July 02, 2005
So, everybody knows now that Tom Cruise is crazy. (In case you don't know this, see: Tom call Matt Lauer "glib", tell Peter Overton to "put his manners back in", and, of course kill Oprah.)
I'm personally happy to see discussion about/around Scientology come out from such high profile forums, but I'm a little disappointed with how unprepared people like Matt Lauer are. Tom's debating skills these days are a little, shall we say, lackluster. He asserts something outrageous and loony ("Psychiatry is a pseudo-science," "There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance," etc) and backs it up with such persuasive facts as "You don't know" or "I've done the research."
Now, at the very least, Matt Lauer could point out, "Interesting to discover you think psychiatry is a pseudo-science, considering the controversy around Scientology, its origins, and its positions on different matters." Or, more to the point, he could say "Interesting to discover you think psychiatry is a pseudo-science, since your religion is batshit-crazy."
Let's take a look at some pseudo-science, shall we? Let's open one of my favorite books, Dianetics, and see just what it has to say. (And I promise, I'm not altering/spoofing the passage below - it's direct from the pages of "America's #1 Self-Help Bestseller")
Growing up in Southern California, I saw the Dianetics commercials on TV constantly. Packed as they were in between day-time talk shows, they came across in much the same way as any self-help books. At some point in my early teens, I started following Scientology, fascinated by its wackiness, but it wasn't until I was in high school that I finally picked up a copy of Dianetics, which I assumed was the key that suckered otherwise normal thinking people into the Church.
To make a gross generalization, I don't particularly care for the industry of self-help. Most of it seems to be a bit of common sense wrapped up in slogans, mantras, and/or anecdotal narratives, none of which particularly appeals to me. Nonetheless, I can see how some self-help appeals to and is effective for others. In that light, I sort of assumed this was the case with Dianetics - its readers, of a certain mindset, might read certain affirmations surrounding common sense, think "this totally relates to my life!", leading them to become curious about Scientology, and then - BAM! - they're dropping thousands of dollars on e-metering sessions to clear themselves of the dead souls from the intergalactic war.
Then I read Dianetics. And I now realize that anyone who reads it and thinks "this totally relates to my life!" is, more or less, a bad person. The following is a passage from the book, detailing the psychological trauma behind what it defines as "perversion" (the ellipses, I promise, do not change the context or the meaning of the content - just shortening a bit, as Mr. L-Ron was always a bit long-winded) :
Exhibit A: Pages 149 through 150
The sexual pervert (and by this term Dianetics, to be brief, includes ... homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc...) is actually quite ill physically...He is very far from culpable for his condition, but he is also so far from normal and so extremely dangerous to society that the tolerance of perversion is as thoroughly bad for society as punishment for it...A bit off the subject here, but it can be remarked about perversion that the best previous explanation for it was something about girls becoming envious of Papa's penis or boys becoming upset about that terrible thing, the vulva, which Mama was incautious enough to show one day. It takes a great deal more than this utter tripe to make a pervert. It is, rather, somthing on the order of kicking a baby's head in, running over him with a steamroller, cutting him in half with a rusty knife, boiling him in Lysol, and all the while with crazy people screaming the most horrifying and unprintable things at him.
If that's unclear at all, just substitute "perversion" with "homosexuality," and "pervert" with "gay." To summarize - homosexuality, and the "tolerance" thereof is "dangerous to society," even if those poor gay people can't help it. And, of course, psychology and society in general blame homosexuality on mom and dad issues (a dismissive, reductive view of Freudian psychoanalysis), but it's far worse than that. So much worse, that only bizarre, fucked-up hyperbole involving really outrageous McMartin-accusation-style child-abuse/mutilation/infanticide can even begin to describe how damaged someone has to be to be gay.
Again, if you read Dianetics and think that it makes sense, you're a bad person, or at the very least, completely homophobic. The Church, through its introductory volume, doesn't attempt to mask its paranoia, belligerent thinking and argumentation, nor its contempt for non-Scientologists and all that it considers deviant groups, including, as noted above, homosexuals. There's really no way that you can approach an acceptance of the church and this book as a thinking adult without being aware of these facts.
And people like Matt Lauer should be prepared to bring this pseudoscience up when Tom Cruise starts dismissing other thoroughly accepted and proven scientific concepts as pseudoscience.
I'll follow this up with my other favorite passage from Dianetics, regarding the "Prosurvival Engram," within the next few days.
Posted by starlen at July 2, 2005 12:10 AM
