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benito posted:In the comic strip Bloom County, Bill the Cat joined the Rajneesh cult and Opus went to go get him out of it. For decades, I assumed that Breathed just made up the name as a vaguely Indian-sounding cult. Rajneesh is Osho  I would have never imagined that this insane cult man was the same many people often quote and study.
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May 30, 2014 04:02
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The phrase "revolutionary suicide" is interesting because it's one of the phrases Jones took from the Black Panthers in order to target poor black people as converts for the cult: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Suicide Of course the meaning of "revolutionary suicide" as Newton meant it wasn't literal mass suicide, obviously, but it's something to know in understanding the types of things Jones was doing.
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May 30, 2014 04:20
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Medieval Medic posted:Of course the weirdo had a li To my knowledge, he didn't have a noticeable lisp, he was almost certainly hosed up on sedatives here.
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May 30, 2014 07:07
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acephalousuniverse posted:Of course the meaning of "revolutionary suicide" as Newton meant it wasn't literal mass suicide, obviously, but it's something to know in understanding the types of things Jones was doing. The only thing that comes to my mind when I hear "revolutionary suicide" is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUHk2RSMCS8&t=33s
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May 30, 2014 08:28
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:Oh yeah, they loving love that poo poo. If you've spoken out against the Church in any way, they consider it a religious obligation to come after you however they see fit. Some even say it should be a right protected by religious freedom laws. It's probably one of the most frightening things about the cult, especially since they've infiltrated government organizations before. Yeah, I remember a Scientology thread a few years ago, and I want to say it was in the wake of one of Anonymous' big deal hacks, and there were a few people in the thread talking about checking it [the Church] out, basically wanting to be internet bad asses by messing around with them. The reason it sticks out to me is because the almost unanimous response from everyone else in the thread was to stay the gently caress away from them, no matter how sound you think your thinking is, and especially if you value, well, everything in your life.
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May 30, 2014 11:22
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Anonymous never forgives, it never forgets. Except it's basically forgotten about Scientology while the C of S probably has a few dossiers on the porn habits of most of 4chan.
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May 30, 2014 11:59
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Phobophilia posted:Anonymous never forgives, it never forgets. It just gets bored and move on. A few anonymous big names got stuck in litigation for a good while after that poo poo, one of them had his cats poisoned IIRC.
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May 30, 2014 12:23
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okay now thats going too far
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May 30, 2014 15:37
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acephalousuniverse posted:People interested in Scientology HAVE TO read Going Clear by Lawrence Wright. It's the best book on the cult ever published and has so many incredible anecdotes, from Hubbard's early career as a weirdo in the navy, to the loving bizarre Sea Org days, to disturbing poo poo like The Hole, blackmailing and kidnapping celebrities, bullying governments into doing what they want, etc. It's a quick read too, well-written. Am reading this now thanks to your recommendation, it's really drat good! I had a hell of a time getting an ebook version though, nobody would sell me this book, even other countries, turns out UK publishers dropped it because of our libel laws and the CoS being insanely litigious. I could buy a hard copy no problem though *shrug*.
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May 30, 2014 17:26
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:Jim Jones had such a crazy cult of personality surrounding him. He studied everyone from Hitler to Ghandi as a kid, and it shows in his ability to get people willing to follow him to hell and back. What's most interesting about Jones is that he honestly seemed to believe in total equality, being a huge proponent of racial integration and socialism. However, he had no qualms with manipulating the hell out of people to turn them to his way of thinking, and got incredibly petty and selfish whenever things didn't go his way. You can't help but wonder if he could have been an agent change instead of the instigator of tragedy. This is the most interesting part of the People's Temple to me. Like someone said above, it was in many ways really progressive for the time, and Jim Jones could have been a hero had he not been an evil lunatic murdering scumfuck.
