Threatening Man Shot Dead by Scientology Armed Guard

The LA Times have more info on the deceased, suggesting that he was a former member of the Church. I'll post more details as they come to light.

Why Germany Bothered.

The German government recently announced that it was no longer looking to ban Scientology in Germany. This has been heralded by many a Scientologist as a victory for their church, despite the government also stating that both its Domestic Intelligence Services and its Office for the Protection of the Constitution will continue to monitor the organisation.

The reason the attempt to ban has been abandoned appears to be the large divide between what Scientology says and what it does. Germany's annual report on Human Rights described the organisation as "[seeking] to limit or rescind basic and human rights, such as the right to develop one's personality and the right to be treated equally." This is in no doubt based on the writings of Hubbard himself, who declared that Civil Liberties should be withdrawn from people who are 2 or lower on the tone scale (people suffering from grief, or fear, for instance). Hubbard also declared quite openly his political ambitions. In discussing a "clear" planet, he envisioned a society wherein local government would be run from Scientology orgs, where policies would be based entirely on Scientology principles. He describes democracy as a failed experiment. Germany has, in light of these writings, decided that, at its heart, Scientology is an unconstitutional organisation. Its attempt to ban the Church was in this context, and Germany has, due to its own history, charged itself with taking a very close rein on the organisations that practice within its borders.

But happily, Scientology does not practice what it preaches. Not outside Clearwater at least. Erhart Koertig, Berlin's top security official, said "This organization pursues goals — through its writings, its concept and its disrespect for minorities — that we cannot tolerate and that we consider in violation of the constitution. But they put very little of this into practice. The appraisal of the government at the moment is that [Scientology] is a lousy organization, but it is not an organization that we have to take a hammer to."

CoS might point to the number of Euros that have been spent in surveilling the organisation, only to shy away from putting a ban in place. I suspect that the German government has also seen wisdom in this; that there is little ground to be had in attempting to outlaw an organisation that is held in such low public regard to begin with. They are, in effect, saying that Scientology in Germany is so poorly organised that should they seek to put into practice those policies of Hubbard that are unconstitutional, they wouldn't be able to. Also, like it or not, Germany has to walk a tightrope between outlawing unconstitutional organisations and being seen to be unconstitutional in doing so - its own First Amendment paradox.

I suspect Germany's biggest mistake in pursuing the Church of Scientology is that it attempted to address the organisation's vision of a Scientology-run planet. A more effective approach would be to look at the church's recruitment methods and its practices; its fraudulent marketing, its dodgy employment policies, its medical claims. Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion...

Criminon worse than nothing!

I don't usually post in this manner, but thought I'd make an exception in this case. Many apologists and supporters of the Church of Scientology point to its drug and crime programs as evidence of the good that the Church does (confusingly, as a way of counterbalancing the bad that the Church does). Second Chance, offering Criminon in New Mexico, claims a 90% success rate, but appears to have a lower success rate than people not participating in the program.

The document mentioned can be found here.

The overall point of this is that many of the services that the Church of Scientology try to provide are services with measurable performance - Narconon, Crimonon, Scholastic Tech, the Purification Rundown. Because Scientology is always marketed as new and revolutionary (Dianetics is still "Modern Science" despite being over fifty years old. And not science.) they'll often get away with suggesting that the reason they don't have any research into efficacy is because they've not had the chance to do any yet. Leaving aside the fact that they are marketing techniques before establishing whether or not they work, they have had plenty of time, money and resources to put their theories to the test. When research has been carried out, the results have been hidden away or misrepresented.

Scientologists often claim that their religion is being victimised, that they should be free to believe in what they want. I agree that they should be free to. Emphasis on free. I also believe that where their organisation makes realworld, falsifiable claims, then those claims should be put to the test, and put to the test in an open and honest manner. If seeking out proof is unpalatable to Scientologists, then they ought only be offering their unproven services to other Scientologists, not trying to peddle it to all us spiritually-stunted, evidence-based fools in the Wog world.

Co$ and the Chemical Brain

The Church of Scientology, as any fule kno, thinks that all psychiatric drugs are bad. Quite where they draw the line on things like "what is a drug?" and "what is a psychiatric drug" is anyone's guess, but in the broad brushstrokes of their anti-psych rhetoric, they're all bad. As Juliette Lewis said recently, schizophrenics would be much better off forgoing their meds and getting themselves down to a petting zoo.

What amuses me is the reasons given. Invariably two simultaneous but contradictory positions are maintained. Firstly, they claim that psych drugs are based on "brain chemistry" and that this theory is flawed, that there is no evidence for it [sic]. Secondly, and here's the fun part, they claim that psych drugs have a detrimental effect on people. Drugs that operate on a person's brain chemistry can lead them to kill themselves, or shoot up their highschool. So in the first instance, brain chemistry does not exist, but in the second instance it does. Whenever you find yourself in a discussion about this with a Scientologist (flunk! You've let them derail the conversation!) ask them the all important question of how psych drugs effect behaviour.

