Udarnik
Gold Meritorious Patron
Hi All!
Like Marvel Parsons, I wanted to say upfront that my interest in Scientology is avocational - I have no personal history with Scientology, other than earning some dirty looks from Scienos for warning off passerby at street displays in NY and San Fan.
I am a scientist, and am generally mildly to openly hostile to mysticism, belief without evidence and argumentum ad auctoritatem. But also like MP, I don't plan to be confrontational about it on these boards. I am here to learn and observe.
I first became aware of Scientology in 1988 or so when a friend at college who used to work as a manager at a B. Dalton's complained bitterly about receiving boxes of Dianetics from the warehouse that already had the B. Dalton’s price stickers on – indicating that people had bought the books just to boost sales figures, then recycled them to the publisher. His rant about brainwashed loonies amused me, but this was pre-Internet, and my research went no further.
Then in the summer of 1991, I was traveling through Prague on a break from being an exchange student in the USSR , and desperate for something to read in English. I passed a news stand on Wencelas Square that had a copy of the Time expose. That was fascinating. Soon after I wound up back in the US in grad school in 1992, experimenting with Gopher, Netscape and other early browsers, and stumbled across the CMU archives.
I was hooked. I read Armstrong and Atak, and whatever else I could get my hands on. Over the subsequent years my interest has waxed and waned, but never went away.
Now I have a couple of sprogs of my own. I consider the most important mental tool in the modern human’s kit to be a fully functioning bullshit meter. And the schools are doing a woefully inadequate job of helping kids build those, so it seems to be one of the primary responsibilities of parents, and probably always has been. A major piece of my construction project is getting my kids to look hard at the stories of otherwise intelligent people who got sucked into L. Ron’s web of crap.
The other part of my parenting mission is looking at my own traditions. I grew up in a Baptist Church in West Virginia, and while we didn’t speak in tongues or handle snakes, there were plenty of sister churches around who did. If you want to see something as scary as an Sea Org indoctrination, go visit a snake handling church in some holler. From those beginnings comes my fascination with another pile of horse shit – Young Earth Creationism.
I don’t know why I have such fascination with horse shit. Perhaps it’s because when I was young, my dad and I would sit around his old Zenith shortwave radio at the height of the Cold War and listen to Radio Moscow and Voice of America, to compare different versions of propaganda. That’s what drove me to see the USSR for myself, and I’ve been hip deep in horse shit as a hobby ever since. And believe me, I know horse shit, as part of my activities in the USSR I was a member of the Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol) construction brigades. Hell, in grad school, I got sucked in to the debates on postmodernism, too. (See the Sokal Hoax for the type of thing I’m talking about).
Part of the training efforts with my kids is looking at the lingering effects of mind control (such as avoiding scented products long after blowing Scientology). This is partially to warn them off of believing in self-proclaimed messiahs and gurus, and partially as an exercise in getting them to look at their own un-examined assumptions, some of which will even come from my teaching. (I’m not perfect, or perfectly rational, much as I aspire to be. If the teacher is any good, his best students should surpass him.) I drill into them to always ask others and themselves the questions: what evidence do you have for your current beliefs, and what would it take for you to reject those beliefs? If you can’t answer those questions clearly and a priori, your life will be a series of installments in moving the goalposts, cherry picking, and other logical fallacies.
The parenting moment I am most proud of is that when a science lab partner wanted to throw out data that did not conform to his expectations, my daughter called him a “cherry-picking cheater”.
So some of the reason I’m here is to look for the posts form the people who were there at the beginning, some is to look at the evolving stories of those who are just getting out, and some derives from my own questions about the crossroads Scientology is in right now.
In reading about the state of the Catholic Clergy and the Reformation, I am struck by the admitted or behavioral unbelief of the clergy in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. I am somewhat of the opinion that Christianity had run its course by then and would have begun to die off had not Martin Luther breathed life back into the faith by causing a schism. Similarly, some friends and I are debating whether Marty Rathbun’s movement could parallel Martin Luther’s.
One postulate is that a religion is a cult that has survived its birthing pains. That may be so, but most cults don’t make it to religious status, they merely die out. My own bias is that there is far too much malice hidden in the tech for Scientology to survive, but I would LOVE to hear the perspectives of the members of this board on the Reformation issue.