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May 30, 2014 19:14
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FrozenVent posted:It just gets bored and move on. There were feral cats in his neighborhood and he would put food out for them and they'd wander in and out of his house, if I remember the story. One day he found blood everywhere and one of the cats dead, and when they ran tests at the vet they found poison in the bowl of food he'd left out. It was a really nasty, painful death too, that poor animal really suffered. I don't think he wound up losing the court case, but killed himself while the protests were still going on, or so I heard. Really scary poo poo.
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May 30, 2014 22:11
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They recruit paranoid crazy people. This cannot be overstated. Their whole mythology is that mental health professionals are part of an alien conspiracy to suppress humanity's true powers. Prescribed drugs rob you of your superpowers, as does talk therapy. They've cultivated a fanatically loyal army of lunatics.
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May 30, 2014 23:36
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Otana posted:I don't think he wound up losing the court case, but killed himself while the protests were still going on, or so I heard. Really scary poo poo. Are we talking "killed himself", or legit suicide?
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May 30, 2014 23:37
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I think it was legit, that guy wasn't the most stable person to start with... Again, it's been a few years and I'm going from memory but I don't think anyone really questioned that one (Sean something, right? Didn't he go by Rorschach online?) There was another guy in Clearwater who'd film scientologists and stuff who "killed himself" more recently and that was a heck of a lot more suspect.
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May 30, 2014 23:48
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That drat Satyr posted:Are we talking "killed himself", or legit suicide? I honestly think in this case it was legit suicide (especially considering his mental state like FrozenVent mentioned), but considering the kind of psychological torment he was put through beforehand I think they're at least partially responsible for pushing him over the edge.
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May 31, 2014 05:45
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Phobophilia posted:Anonymous never forgives, it never forgets. https://whyweprotest.net/community/ Things have definitely slowed down since Tom Cruise jumped around on Oprah's couch, but they're still protesting.
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May 31, 2014 06:13
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Dr Scoofles posted:Am reading this now thanks to your recommendation, it's really drat good! I had a hell of a time getting an ebook version though, nobody would sell me this book, even other countries, turns out UK publishers dropped it because of our libel laws and the CoS being insanely litigious. I could buy a hard copy no problem though *shrug*. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00A9ET54E?cache=cb6bad40a6f100c64f235f575a1abe77&qid=1401515546&sr=8-1#ref=mp_s_a_1_1
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May 31, 2014 06:51
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Jack Gladney posted:They recruit paranoid crazy people. This cannot be overstated. Their whole mythology is that mental health professionals are part of an alien conspiracy to suppress humanity's true powers. Prescribed drugs rob you of your superpowers, as does talk therapy. They've cultivated a fanatically loyal army of lunatics. The thing about Scientology is that they don't actually tell their followers about the wackier parts of their mythology until they've eventually spent their life savings on level-ups so that they can access the "higher knowledge" (that they could have just looked up on the internet). I imagine at least some people are far too invested in the whole thing by then so they just accept it, because drat they must feel like idiots when they get to the part about spacelord Xenu otherwise. But what is really kills me is that there are now reformist Scientologists who agree as a church the religion is corrupt and horrible, but the "core teachings of Scientology" are still important and deserve a better church around them.
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May 31, 2014 10:52
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BioMe posted:But what is really kills me is that there are now reformist Scientologists who agree as a church the religion is corrupt and horrible, but the "core teachings of Scientology" are still important and deserve a better church around them. "Well we don't like the forced labour or the torture but the creation myth where a space warlord flew people through space on Douglas DC-8s to earth where they were blown up by nukes in volcanos is the hill we're willing to die on" Edit: I was just reading the Xenu article as a refresher on Wikipedia and gosh, they just obfuscate everything with technical-sounding jargon don't they. "Incident II" "R6 implant" "Operating Thetan level III" "Advanced Technology" and so on. I guess the fact that it sounds vaguely scientific is why people don't just immediately laugh it off; though I suppose it helps that the average Scientologist who makes it that far is already at least a little unhinged to begin with. BattleMaster has a new favorite as of 11:11 on May 31, 2014 |
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May 31, 2014 11:01
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There are also the people who were born into it or joined as children with their parents. You have to feel sorry for those people at least.