Now I'm no fan of Big Pharma myself. It is true that mistakes happen, with varying degrees of culpability and intent - trials resulting in negative findings fail to get published, adverse reactions aren't picked up on, and so on. But Big Pharma is slowly getting better. Big Pharma creates self-regulatory bodies with real power to monitor the way that drugs are developed and marketed. There is an increasing momentum behind the ideas that are looking to address flaws in the clinical trial process (such as the trials that are registered but never published). Put simply, it is an evidence-based field, so anything that generates evidence will come out sooner or later, and there is a wealth of patients and practitioners out there who want the straight dope, pun intended, on their lotions and potions.

Big Pharma may not get it right all the time, but they stand a far better chance than the vitamin and dietary quacks who cling to their unmonitored products and wave massively flawed studies and even more flawed reasoning at media whorish enough to lend anyone with the remotest air of scientific authority fifteen minutes in which to flog their snake oil. One weak and yet to be repeated study into the effects of Omega 3 fish oils on kids suffering from ADHD becomes the foundation of sand on which is built an industry safe in the delusion that fish oil turns kids into placid brainiacs. One weak and yet to be repeated study into Narconon suggests that the rehab treatment aint that great, and so is buried away, far from the prying eyes of a public that have a genuine need to know.

But I digress. The cognitive dissonance at the heart of the Church's anti-psych stance stands as a crystalisation at the level of cognitive dissonance that exists throughout the organisation as a whole - the Orwellian double think that allows people to believe they are free, yet unquestioningly follow orders, write cheques, and fill out credit applications. And on the subject of the chemical brain, who says there's no evidence for it? It remains the strongest model we have of the way mood functions, and certainly a stronger model than the suggestion that we are controlled by memories lodged in each and every cell of our body. There is an excellent and balanced blog post on the subject here.

Adapt and Survive

One of the things I enjoy about criticism of the Church of Scientology is that it forms a microcosm of most religions, as though Hubbard had engineered it as a model of religion so he could observe how it behaved in the world at large. He didn't; he just foolishly thought it would allow him to get rich through the application of little effort.

Much of the criticism of Hubbard's writing, that which doesn't hinge on its logical inconsistencies and occupation of bad or invented science, has focused on its bigotry - its position on homosexuals (should be cured or killed), on native South Africans (can't do anything with them, primitive, utterly materialistic), on Chinese ("the trouble with China is there are too many Chinese there"), and so on. Apologists say "well, he was a white middle-class guy in the 1950s, what do you expect?" To which one must reply "I expect him not to inflict his opinions on future generations by starting up a fraudulent organisation pedalling this bigotry as though it were inescapable gospel truth."

Last year David Miscavige oversaw the re-editing of many basic texts, against Scientology rules, and resold them all to Scientologists worldwide in an aggressive series of celebratory events. If you're curious about these new editions, you can get them for pennies on ebay. You might even be able to save on postage and packing by contacting local libraries, many of whom will have been sent unsolicited copies they'll be keen to get rid of.

This is the second time the tech has been changed since Hubbard's death, and crystalises the paradox of the sacred text. How can Truth cease being True over time? How can you change your sacred texts and still be the same religion? How can the new Truth be trusted if the old Truth has been swept away. Scientology adopts the George Orwell approach. The new Truth is actually the original Truth, kept from us by nasty nasty squirrels, which is not a trick they can go on pulling forever (twice is already pushing it) and when the continued financial success of the corporation relies not on the increasingly impossible task of new recruits, but of reselling the same stuff over and over to members who feel unable to leave.

But here is the dilemma, and it is a dilemma that is faced by many more orthodox religions. People pursue their own moral compasses - they have an ability to assess, based often on a few core principals and internal debate based on those principals, the rightness and wrongness of things. Often that compass will develop within religion and within a legal system. The law and religion will not necessarily see eye to eye all the time, but more to the point, that person's moral compass will not always marry up to what their religion tells them. These people then run the risk of disenfranchisement from that religion. If the dissonance is strong enough then the religion will cease to function well at all. If, for instance, a religion stipulates in its scripture that women are subservient to men, then in time, as sexual equality becomes the norm, people will consider this aspect of religion (often taken, rightly or wrongly, to be representative of the religion as a whole) and choose to leave, or at the very least to humour it without conviction. If this continues, over the course of a couple of generations the religion will flounder and fail - and attendance will drop. If the religion refuses to change its ways, it will not survive; it will return to the cult status it no doubt started as.

