Religion or Cult - Scientology Has Big Enough Profits to Advertise on Super Bowl 2015

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SeaBreeze

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This "non-profit religion", who allegedly does charge large amounts of money to its followers for certain services, seems to be raking in the big bucks to afford air time on the 2015 Super Bowl. I didn't see the commercial, but there's enough people buzzing about it this morning. Believers like Tom Cruise and John Travolta appear to be lining their pockets very well. :dollar: Do you know any scientologists? I don't, but if I did, I wouldn't want them trying to convert me, that's for sure.


 

Scientology has a history peppered with questionable, illegal and sometimes violent episodes.

Of course that can said of most organized religions, but Scientology just seems to go the extra yard in those departments.
 

Most cults are based upon the personality of a single, charismatic leader.

If that is indeed true, then Christianity itself is one huge cult. As is Islam, Buddhism and pretty much most other belief systems.
 
SifuPhil said:
Most cults are based upon the personality of a single, charismatic leader.

If that is indeed true, then Christianity itself is one huge cult. As is Islam, Buddhism and pretty much most other belief systems.
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Just want to say, yes, scientology is definitely a cult and a dangerous one at that. I've had first hand experience (in another cult), know someone in scientology and have done lots of reading on the subject - and avoid it like the plague. Once you know their methods it's very obvious. IMO Christian sects are cults too, including christianity, although they would disagree.

There's a new movie out 'Going Clear' on scientology.

Google 'cults' - it's all there.
 
Mormons are another group that makes me wonder...Joseph Smith had a "visit" from an angel telling him about a book written on golden plates...which he never found....but which he used as a basis for his new religion...Yeah, right. That is another reason why I could never take someone like Mitt Romney seriously as a Presidential Candidate....or Harry Reid as a Senate leader. If these people can blindly follow such religious dogma, what other "illusions" do they harbor???
 
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If you can get hold of this book, it's excellent. Niece of current head honcho - I got it from the library here.
 
jujube said:
Scientology pretty much "owns" Clearwater, FL. Pretty good for a "non-profit", huh?
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I've heard about that, and did some reading on it. It seems they either bought-out or corrupted the local police and have them run out anyone who causes problems for their headquarters.

In addition to their own "bouncers", of course.
 
No, it is more like some kind of crazy science fiction movie - as the leader had previously been a sci-fi writer who made a bet with a friend that he could start a religion/cult.
 
Sunny said:
I'm as skeptical of this as I am of any religion. But I'm curious: what is it? Is it a branch of Christianity?
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Scientology is the creation of L. Ron Hubbard....a noted Science Fiction writer. A few years ago, I looked up the info on this Sect, and it appears that it all started with a barroom bet with Robert Heinlein...another Sci Fi writer, when Hubbard bet Heinlein that he could get rich by starting a "religion". If you look up Scientology on the Internet, there is gobs of info on it...but the basic seems to be that humans came to Earth from a planet called OZ on a vessel that strongly resembled a Boeing 707...which at that time was the most sophisticated form of human transport. It gets even more bizarre, the more you read. The fact that people are gullible enough to believe this nonsense shows just how dumb some people really are.
 
What baffles me more than the sometime criminal cultishness of these religions or philosophies IS the willingness to follow. Which is the saddest thing of all. But people are like sheep and want to follow if for no other reason laziness. It's sad how bad people "want to belong" or feel obligated to belong to something, anything. It's worse than childhood peer pressure sometimes. For some reason "belonging" or what you belong to is a status symbol, not the substance or individual.

Cults and cult leaders need what a criminal conman needs-greed. Except cults exploit the desire to belong. Instead of money they use that 'desire' to their advantage. They know they have a gullible if not broken individual. Along with wanting to belong people want a clear cut road map in life. They want clear direction again sometimes leading back to laziness. People want a paint by number life. They don't want to have to think. They want cookie cutter solutions. They want "answers".

Cults and religions in particular give people those answers in the way of their own rules and laws. This is why many react negatively to different thinkers-they're not like me because they don't do as I do-uh oh.

Eh, in short most Americans are lazy sheep just looking for a heard & shepherd.
 
Apart from your last sentence, I am in complete agreement.
One way you can tell a cult from a genuine faith community is by whether or not you can simply walk away.
Apostasy has no place in any religion. Nor has harassment or isolation from your family.
 
Sunny said:
I'm as skeptical of this as I am of any religion. But I'm curious: what is it? Is it a branch of Christianity?
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Here's some info on the story of scientology.


"In Scientology doctrine, Xenu is a galactic ruler who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs.

Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to cause problems today. These events are known to Scientologists as "Incident II", and the traumatic memories associated with them as The Wall of Fire or the R6 implant.

The story of Xenu is part of a much wider range of Scientology beliefs in extraterrestrial civilizations and alien interventions in Earthly events, collectively described as space opera by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.

