"all religions, from Scientology to Catholicism"

spoken like a true Catholic :-)

I guess i should have said from Arianism to Zoroastrianism. But in my mind I was thinking: from fringe to mainstream.

i get exceedingly frustrated with cynics who lump scientology in with all religions -- as if they are all worthy of the *same kind* of cynicism. it's possible to be cynical and morally opposed to multiple things for different reasons!

scientology is a dangerous organization of brainwashing money-grubbing controllists. claiming (stupid voice) "well, so are religions!" is a petulant and simplistic attitude.

I think Maher is more interested in individual belief, rather than institutional corruption.

i wasn't aiming at him per se. but the phrase "he views all religions" had a duplicate effect; made me think he meant the institutions, and made me annoyed with you for lumping scientology in with "religion."

scientology = pyramid scheme with corrupt power structure.

catholicism = organized religion with oft-corrupt power structure.

One thing I'll say about Catholicism -- it certainly doesn't encourage people to climb the hierarchy.

"I guess i should have said from Arianism to Zoroastrianism. But in my mind I was thinking: from fringe to mainstream."

Which were you classifying as mainstream?

I'm with Bill Maher on the general principal (and against jbg) that there's no major theoretical distinction between Catholicism and Scientology (with the possible exception that the modern Catholic church is not so aggressive at defending itself as the modern Scienologist church is).

I still shudder/laugh at the story a relative told me about being forced out of his temple during the high holy days as a child because his parents couldn't/wouldn't pay the entrance fee. If money-grubbing-ness is a complaint about Scientology, it's certainly not the only organization to have that problem.

I was about to ask jbg to make the case for scientology being substantially more ridiculous than established religions, but then I realized that:
1. Scientology is even more nakedly about taking your money than other religions, and I don't think it says a thing about helping the poor.
2. At least there's scientific evidence that various Biblical figures existed once, even if they didn't do anything divine. The same cannot be said for Xenu or whatever it is.

1. I don't know, an extremely high percentage of American Mormons tithe, and Christianity has its history with indulgences -- don't forget that Scientology is young, and hasn't had a reform movement, something that took 1500 years to happen in Christianity.

2. I think you mean historical evidence, and there is indeed a lot that supports the bible -- but that makes sense, because one of the major purposes of the bible was to record the history of certain peoples. But the parts of the Bible that are the most well-known, the Garden of Eden, Noah, Jonah, and Jesus, among others, have little or no historical evidence.

Scientology is more ridiculous than other religions almost purely based on its youth. Maher tries to simplify things by saying: there's nothing inherently more ridiculous about Xenu the overlord than about a talking snake. But he never attempts parallel every single religious component. I.e., it would be a useless exercise to compare the biblical details about Nebuchadnezzar with details about thetans, or Scientology's theory of repressed memory with Jesus turning water into wine.

Of course, there are many faithful Christians who don't believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis. (We even discussed such possibilities in the classes I took before my Catholic confirmation as a teenager.) I'm not sure there are many sincere OT8's who don't believe in a literal interpretation of Xenu's Galactic Confederacy.

I don't know whether the tenets of Scientology talk about helping the poor, but the Scientologists themselves do some charity work:

http://www.scientology.org/world/news/goodwill/index.html

Please note I have nothing positive to say about Scientology at all, except that it may have indirectly led to the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004.

comparing the beliefs of faithful christians with those of sincere OT8s is not fair, because of the extreme difference in sample sizes. How about the beliefs of the college of cardinals? I imagine most of them literally believe in, e.g., transubstantiation.

Yes, I think you're right. But then it's probably not fair to bring up Xenu at all, since he's introduced only if you become an OT III.

At least some Mormon tithing gets put to a good cause. (OK, and I'm sure some of it goes into grain silos for after the fictional apocolypse.) Growing up with a Mormon girl whose family was poor taught me that some religions are good at taking care of their own. They had Deseret brand everything in their kitchen and they did not pay for it. I know there's a similar situation with Catholics.

Scientology is more ridiculous than other religions almost purely based on its youth.

