Scientology: Isn't It Fascinating?

Scientology has been all over the news of late thanks to a leak of a Tom Cruise awards acceptance speech.



I've been fascinated with this organisation for a while. Now when I tell people I'm fascinated by Scientology they often start to back away whilst stringing out the word "Rrrrrright" in order to escape through the nearest door. I'm not fascinated by it in that way! I'm fascinated with it on a "Wow... are they really just trying to make money or, worse, do they really believe this stuff??" kind of way.

Digg has a link to Scientology's Orientation video. Jesus did that add some fuel to my internal debate over them... basically it's got 20 minutes of infomercials ("if you buy all these books we'll throw in this book free of charge!" Yes... that is a real paraphrase of part of the video), 2 minutes of disturbing anti-psychology ranting and 8 minutes of pure weirdness in which the presenter informs the viewer that to leave the screening room and walk away is their right but it'd be damn stupid as they will live the next trillion years (yes... trillion) in despair and confusion (P.S. Don't forget to buy L. Ron Hubbarbs extremely popular books before they all sell out again because, did we mention, they are extremely popular books).

Honestly it was pretty crap. If I had to sit through that for 30 minutes I'd probably not hang around afterwards unless there was some sort of free cake offer going along with it.

Much better is The Bridge, which is a very interesting movie plus of course the two Panorama documentaries of which I think the 1980s one is far superior (Scientlogy And Me was a bit too... populist pulp).

For some extremely harsh, but maybe well deserved, criticism of the church why not check out Operation Clambake. Not KSW! Probably run by SPs no doubt. ;) Yeah when I study something... I really study it.