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May 31, 2014 11:14
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Excerpt from Xenu article: The narrative of Xenu is part of Scientologist teachings about extraterrestrial civilizations and alien interventions in earthly events, collectively described as "space opera" by Hubbard. Hubbard detailed the story in Operating Thetan level III (OT III) in 1967, warning that the R6 "implant" (past trauma)was "calculated to kill (by pneumonia, etc.) anyone who attempts to solve it". Totally legit guys.
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May 31, 2014 13:34
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Do you think that people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta really believe in this stuff? I'm sure, as Scientology Royalty, they are shielded from the worst aspects. But it could be that some of them are deeply ashamed of having spent millions of dollars on this crap. Or they've told all their secrets to the organization and are afraid of what might happen if they leave. At least Katie Holmes had the smart idea of getting her daughter out of there before it was too late. Of course she should have realized what was going on before she married Tom Cruise in the first place, but we can't change the past. Are Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes "Fair Game"? Or would Scientology not risk going after celebrities?
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May 31, 2014 14:31
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bean_shadow posted:Or would Scientology not risk going after celebrities? Probably not as blatantly as they would some member of Joe Public but I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to pull strings and have people effectively shut out of their industry, by telling members they have to refuse to work with these people or whatever.
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May 31, 2014 17:15
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jalopybrown posted:Probably not as blatantly as they would some member of Joe Public but I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to pull strings and have people effectively shut out of their industry, by telling members they have to refuse to work with these people or whatever. I doubt they'd mess with Katie Holmes for fear of losing Tom Cruise. Unless she really raised a stink somehow but I think she knows enough not to stick her dick into that hornets nest. I'm sure they'd gently caress with Leah Remini though and probably subtly have.
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May 31, 2014 17:27
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BattleMaster posted:"Well we don't like the forced labour or the torture but the creation myth where a space warlord flew people through space on Douglas DC-8s to earth where they were blown up by nukes in volcanos is the hill we're willing to die on" What was Hubbard's explanation of how he 'found out' this stuff? Other religions have divine revelation, but what's Scientology's explanation of how Scientology came about?
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May 31, 2014 18:39
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It can't have been as strange as the Joseph Smith "reading gold plates in a hat with stone glasses" method.
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May 31, 2014 18:46
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LoonShia posted:It can't have been as strange as the Joseph Smith "reading gold plates in a hat with stone glasses" method. This is one of those things that sounds nutty today but made sense to people at the time. Revelation and Prophecy using Fairy Stones (as they were known) was a pretty common thing that ranged between an actual profession and a parlor trick. It was a pretty commonly held belief in many parts of rural America that certain special people could use them to read codes and ciphers and find hidden things like mines and wells. It was a time filled with a lot of these folksy magic things, it was when a lot of the first huge waves of immigrants from poor places in Europe were showing up and they brought with them a lot of stuff like fairy stones and tarot, and then on top of that it was when the first real seeds of what would become the Occultism and Christian Revival movements were brewing and both of those heavily factor in a lot of strange stuff (snake handling, speaking in tongues, prophecy and revelation, deciphering codes in religious works etc).
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May 31, 2014 19:54
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Speaking of Mormons: One day a bunch of mormons came across a bunch of pages written in hieroglyphics, and brings it to Joseph Smith, who claimed to be able to read hieroglyphics, and asked him to translate it. He gladly did so, and the translation was published as "The Pearl of Great Price." Fast forward 150 years or so. We now know how to translate hieroglyphics, and it turns out those pages say nothing like what Joseph Smith says they did. The LDS church puts one of their top apologists on the case, asking him to find a way to reconcile the two translations. According to his daughter, it drove him insane, which caused him to sexually abuse her and possibly other members of the family. 