What? Are you saying that if Christianity were only 40 years old, you'd judge its ridiculousness differently? Surely not. Literal transubstantiation is still hard to believe in, even if people believed in it 1500 years ago.

I was told by a friend that in her church, they would bless the wafer things ahead of time, or maybe had leftovers, and the ones that were blessed but not used had to be watched over 24/7 until they were used up. So there was a rotating volunteer job where you would go in for a two hour block and pray over the blessed bread by yourself. It sounded amazing.

"Are you saying that if Christianity were only 40 years old, you'd judge its ridiculousness differently?"

Of course. If Christianity were 40 years old, I could read more than four 1st person accounts of the events. Plus, we would know a lot more about the lives of the principal characters. It's only by virtue that he lived last century rather than two thousand years ago that we know that L. Ron Hubbard was a wife-beating, tax-evading maniac.

Hmm, got my terms wrong. I said transubstantiation but I meant the whole 3-in-1 thing. Eh, they're both equally silly (he says, as he notes that his circumcised penis gives him the inherent right to relocate to a pleasant little Mediterranean village).

i really find the argument that "scientology is no worse than any other religion" to be simplistic and dangerous.

while you can criticize many, many, MANY things about the institution of the catholic church, i will dismiss outright any claim that "catholicism" as a system of beliefs is downright *harmful* to those that subscribe to it.

for example, what's the harm in believing that there was a guy 2,000 years ago who embodied god's love, and wanted people to share that love with each other -- compared with, say, hooking a 6-year-old up to a lie detector and then asking that 6-year-old if he has ever destroyed a planet, murdering 8 billion of its inhabitants?

Because it can make you care not about what's happening in the real world but only about what's happening in relation to your future life. When the real world doesn't matter to you as much as the afterlife, your behavior while you're here is going to be odd at the best and downright unfortunate at the worst. It's always odd that religious people think that non-religious people won't be moral because we're not worried about the afterlife... I always think the same thing about religious people for the exact opposite reason.

If Scientologists ask people for money and they willing give it over, more power to the Scientologists. Why is that dangerous, exactly? They're fooling people, and thats irksome, but I don't see it as a threat to me or anyone I know or care about. Additionally, I don't really think they're fooling anyone any more than the Catholics are.

Scientology created Battlefield Earth.

I don't think the afterlife is the crucial aspect. Judaism is as messed up as other religions and it is only tepidly about the afterlife.

a) marco, you are now speaking about extremists. most reasonable christians/catholics that i know believe in the teachings of jesus as related to HOW WE SHOULD TREAT EACH OTHER ON EARTH BECAUSE IT'S WHAT GOD WANTS, not HOW WE CAN GET TO HEAVEN.

2) you keep thinking of scientology as a volunteer effort: "oh, let those fools spend their money." PEOPLE ARE BORN INTO SCIENTOLOGY AND CANNOT GET OUT. they have BOATS for chrissakes. you obviously didn't read that rolling stone article that you LINKED TO. i've never met an adult who said "i'm a catholic because they threatened to completely cut me off from my family if i lapsed."

$) jon: i take umbridge with "judaism is as messed up as any religion." while correct about the lack of afterlife specificity (it's a "here and now" type of faith), how exactly do you think it relates to organized christian churches? we have no real heirarchy, and no real power structure. it's a faith based on QUESTIONING FAITH AND AUTHORITY, which is one of my favorite things about it.

larry) i can't believe that I'M THE ONE defending "religion." but i maintain that it is fundamentally childish to say "blah blah scientology is the same thing as catholicism, but with aliens."

CLEARLY IT'S NOT! if catholicism ever had a "fair game" policy, it was in 1397, and it's long since passed. except when related to touching little boys, there i said it for you.

jbg, you are arguing with Ingen Angiven, not me.

Like Christianity, Judaism comes in all flavors, and on the continuum of "relationship with the secular world" we can get to the point where we're only talking about culture and foods and nothing to offend anyone. We can also get to the point of the Haredi (black hats) which, I know, you refuse to recognize as Jewish, but they're certainly coming from the Jewish tradition and Jewish teachings, and of course they are firmly in the wacko camp w/r/t afterlife-pining, literalism of the bible, etc.

