Simple enough yes.

The argument is a silly one.

We know Santa Claus is a fictional character. If we use Santa Claus and covert hypnosis to fool people into believing in Santa and we use the techniques of con men and cults to fool people into believing in Santa the fact remains that we are criminals engaging in a crime.

That’s my opinion on the religion angle. Scientology is a harmful fraud. Period.

The standards are something that Richard Paul describes at length. He worked on the subject of critical thinking for decades and wrote numerous books and educated educators for many years.

So summing up, I don’t think any well educated parent would wish their children become Scientologists, and would fret like crazy if their kids hankered to join Sea Org and “go OT” and help the planet “go OT.” LOL.

I threw out all my apologist academic books, I was going to someday review them, and then try argue against their points, point by point. It’s too much for me, not enough time.

But some of their nagging points I heard personally, from Cowan (he’s not really an apologist though, but he said one thing that’s nagged me for years). He said even if Scientology was founded falsely, if eventually the members believe the stuff, and act “religious” like, and they demand their religious rights, believing it, even if critically thinking wise they are nuts and brainwashed and hypnotised; despite all that, still, they get to call themselves a religion.

So, how to get around that, in the US, where a group can even by false pretense of their founder, even with brainwashing/hypnotising beliefs in their beliefs, still, they get to count themselves as a religion, just by stating so, and having their religion founder say that they are a religion (even though he chose the “religion” angle admittedly).

That’s the report card criticism I have on the USA, and you can feel this, in other subjects.

Pseudo-science crap is still around. Bad religions are still around, and fake bad religions like Scientology with pseudo-science and quackery, are still around.

Free speech in the US at least allows me to say the above, and free speech seems to untie the knots of a self brainwashed hypnotised group started by a founder who admitted taking the religion angle, and who made it group policy for the group to consider itself a religion.

And likewise, the free speech freedom allows the brainwashed/hypnotised self admitted religion angle religion to spew hatred around, do irreligious things, fair game their perceived enemies, and all.

So this goes on.

Untying the Scientologists’ minds from their mental predicament, it goes on too.

——————–

I like the report card model for framing my book, if I ever write one.

I selected from the above:

“…clarity, accuracy, relevance, depth, breadth, precision, logic, significance and fairness …..”

Virtuous characteristics of good critical thinking.

I like the report card model to grade subjects and people.

Just establish the categories to be weighed, and let observers grade for themselves where subjects and people sit on the scales of virtuous characteristics.

Indeed!

Holy shit, Mockingbird… you write some serious novels here. But I secretly love it! 😆

If we have considered the value of critical thinking, being open to possibly being wrong, to having doctrine and beliefs that may be wrong and could be falsified by solid evidence and that we may be ignorant of important relevant information and simply believe in incorrect ideas, even if they are long held, to our minds well established and deeply cherished with high confidence then we may be open to critical thinking.

A feature of critical thinking regarding a subject is being open to evidence from other subjects, particularly reality based subjects.

With Scientology a way of showing this is well established by the work of several people, for example Jon Atack has presented a tremendous amount of work in this area.

For example he compiled numerous Hubbard quotes showing that Hubbard knew quite a bit about hypnosis and in many, many, many places in his lectures said that Dianetics and Scientology auditing and indoctrination are in fact hypnotic and he knew it quite well. Hubbard also in turn claimed that they also are not hypnotic.

The examination of the techniques by numerous experts in psychology and psychiatry and hypnosis has produced a tremendous consensus that Dianetics and Scientology are in truth hypnosis used covertly to attempt to mentally manipulate and even enslave people.

An examination of the letters of Hubbard and his most private communication to himself, his self hypnosis commands aka affirmations completely confirms this statement.

Numerous people who have actually bothered to study hypnosis have supported this including Jon Atack, Margaret Singer, Steve Hassan and on and on. In fact when I left Scientology I discovered that students of hypnosis examine the works of Hubbard and are astounded that the general public can’t see that virtually all the materials that Hubbard produced and techniques that are used in Dianetics and Scientology auditing and indoctrination are to them the most obviously hypnotic techniques one could ever devise. They actually just compare the materials and methods and laugh at the boldness of someone to use these methods so overtly while denying it. And the fact that the people in Scientology say that these are not remotely hypnotic.

We also have the legal and profoundly criminal history of Scientology as another reality based subject with which to enhance our understanding of Scientology, including the criminal conviction for fraud of Ronald Hubbard in France and the convictions regarding operation Snow White of numerous Scientology executives in which Hubbard was named as an un-indicted co-conspirator by a judge. We have many, many, many more criminal and civil cases as well.

We can add the reality based subject of the evaluation of the harm and the fraudulent nature of Scientology by experts in the Anderson Report and many other reports by different experts in different countries that occurred at different times.

We have had experts in education who have found study technology to be in fact inferior to other methods of education and experts in mental health who have found that auditing is harmful to the mental health of patients and on and on and on.