This is one of the best statements I’ve seen in a while Cecybeans and I agree completely. Any dogma in the right hands can have great effects yet the same dogma in the wrong hands can have destructive effects, it’s all about the intention behind the person leading from the top, do they really have everybody’s best interests in mind or are they just busy trying to run their own powerful empire.

Thank you! I enjoy a lot of the content here, although sometimes I feel like I’m attending someone else’s high school reunion. I don’t know the buzzwords and secret handshakes.

But I’ve been interested in and studied comparative religion for a long time. And what I have observed in organized religions is that it’s not the dogma that is necessarily toxic, it’s how it is applied. And that there are people in almost every single one that exist on the globe, or throughout history, that have done terrible things to other people twisting the language of its tenets or donning the ideology as a disguise and justification.

None of us here know anything for sure about what goes on in the universe, we’re basically spitballing. We are barely crawling out of our own solar system. Religions can be artistic and beautiful ways for us to explain life and the cosmos to help us find meaning in life. And they can also be horrific prisons of arrogance and control when in the wrong hands.

I feel so much for the people who have been through this. There is no beauty or freedom in any of us thinking we have all the answers and that it somehow makes us superior to anyone else. It’s like the difference between fascism and democracy. Inequality and lack of freedom or tolerance for others is just backward, it’s not evolution, it’s devolution as a species. It’s efficient and effective but it adds nothing positive to our universe. The concept of Free Will in self-development one of our highest attributes. Anything less is disrespectful to each other and those we share the world with, which is my ultimate benchmark for judging the worth of any philosophy.

I have great respect for you, Cecy. That’s why this is the only ‘social media blog’ that has my participation. Intelligent conversation is never wasted.

(And there are some very funny posters on here as well.) ?

Okay – I may have misunderstood her intention then. I watched it twice and that was my impression. That she was making it correlative. But I am glad to be in the minority. Living in a Western society, full of religions that don’t believe it in anyway, and are far harsher about their criticism of it, it makes my own point very small. But I have great respect for how both Mike and Leah are managing to circumvent criticizing the ideology itself – because that does feed into the “religious intolerance” bullshit they spout, and concentrating on its practices.

Plenty of so-called “Christian” churches are full of horrible examples of corruption and sexual abuse (FLDS comes to mind), and the law still somehow is able to prosecute them, so I think there is great hope.

And while I hate to say it, it may be actually be an advantage to prosecutors that these children have no real close connection to their biological families. When abused children are removed from other “religious” environments, the court often is loathe to take them away from their parents, seeing it as emotionally traumatic to sever that bond. CoS has completely given up that argument or option.

I hope that these abuses, and others involving child labor, trafficking, etc. are able to be collected in some kind of class action suit. The hardest thing for these kinds of victims is having to testify in court individually. Even in the best circumstances it can feel like victimizing them twice.

Most people who believe in reincarnation these days don’t believe that people walk around with full knowledge of former lives. It would kind of spoil the point of learning lessons. And most religions who believe in reincarnation are wisely not that interested in finding out – it turns into an ego thing, which is also counterproductive. For many years, however, the Dalai Lama was chosen by individuals who had to pass a test to verify they knew certain things that only the previous lama would know, so that is not the practice in Tibetan Buddhism.

A growing body of evidence exists from a broad variety of groups (and I have been studying the phenomena for many decades) of hypnotherapists and even some scientists that people can be regressed and very often vividly remember previous lives with verifiable historical details. Parapsychology researchers in countries all over the globe have amassed a lot of data over the past century, even though it is not yet mainstream at this point. But it is climbing out of the New Age woo-woo stage and pretty quickly. It has been successfully used by some therapist to explain and treat phobias and conditions that do not result from any trauma in the person’s current life, or can otherwise be explained.

The thing that makes these examples somewhat believable is that people recounting them are not creating stories where they are famous or important people. While it may be more a function of a universal database (sometimes called an akashic record) where certain people can tap into a record of events in certain states of mind, that does not exist in the current spectrum or frequency available to the ordinary senses, it is not a phenomenon that has been thoroughly disproven or debunked by any means.

Just because LRH was a dipshit who twisted the idea, doesn’t mean the entire concept is invalid. That man turned everything normal and decent he encountered into some kind of sordid perverse version of the original, designed only to control others and benefit himself. I think it’s important to separate ideas and doctrines he borrowed from others, from both Eastern and Western cultures, and distorted, from similar ones that still may be legitimate.

Hey Wynski, do you ever consider your words before you type them? Give me a break already!!!!!

Yes threefeetback, “The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.”

Yes jere. I didn’t mean to say he wasn’t a criminal throughout his life after founding his scam.

Spike, when I see disinformation, I call it. Suck it up sunshine.

So what does that tell you about the tech? Not the best advert for it’s efficacy, is it?