Let's look in the broad middle of self-identifying religious Jews, everything from those with semi-regular attendance at reform temple to the sort of Modern Orthodox who keep kosher and wear kipot and keep refusing your invitations to go to the Dodger game on Saturday, but are otherwise nice normal people who are well integrated into society.

In that spectrum I see the same behavior as in the analogous spectrum of Christianity, i.e. fairly rational people who still occasionally behave weirdly for no reason other than a doctrine instilled from a very young age. When I become obsessive compulsive about avoiding grains for a week in spring, and when my Catholic friends show up with soot on their foreheads or get abnormal cravings for fish on Fridays, these are behavioral quirks instilled from above, and are signs of being submissive to some religious power structure. I submit this is somewhat messed up.

As far as the Jewish tradition of questioning faith and authority, I think you're overstating the impact this has. Yes, the talmud is largely concerned with two rabbis arguing with each other about details, but 1) one is basically the Washington Generals of Jewish thought and always ends up losing to the other, Globetrotter-like rabbi and 2) the debate is over small details like "how long must one wait after sundown before eating at the end of Yom Kippur?", not "what's the deal with this pork prohibition?" Eating a ham sandwich in a Reform sanctuary on Yom Kippur is still an act of apostasy, and there are stories in Jewish literature to this end.

Finally, as to your point about hierarchy, Judaism as practiced today is quite hierarchical as regards Kashrut authority and degree-granting denominations, not to mention individual temple hierarchies like boards of directors, sister/brotherhoods, etc. Rabinnic authority is valid as well -- you are generally regarded to "consult your rabbi" if in doubt about the suitability of some specific food or item or behavior, and that means quite literally "ask him and do what he says". Judaism as originally practiced is in fact several orders more hierarchical.

"If Christianity were 40 years old, I could read more than four 1st person accounts of the events. Plus, we would know a lot more about the lives of the principal characters. It's only by virtue that he lived last century rather than two thousand years ago that we know that L. Ron Hubbard was a wife-beating, tax-evading maniac."

Wow. Silly me; I thought we were judging the ridiculousness of beliefs based on the beliefs themselves, not the messenger or the surrounding events.

jbg: I submit that Catholicism is somewhat harmful in that strict practicioners are encouraged to have more babies than they can afford. Then there's the needless guilt aspect.

"I thought we were judging the ridiculousness of beliefs based on the beliefs themselves, not the messenger or the surrounding events."

Yes, but it's easier to question the beliefs when we can judge the person responsible for initially spreading/creating them. For example: Joseph Smith vs. Paul. I'm really making a simple point: the older a religion is, the less evidence there is to disprove its particulars. This started with me making this claim: "Scientology is more ridiculous than other religions almost purely based on its youth," which didn't delineate between the beliefs and the messengers.

I submit that it's equally impossible to prove or disprove that Xenu tied his enemies to volcanoes and detonated thermonuclear bombs, vaporizing them, an ancient Indian civilization was visited by Jesus and recorded its findings on golden plates in upstate New York, Jesus turned water into wine and fed the masses with crackers and herring, and Moses lifted his staff, causing the waters to part just long enough for the Israelites to get across.

I'm staunchly secular, and agnostic because atheism is dogma and I hate dogma. It sorta obviously follows that I think people who, for example, tailor their behavior with end times in mind are hard to relate to. But I have a hard time seeing religion as cause and behavior as effect. It seems much muddier than that to me.

Also, a peasant in medieval england with a deep and literal faith in jesus is clearly less ridiculous than a rich celebrity with a modern education and, like, a car and a television and the internet so on, believing that L. Ron Hubbard had anything important to tell him or her. Therefore on some level scientology is more ridiculous than christianity, historically speaking.

It's probably not fair to compare the modern celebrity to a medieval peasant. Maybe Emperor Constatine is a more apt comparison?

Fair point, but I'm just trying to say that being an illiterate agrarian of a long-gone age, with no means to become worldly, and being inclined to believe in miracles or to long deeply for salvation is not nutz, but in the modern era treating a TERRIBLE sci-fi invention as gospel iz. So instead I'd like to trade the modern celebrity for one of those ordinary looking (if a bit geeky and tending to wear a fanny pack and a flannel shirt in summer) people who man the lie detectors in the union square subway station.

