Senor Hugo wrote:Other than that, seeing as how several people, ranging from journalists, courts, and governments have said that "the Church of Scientology is a cult and an unscrupulous commercial enterprise that harasses its critics and abuses the trust of its members."
Just for those curious:
Cult (also called new religious movement)
A group typically characterized by (1) distinctive ritual and beliefs related to its devotion to a god or a person, (2) isolation from the surrounding "evil" culture, and (3) a charismatic leader. (A sect, by contrast, is a spinoff from a major religion.)
Examples of cults:
Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church - "Sun Myung Moon's mixture of Christianity, anticommunism, and glorification of Moon himself as a new messiah attracted a worldwide following. In response to Moon's declaration, 'What I wish must be your wish,' many people committed themselves and their incomes to the Unification Church."
Jim Jones's People's Temple - "In 1978 in Guyana, 914 disciples of Jim Jones, who had followed him there from San Francisco, shocked the world when they died by following his order to down a suicidal grape drink laced with tranquilizers, painkillers, and a lethal dose of cyanide."
David Koresh's Branch of Davidians - "In 1993, high-school dropout David Koresh used his talent for memorizing Scripture and mesmerizing people to seize control of a faction of a sect called the Branch Davidians. Over time, members were gradually relieved of their bank accounts and possessions. Koresh also persuaded the men to live celibately while he slept with their wives and daughters, and he convinced his 19 "wives" that they should bear his children."
Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate - "Marshall Applewhite was not similarly tempted to command sexual favors. Having been fired from two music teaching jobs for homosexual affairs with students, he sought sexless devotion by castration, as had 7 of the other 17 Heaven's Gate men who died with him (Chua-Eoan, 1997; Gardner, 1997). While in a psychiatric hospital in 1971, Applewhite had linked up with nurse and astrology dabbler Bonnie Lu Nettles, who gave the intense and charismatic Applewhite a cosmological vision of a route to "the next level." Preaching with passion, he persuaded his followers to renounce families, sex, drugs, and personal money with promises of a spaceship voyage to salvation."
- David G. Myers,
Social Psychology, p272-273
And the book goes on to discuss the recruitment and initiation techniques of cults and military forces as examples of high-power indoctrination systems.
Of course, those who've read up on the Church of Scientology's somewhat dodgy history may be tempted to draw parallels between the church and new religious movements. They may also be tempted to draw parallels between the Roman Catholic Church of the Dark ages, or the Puritans of Salem, and cults, depending on what they choose to see and what they choose to ignore.
And of course, something else a person might want to consider when weighing the credibility of a religion is the credibility of its founder. Ask questions like: did he have a good track record of honesty and humanitarianism before he came up with this religion? If not, is the religion inspired by vigorous retrospection and atonment for his past history, or has it seemingly just come out of nowhere? Is the leader conveniently profiting off of his religion in the form of material or sexual gain?
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