So listening to the new Beck cd, the natural thing to do was look up Scientology in Wikipedia. The results went far beyond any possible expectations in terms of both hilarity and terror.
As you're reading at first, you're just thinking, "Okay, another lame new-agey religion." But then you arrive at the story of Xenu. Apparently 75 million years ago, the galactic ruler Xenu faced a bad overpopulation problem (average population of the planets he ruled: 178 billion). So, in alliance with the psychiatrists (see below), he paralyzed billions of people and transported them to Teegeeack (today called Earth), stacked them around a bunch of volcanos, and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their immortal souls were then collected by Xenu and taken to a movie theater, where they were fucked up by watching a "three-D, super colossal motion picture". These souls are still with us, clinging to us normal people and messing up our lives. Which is why you should be a Scientologist, because they have (expensive) ways of dealing with these guys.
This is only the beginning of the Scientology wackiness, which also includes a deep hatred of psychiatrists, who were once involved in a conspiracy to create a world government and run it on behalf of the Soviet Union, and are also responsible for World War I, the rise of Hitler and Stalin, and 9/11, among other crimes.
But the world faces bigger problems than just psychiatrists. Scientologists give everyone a number on a "tone scale" that ranks emotions and behavior. Once you know the scale you can interact more productively with people, enhancing your personal life and business prospects, and enabling you to raise others on their scale. The scale goes as high as 40, but the average is (charitably) 2.8. Where you're at on this scale also determines how useful you are to society. Says L Ron Hubbard:
There are only two answers for the handling of people from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale, neither one of which has anything to do with reasoning with them or listening to their justification of their acts. The first is to raise them on the Tone Scale by unenturbulating some of their theta [ie soul] by any one of the three valid processes. The other is to dispose of them quietly and without sorrow.
Wtf?!?! Did he actually say that?! You should kill people below 2? Let's read on:
Not all the beauty nor the handsomeness nor artificial social value nor property can atone for the vicious damage such people do to sane men and women. The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the Tone Scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered.... A Venezualan dictator once decided to stop leprosy. He saw that most lepers in his country were also beggars. By the simple expedient of collecting and destroying all the beggars in Venezuala, an end was put to leprosy in that country.
Fucking hell man, who knew Scientology advocated mass murder? Suddenly the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes romance doesn't seem so cute.
2 comments:
well, it's obvious that jake has been out of the country for the eleven months, because i doubt any of us would describe the tom cruise/kate holmes "courtship" as "cute." i'd say it's seemed much like scientology itself, shot through with an undercurrent of horror and falsity.
okay, i admit it, i was only looking for a good turn of phrase to end the post. now i've been exposed as just another hack writer. but this does show that the chinese media, tho increasingly free and market-driven (the same thing really), have yet to achieve the sublime freedom of american media, as incarnated in saturation coverage of celebrity "love" affairs.
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