Who Is More Insane?
Scientologists ACTUALLY believe the evil alien ruler Xenu killed a lot of aliens (Thetans) from around the universe by bringing them to earth & blowing them up inside volcanoes. They believe the souls of these aliens (these souls are "Body Thetans") have attached themselves to us & cause many of our mental & physical ills. Members who know about Xenu will attempt to deny it or pretend like it doesn’t matter. They are required to sign a contract binding them to silence on the matter. Lower level members don’t know about Xenu & accordingly deny everything because they honestly don’t know.
To rid ourselves of "Body Thetans" & also “engrams” (past negative experiences stored in our unconscious mind) so that we can become “clear”, we have to go through "auditing" with a member of the “church” who uses an "e-meter" to measure our “reactive mind”...... & we have to pay lots & lots of money for “auditing” (purchased in 12.5-hour blocks, costing anywhere from $750 for introductory sessions to between $8,000 & $9,000 for advanced sessions) & to take courses on Scientology to advance to higher “levels” in the “church”. The “church” has also taken a very hostile stance towards psychiatry & psychiatric drugs irrespective of the fact that some people require medication to remain adequately functional in everyday life. They deny the reality of chemical imbalance & profound mental disturbance & accordingly do NOTHING to effectively stabilize the dangerously unstable. The “church” has been known to withhold prescription pharmaceuticals from member (with deadly results).
This may sound completely insane, but how is that more insane than a supernatural being that created the world in 6 days, creates two people who somehow populate the world, then this divine being floods the whole world killing everyone and everything except a man named Noah and his family and of course two of each animal (plus the others for sacrificing)they somehow go years without food or water and then when they finally land somehow Noah can evenly distribute every single animal to its proper location. Then they somehow repopulate the world and somewhere down the road God destroys the city that Lot lives in because there were no moral people there, then he asks Abram to change his name to Abraham, circumcise himself and everyone else (including slaves) then he asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son, but stops him at the last second (to make sure that he fears God) then down the road he leads non-existent Hebrew slaves out of Egypt by casting 10 plagues upon the people of Egypt (which there isn't any evidence of in any Egyptian record), those people then wandered the desert for 40 years and had bread fall from the sky (the mana) and never left a trace of physical evidence of ever being in Egypt or wandering in the desert. Then down the road God "makes" a woman named Mary pregnant with a son. This was supposed to be the son of God, but there are really no first hand accounts of this messiah, but he could heal sick people, make people's arms grow from stumps, walk through walls and buildings, turn water into wine, and rising from the dead.
I am really quite curious as to how any rational person could believe either one of these things, and how someone believing in one can call someone believing in the other insane! Someone please explain this to me.
Tags: Atheism, Belief, Christianity, Discussion, Insanity, Rational, Religion, Scientology, Thinking
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Adam on -
There is really no any religion is more insane than the other. Any ideology that claims itself as the absolute truth without any proper materialistic evidence or rational claim is completely insane. So it doesn't matter what theistic ideology one follows, they are all equally as absurd as the next one.
The problem lies on the believer itself. If one believes their doctrine is correct, then they will compare it another and ridicule the other as false and incorrect with the same fallacies and irrationality that can be said for the very same person's doctrine. But usually they are too ignorant to accept it. The insanity really comes from not only the belief system but also the followers acting upon it. Such as donating money to "reactivate" your mind in Scientology or teaching creationism or participating in violent martyrdom.
I guess you can say there are degrees of insanity but not really in theological cases. The reason someone might think Scientology is "more" insane than Christianity is because of societal and cultural brainwashing. In USA we are brought up in a culture where Christianity is the largest group, so automatically there is a phenomena that teachings of Christianity is the "truth". Anything else of that is considered wrong/insane. Now if we lived in a nation where Scientology was the majority, then we would think Christianity is wrong. This also ties into with propaganda. Scientology because of certain celebrities and what not, have a bad reputation. We see it in our media, always portraying Scientologists as weird and odd people. Kinda like with Muslims, its always violence, terrorism and oppression. Lot of Christians like to point out how insane Islam is and all, but they ignore the history of their own religion, which is filled with the same, if not, more violence.
