Re: Top 100 Stupid Moments in Scientology
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It's only a couple minute video, but I think I am going to have nightmares for a couple months. . .
[video]http://www.ina.fr/video/CAF93026901/la-scientologie-video.html[/video]
It's simply amazing that something that is so culty, cringey & creepy doesn't seem that way when you are on the inside.
These 1972 Scientologists look really scary.
Actually, they were scary. That was a time period that Hubbard was ordering cult members all over the world to commit felonies and destroy his enemies. And they were happy to do whatever he ordered them.
And stupid too, did I mention that recently? LOL
SACRED FECES!! That IS scary!
The scariest thing about it is knowing those Scilons are probably
sincere!
I never saw anything that looked so much like a real church in the short time I was In! If I'd seen a performance like that in the 70's, I might have blown even earlier than I did.
Okay, I don't have anything like the experience of a lot of you guys here: As I've said before, I was not on Staff, but I've always considered myself more than just "Public", because I did serious volunteer work at FCDC for years while my wife was on Staff. I did qualify as a Dianetics Auditor--just before NED was introduced, which would have made my training obsolete, (if I'd given a shit)--although I didn't stay involved long enough to understand that was how it worked---
Okay, strayed off on a tangent there, but my point is that by the early 70's, before I encountered $cn, I had given up on the church(es) of my upbringing. I don't know that I could have articulated most of the fallacies at the time, but I was vaguely aware that their common fallacy was DOGMA: The absolute refusal even to
consider that they might be the teeniest bit mistaken about any of their basic tenets, regardless of what they encountered in the real world. (My mother visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and looked at excavated bones reassembled into dinosaur skeletons, and she
still didn't believe in dinosaurs. And folks, she actually had a high IQ: She was intelligent, but her mind was shackled by dogma. In retrospect, it can be heartbreaking!)
One day I'll give a fuller account of my rather boring story in the Co$, but here's part of it: One of the hooks that caught my attention from the first was the idea of a "Scientific Religion"--a religion based on provable, demonstrable facts and research. One of LRH's quotes that pulled me in--don't remember where/when He said it, and I can't actually quote it, but it amounted to something like, 'When evaluating the validity of a study/practice/group/whatever, one must go on proven facts alone--there can be no "Recourse to Authority"...ect'.
When I read that, I believed Scientologists took it seriously and I was sucked in. I was willing to "
suspend disbelief" and join the Church. I wanted some of that! I extended my trust and had faith that I would eventually encounter, in my studies and experience, those demonstrable facts that the Church's tenets were founded on. It took a few years before I looked up one day and realized that everything I had seen and heard was still all faith and no evidence, and some of the evidence was contrary to what I'd been implicitly promised I would see. And I also noticed that whenever I questioned the discrepancies between "scripture" and observation (Hey, that Clear still needs glasses, and there's another Clear who can't remember the name of the girl he met yesterday...) I was routed to Ethics rather than given an explanation.
At that point, the Co$ began to occur to me more and more like the dogmatic churches I grew up with--like any doubt was the devil's doing = out-ethics. They began to feel the same, and I was already familiar, from my upbringing, with the absolute refusal to recognize reality that contradicts Scripture. I eventually recognized that same dynamic was happening in the Co$.
When I joined the Church, I had
suspended disbelief--the way I do when I read a good fiction novel, or when I study a subject that seems implausible until I accumulate enough understanding to see why it actually
is plausible. For example, it's intuitive that the world is static and the sun rises and sets. It takes some education to understand that we're rotating and the sun, relative to us, is static. A static sun and rotating Earth is counterintuitive and may require suspension of disbelief long enough to learn all the evidence that compels the conclusion. Well, I'd studied for more than a year on a prescribed curriculum, and realized that I'd seen no evidence for the certainty of what I'd been taught.
I had s
uspended disbelief--I hadn't
revoked it; so at that point, I reinstated disbelief, did a Doubt Formula and cycled out of participation in courses and auditing. I didn't get myself Declared SP, I guess because I wasn't very vocal about my doubts ( and maybe because I was still financially supporting my wife, and partially supporting another staff couple living with us).
Anyway--back to the original point, I attribute part of my wake-up call-to-reality to recognizing that dogmatic church-feeling. If I'd encountered scenes like the one in this video, it might have blown me out earlier.
