Scientology, not all bad?

[paigetheoracle]

My experience of Scientology makes me suspect of its status as a religion and its motives for doing things as well as setting up a pyramid selling idea par excellance but as a pair of recent newspaper articles has reminded me, it's like the Curates Egg - good in places, even if rotten over all in appearance.

 

Jeff Conaway of Grease and Taxi fame, claims it helped him cure his addiction to drugs, through his connection to John Travolta.

 

The second piece was a review of a book called 'My Lobotomy' by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming, which reminded me how primitive treatment for the mentally ill was and that when I was in Scientology they actively campaigned against this and ECT as being barbaric, which I have to agree with still (It reminds me of Star Trek IV and Bones reaction to present day medicine applied to Chekov).

 

My point in mentioning this and bringing up Scientology is that we can lose sight of the reality of anything by painting it all black or all white and missing the fact that reality is usually boringly grey (a mixture of the two). Extremism like in Islam at present or Nazi Germany, can make us lose sight of this truth (Watch Al-Jazeera features for more moderate views from the Moslem world and remember that concentration camps weren't just full of Jews but held German dissidents and resistance fighters too as well as other non-conformists - the enemies of all violent movements as individuality and the willingness to see the go(o)d in all, destroys the vengeful qualities that make war possible)

[Buffy]

Couple of notes:

 

Scientology has since the 70s had an amazing investment in Public Relations, and one of the things they realized early on in that period was that the best advertising was celebrity endorsements. The LA and Hollywood Scientology centers that cater to the celebrities are like palaces, just like those luxury hotels in exotic locations that "you" can't afford.

 

Its an entirely different experience than the run of the mill Scientology centers that the hoi polloi go to. The approaches at each are very different, with the celebrities being gently convinced by their friends, while the mainstream are subjected to the old-fashioned friendly-hostile approach that is familiar in est and even the Unification Church. In fact its been argued that est actually picked up its proselytizing techniques from Scientology.

 

I know people who have been in (or even grew up in) both of these approaches at Scientology, and while the celebrity folks can be pretty copacetic for the most part, I've seen some horrible--now broke--basket cases produced by the other (and they have debt collectors that would put the ones that work for the credit card companies to shame!). Both come out with that same annoying "I'm better than you because of my beliefs" that you get from any religion of course....

 

The other thing to note about your example is that Scientology at least indirectly created (and at least later absorbed) an organization called Narconon which started in the 60's and basically applied a much tougher version of AA to drug addicts. It was *huge* back then, and I remember the highrise they had on the Santa Monica beach where all the 60s and 70s drug victims went to clean out. They built up strong ties to the legal system, and recently got into quite a dustup when they tried to sell drug education programs to schools in various states (for amazingly large amounts of money) but then people found the connection back to Scientology and it collapsed.

 

The point of this is that especially for celebrities, Scientology has *excellent* resources for dealing with substance abuse, and they've gotten a lot of people clean. I guess you'd call that "good" but there are obviously alternatives. And of course there's a long way to go between "clean" and becoming "a clear."

 

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees,

Buffy

[paigetheoracle]

Couple of notes:

 

Scientology has since the 70s had an amazing investment in Public Relations, and one of the things they realized early on in that period was that the best advertising was celebrity endorsements. The LA and Hollywood Scientology centers that cater to the celebrities are like palaces, just like those luxury hotels in exotic locations that "you" can't afford.

 

Its an entirely different experience than the run of the mill Scientology centers that the hoi polloi go to. The approaches at each are very different, with the celebrities being gently convinced by their friends, while the mainstream are subjected to the old-fashioned friendly-hostile approach that is familiar in est and even the Unification Church. In fact its been argued that est actually picked up its proselytizing techniques from Scientology.

 

I know people who have been in (or even grew up in) both of these approaches at Scientology, and while the celebrity folks can be pretty copacetic for the most part, I've seen some horrible--now broke--basket cases produced by the other (and they have debt collectors that would put the ones that work for the credit card companies to shame!). Both come out with that same annoying "I'm better than you because of my beliefs" that you get from any religion of course....

 

The other thing to note about your example is that Scientology at least indirectly created (and at least later absorbed) an organization called Narconon which started in the 60's and basically applied a much tougher version of AA to drug addicts. It was *huge* back then, and I remember the highrise they had on the Santa Monica beach where all the 60s and 70s drug victims went to clean out. They built up strong ties to the legal system, and recently got into quite a dustup when they tried to sell drug education programs to schools in various states (for amazingly large amounts of money) but then people found the connection back to Scientology and it collapsed.

 

The point of this is that especially for celebrities, Scientology has *excellent* resources for dealing with substance abuse, and they've gotten a lot of people clean. I guess you'd call that "good" but there are obviously alternatives. And of course there's a long way to go between "clean" and becoming "a clear."

 

Men become accustomed to poison by degrees, :P

Buffy

 

Thanks for that Buff - we only get the watered down version here but it stills comes across as scary. Didn't know Narconon wasn't their invention - any angle to make a swift buck?