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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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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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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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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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