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12/18/2005
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I watched the whoooooooole thing. Beginning to end, checking the timer bar about once every 30 seconds to see how much more I had to endure. But now I feel remarkably clear. I like the way the MC does that Motown thing by pointing toward the camera lens each time he says "you." (4 Tops = I guess "you" [point to audience] say, what can make me feel this way...) Anyway it was so powerfully personal, I thought he was speaking directly to me. And my heart.
Didn't it make you wonder how a product like THAT ends up on a Scientology (a bona fide religion according the world courts including the Supreme Court) big screen when the Admiral had been, among his 28 other professions, a movie-maker. In the heart of Hollywood, that is the best indoctrination video they could come up with??? With Tom and John and Ally members of the "Church???"
I tried to take myself back to that 22-year-old newcomer, who was first approached on the beach in Santa Monica by a member of the church asking did I want a free copy of Dianetics. I took it and read the beginning where they expressly stated Scientology is NOT a religion, religion not being so popular back then. Even then I was struck by the small print saying they were a tax-deductible religious organization. Were they both? I wonder how I would have processed that little film if they had it then. I think it would have come across nearly as vacuuous as it did this time -- lots of words saying nothing. So grand and over-reaching as to be meaningless. There is purposefulness to that, I suppose. Everyone who is flailing and lost can sculpt their own individual meaning out of the ambiguity and think...WOW. Eureka! Can you guess what other "bona fide" non-religion (or maybe it is...) this little film brought to mind? Caveat those in possession of THE ANSWER, especially when they want to SELL it to you. [pointing to you] Beware of snake oil vendors.
Susan PS This gives an explanation for the tax-exempt status I mentioned above. I moved to Los Angeles in 1970, a time of flux for the "church" as you can see...
An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped Scientology's mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal court ruled in 1971 that Hubbard's medical claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing could no longer be called a scientific treatment. Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking First Amendment protection for Scientology's strange rites. His counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were built, franchises became "missions," fees became "fixed donations," and Hubbard's comic-book cosmology became "sacred scriptures... "During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars from the church, laundering the money through dummy corporations in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts... "Pending charges against more than 100 of its overseas church members include fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion, illegally practicing medicine and taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people... "As long as the organization's opponents and victims are successfully squelched, Scientology's managers and lawyers will keep pocketing millions of dollars by helping it achieve its ends."
--Richard Behar, "Scientology: Cult of Greed and Power," Time, 5/6/91
“Half a truth is often a great lie.” Ben Franklin
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