Christianity
The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree… yeah, makes perfect sense.

Sad but true.

Somebody really ought to keep a watch on this….

And frankly, scientolagy is more scary then it looks.

A decent blog summary that also links to an NPR episode of “Fresh Air” where Terry Gross interviews Haggis on the subject is here: http://bit.ly/fnMEdh

It’s also an extensively fact-checked piece with the Church of Scientology being consulted.

Folks, this is a major rare piece of investigative journalism against these loonballs. May this not be the last one.

best reaction was the time a HUGE quarter-back kinda guy asked me if i would like a free personality test. i cheerily replied “no thanks – i’m over the bridge!”

he literally had to be physically restrained from killing me, and i heard one of his trainers saying maybe he wasn’t ready for the street just yet. his repeated screams of FUCK YOU! drew quite a crowd.

never saw him again.

for more fun, read bald-faced messiah.

Fooling yourself can be a useful kind of therapy.

And then they went and invented a lot of really obnoxious reality tv shows that keep getting imported! I’ve suffered so much.

Truly, they are evil personified, as this definitively proves, and is not just a meritless justification of my own prejudices.

I think my brain must be wired wrong and I need a *personality test*

The thing I don’t like about this particular religion is that they aren’t up front about those wacky beliefs. By the time most members find out they’re in a UFO cult they’re so thoroughly invested in the church that they’ll believe anything they are told by its authorities.

Say what you will about the Catholics, but at least they don’t try to keep potential converts from finding out what’s in the New Testament.

Umm, have you ever heard about the protestants and where they come from? The catholic church was all about protecting the power of the priests by using languages those under their power didn’t master.

Also, they didn’t sue and harass as much as they burned people at the stakes.

I mean, specifically, that I read of Paul Haggis’ public disenfranchisement with the church over a year ago — didn’t I? What’s different now? Or is this just old news rehashed.

Perhaps the article did explain this and I didn’t see it. It’s too long, I agree, and not engaging enough.

(I’m not interested in Scientology especially. But I am interested in Mr Haggis; he’s written a lot of stuff that I really enjoyed.)

It may be old news to you and a few others here; on forums like http://www.whyweprotest.net, you’ll probably learn of high-profile defections a few hours of them happening–but it’s certainly news to a lot of bOINGbOING readers, judging from comments to an earlier, similar post on Scientology. It’s almost certainly news to New Yorker readers, many of whom are vaguely aware of Scientology’s existence beyond “that thing Tom Cruise is in.”

Scientology is much bigger in LA than in New York, so the New Yorker article necessarily includes a lot of background, but researched beyond the usual regurgitation of Scientology PR and the detail that Tom Cruise won’t let you interview him about it. And Scientology as an organization have been up to a lot of no good. 26 pages barely cover it.

October 2009: “Film-maker Paul Haggis quits Scientology over gay rights stance” – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/26/paul-haggis-scientology-prop-8

So, AFAIC, old news.

Do not think I am defending Scientology; far from it. I’m condemning Catholicism! The damn Catholics have been actively causing trouble for my family for hundreds of years; we left Europe to get away from them, but the bastards followed us.

They burned my wife’s ancestor Joseph Priestley out of his house for questioning the divine right of kings, and put a price on my great-great grandfather’s head for being a Puritan, and most recently they developed the land above my house (to pay the vig for child sexual abuse, no I am NOT KIDDING) and used their complete control over the local development and land use committees to send all the traffic from their (retroactively legalized) new housing development down my privately owned road.

Fuckers are evil. They BURN PEOPLE to death – and I’m not talking about the Middle Ages, check out what Catholics are up to in Africa, there’s more than one reason Islam is growing down there.

Scientologists are Catholic wannabes. Maybe they should be exterminated before they reach Catholic levels of power.

But they’ll probably Fair Game him anyway. Come to think, quitting a high-profile cult is a good way for someone to defuse an actual scandal, innit?

Zing!

Church of scientology: as deluded as most churches, but more twitchy when it comes to criticism. Brian Dunning recently had an ep. on the Scienschmologists http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4242

Interestingly, he was not very critical of the church, which seems at odds with the fact that many ex-members feel robbed or abused after their ordeal. Brian does give an excellent summary of Hubbard’s life history which demonstrates what an unqualified charlatan he was.

Consider my mind blown…

So, its like my student loans?

The curse of the internet is old news.