A Day in Court No-one Wants

During the May Anonymous demonstrations, a fifteen-year-old boy was singled out by the police and served with a court summons for persisting in holding a plackard that stated "Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult." This story has been picked up by The Guardian, and leads to a curious issue. The article in question is by Anil Dawar, who wrote about Will Smith's forthcoming school which intends to make use of Scholastic Tech, the untested teaching method licensed from the Church of Scientology and "developed" by physics drop-out L Ron Hubbard. This is how the first sentence in that article reads:

"Actor Will Smith is funding his own private school that will teach youngsters
using an educational system devised in part by the Scientology cult."

Clearly the Church of Scientology wishes to choose its battles wisely, and sees more scope in taking a minor to court over exercising his freedom of speech than a national newspaper. The trouble is, should the Crown Prosecution Service feel that a child calling a cult a cult is a matter for the courts, then who will benefit from the trial? The defendent could probably do without the hassle. He's got GCSEs to prepare for. The Church of Scientology probably could do without the embarrassment of standing in court and describing how, against all knowledge of their modus operandi, the term "cult" is abusive and insulting. Those who will benefit, one can assume, are the media. A large and powerful organisation playing to type by pursuing a case against fifteen-year-old that will make McLibel look like the Queensbury Rules will cause heavenly column-inchage for reporters in any country the CoS maintain an org in.

This demonstrates with incredible clarity how lost the Church of Scientology has become. It finds itself in an idealogical combat with a group that was motivated primarily in pursuing a freedom of speech agenda. At a demonstration targeting specifically the Fair Game policy, which suggests that crimes of critics should be discovered or invented, they ensure that freedom of speech is curtailed, and potentially that people may be criminalised for daring to speak out against the criminal organisation in their midst. This can and will and has brought the wrong kind of attention to further the planet-clearing ambitions of Scientology. Why grass roots parishioners have yet to hammer CoS out of existence remains a mystery.


The Telegraph cover this story too.

Call an End to "Pay and Obey" Scientology

It's no secret that I don't agree with a great deal of Scientology's weltanschauung, but nevertheless I do believe that it is an individual's right to believe in whatever they may wish to, on the proviso that that belief does not damage in any way anyone who does not share that belief, or encroach on their freedom.
There appears, with the emergence of various websites written from, if you like, a post-Church Scientology perspective, that there is a growing wave of dissent against the current Church's hierarchy, its staff and its policies. The trouble is that due to its fascistic nature, the brandishing of ethics as a weapon against dissent, its use of KSW as a means of keeping parishioners and staff in line, it is difficult and often impossible for that dissent to find a stong enough position to have an effect on the Church.
Another poster on ARS has called attention to the child-abuse scandals that have beset the Roman Catholic Church, and this provides a very powerful allegory for dissenting Scientologists. This is covered in great detail in the Clay Shirky book Here Comes Everybody. Priests who were guilty of child abuse were being protected by the Church; and unpalatable and unacceptable state of affairs, but within the parishioner / church relationship there was no mechanism in existence that could counter it. Legal actions were derailed by the church's attempts to cover up what was going on.
The thing that finally empowered the parishioners, and allowed a victory against the church, was the networking tools available on the internet. By some coincidence, the difference that the internet had over such a situation can be clearly seen; two separate, but near indentical, scandals broke out, the first in 1992, the second in 2002. In each case a pressure group was formed, but the one that was able to utilise modern communication technology was the one that won through. The ability to quickly and cheaply spread the scandal far and wide, and attract an interest in doing something about it made all the difference.
Voice of the Faithful was set up by Catholics frustrated with the conspiracy of silence and the browbeating that their Church was perpetrating against its parishioners. The initial membership of 30 meeting up in a church basement quickly grew, such that in a few months the group had amassed 25,000 supporters; a single body stretching over diocesan borders the world over - a post-geographic organisation fighting against (or rather for) a geographically demarcated body.
The RCC were unable to quash the movement, and some six years after its conception, the VotF have become a genuine force for laity representation in Church matters, having brought about a bedrock for reform, and even successfully campaigning for the resignation of corrupt church staff. It should serve as a beacon of hope for any Scientologist who feels that the Church no longer represents their faith, that their Church could quite feasibly be brought to order, that all it would take is the strength that comes from parishioner unity.
The relatively small size of the Church of Scientology might make what Voice of the Faithful achieved seem only a pipedream, but consider that, with a smaller parishioner base, the power yielded by each individual parishioner is far greater. If the rules and policies that you operate under forbid such union and affirmative action, then perhaps that is where your reformation should begin; the RCC tried to insist that VotF follow diocesan boundaries; VotF simply refused. KSW serves to keep any existant rot in place, which surely is not its purpose.
With CoS in such a state of chaos, it seems the moment is ripe for the Church to be refashioned by its grass-roots laity into something worthy and respectable. If you want to read more about the VotF story, here are some links to get you started:

http://www.voiceofthefaithful.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_the_Faithful http://www.amazon.com/Keep-Faith-Change-Church-Catholics/dp/1579548903