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Permalink Reply by Real Life James Bond on -
That seems pretty logical and I would agree with you. However, is religion in general insane?
I tend to think that it is not as insane as people think. Personally, I think that religion started as a result of Natural Selection (stay with me I promise to explain this one).
Lets go back about 10,000 years when the Neanderthals were dying out as a result of Homo-Erectus (evolution). In these extremely primitive cultures religion was pretty much non-existent in those cultures. In my research I have found that religion started when primitive man was able to capture animals and breed them for food (thus allowing them to create what we call a society). Now I'm sure that everyone would agree that Darwinian theory says that it is intrinsically important to animals and humans (seeing as we are just animals with more evolved brains - which allowed us to gossip <-- that will be important later) to pass on our genes (reproduce). Now this is where God comes in. If someone (lets call this person P1) in a primitive society did something unfavorable then the others in this society would gossip about it, making P1 unfavorable and less likely to reproduce. Once this outcasting would occur primitive people realized that they too could become unfavorable for reproduction and therefore invented a being that would watch them always so as they would never act unfavorably to their society.
So the crux of my argument - the IDEA of God came about as a result of Natural Selection making it not as crazy as one may think.
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Permalink Reply by Adam on
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That is definitely an interesting theory. However from what I learned in anthropology class, many of the early religions, specifically the ancient greek civilization during the paleolithic era, many of the religions beliefs had a purpose of identity rather than believing in a being for moral guidance. For example terracota figurines in ancient Greece represented mostly females and represented an offering to gods for good luck such as fertility to women.
One thing I would like to ask is, we Humans didn't really have oral language during the early Paleolithic era, about the time time when Homo Sapiens started to first appear. How would early mankind engage in any gossiping if oral or written language was not really established at the time.
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Permalink Reply by Real Life James Bond on
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In order to esablish a society they have ways of communicating weather it be in drawing, grunting, etc. The Greeks specifically, used religion as myth to start out with. It was a way to explain things like volcanoes exploding (the Gods were fighting). In other words it was extremely easy to fool primitive early human beings. The Egyptyans also believed that bathing in the Nile would bring fertility. Natural Selection, I think, is the driving force behind all (well at least 95% of) human actions. The reason I think that 95% is because of people like John Wayne Gacey and other psychopaths who have mental disorders. I think that it could be that their actions were results of freak mutations, if you will. I don't know which anthropology class you took, but you might have learned that human beings evolve through society rather than physically. The evolution comes into society in forms of thought and belief (in my opinion)
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Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on -
I found this extremely interesting, and you might be able to glean from it something that may lend insight to your hypothesis: 5 things you probably didn't know about Neanderthals
Diminished social skills may have led to their extinction.
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Permalink Reply by Real Life James Bond on
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After all that the dogmas and all the "crazy" stuff came once God started to become more defined.
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Permalink Reply by Logicallunatic on -
All religions are equally untrue and equally batshit.
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Permalink Reply by Unseen on -
Well, I don't know. Buddhist theory has some surprising (and perhaps coincidental) correlations with modern physics. For example that the everyday world of the senses is an illusion (reality is mostly empty space), that fundamentally the world consists of vibration (string theory), and so on. Certainly that is considerably less crazy than Scientology and the three Middle Eastern religions.
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Permalink Reply by Real Life James Bond on
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Well yes, but Buddhism at its roots started out as a Philosophy with Siddhartha. I do agree that the original Buddhist teachings are far less insane than the other religions you named.
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Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on
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Sounds like you're interpreting Buddhist theory, to conform with modern scientific thinking, much as theists do with the Bible - "The Bible says god said, 'Let there be light,' then the Big Bang happened, and by god, there was light!"
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Permalink Reply by Doug Reardon on -
For tens of thousands of years, delusional, insane people have been killing and eliminating from the gene pool, those people who do not share their delusions and insanity (ie. sane, rational, people). Thereby selecting for craziness. So, now we have a population with a propensity to be completely credulous.
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