There's a good reason why Scientology emphasizes recruitment of those from low self-esteem populations: struggling actors, drug addicts, sufferers of post-traumatic incidences, etc.

"Yes, but it's easier to question the beliefs when we can judge the person responsible for initially spreading/creating them."

Well, I prefer to judge them based on their content, but your mileage clearly varies.

My mileage doesn't vary, but I'm a realist. I cannot possibly give a fair appraisal of the claims of every person I come across without some sort of filter -- just ask any organization who receives intake from the general public. Or for example: let's say you are at a party, and a nerdy-looking guy converses with you. He tells you he's PhD in physics, and then goes onto tell you some facts about quantum entanglement you never thought were possible (and is in fact false). Next, you find yourself conversing with a surfer-dude looking actor, who starts telling you about an encounter with interdimensional beings he had, and the theories about time/space he gained from it. Would you walk away from such a situation believing both equally? Would you give the PhD student more the benefit of the doubt? Granted, you are not going to start stating as fact either without doing more research, but I'm talking about the day-to-day judging we all must do with humans. If you are giving an award or accepting someone into a program, then you judge by content, not by the messenger. But in day-to-day life, we all must resort to some filters. The same applies to religion -- sure, if I wanted to do a serious study of the truth of various religions, and write a treatise on it, I would purely make my arguments based on content.

But that's not what the average human is doing -- the average human hears about Scientology, sees that its main proponents are rich actors and weird people, and they let that color their perception of the religion's beliefs. Likewise, the tenets of Christianity are stated everywhere, from your loved ones, to your community leaders, to mainstream presidential candidates, and therefore even something that usually might sound ridiculous without context (a snake talks, a sea parts) begins to gain an air of familiarity. I'm not really talking about the truthitude of one over the other, but the plausibility. And plausibility is certainly an artifact of the messenger.

You don't seem to be talking about "the person responsible for initially spreading/creating them" any more. I agree with Lorelei in that the fact that a religion created by a tax evading lying drunk is no more or less likely to be believed by me than a religion created by somebody anonymous. Community pressure is a whole other ballgame: I'm more easily convinced when millions of people tell me something is true than when a few do. It's too tempting to want to fit in.

But "the person responsible for initially spreading/creating them" probably has a lot to do with what community ends up adopting the beliefs.

Maybe, maybe not, but that's not the original claim you made, nor is it what Lorelei objected to.

Let's get back to your original point:

"Scientology is more ridiculous than other religions almost purely based on its youth"

and your rationale:

"the older a religion is, the less evidence there is to disprove its particulars"

I think that the age of the claimed events is what is harder to disprove with age. If I told you I walked on water in 1999 you could find a lot of evidence to disprove that. LRH and Joseph Smith conveniently described events that took place millenia ago. When the Testaments were written they were describing various activities that took place relatively recently, but given the ability to collect and preserve evidence, they were as good as being millenia ago. Each of these three religions has an equal ability to prove the truth of its claimed facts, which is to say, zero ability.

But you can also study how the originators claim they learned about the events in the first place. For example, Joseph Smith found his on golden plates, which people have criticized as made up based on weight: http://www.mormonfortress.com/gweight.html And his Book of Abraham was translated from an Egyption papyrus which was later translated for real once the Rosetta stone was discovered: http://www.carm.org/lds/ldspapyri.htm

These kind of criticisms can't be made about the people who wrote the Old Testament, because we know essentially nothing about them, due to the age of the religion.

Same goes for L. Ron Hubbard -- it's easier to question the veracity of his religious teachings when 1) they are so similar to his openly fictional sci-fi writings; and 2) as a follower of Crowley he was known to extol the virtues of making up a religion; and 3) his own son has described him as a fraud.

If we found fictional writings that bore much similarity to the Old Testament written by the same authors, we could question their veracity more aggressively as well, but of course, due to the age of the Old Testament, we will never find anything like that.