Evolution of CAM

The 30 Second Skinny Alternative Medicine often makes a great deal out of its longevity, but how does alternative medicine get started in the first place? How does it keep going in the absence of evidence? This article puts forward a number of stages that contemporary treatments go through. 

Clearing the Glossary

I've just noticed that the definition of "Space Opera" has been removed from most of the online Scientology glossaries! I can't imagine why! It's not gone from all of the glossaries, but I shan't say which ones can still use some work.

For those who are having difficulty with this term, here's the official definition:

"space opera: of or relating to time periods on the whole track millions of years ago which concerned activities in this and other galaxies. Space opera has space travel, spaceships, spacemen, intergalactic travel, wars, conflicts, other beings, civilizations and societies, and other planets and galaxies. It is not fiction and concerns actual incidents and things that occurred on the track."

Second Life sees launch of Church of Enturbulation

Over the past couple of weeks, Second Lifer Charity Stohr has been working on a museum in Second Life discussing the human rights violations perpetrated by the Church of Scientology.


Entitled The Church of Enturbulation, and built in memory of Shawn Lonsdale, it is hoped to become a presence for Anonymous and the hub of CoS criticism in the Second Life universe. The church has been paid for by voluntary donations, and is seeing a healthy level of traffic. Currently available is a free "picket pack" containing slogan t-shirts, placards, and V masks.

A launch party was staged on the fourth of April to launch the site, complete with volcano-baked clam suppers, clam suits, and the occasional dinosaur.

Guests were invited to speak. Charity spoke of being fair-gamed for criticism posted at MySpace, and Darkscorp, whose brother was a victim of the Church, also spoke.

Charity Stohr

Darkscorp

Future events are planned, and will be posted in Operation Clambake and elsewhere.

Here's a graphic should you wish to link to the SLURL.

I Heard A Rumour

John Sweeney may be working on a Panorama documentary about Anonymous and the Church of Scientology. Sweeney, you may remember, presented the previous documentary Scientology and Me, which covered the Church's noisy surveillance tactics, its anti-psychiatry position, and featured the infamous "exploding tomato" moment, where Sweeney, on being accused by Tommy Davis of giving Shawn Lonsdale an easy interview, shouted Davis (who had, let it be said, not been there at the start of the interview) down.

Following Sweeney's presence at London pickets outside the Tottenham Court Road Dianetics and Scientology Centre, the Church claimed it had received bomb threats, though these were never seemingly reported or investigated by the police. The Church, in their rather feeble attempt at undermining Panorama implied that the bomb threats were in some way caused or inspired by Sweeney's presence at the picket. That the same accusations have now been levelled at Anonymous should make for some interesting content if Sweeney is indeed to return to the subject.

The Flipside of Karma

I'm an atheist, so not a big fan of bible quotes, except the ones that are about forbidding cripples into the priesthood, and not letting eunuchs into Heaven. That said, I'd like to start this post with a quote from Ecclesiastes:

"I again saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift and the battle is not to the warriors, and neither is bread to the wise nor wealth to the discerning nor favor to men of ability; for time and chance overtake them all."

And here is the wisdom of Earl

"Do good things and good things happen, do bad things, they come back to haunt you."

So we have a kind of "shit happens" philosophy from the bible (if you forgive me describing the sacred with the profane), and karma from an Emmy-award-winning Sit-Com. And as far as both go, they are all well and good. Ecclesiastes is there to tell you that bad things happen sometimes and you just have to deal with it, and Jason Lee is there to tell you that if you do good things rather than bad things, you'll generally have a nicer time of it. In fact, these two elements combined make for a nice enough philosophy for living.

However, in the regimented, procedure-led world of the Church of Scientology, the notion of Karma takes on a darker hue. Within CoS the logic is that if something bad happens to you, then you must have done something to "bring it in". You are guilty of some unethical behaviour that has led to this thing happening to you. And if you are "out-ethics" then that, too, needs to be addressed. What this in effect means is that the victim (of rape, mugging, theft, violence...) is punished (by way of a further need of auditing, or more extreme measures such as rundowns) for being a victim.