Monday, April 14, 2008

The Cult of Nice

I once watched several interviews with former Scientologists, partly due to the fact that I once had a girlfriend who was raised in the Scientology, and I wanted to see if there were others with similar stories. Yes is the short answer. I can't blame her untimely death on them directly, but I am sure the injury to her psyche they perpetrated upon her made her death more likely.

If you want to hear something similar to what my former girlfriend went through,
watch the Woodcraft's family's interviews.

There's also a
panel of some who were higher up in the organization.

What you may notice is that everyone, even very young children knew they had to be "nice". If they weren't nice, if they weren't happy and bubbly, then something was wrong, and if something was wrong it was because they weren't applying the teachings correctly, and if they weren't doing that- well they must be hiding something. Anyway, as you can imagine under these circumstances the victim gets blamed as the perpetrator.

So there must be some qualifications to nice. Otherwise we risk much the same problem, especially since we seem to have some sort of Christianized version of
positivist thinking going on. Scientologists also think they will change the world and that they are the answer to the world's problems. They are a very extreme example, but it's worth using an extreme example now, to highlight the path we don't want to go down.

No comments: