Teenager faces prosecution for calling Scientology 'cult'

God, you all sound like a bunch of Leninists...

Is the Anti-Scientology movement something that is worth politicizing or not? Oh no, it's really just a bunch of liberals seeking to defend organized religion! Is making fun of Scientology not proletarian enough?

I live right next to the local Church of Scientology and sometimes I bump into the protesters. Far as I can tell, they do it because Scientology is funny (I mean, their devil is Galactic Emperor Xenu) and they think it's hilarious to dress up in V for Vendetta masks and yell "Free Xenu!" I don't really think they're trying to ACCOMPLISH anything...everyone knows the people inside are brainwashed and can't be reached, and it's not like there are really pedestrians who pass by the Scientology offices and are like, "Hey, that looks like it's worth checking out, let's go in and convert!" They just do it for fun, to say that it's an expression of some sort of proto-anarchist anti-authoritarian sentiment or is an inherently alienating form of expression is silly. Harumphing that it's distracting from the Serious Business of class struggle is even sillier.

I agree with cantdocartwheels and Alan. Language like this obviously upholds the false dichotomy between "legitimate" religions and "cults". By criticizing Scientology alone they let the mainstream religions off the hook for their much more objectionable behavior.

If people want to go worship cows, galactic space emperors or talk to an invisible man I'd say fine, whatever gets you off. But anyone who tries to use the legal system to silence critics to censor out criticism or make everyone else worship cows and galactic emperors, then I have a problem.

weeler don't even bother, its's funnier watching the RAAAAAAAGE

Some of the Anonymous kids have started putting anti-war stickers around Glasgow so they do seem to be branching out a tiny bit.
Also when the BNP first tried selling their papers on Buchanan street a bunch of Anonymous kids came with us to fuck them off.
There's hope there for some of them at least, I just find it funny seeing an internet meme in the real world.

kid on the left, with the genuine afro - he was like a god to those kids.

PS welshboy - really? thats very surprising but kinda cool. I did get the vague impression that aome anon in london were trotty, generally from the fact they had megaphones and weren't afraid to use them...

God you really are a fucking Trot if somehow you can claim to magically elucidate why everyone showed up to a demo when obviously it was a weird mish mash of people, mostly weird fucking nerds, doing it for all kindsa reasons.

Why so bothered?

The CoS is creepy and they do deserve to be taken down, no more than any other Big Nasty admittedly but if these kids want to have a crack then why not? It's not like class struggle is doomed by a few folks having a laugh at the expense of religious nuts.

I think you got the wrong person...you don't know me.

"you must not know 'bout me, you must not know 'bout me"

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yeah but come on hipster, you know where the lyric's from!

Dizzee?

The ability Scientology to make people very nervous about being critical of them is tied to their reproduction and expansion as an organisation generating income by talking bullshit which might be less effective if constantly ridiculed or exposed. And they are not just a network of rich people enjoying conspicuous consumption by any means, but will try to milk people with any cash at all in lots of ways.

For example, they have a supposed drug rehab program with a name which makes it sound like it is connected to AA or NA, which is largely targeted at relatives of drug users so worried that they will hand over lots of cash to a Scientology front to 'fix' their children/relatives, and which also gives them a bunch of drug users who may be looking for help and sometimes willing to try/believe almost anything if it presented as a fix for their problems. Turning vulnerability into income. They would come into ,my local community health centre and put pamphlets around with the health brochures the centre distributes, as if it was just another health service or something which the centre might find acceptable - which it isn't.

A culture in which people are scared to criticize anything connected to Scientology because it may lead to being sued or being subject to similarly punitive action helps them to keep such operations going, creates space to try new ones, etcetera. Their actions have real consequences for like real actual people, not just people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta who can presumably afford to play with this bunch without it seriously screwing up their existences - though even that is questionable.

I, too, hate the "they are a cult not a real religion" stuff, and the sense in which this legitimizes 'mainstream' religion and makes easier the suppression of smaller or different religions, as if there is something so much better about large organisations founded on, for example, symbolically eating flesh and drinking blood in worship of a tprtured and murdered god of love. Some of the first people put in concentration camps by the Nazis were members of small religious groupings like the Seventh Day Adventists; there is an argument that the treatment of the people at Waco was based on similarly authorized contempt for minority religions.. And the Scientologists have been subject to pretty discriminatory laws in Germany in modern times, for example laws which prevent members from being employed as teachers, which seems pretty outrageous and again similiar to laws which for a long time affected leftists in post-war Germany.

I think it can de facto stigmatize the holding of any belief which makes people act in way considered too non-conformist i.e. not in line with the acceptable forms of capitalist social relations. The anti-cult 'deprogramming' types are hardly an admirable bunch, and I know that they have previously targeted people in secular, left-revolutionary groups on behalf of the conservative 'concerned relatives' they also exploit.

So obviously I have contradictory feelings about the ways in which Scientology is attacted. But I think that publicly criticising the organisation could have positive, and even, I suppose, 'politicising', effects, the former if it makes them less rather than more tempted to use the law to try to silence anybody being critical, the latter if it leads to discussion about, well, slightly broader questions than the particular stupid things they say.or more eccentric things they do.

That would probably come as quite a surprise to all the rich bourgeois fucks who end up working for the Church to pay the course fees they owe.

that pic is pretty much my life.