How that change takes place is problematic if the rules are laid down in scripture. Abrahamic religions are lucky (just about) in having a multi-translated ancient text to work from - open as it is to reinterpretation, translation errors and more. Hubbard's intentions, however, were to avoid schism. He mistakenly believed that the best way of avoiding schism was to ensure that everyone was clear on what was meant by everything he wrote. He wasn't especially good at this - his policies were frequently amended, something that has officially stopped since he died. Hubbard's words are carved in stone (well, etched in titanium, really) so can't be changed as readily. As a result, critics, perhaps a little unfairly, highlight Hubbard's bigotry, but also highlight the Church's attempts at changing its ways. The real root of this two-pronged attack is that CoS makes the claim that it is the purveyor of truth ("I only deal in facts" as Hubbard so memorably sang), but doesn't make very convincing arguments, especially when it starts changing its story about what that truth really is. The attack only seems unfair because it has been spawned by the cognitive dissonance at the heart of Scientology; the doublethink on which the cult thrives. As noted in the Purview, a CoS PR officer recently stated that touch assists are there as a means to heal on a spiritual and emotional level. For years touch assists have been marketed as a means of speeding recovery on a physical level; as it becomes clearer and clearer that no evidence for this will be forthcoming, the claims are being shifted to where evidence cannot exist - the spiritual plane (see Evolution of CAM). Soon those will be the only claims ever made about it, irrespective of what is written in the books right-thinking Scientologists ought to have pulped when they got their new, un-squirreled editions hot off the presses

As a footnote, it should be pointed out that Hubbard, for all his attempts, got his schism in the end. The unmovable position he made, first on Dianetics, and later on Scientology, created the Freezone, offering many people who like the belief system but not the Church, a way to the kind of freedom they'd initially imagined.

Atheists Go Home!

One of the accusations that is regularly trotted out when addressing critics of the Church of Scientology is that of "religious intolerance". This is to suggest that by voicing one's concerns about the Church's scant avoidance of corporate responsibility in, say, the safe removal of blue asbestos from it's fleet, or its willingness to allow its staff to practice medicine without a license, a person is no better than an ignorant bigot and would probably go around leaving burning CroSses on Beck's front lawn. Apologists and Scientologists alike are quick to draw comparisons between critics of the Church and Nazis, which is rather insulting to Jews, and also confuses religious and racist persecution. It was the Jewish race (along with gypsies, the mentally ill, homosexuals) that Nazi Germany had a problem with - no appostates were saved. Unless I have misunderstood, and the Nazi card is played in reference to their persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses, then the murder of six million Jews ought not be compared to people speaking out against another person's belief system or, as is more usual, their behaviour.
Religious Tolerance, though, is a peculiar beast. It has to be universal for it to work at all. We can't pick whose religion we are tolerant of. You could, for instance, say that you were tolerant of all Abrahamic religions, but you're still making a distinction. I think it's true to say that most people who pay lip-service to religious tolerance have to qualify it to a greater or lesser extent; they have to draw a line in the sand. That line may concern itself with behaviour, fundementals of belief, or even be personal to individuals within a particular belief system, but it is drawn nonetheless.
Except that in today's political climate, you can't say any of that out loud. We're all supposed to have universal religious tolerance. People of differing religions are expected to have tolerance of other religions. This latter issue is particularly amusing because in most cases, it's fundementally disallowed. Nazarene dissident Jesus Christ said "No one comes to the father, but through me," and pretty much all religions have some kind of exclusivity claim built in somewhere; so what is the true nature of that religious tolerance? It is either an admission that one's own religion is just as flawed, unlikely and dubious as everyone else's or it is disingenuous "I tolerate your beliefs, however wrong they may be."
Now, how far this is right or wrong doesn't immediately concern me. I'm an atheist, so anyone of any religious conviction is barking up the wrong tree as far as I'm concerned. What does interest me, however, is the effect that this tolerance is having on the religious landscape as a whole.
The importance of tolerance comes down to the current climate of fear we're enjoying following the terrorist attacked that have been made by Islamic fundementalists. Political figures, realising the possibility of widespread civil unrest and intolerance in our multi-cultural and multi-faith world, made it hand-wringingly clear that we all had to get along, Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and Christians, Scientologists and Moonies. So we end up with senior policemen making glowing speeches about Scientologists at the opening of a London Celebrity Centre, and we decide to lift the ban on the Reverend Moon entering the United Kingdom.
Put plainly, fringe religions are, more and more, enjoying the same kind of respect and lack of scrutiny enjoyed by more mainstream religions, and at the expense of mainstream religion. Christianity in the UK has been multi-denominational for years now, but I'm noticing a greater number of small churches springing up, often with more letters in their overbearing titles than they have congregation. Along with that, Christians themselves seem to be getting kookier, or at least the visible ones are. Fundementalism is creeping into the fragmented church under a blanket of political correctness. Fringe cults are beginning to enjoy tax funding for the running of faith schools. It is becoming increasingly possible to pick a religion that matches one's own prejudices, faiths that use the bible to excuse a belief in racism, slavery and sexual inequality.
Here's a reality check. The guys who stand on street corners and tell passers by that they're going to hell are not good adverts for their religion. The smiley, happy clappy Christians performing entertaining bits of shtick in front of a Sesco are not good adverts for their religion. Both parties are projecting an image of what their particular religion does to its converts. This, you're probably thinking, is stating the obvious. But the trouble is, passersby aren't going to know where these people have come from as they quicken their step to take themselves out of earshot. They'll hear the word "God", or they'll recognise the tome of onionskin in the preacher's hand, and just lump the evangelical in with all the other Christians. And in an environment where we are continually told all religions are created equal, where does this ripe and fertile ground for fringe religions leave mainstream religions. Which faiths are rubbing off on which? Religious tolerance does not, in practicality, provide a bedrock for Christianity or Islam; by embracing the fringe and the fundementalist, religious tolerance serves only to undermine it. It is said of Incident II that it is no stranger than many of the events spoken of in the bible. This is quite true, but illuminates Christianity more than it does Scientology.