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May 31, 2014 20:08
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Encolpio posted:What was Hubbard's explanation of how he 'found out' this stuff? Other religions have divine revelation, but what's Scientology's explanation of how Scientology came about? The basic idea is that once you start losing your body thetans, and doing all these dianetics things to yourself, you start to have better and better recall of your own experiences. You can remember what you had for breakfast on the third of June ten years ago, or whatever. So, in order to 'punch-up' the claims of dianetics for the sixties, he started to claim that people could remember back to birth, and then even before birth, back to past lives. So, as Hubbard went further and further back into his own past lives, he started recovering more and more information about the history of the universe, like galactic empires and Xenu and space planes.
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May 31, 2014 21:44
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Lamprey Cannon posted:The basic idea is that once you start losing your body thetans, and doing all these dianetics things to yourself, you start to have better and better recall of your own experiences. You can remember what you had for breakfast on the third of June ten years ago, or whatever. So, in order to 'punch-up' the claims of dianetics for the sixties, he started to claim that people could remember back to birth, and then even before birth, back to past lives. So, as Hubbard went further and further back into his own past lives, he started recovering more and more information about the history of the universe, like galactic empires and Xenu and space planes. Ah, ok, thanks. I was just reading the wiki page on space opera in Scientology, and Hubbard's cosmic history comes across as a hilarious mix of the ridiculous and the banal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera_in_Scientology quote:In an attempt to solve his overpopulation issue, Xenu placed several billion of his citizens onto DC 8 planes in refrigerators and sent the planes to the planet Teegeeack (now known as Earth).[20] Hubbard stated that Xenu told the subjects that they were being transported there for tax auditing. quote:Hubbard taught that the Christian concept of heaven was based on a physical location on another planet, which he claimed to have visited. He compared its appearance to Busch Gardens in Pasadena, California. I think part of what sets mormonism and scientology apart from mainstream religions (in addition to their being new) and prompts scorn more quickly is their scriptures' total lack of aesthetic worth.
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May 31, 2014 22:51
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Separating Hubbard from his freaky UFO cult, he really wasn't a very original sci-fi writer. The appearance of every drat thing in his stories looks like some mundane thing from present day (circa 1940-1960). I mean god forbid you actually describe how something looks without saying "oh Markabians look like IRS auditors" or "Xenu's personnel transports look exactly like a contemporary passenger jetliner but with rockets" etc..
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May 31, 2014 23:19
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bean_shadow posted:Do you think that people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta really believe in this stuff? One of the most fascinating things about Going Clear, the book, is the insight into Travolta and Cruise. Travolta's case is really sad and he's obviously been blackmailed into it for years and years; you get to pity him a lot. Cruise on the other hand seems like both a true believer and a huge piece of poo poo. As far as going after celebrities, their method there is less "kidnap and murder" as "collect every embarrassing detail in your file and threaten to release it and destroy your career if you cross us." The church was popular in Hollywood because it legit could hook you up with real contacts and career opportunities, and take them away if it wants. And a lot of its techniques in the early stages are just basic confidence and improve exercises found in any acting workshop, with a layer of new agey psychic poo poo added.
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Jun 1, 2014 03:14
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In case you are wondering, one way which CoS uses to gather information about its members' personal lives is recording their confession sessions
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Jun 1, 2014 11:14
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In addition to the past-life-regression through auditing thing, one of the more notoriously goofy texts called What to Audit/A History of Man was written by giving a teenager tons of amphetamines on a yacht and recording everything he said. The Saturday Evening Post posted:The boo-hoo, Hubbard writes, was a clam-like animal that lived millions of years ago and used to pump sea water from its shell through its eyes. It marked the transition from life in the sea to life on land, and may be "the missing link in the evolutionary chain." Life on the beach was miserable for the boo-hoo. Encolpio posted:I think part of what sets mormonism and scientology apart from mainstream religions (in addition to their being new) and prompts scorn more quickly is their scriptures' total lack of aesthetic worth. You don't think that's a bit subjective? You don't think the timeworn and lapidary character of pre-modern texts, translated through a centuries long game of politically motivated "telephone" leads to their perceived clout?
