"48 Hours" looks at Scientology: Saturday night at 10 EDT

From the APA: "This is a special alert to watch CBS's "48 Hours" investigative news program this Saturday, Oct. 28, 2006, at 10 p.m. (ET). This edition of the show features an investigation into the Church of Scientology, and begins by recounting the tragic death of Scientologist Elli Perkins. Perkins was killed in 2003 by her son, who was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia but was mostly treated in accordance with Scientology protocols. The program asks the question Did A Mother's Faith Contribute To Her Murder? and then delves into broader issues, including Scientology's opposition to psychiatry."

[Edit]=====After the show=====
Dr Roy [it's a different Dr Roy]: "Tom Cruise and his 'religion' are more dangerous than I thought."

Dr RW: "Just got through watching the documentary..."

Leigh from Thoughtprints: "What's scary is that there are 10 million members worldwide. How can that many people allow themselves to be brainwashed by crap like that?! If any of you 10 million are reading this, I bet you're really pissed, huh. Whatever."

KFAN Rube Chat: 'The thing that really annoys me is that they use a cross as the symbol outside of their "churches". If you're such an enlightened religion, spoken to by aliens, wouldn't you have a more creative, or original symbol than the cross?

Roy: Psychiatry declared a "religion"

I suppose some of you may find this story amusing; this Onion-like site has declared Psychiatry to be a religion, not a medical science.

"If you dressed up a parrot in a doctor’s smock and taught it some Latin phrases, it wouldn’t be a doctor. It’s the same with Psychiatrists."

If the God of Psychiatry for the last century was the Supreme Superego, it is now the Cosmic Chemical.

"The matter of faith in a deity was also a sticking point but a study of Psychiatric scriptures reveals that Psychiatrists believe in an invisible entity known as “chemical imbalance”. The existence of Chemical Imbalance is stated as fact in the texts though there is no proof of his existence, analogous to a Christian’s belief in God or a Muslim’s belief in Allah."

Now all they have to do is declare Scientology a real religion, and then I can truly deem The Spoof editors to be the Ra of Rhetoric.

Roy: Rolling Stone's deconstruction of Scientology

This is an interesting read.

In June of last year, I set out to discover Scientology, an undertaking that would take nearly nine months. A closed faith that has often been hostile to journalistic inquiry, the church initially offered no help on this story; most of my research was done without its assistance and involved dozens of interviews with both current and former Scientologists, as well as academic researchers who have studied the group. Ultimately, however, the church decided to cooperate and gave me unprecedented access to its officials, social programs and key religious headquarters. What I found was a faith that is at once mainstream and marginal ... It is an insular society -- one that exists, to a large degree, as something of a parallel universe to the secular world, with its own nomenclature and ethical code, and, most daunting to those who break its rules, its own rigorously enforced justice system.

When asked what, if anything, posted by the apostates is true, Mike Rinder, the fifty-year-old director of the Church of Scientology International's legal and public-relations wing, known as the Office of Special Affairs, says bluntly, "It's all bullshit, pretty much."

The most important, and highly anticipated, of the eight "OT levels" is OT III, also known as the Wall of Fire. It is here that Scientologists are told the secrets of the universe, and, some believe, the creation story behind the entire religion. It is knowledge so dangerous, they are told, any Scientologist learning this material before he is ready could die.

On January 17th, 1986, Hubbard suffered a crippling stroke. A week later, he died, in a 1982 Blue Bird motor home on his property. He was seventy-four years old.

Upon Hubbard's death, his ambitious twenty-five-year-old aide, David Miscavige, who would soon succeed him as leader of the church, announced that Scientology's founder had willingly "dropped" his healthy body and moved on to another dimension. In keeping with Hubbard's wishes, his body was cremated within twenty-four hours. There was no autopsy. But the coroner's report described the father of Scientology as in a state of decrepitude: unshaven, with long, thinning whitish-red hair and unkempt fingernails and toenails. In Hubbard's system was the anti-anxiety drug hydroxyzine (Vistaril), which several of his assistants would later attest was only one of many psychiatric and pain medications Hubbard ingested over the years.

Discussion, as some academics like Kent note, isn't encouraged in Scientology, nor in Scientology-oriented schools. It is seen as running counter to the teachings of Scientology, which are absolute. Thus, debate is relegated to those in the world of "Wogs" -- what Scientologists call non-Scientologists. Or, as Hubbard described them, "common, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety humanoid[s]."