guess is that the ones he "discredits," I either thought weren't very good in the first place, or else he probably didn't actually discredit them.:-)
Please don't jump to conclusions based on one brief interview.
Oh, I've been listening to and reading Dawkins for years. And he himself is a significant discredit to atheism, saying things like (paraphrased slightly) "raising a child Catholic does more damage than sexual abuse of the child." That's a despicable and thoroughly unreasonable and unscientific thing to say. Sure, some vocal theists say similar things about atheism or "other" religions, but I find those statements to be despicable as well.
Re:Monotheism?
Aristotle on 2006-10-18T16:07:28
I can never understand atheists. I can never understand theists either.
I’m staunchly agnostic. I am convinced that nothing we see inside the universe requires invoking a supernatural being to explain it; and that we do not and cannot know what caused the universe to come into existence – whether it was randomness, a supernatural being, or something else we might not even be able to fathom, it not being of this reality.
No arguments I’ve ever encountered that were put forth to prove or debunk the existence of God have been complete and self-consistent. The position I outlined above seems unassailable. It seems to me to be what any skeptic with rigorous thinking must arrive at.
I’ve heard people complain that it isn’t very satisfying to not know and not be able to know; on this, I agree with Feynman:
I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things… by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose – which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.
Both theists and atheists, however, do sometimes frighten me…
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
chromatic on 2006-10-17T02:10:40
The best definition I've ever heard uses the phrase "mind control". If you've ever seen real mind control in action, you'll never mistake it for anything else.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
Ovid on 2006-10-17T06:00:58
Given that someone close to me was in a cult for a number of years then I would be inclined to agree with this assessment. It was a Baptist cult, of all things, but definitely nothing like the Christianity most people are exposed to. It was horrifying.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
drhyde on 2006-10-17T11:24:24
No-one is born into a religion. It's something learned. And cults, sects and "respectable" religions are indistinguishable from the outside, from whence they all look crazy.Re:Wikipedia still has some info
sigzero on 2006-10-17T11:47:44
And cults, sects and "respectable" religions are indistinguishable from the outside, from whence they all look crazy.
Sorry, I just don't subscribe to that. Unless you have a very low tolerance for crazy or define it in some other way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult/Re:Wikipedia still has some info
drhyde on 2006-10-17T13:24:41
Having invisible friends is crazy.Re:Wikipedia still has some info
sigzero on 2006-10-17T13:44:09
Much better than have no friends at all. : )
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
Ovid on 2006-10-17T13:16:07
I don't see it. There are plenty of decent religions out there (I just don't subscribe to them). Cults, on the other hand, tend to scare the hell out of me.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
pudge on 2006-10-18T07:09:33
FWIW, there are actually two completely different definitions of "cult." One is a technical term that defines a relationship between two religions, and basically means a sect that is a child of a parent religion, but is seen by the parent as being incompatible. Examples: Christianity is a cult of Judaism; Vaishnavism (some say) is a cult of Hinduism; Mormonism is a cult of Christianity.
Then there's the more subjective definition, which is unrelated, and implies that devotees are in some way "brainwashed," that it is demanded that they make significant sacrifices to the religious community, and so on.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
jdavidb on 2006-10-16T16:04:37
I'm with you on that last paragraph, until the "organized" part.
:) (Don't blame me, my religion's libertarian. ;) ) Re:Wikipedia still has some info
djberg96 on 2006-10-16T18:19:06
Organized religion? It's more like a pyramid scheme masquerading as a religion.If I had the time, money and energy I think I would make a video with a group of Amway zealots getting into a fight with a group of Scientoligists. And you wouldn't be able to tell who was who.
Re:Wikipedia still has some info
sigzero on 2006-10-16T18:31:27
That is silly! The Amway people would be cleaning up afterwards with LOC! : )
According to wikipedia and the FTC it isn't a pyramid scheme.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amway/
