"OmniNerd" website posts blog about Scientology

[Lorelei]

http://www.omninerd.com/articles/Scientology_We_ve_had_it_with_you

Best comment:

So, you respond to what you think is intellectual lazinesss with your own laziness. Most critics would never profess to describe and/or define every aspect scientology and suggest that you get the net and read both sides. However, what we talking about here is the organisation and the policy driven actions of scientology, not the belief system.
Nobody cares what the individuals believe. However, when you entangle the belief system in with your church policies then there is an overlap. For example, in their appleal on the Wollersheim v. Scientology case they tried to claim that their “Fair Game” policy was a core practice…. like a religious rite. Yes, they actually expected to win an appeal by trying to tell a court that they should be allowed to trick, lie to and destroy utterly, anyone who attacks scientology, because it was “protected” as “religious expression”.You see, it is not the critic who generally brings religion into the argument, it is always the scientologist because they expect to be able to hide their abuses under some sort of default forcefield of religiosity. They want to drag you down that convoluted route because they expect to garner sympathy from the broader religious community. As Admiral Ackbar says: “It’s a trap”.

Which was in response to:

I don’t know much about Scientology. My problem with your post is that after reading it, I still don’t know much about it.Yes, you provided a link. But, after reading just the title, it was obvious that was not the place to start. (The title “A New Face of Evil” just didn’t ring objective to me … for some reason.)Yes, you said they control people with mind tricks, but it appears to be nothing more than an assumption. You don’t understand how someone could possibly want to be a Scientologist … so they must be brainwashed. Again, that isn’t the way to start learning.So, in the end, I can’t support something as extreme as passing laws against their religious practice.On the other hand, there has to be clear reason for any sort of government support. For example, if tax money was given to the church, it would have to be used in the interest of the public – by running a soup kitchen, or housing a homeless shelter, or something like that.As for tax breaks, the requirements should be the same for them as it is for any other non-profit organization. Is that not the way it is now?

Enjoy.

[Lorelei]

P.S. I give up. I tried formatting it with the paragraph breaks the original quotes had, but it defies me. I don't know why the forum likes to omit line breaks / paragraph breaks like it does.

[ethercat]

P.S. I give up. I tried formatting it with the paragraph breaks the original quotes had, but it defies me. I don't know why the forum likes to omit line breaks / paragraph breaks like it does.

Go into your Profile, then choose "Look and Layout" and make sure "Show WYSIWYG editor on post page by default?" is unchecked.  You'll get a plain text editor which, imo, is much easier to use.  (You will see the bbcode, the formatting tags, but it will be easier to paste into without acquiring formatting you don't want.)     Does that help?

You can also remove formatting using the  button, and you can toggle between the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor and the plain text editor with this one: .

[Lorelei]

I thought that was how I had it set. D'oh! It WAS selected, but should NOT have been. Sheesh, I should have figured that it wasn't set properly.

[News Thetan]

RE: Actually... - OmniNerd (blog)
22 March 2010, 12:52 pm

There is fairly conclusive evidence that ECT  (electroconvulsive therapy) can benefit someone in extreme cases of certain mental illnesses, as there has been ongoing research in this area since the 1960’s when they discovered that it was actually destroying portions of the brain (this was also at the time when frontal lobotomies were found to be inhumane as a management condition).

What is missing from this research is appropriate scientific rigor, which is all but impossible due to truly humanitarian reasons. It simply isn’t proper to shock perfectly healthy people for the sake of science.

But the picture that Scientology paints is that lobotomization and ECT are both done today in just the same way that they were in the 1940’s, and that psychology is some kind of massive conspiracy to cover such things up. Having been a rights activist (read: psychology watchdog) for the mentally ill in the past, I’ve seen virtually every kind of abuse perpetrated by those in the psychology profession. But they are the exception and not the rule (in general), and people just don’t get lobotomized any more. Even ECT is a last-resort act of desperation, but they carefully regulate the electricity so that it doesn’t actually destroy brain cells the way it did 50 or 60 years ago, when Scientology originally declared psychology evil.

But I also have to say that I am not a fan of a group which uses outdated claims to bolster its own position. This includes the Church of Scientology on the basis of their stance with psychology, PETA for their stance on animal ethics (there are things which aren’t relevant to this discussion that PETA could be doing, and don’t; and things that they do which are at least as equally wrong as the things they protest against), and even the establishment of science for its promotion of politics in academia, rather than maintaining a solidly rational position (I don’t view skepticism as rational when it’s a knee-jerk emotional reaction, any more than I view belief as rational when it’s a knee-jerk emotional reaction).

It’s not the right to believe that I’m against, where Scientology is concerned; it’s the irrational stance that a thing is bad right now because the barbarism of 2 generations ago makes it bad. There are a lot of good things that psychology does; and there are things which still need to change. I’m sure the Church of Scientology wouldn’t like it if I used the actions of their leader (his name escapes me at the moment) to justify not joining, on the grounds that their organization is rife with abuse (abuse which appears from the outside to be both ongoing and real). It’s the same “bad apple” logic that they use against psychology.

It’s one thing to simply say it’s against your beliefs; it’s quite another to spout tripe which holds no real relevance to those who are involved in the real fight for rights. It’s like saying that a camera will steal your spirit, or that a shaman guides the dead to heaven—it’s all beliefs, and should be respected even when we disagree. Even if it’s irrational, there’s no real reason to deny the right to believe.

But where the actual facts are concerned, that is not simply a right to believe. That is provable, demonstrable, evidential and objective. One can demonstrate it to be false, un-false, or unprovable. If your belief is based on something which is demonstrably false, that falsehood should be revealed. No amount of discussion should occur, except over whether or not something can be trusted as true or false; and whether or not we believe, there is little reason to create false arguments to bolster our beliefs, because in the long term all it tends to do is to weaken our position and remove any sense of reality in what we’re saying.

[ethercat]

I thought that was how I had it set. D'oh! It WAS selected, but should NOT have been. Sheesh, I should have figured that it wasn't set properly.

Glad I could help.   

[Lorelei]

Yeah, apparently when tweaking some other setting, maybe when choosing my sig line, I must have accidentally reset that one. The connection between sudden irritation with quoting issues and those recently updated settings simply failed to register.