{"id":87,"date":"2006-08-25T10:54:28","date_gmt":"2006-08-25T09:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=87"},"modified":"2006-08-25T10:54:28","modified_gmt":"2006-08-25T09:54:28","slug":"the-dark-world-of-scientology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=87","title":{"rendered":"The dark world of Scientology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the week that the world&#8217;s most famous scientologist Tom Cruise is dropped by Paramount Pictures because of the actor&#8217;s strange behaviour, I attended my first meeting of an informal gathering known as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skeptic.org.uk\/pub\">Skeptics In The Pub<\/a> when the subject for debate was cults with particular reference to scientology.<br \/>\nScientology &#8211; the term means &#8220;the study of truth,&#8221; in the words of its founder and spiritual messiah, the late science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard &#8211; calls itself &#8220;the world&#8217;s fastest-growing religion&#8221;, although the evidence to back this &#8211; like many other claims from the &#8216;church&#8217; &#8211; is lacking.  Started in 1952, the group now claims 10 million members in 159 countries and more than 6,000 scientology churches, missions and outreach groups across the globe.<br \/>\nIts holdings, which include real estate on several continents, are widely assumed to value in the billions of dollars. Its missionaries &#8212; known as &#8220;volunteer ministers&#8221; &#8212; take part in &#8220;cavalcades&#8221; throughout the developing world and have been found, en masse, at the site of disasters ranging from 9\/11 to the Asian tsunami to Hurricane Katrina.<br \/>\nThe speaker at Skeptics In The Pub was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.weird.co.uk\/martin\/\">Dr Martin Poulter<\/a>. He exlained that Scientology covers a lot of topics that skeptics are concerned about &#8211; pseudoscience, psychic powers, pseudohistory, bogus medical practice, mega-doses of vitamins, truth-relativism, therapeutic touch &#8211; and he showed how Scientology practices and institutionalises each of these. In a rather rambling discourse, one of his more interesting points was that the law should treat Scientology as a business rather than as a religion and enforce normal consumer protection legislation.<br \/>\nMore information on the strange beliefs and practices of scientologists <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Scientology\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the week that the world&#8217;s most famous scientologist Tom Cruise is dropped by Paramount Pictures because of the actor&#8217;s strange behaviour, I attended my first meeting of an informal gathering known as Skeptics In The Pub when the subject for debate was cults with particular reference to scientology. Scientology &#8211; the term means &#8220;the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}