Hubbard detailed the story in Operating Thetan level III (OT III) in 1967, famously warning that R6 was "calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) anyone who attempts to solve it." The Xenu story was the start of the use of the volcano as a common symbol of Scientology and Dianetics from 1968 to the present day.

Much of the criticism of the Church of Scientology focuses on the story of Xenu. The Church has tried to keep Xenu confidential; critics claim revealing the story is in the public interest, given the high prices charged for OT III, part of Scientology's secret "Advanced Technology" doctrines taught only to members that have already contributed large amounts of money to the organization.

The Church avoids making mention of Xenu in public statements and has gone to considerable effort to maintain the story's confidentiality, including legal action on the grounds of both copyright and trade secrecy. Despite this, much material on Xenu has leaked to the public.
Xenu - Summary of the Xenu story

The story of Xenu is covered in OT III, part of Scientology's secret "Advanced Technology" doctrines taught only to advanced members. It is described in more detail in the accompanying confidential "Assists" lecture of 3 October 1968 and is dramatized in Revolt in the Stars. Direct quotations in this section are from these sources. (See also Scientology beliefs and practices)

Seventy-five million years ago, Xenu was the ruler of a Galactic Confederacy which consisted of 26 stars and 76 planets including Earth, which was then known as Teegeeack. The planets were overpopulated, each having on average 178 billion people.

The Galactic Confederacy's civilization was comparable to our own, with people "walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute" and using cars, trains and boats looking exactly the same as those "circa 1950, 1960" on Earth.

Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of "renegades", he defeated the populace and the "Loyal Officers", a force for good that was opposed to Xenu.

Then, with the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions of people to paralyse them with injections of alcohol and glycol, under the pretense that they were being called for "income tax inspections". The kidnapped populace was loaded into space planes for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth).

The space planes were exact copies of Douglas DC-8s, "except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't." DC-8s have jet engines, not propellers, although Hubbard may have meant the turbine fans.

When the space planes had reached Teegeeack/Earth, the paralysed people were unloaded and stacked around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were lowered into the volcanoes, and all were detonated simultaneously. Only a few people's physical bodies survived. Hubbard described the scene in his abortive film script, Revolt in the Stars:

Simultaneously, the planted charges erupted. Atomic blasts ballooned from the craters of Loa, Vesuvius, Shasta, Washington, Fujiyama, Etna, and many, many others. Arching higher and higher, up and outwards, towering clouds mushroomed, shot through with flashes of flame, waste and fission. Great winds raced tumultuously across the face of Earth, spreading tales of destruction.

Debris-studded, and sickly yellow, the atomic clouds followed close on the heels of the winds. Their bow-shaped fronts encroached inexorably upon forest, city and mankind, they delivered their gifts of death and radiation. A skyscraper, tall and arrow-straight, bent over to form a question mark to the very idea of humanity before crumbling into the screaming city below... —Revolt in the Stars treatment

The now-disembodied victims' souls, which Hubbard called thetans, were blown into the air by the blast. They were captured by Xenu's forces using an "electronic ribbon" ("which also was a type of standing wave") and sucked into "vacuum zones" around the world. The hundreds of billions of captured thetans were taken to a type of cinema, where they were forced to watch a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for 36 days.

This implanted what Hubbard termed "various misleading data" (collectively termed the R6 implant) into the memories of the hapless thetans, "which has to do with God, the Devil, space opera, etcetera". This included all world religions, with Hubbard specifically attributing Roman Catholicism and the image of the Crucifixion to the influence of Xenu.

The interior decoration of "all modern theaters" is also said by Hubbard to be due to an unconscious recollection of Xenu's implants. The two "implant stations" cited by Hubbard were said to have been located on Hawaii and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands.

In addition to implanting new beliefs in the thetans, the images deprived them of their sense of identity. When the thetans left the projection areas, they started to cluster together in groups of a few thousand, having lost the ability to differentiate between each other.

Each cluster of thetans gathered into one of the few remaining bodies that survived the explosion. These became what are known as body thetans, which are said to be still clinging to and adversely affecting everyone except those Scientologists who have performed the necessary steps to remove them.

The Loyal Officers finally overthrew Xenu and locked him away in a mountain, where he was imprisoned forever by a force field powered by an eternal battery. (Some have suggested that Xenu is imprisoned on Earth in the Pyrenees, but Hubbard merely refers to "one of these planets" [of the Galactic Confederacy]; he does, however, refer to the Pyrenees as being the site of the last operating "Martian report station", which is probably the source of this particular confusion.[1]) Teegeeack/Earth was subsequently abandoned by the Galactic Confederacy and remains a pariah "prison planet" to this day, although it has suffered repeatedly from incursions by alien "Invader Forces" since then.

Xenu - Xenu's volcanoes

In OT III, Hubbard names the locations around the world where Xenu's genocide took place, in addition to the two "implant stations" located at Hawaii and Las Palmas. The volcanoes which Xenu blew up were said to have been situated at:

Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9f5_1257197129#tgqv5Mc6uEKBb61p.99
 
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