scientology & celebrities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYvHpVwIqYY

http://vimeo.com/6587408

This interview w Timothy Wyllie from Scientology spinoff The Process Church of the Final Judgment is pretty great. And quite a bit less opaque than the usual Hubbardian technobabble.

i really really wonder about all the successful ppl in the entertainment biz who have nothing to do w/ these people at all, what are their interactions like. there must be tons of stories. of course stories of tom cruise with his proselytizing tent at a shoot get out, but that kind of thing must happen in miniature all the time, right?

― goole, Friday, February 11, 2011 4:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i remember reading some article by joey lauren adams in the 90s about "what she learned on the set of mallrats" (in premiere or one of those now-dead movie mags, rip) and she was like "never discuss religion with people unless you know what everyone practices. this is nothing more than an apology to jason lee." and it never made sense to me until years later i learned that lee is a scientologist.

BTW, anyone else catch in the NYorker piece that Haggis recalls the early e-meters (I think) as being constructed out of soup cans, like a toy telephone?

I was enticed into a Scientology store front in the early 80s and given the e-meter test, and it was definately some kind of re-purposed food storage can. They asked me to remember a painful memory (I thought of my mother's death) and sure enough, the meter deflected. I knew generally how "lie detectors" worked, so this was no surprise to me. I don't remember any conversations after that, but they never contacted me again.

Comedy dude from melb who had a show called "music jamboree" did a Sci skit, its p funny:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM7WtAWYDN4

(just ignore how annoying his voice is. It totally is)

http://www.xenu.net/archive/so/seaorg_contract.jpg

Why seahorses?

Never a bad time for this, in my opinion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4TedkQP_hM

This interview w Timothy Wyllie from Scientology spinoff The Process Church of the Final Judgment

uh this is kind of a mischaracterization of the Process Church. The "Love/Sex/Fear/Death" book that Wylie put out recently is BONKERS

ive been reading a bit of jung lately and his thoughts on the consequences of assimilating contents of the unconscious seem very relevant to the story of scientology. namely, one possible consequence of the individual is that of megalomania (as can be clearly seen in those thom cruz videos) and in the collective being secrecy and controlling access to information. maybe ill get my thoughts together and write something up

this article!

the end where he basically narrates his confrontation with tommy davis is awes

unfortunate side effect of making me find paul haggis sort of sympathetic :/

He is horrible at everything he does, but at least he likes gay people!

i was thinking while reading it, if paul haggis is the bro who takes down scientology, does that cancel everything else out?

There are one or two things he's done I don't hate, but I think they're the ones he had the least control on the end result.

tbh i dont understand why being a guy who wrote some bad movies once makes him a piece of shit?

Due South was awesome too

because we are joking around dummy

Please don't call me names, max...

he's probably a good guy at heart but he seems like a total dweeb in that article - "as a rebel, i reject society's rules and am sympathetic to the world's underdogs, so i became a scientologist"

Yeah, that article (what I read, since I didn't finish it) made me like him even less.

sry man i got carried away :-/

EZ Streets was great

^^^he's a total idiot! anything good that comes of his life is strictly bonus

xp

It's okay man :)

http://www.graphicsdb.com/data/media/566/I_m_glad_we_re_friends.gif

KILXW

he seems like a total dweeb in that article - "as a rebel, i reject society's rules and am sympathetic to the world's underdogs, so i became a scientologist"

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, February 14, 2011 6:59 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, totally, the way his brain works is very opaque to me, but i found his omg i was in a cult for 30+ years why didn't i leave predicament sort of compelling for some reason?

I'm fascinated by the moment where they give you the Xenu story in a manila envelope and tell you to read it and accept it without question. I bet it's made even trippier if you had heard other scientologists dismiss the Xenu story as a smear.

They probably slip you some LSD and lead you to a Universal Studio-type audio-visual theater and you think everything that is happening is real.

Those macrocephalic sea ponies are almost as freaky as scientology.

i finally read this and it's pretty amazing! there's a bunch of stuff in there I didn't know about, like Sea Org. got a philip k. dick vibe from it all. haggis is a complicated asshole, but its hard not to be like 'fuck yeah' when he says he'd want to take down the church for sea org alone. and the last line - “I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.” - was kinda devastating. sinister cults and the people who join them are so fascinating.

I'm sure it's been said before, but it's funny $'s antipathy for psychiatry when it's basically a dumbed down Freudianism.

ya i was thinking about that. i think psychiatry is basically the competition in a way.

yeah there's a revealing moment where haggis is like, ya im in therapy now and i wish i'd started it 30 years ago

A couple of years ago I went through a thing where I read a lot about Scientology. This story stuck with me: http://www.lisamcpherson.org/. I mean obv it's only one side but I read through the whole thing including pages of hospital records and it's pretty fucked up. Clearwater, FL kinda creepy imo.

When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my best friend convinced me to steal a copy of Dianetics from the local library. We set it on fire in the woods outside Merriweather Post. He was really upset about Scientology! Looking back, this would have been around the time of the Noah Lottick suicide.

Two of our friends never received this New Yorker issue in the mail. Their theory is that their mailman is a Scientologist. Along the same lines, I wouldn't put it past an organization known to buy thousands of copies of Dianetics to boost sales to scour newstands and whatnot for copies of this issue and, er, clear them.

Two of our friends never received this New Yorker issue in the mail. Their theory is that their mailman is a Scientologist.

I think Scientologists are smart enough to have realized that the article is online in its entirety.

Suppressive Packages

That sounds like an anti-diarrheal suppository.

Friend in LA whose NYer sub just lapsed went to tons of newsstands in Hollywood and Santa Monica and couldn't find one. She suspected a buyout.

I'd just as soon suspect a sellout, though. It's kind of a big deal. Almost as big as the snorg girl.

ya i was thinking about that. i think psychiatry is basically the competition in a way.

^^^this is exactly where it comes from. In the 50s, psychiatry was very much in vogue, and especially in sci-fi circles Freud/psychotherapy/psychiatric ideas were HUGE. A cursory survey of sci-fi authors from the time (Sturgeon, Bester, etc) will show the culture was loaded with a fascination for these ideas/approaches and their implications. It was something a lot of smart, successful but still unsatisfied people were turning to, and that was L. Ron's target audience - unhappy people with money and a drive for self-improvement.

Also, the kind of old-school method acting taught in that Beverly Hills class has roots in Freudian psychology as well.

From the article:

"Dianetics, Hubbard said, was a “precision science.” He offered his findings to the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association but was spurned; he subsequently portrayed psychiatry and psychology as demonic competitors. He once wrote that if psychiatrists “had the power to torture and kill everyone they would do so.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright#ixzz1E3L0UNec

Miscavige! Seems like a weird guy, right?

Miscavige immediately brought to mind the Alby Grant character in 'Big Love'.