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Damn straight, LVX! I mean, does Scientology offer anything like 100% kosher Kabbalah Water, the spiritually-charged version of Krunk Juice? I think not.
For realsies, though, Scientology is an awful institution. I'm a psychology major, and the Scientologists I've talked to have thought of psychology as a vicious scam which is designed to keep people down while fufilling my supposed need for torturing people (through the multi-hued evil of 'experimentation'). Their critique of psychology involved pointing out that 'Freud was wrong' (because Psychology still apparently centers itself solely upon him), that all psychopharmaceutical/mind-altering drugs are always degrading and evil (as they sip their lattes), that electroconvulsive therapy is the devil, and that lobotomies are bad (as the merciful q-tip rends my frontol cortex and ends the conversation). Half their arguments sounded straight out of the 1950s, probably because L. Ron hadn't changed his opinions a bit since then. Some of the critiques were valid then - I mean, there were a few too many lobotomies handed out earlier in the 20th century - but they're no longer nearly as relevant to the field now.
The strangest thing was that other than topics related to this, or to their own religion, these two ladies were bright, sharp, logical, and at loathe to overgeneralize, yet they can swallow "There is no science in psychiatry, only ABUSE" and other such tripe.
Finderwolf mentioned the more wacked-out portions of their cosmology - just google 'Xenu' for a good time. Apparently 75 million years ago all our souls were brought here by some alien bastard, strapped up around volcanoes, and 'sploded with atomic bombs droped from cosmic B-52s. We reincarnate and reincarnate, but reeducation camps on Mars stop us from remembering what happens when we die.
No, you didn't just take some acid - that's the cosmology. It's why we're here. And the CoS hasn't fought this by saying 'Oh, that's such slanderous crap. How absurd.' They've sued people for putting this copyrighted material out in the public domain of the internet. Which is to say that they've claimed ownership of this shite. Which is to say that they're swimming in it.
The beliefs are screwed. The techniques, I have not really sampled. Willaim Burroughs has a great essay dealing with both, as he apparently went through auditing, the Scientology-approved form of counseling/self-improvement. He finds some of their techniques quite effective, but drowned in a mire of hiearchy, bullshit, and fascism. |
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