The Creeps of the Cosmos (2017)
nevalalee.wordpress.com
nevalalee.wordpress.com
The implementation, leadership etc are somewhat questionable on individual basis.
Wondering, where can I read more about the connection to Scientology?
But if you really want to be deprogrammed, seek out the testimony of passionate ex-RC people. I only allowed myself to look when I was done.
E.g. Jackins would do these weird-assed "sessions on sex" with young women, and when the Minnesota RC community insisted there be a reckoning about it, the entire community was banned. That's when Jackins came out with that encyclical on criticizing leadership.
> The clear anti-racist and anti-oppression stand of the org is admirable.
Meh. My first and only, I forget now what it is called, away camp, that I went on was a racism workshop, and it was cringingly awful. It was that penny-drop that caused me to jettison the whole albatross.
There was all of this mannered formalism that white people were expected - no, required - to maintain when interacting with a PoC that was ... just, embarrassing and worse than useless.
As an aside, it also made me realize that most "anti-racism work" are people projecting their own internal discomfort with other races externally, into other people. People who insist that everyone is racist, for example, are people who cannot imagine a non-racist mindset, likely because, well, they're racists. Avoid these people for the same reason you should avoid men who insist that all men are creepers and rapists. But, you cannot avoid such people in RC, because that's a tenet of the organization itself.
I could go on and on. Anyway, good luck.
As for racism - I do believe our culture is deeply racist, resulting in automatic (at least somewhat) racist perceptions for everyone swimming in it. Acknowledging this influence without shame or tension, and making an effort to correct for it is not a bad thing. This is my personal view.
Well, a lot of people agree with you. I also think that perspective is racist, and perpetuates the very problems it purports to solve.
There are some ground rules you and I can agree on, I'm sure: human beings are human beings, regardless of race, and as such have certain inalienable rights like life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom to assemble, freedom of speech, freedom to defend themselves from tyranny, freedom from slavery, genocide, etc. These rights apply regardless of appearance, sex, gender expression, race, religion, ancestral background, caste, sexual orientation, IQ, sins of the father, what-have-you. If we align on all that, we're on the same page. You're in my tribe.
Well, almost every culture believes its own outlook is the correct outlook. The problem with the USA in particular is that it has the hard and soft power to confidently impose their provincial ideas elsewhere. Some of these ideas are good, eg see above.
Other ideas, not so much. There's this definite assumption in the US that what is true in the US is true everywhere in the world. And, unfortunately, the US is deeply fucked up about race (among some other specific topics).
So, right now, because Americans prefer simplifying assumptions, and historically the US is comprised of (simplifying) 2 peoples (i.e. the descendents of European empires that traded slaves, and the descendents of those slaves) US culture views the entire world through that fucked up demographic lens. Europeans: colonists and slavers. Africans: enslaved and downtrodden. Sure there are other peoples in the US worldview, but these 2 peoples are what everyone talks about and everyone has to be shoved into one of those two boxes.
Even though this is incredibly reductionist, it's a fairly simple narrative, easy to understand, easy to communicate, an incredibly powerful conceptual gravity well: black & white, powerful & powerless, oppressor & oppressed. It is very difficult for Americans to see outside of that dipole, especially because for whole regions of the US, it seems to be self-evidently true.
The most powerful academic theorists on race today are American, and because they are Americans, and even within American culture they are outrageously privileged Americans, these people have platforms and support to amplify this outrageously fucked up, myopic, provincial, self-serving perspective on "transformation and healing" and insist that it applies to every last person on the planet. Ironically, that is exactly the same cultural expansionism that caused problems in the past, but here we are, repeating history.
There are 40 million slaves today, but because American "transformation and healing" experts are obsessed with American history, these real-life, contemporary slaves get very little love and attention from the world.
The world is nuanced. There are, today, whole nations of dark peoples who currently benefit from centuries of privilege. There are whole nations of pale peoples who have quite recently endured the most terrible privations imaginable, including slavery. Some of them no longer exist, because genocide. And all the range in between. Melanin content of the skin is a manifestly stupid way to categorize people, a very stupid proxy for understanding their background, attitudes, success, politics. We were all supposed to have learned this lesson already, but here we are, both racists and so-called anti-racists, insisting we do exactly that.
Americans, and RC in particular, like to put individuals in boxes, in categories, because it lends a false predictability and regularity to the messy chaos of humanity: "raised owning class, middle class or working class", "Raised Catholic, Protestant or Jew", "white or person of color". I loved RC because I felt like it have me a super-power: all I had to do was know about somebody's background, and because of the RC taxonomy of distress, I felt like I knew what someone's issues were. If they disagreed, clearly they were distressed! Reductive. Circular. Closed. Just like American-style "race work".
I don't have answers. Just, trust your instincts. Don't allow anyone to override what you know to be true and good. Embrace nuance. Listen to people you disagree with. Form genuine bonds with people unlike yourself. Set aside time for genuine fun. That should introduce enough cognitive dissonance to insulate you from some of the more egregious, virulent brainwashing and propaganda you will endure.
I don’t see a reason not to correct for these, in context and with awareness of personality + scenario.
I get the complexity and the limitations of trying to come with universal solution.
"The Underground Bunker: Latest News"
https://tonyortega.org/scientology/
"Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leah_Remini:_Scientology_and_t...
EDIT: As pointed out below, the term "real religion" just means one that has lasted to this day with a substantial enough following to obtain protected status.
So what's happening when an adult accepts a new religion that makes them accept a new set of supernatural 'facts'? I always wondered about that process.
Mormonism, on the other hand, was only 180 years ago. For some reason, that makes their supernatural stuff a little harder to accept.
For many branches of Christianity, miracles continue to happen! Of course, most Christians likely don't _literally_ believe in miracles.
So in the case of Scientology, perhaps there was a set of techniques that worked for one reason or another, and people still swarm around the dead husk - the empty rituals. The why is obvious; control and greed. Two things that are almost guaranteed to kill something delicate and living.