I stand by my original statement: "Scientology is more ridiculous than other religions almost purely based on its youth."

Let me present a counterfactual. Imagine that: 1) We knew nothing about the historical L. Ron Hubbard; 2) His writings were thousands of years old; and 3) Scientology existed as a religion pretty much as it does today. Do you think, in that case, the beliefs would be ridiculed as much by the press, in entertainment, by bloggers, etc.?

Wait, we're judging the ridiculousness of a religion by what other people think of it? Other people believe the bible is completely true!

All I'm trying to say is that the miracles described in 40-year old and 3000-year-old texts are equally implausible, since neither has evidence to support them.

http://www.moviesoundscentral.com/sounds/debate.wav

Damn deep link prevention. Try this.

By the way, I object to atheism being a dogma.

It's not a dogma any more than believing that things are going to continue falling down instead of up is a dogma.

But believing that gravity will be the same tomorrow as today is based on scientific induction. I don't see how that applies to atheism, which isn't based on past evidence.

Atheism is absolutely based on past evidence... what else could it be based on?

excessive certainty.

Gravity: Day 1, it's going down. Day 2, it's going down. Day 3, it's going down, etc.

God: Day 1, no evidence either way. Day 2, no evidence either way. Day 3, no evidence either way, etc.

In other words, you can't use inductive reasoning to defend atheism. You could, however, use inductive reasoning to say that the Rapture will not happen tomorrow.

No evidence either way? I also don't think there are unicorns even though there's no evidence either way about that. I mean, of course, invisible unicorns.

Lack of evidence for the entirety of recorded time is evidence.

PS. are you agnostic about dragons as well?

I'll admit that as you get more specific (unicorns, dragons, a God who visits Native Americans), while I remain technically agnostic, the probability of belief is very very low. But beliefs for me are exactly that: a rough, internal probability. A god with specific attributes is one thing; God as an entity who is responsible for the universe is another. I'm agnostic in varying levels depending on the hypothesis, but in few cases is my belief probability equal to 0.

Yeah, CM, that's pretty much exactly how I feel about it. There absolutely is evidence for some nebulous something which is an utter, utter mystery to us, and which precedes us, or supercedes us, or whatever- the evidence is our conscious experience of a universe. I make no claims about the nature of said nebulous something, nor do I insist that it absolutely exists, even. I'm agnostic. I'm pretty close to atheist in the sense that I think it's highly unlikely that the nebulous something that supercedes us or whatever is graspable in terms of ideas about 'god' or other existing linguistic categories. I don't base my actions on any expectations about any afterlife, nothing like that. I don't think there's a 'god' that 'hears me when I suffer.' However, until you can explain to me how there was nothing and then there was something using an explanation that requires no "creator," then there is a degree of uncertainty. Insisting on certainty in the face of this uncertainty is, I believe, the very definition of dogma.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080611/ap_on_fe_st/italy_unicorn

I retract everything I said above. I now believe.

When you broaden the definition of god so wide that it would include a yet unknown scientific force, I'd argue that you've moved beyond the traditional meaning of 'god' and are using it in a broader sense to basically mean science.

God is only god if he would be recognized as such by a followed of a major religion. Otherwise, we're talking midichlorians.

(CM - I had a comment with a link get lost in the fog.)

I'm not even touching the scientology thing. I made my point and I don't believe there's anything written here that disproves or makes me doubt it.

There should be a word for people who aren't religious because they don't really care how the universe got here. It's here and that's good enough for me.

Fixed.

"God is only god if he would be recognized as such by a followed of a major religion."

I don't really agree with this statement. Even the most observant members of the same large major religion will have their own personal definition of God.

"There should be a word for people who aren't religious because they don't really care how the universe got here. It's here and that's good enough for me."

Scientifically or philosophically incurious?

Also, I broadened the definition of god but I didn't broaden it to include a "yet unknown scientific force." A yet-unknown force that science might one day observe might turn out to be something other than "god." The whole point is that it's unknown.

Lorelei: Apatheist.

Damn Internet always thinks of ideas first.

It's a shame that Ingen doesn't have any place to put all of the interesting new words he's coined.

It's already on wikipedia.