The Secret... of Assumed Mechanisms

Having learnt recently of the forthcoming visit of The Secret interviewee and chiropractor John F Demartini to London I thought I would finally get round to posting on the dread subject astral calling.

Astral calling, or the law of attraction, or whatever you want to call it follows, in all its guises, the following stages; the window dressing may differ, but the core is the same.

1) write down what it is that you want.
2) consciously permit yourself the thing that you want
3) look out for and pursue any opportunities to achieve what you want.

As I say, the rituals of 1 may vary. Tell everyone, tell no-one, stick it in a box, write it in a tin and bury it, say it out loud to the stars at midnight. The point is, though, that most people's goals are woolly and vague. Generally speaking people know that they don't want whatever it is they already have, but rarely get to a point where they sit down and establish something that they would like to have. Within the context of astral calling, then, point 1 serves two important functions - it allows the person doing the calling to establish concretely what it is they want but it also lays down a parameter of success.

Once the person has decided what it is they want, then they must allow themselves to have it. This is a fair bit of deprogramming - to tackle one's own guilt at, or fear of, achievement. More important than this, the person is taking their pipedream and changing their attitude to it so it becomes an achievable goal. This becomes absolutely vital for the next phase.

If we return to our average non-achiever, another thing holding them back is the likelihood that they are risk-averse and non-opportunistic. Even if they've decided what it is they really want, they are probably pessimistic enough to believe their ambition is unattainable, so they simply will not try. We can, rather sadly, add fear of failure to fear of success, pushing an individual into a position where they daren't even make an attempt. Astral calling breaks that by instructing its advocates that once a goal has been decided on, opportunities will be drawn to them, that success will virtually fall into the person's lap. What occurs, though, is that people will start to recognise opportunities that were always there, and will even be in a position to take things that aren't prima facie opportunities, that don't have anything directly to do with the goal, and turn them into stepping stones towards achieving that goal. The last aspect of this phase is that individual failures are shrugged off but the pursuit continues. The knowledge that the opportunities are out there means that the individual moves away from the "you only get one chance" mentality, and failure really can become a learning experience on the way to success.

So here, in summary, is what is happening - someone is defining their goal, they are creating an attitude whereby they will pursue that goal, they will take opportunities and risks in order to achieve that goal. What amazes me about this is that it is so simple, and in a sense so humanist. There's an aspect of freeing oneself in order to achieve success which is actually quite moving. It seems, though, that it isn't moving enough. What I have described is the mechanism of astral calling, but most sources of astral calling suggest this is not mechanism but method, that the mechanism lies elsewhere.

Here's the other side of the three phases.

1) you describe what you want - something out there listens to you
2) you allow yourself to have it - something out there listens to you
3) you take opportunities and risks as they arise - something sends them to you.

Opinion varies on the something. Some say it's the universe (which is kind of a handy get out considering you're part of the universe too). Others, like Joel Osteen, will tell you that it's God listening and responding. There is a strong and definite suggestion by many of its proponents that whatever is out there responding to what we have written on a bit of paper and buried in the garden is a universal and intelligent force. But this process does not require the existance of such a force. It is akin to saying that God powers your bicycle, and you call on God to power the bicycle by working the pedals. Not only is it a ludicrous suggestion, it's also demeaning to the pedal-pushers, robbing humankind of achievement so that those laurels can be handed to a fictional genie.

Oh, and because I couldn't fit it in anywhere else, The Secret is not quantum mechanics. What are they talking about?