Thanks for having me here.
Like Marvel Parsons, I wanted to say upfront that my interest in Scientology is avocational - I have no personal history with Scientology, other than earning some dirty looks from Scienos for warning off passerby at street displays in NY and San Fan.
I am a scientist, and am generally mildly to openly hostile to mysticism, belief without evidence and argumentum ad auctoritatem. But also like MP, I don't plan to be confrontational about it on these boards. I am here to learn and observe.
I first became aware of Scientology in 1988 or so when a friend at college who used to work as a manager at a B. Dalton's complained bitterly about receiving boxes of Dianetics from the warehouse that already had the B. Dalton’s price stickers on – indicating that people had bought the books just to boost sales figures, then recycled them to the publisher. His rant about brainwashed loonies amused me, but this was pre-Internet, and my research went no further.
Then in the summer of 1991, I was traveling through Prague on a break from being an exchange student in the USSR , and desperate for something to read in English. I passed a news stand on Wencelas Square that had a copy of the Time expose. That was fascinating. Soon after I wound up back in the US in grad school in 1992, experimenting with Gopher, Netscape and other early browsers, and stumbled across the CMU archives.
I was hooked. I read Armstrong and Atak, and whatever else I could get my hands on. Over the subsequent years my interest has waxed and waned, but never went away.
Now I have a couple of sprogs of my own. I consider the most important mental tool in the modern human’s kit to be a fully functioning bullshit meter. And the schools are doing a woefully inadequate job of helping kids build those, so it seems to be one of the primary responsibilities of parents, and probably always has been. A major piece of my construction project is getting my kids to look hard at the stories of otherwise intelligent people who got sucked into L. Ron’s web of crap.
The other part of my parenting mission is looking at my own traditions. I grew up in a Baptist Church in West Virginia, and while we didn’t speak in tongues or handle snakes, there were plenty of sister churches around who did. If you want to see something as scary as an Sea Org indoctrination, go visit a snake handling church in some holler. From those beginnings comes my fascination with another pile of horse shit – Young Earth Creationism.
I don’t know why I have such fascination with horse shit. Perhaps it’s because when I was young, my dad and I would sit around his old Zenith shortwave radio at the height of the Cold War and listen to Radio Moscow and Voice of America, to compare different versions of propaganda. That’s what drove me to see the USSR for myself, and I’ve been hip deep in horse shit as a hobby ever since. And believe me, I know horse shit, as part of my activities in the USSR I was a member of the Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol) construction brigades. Hell, in grad school, I got sucked in to the debates on postmodernism, too. (See the Sokal Hoax for the type of thing I’m talking about).
Part of the training efforts with my kids is looking at the lingering effects of mind control (such as avoiding scented products long after blowing Scientology). This is partially to warn them off of believing in self-proclaimed messiahs and gurus, and partially as an exercise in getting them to look at their own un-examined assumptions, some of which will even come from my teaching. (I’m not perfect, or perfectly rational, much as I aspire to be. If the teacher is any good, his best students should surpass him.) I drill into them to always ask others and themselves the questions: what evidence do you have for your current beliefs, and what would it take for you to reject those beliefs? If you can’t answer those questions clearly and a priori, your life will be a series of installments in moving the goalposts, cherry picking, and other logical fallacies.
The parenting moment I am most proud of is that when a science lab partner wanted to throw out data that did not conform to his expectations, my daughter called him a “cherry-picking cheater”.
So some of the reason I’m here is to look for the posts form the people who were there at the beginning, some is to look at the evolving stories of those who are just getting out, and some derives from my own questions about the crossroads Scientology is in right now.
In reading about the state of the Catholic Clergy and the Reformation, I am struck by the admitted or behavioral unbelief of the clergy in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. I am somewhat of the opinion that Christianity had run its course by then and would have begun to die off had not Martin Luther breathed life back into the faith by causing a schism. Similarly, some friends and I are debating whether Marty Rathbun’s movement could parallel Martin Luther’s.
One postulate is that a religion is a cult that has survived its birthing pains. That may be so, but most cults don’t make it to religious status, they merely die out. My own bias is that there is far too much malice hidden in the tech for Scientology to survive, but I would LOVE to hear the perspectives of the members of this board on the Reformation issue.
Thanks for having me here.
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