“That sort of “thinking” sure makes life simpler. As simple as a club to the head.”
Yes!
Recovering 9 years
My head still hurts some.

Aqua put forward:
“There are things in the Bible, in the Old Testament, the New Testament, that work for me. I pick and choose. There’s also a lot of what I consider nonsense and magic that I ignore or outright rejected.”

On that note, I’d LOVE to see a compiled version of Thomas Jefferson’s Bible, which excised the miracles & supernatural events completely, leaving only what Jesus SAID. I rejected magic & magical thinking before hitting my teen years, though I believe I’ll always have a hankering for the ESP “stuff” that runs through so many of the “old stories”. Those powers are the stuff of legend in so many cultures, it seems there must be SOME truth in there.

Ramen! INDEED. Shades of the Pastafarian sermon a friend ruthlessly tossed off at a party. She had all of us in stitches, but I can’t for the life of me remember ANY of what she actually said, though it sounded more like a religion than scn ever did while I was “in”. For scn to be a religion, you’d have to strip away all of the dianetics “stuff”, sounding all science-y and all.

Rip:

“stable datum” is such a *useful* construct, I find it hard to believe Ron thunk it up himself, but I haven’t found any indication where he plagiarized the concept from. ‘Tis strange, not knowing even where to look for a possible source. Idée Fixe is the closest I can come up with. IIRC, Ron even stated that a stable datum need not be TRUE for it to work. Was that a “spoiler”, or possibly foreshadowing?
If I really cared, I’d probably go hunting around in “Chaos Theory” as Tubby’s example sorta felt chaos-y to me.

Portland Illegal PC sagely stated:
“Scientology did not work because it does not work.”

That says it ALL, poetically.

Love it Jere & Mark…..we can come up with some really funny “dandies” for I.A.S.

INTIMADATED ASSHOLES SURRENDER….

Please Note: I am NOT talking about anyone who escaped/blew/got out or was never in!

Some person. group or entity is ALWAYS to be believed, or, NEVER believed.

Another term for a fixed idea is an “uninspected stable datum”.”

AND, as practiced in cults like scientology, the fixed idea is just that binary, with no shades of gray. Applied to labels applied to people ‘out of favor’, anyone CALLED an SP is ALWAYS a murderous scumbag out to drag EVERYONE into the primordial ooze of DB-dom. There’s no middle ground, no possible way that they could be converted into functional, contributing members of society. Not even the East Grinstead baker whose apple pies were SO good that he couldn’t make enough, so he of course was declared treasonous & an SP and NO scientologist cold get an excellent apple pie from him ever again. NO scientologist could examine the situation and decide for themselves.

THAT SORT of “thinking” SURE makes life simpler. As simple as a club to the head.

“

”
In WHICH country? city? In some, it’s seemed somewhat different. NYC, for instance, requires not only DEFENSIVE driving, but hyper-vigilance and lightning reflexes. There was a SciFi movie, I’m not sure which now, that opined that green was “go”, yellow “go faster”, and red “Much faster”. The car and contents got through the trip unscathed, if you discount the “accidents” the passenger would have had watching him drive like that, and a few bumps of the head as the car bounced around. In NYC, I once saw an old Checker cab fly through a red light, daylight visible under all 4 wheels. Thems crazy drivers out there, sometimes. Checker cabs had an insanely long set of shocks; possibly suitable for something like the Baja 500, a crazy race through crazy-rough terrain.

Kat offered, in part:
“…Think of it this way: if you go hang out with IT guys, they will have their own jargon that may sound like gobbledygook to you.”

Depends…. I AM one of them IT guys — or was for 35 years. Nowadays, we all are, now that Windows is ubiquitous and most Windows users have to maintain their own machines. I worked as a Windoze developer, so at home chose Macs, as did a few of my co-workers in IT. I didn’t HAVE to fight the malware at work as a Windoze developer as we had a crackerjack team protecting our network and all of us on it. Still, I was enough affected that even though I could have gotten fully-loaded Windoze boxes for essentially free, at home, we went with Mac, because its long-term cost was less. Then a friend got a Mac and loaded windoze on it, as well. (Macs can do that, boot into either dos or Mac OS when you start up). THAT machine soon crashed and burned catastrophically due to malware. Mine is still running (with a couple of failed components from a drop) 20 years later, with a few quirks after the drop. This Mac, a reconditioned 22inch iMac, (even more fully loaded) cold-boots in 35 seconds, MUCH faster than my then-new Windows XP box woke up from sleep. On a Mac, waking up is essentially instant; sub-second from “black” to cranking out tasks. With the Micros..t machine, I usually could go get a coffee or go smoke a cigarette before my machine was where it could be logged into. THEN it took a minute or ten for my usual suite of applications to be re- invoked, since all of them required different passwords be entered again, never mind that I was still me, as demonstrated by my logging in as “me” properly again. Windows is SUCH a fussy baby to take care of. They paid me well to keep it going so I could get WORK done. In many ways, it’s as mind-numbingly flawed a design as scientology sounds to have made with its InComm.

They would CALL it something else, perhaps “buttons” IIRC, but it amounts to the same thing. Tubby renamed and laid claim to EVERY technique that EVER demonstrably WORKED, while running and hiding when his mis-statements of others’ real research failed; usually hiding behind the straw men of SPs and “Invasion Forces” and other fictions (poor, unbelievable fictions, IMO). (He wasn’t that good a SciFi writer, in my experience. Too much fiction, little or no “science”.)