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Jun 1, 2014 11:53
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Otana posted:There were feral cats in his neighborhood and he would put food out for them and they'd wander in and out of his house, if I remember the story. One day he found blood everywhere and one of the cats dead, and when they ran tests at the vet they found poison in the bowl of food he'd left out. It was a really nasty, painful death too, that poor animal really suffered. poo poo, olddirtybtard killed himself? Man, we were good friends for a while. I remember when his cat got poisoned, I was on irc with him at the time. Later on his other cat, one he actually owned , died of old age and he got really depressed. I dropped out of that community due to rl poo poo, but I really didn't think he'd actually kill himself
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Jun 1, 2014 11:55
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moller posted:You don't think that's a bit subjective? You don't think the timeworn and lapidary character of pre-modern texts, translated through a centuries long game of politically motivated "telephone" leads to their perceived clout? Yeah, that's what I was getting at when I said "(in addition to their being new)".
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Jun 1, 2014 12:26
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FrozenVent posted:There was another guy in Clearwater who'd film scientologists and stuff who "killed himself" more recently and that was a heck of a lot more suspect. Clearwater is basically owned by Scientologists and a lot of the local police force works as paid security for the various Scientology centers in their off-hours. Consequently it's very hard to get the police to take any actions against Scientologists in Clearwater, and even when they do make efforts they often give up conveniently quickly if denied entry to premises by Scientologists - even places where emergency calls have come from. There is an alarming amount of evidence pointing to the probability that Scientologists have murdered people in Clearwater and gotten away with it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_McPherson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Harrison_Hotel "In 1997, Clearwater police received over 160 emergency calls from the Fort Harrison Hotel, but they were denied entry into the hotel by Scientology security."
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Jun 1, 2014 12:46
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Encolpio posted:Yeah, that's what I was getting at when I said "(in addition to their being new)". Right, but isn't the corollary to this that in 200 years the references to DC8s and Busch Gardens will be anachronistic enough to sound plausible/spooky/cool or have been massaged out of the text in the retellings and translations? I'm not trying to pick on you or anything, I've just wondered before if anyone around to witness the birth of a new faith wouldn't find it completely absurd, if blessed with the proper context. The LDS has (have?) survived the United States being essentially at war with them and the CoS used espionage and the legal system to force a détente, so I'm pretty sure neither of them are going anywhere any time soon. Barring widespread societal collapse they will continue to grow for our lifetimes and many more, and academics will argue from varied positions about the meaning of their writings. I find that scary and unnerving, but also sort of hilarious.
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Jun 1, 2014 14:37
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moller posted:Right, but isn't the corollary to this that in 200 years the references to DC8s and Busch Gardens will be anachronistic enough to sound plausible/spooky/cool or have been massaged out of the text in the retellings and translations? I'm not trying to pick on you or anything, I've just wondered before if anyone around to witness the birth of a new faith wouldn't find it completely absurd, if blessed with the proper context. Well, the bible also has things that are silly sounding in it, even now. But on the other hand it contains things like Ecclesiastes, and the Hymn to the Word, and the 23rd Psalm, which I'm not aware of there existing a counterpart of in these newer religious movements. And I don't think the literary merits of these parts of the bible depend on them sounding anachronistic. Joseph Smith's writings seem to be deliberately channelling that sort of anachronistic style, and they don't really compare to the original.
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Jun 1, 2014 15:19
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moller posted:The LDS has (have?) survived the United States being essentially at war with them and the CoS used espionage and the legal system to force a détente, so I'm pretty sure neither of them are going anywhere any time soon. Barring widespread societal collapse they will continue to grow for our lifetimes and many more, and academics will argue from varied positions about the meaning of their writings. I like the concept but I don't really think it's realistic given how differentty information is collected and passed along nowadays. Those religions aren't just being passed mainly by oral history any more. There are and will remain lots of records about their founding preserved digitally and in various books and other formats, and lots of proof about how BS these religions are - that's not just going to disappear from the internet and the world and be entirely forgotten/wiped in such a way that future scholars will have to patch together theories based on word of mouth and gut instinct. Pretty sure they'll still be able to just Google this stuff.
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Jun 1, 2014 16:15
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