Trouble for Scientologists in Waffleland. Maybe the beer drinking flatlanders will be able to expose the truth about Xenu before the Cruises finish converting Becks. Also, check this.
While I would love to have a stricter definition of what constitutes a religion I understand such dialogue would cause more uproar and harm than good. Alas... The US has to recognize it as a religion, sadly, by virtue of precedence established purely for tax purposes and sporadic morals laws around the states. But scientology clearly operates on a different plane, so to speak, from the more established beliefs of the day. For my money, anything that requires such clandestine operations in order to protect the organization, and does so above and beyond any effort to promote the faith to the general public, isn't a religion but a cult. Anything that implies such selectivity without clarification is quite simply a clique. Methinks that's why Dianetics is such a morass of mental babble. You'd have to be slightly off of center to ascribe to their theories.
Well, that is precisely the niche they are targeting. The people who are slightly (or not so silightly) off center. But I guess it works for some. Just ask Tom Cruise.
It also charges fees, and pretends its "teachings" are a "trade secret." Of, by, and for scumbags, weasels, suckers and tools. They can't Heaven's Gate themselves soon enough.
Well, we just had one last January (comet "McNaught"). Comets visible to the naked eye appear on average every 5 years, but of course that could be highly variable. And it's pretty tough to predict when the next good sighting will be.
Dianetics emerged at a time that was ripe for such a thing - pop psychology with alot of pseudoscience, people were starting to think way outside the box in large numbers, and mainstream psychiatry was still using electroshock therapy (one of their big original beefs with the mainstream, and justifiable). I just re-read Martin Gardner's classic "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science," written in 1957. Dianetics was a fad at that time, not an established religion. One fad among many. Another one, which Gardner considered a somewhat equivalent crackpot notion, was linguistic analysis, which I think has been toned down into a serious academic discipline. He even refers to one of the leading adherents, SI Hiyakawa, who became a US Senator from California in the 1970's. In the 50's, that discipline was more of a cult, analyzing auspicious words and such. As long as psychology remains on the fringes of the hard sciences, that stuff will continue to thrive.
For those of you interested, Comet Holmes became highly visible recently. Unfortunately, the gods have cursed me with a cloudy sky. But if it makes some nuts decide to go "off planet", then it will be worth it.