You won't see much Hollywood/celebrity gossip here because I consider our cultural fixation on the personal lives of the stars pretty much stupid and unhealthy. That said, Tom Cruise is freaking me out, and not in the standard movie-star-on-dope way. It seems like he's acting really weird, and I think Scientology may be a big part of the problem.
Scientology (an introduction here) claims to be "an applied religious philosophy", but many say that it is a business or a cult. Founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, its history goes back to the 1950s and over the years it has been the subject of articles in Time, Readers' Digest, the Boston Herald and the New York Times. The Church of Scientology apparently holds to an amazing account of ancient earth history, but most of the criticism of the group (here and here) focuses on their alleged coercion and use of mind-control techniques. Known to be very well funded and extremely litigious, they often sue to suppress damaging information or dissemination of their materials.
Tom Cruise is one of a number of high-profile Hollywood Scientologists, who are said to receive very special treatment by the organization. Now the new love of his life, Katie Holmes, has decided to convert to Scientology in the course of their whirlwind romance. In the article featured below, Fox's entertainment columnist tiptoes around the issue but obviously suspects that Holmes has been subjected to some kind of brainwashing procedures (and he's not the only one who smells a rat). Oh, and Cruise argued with Matt Lauer over the Scientology hot-button topic of psychiatry. All of this has Cruise seeming a lot more creepy than cool lately.
FoxNews: Katie Holmes' Missing Days
Sardonic alt-rockers Cake have a song called Comfort Eagle whose lyrics seem to be speaking about Scientology. Or maybe not; you never can tell with music these days...
filed: entertainment; religion
5 comments:
i couldn't agree with you more!
Q: why are the L Ron Cult-ist's soooo over protective of their "religion?"
A: because it aint one!
Huevo,
I can agree with you that this new "religion" of scientology is weirding you out-I read a little about it and it concerns me too. Don't get me wrong(all you scientologists), being nice to people and wanting peace instead of war is great(and I don't think anybody would want war);but instead of focusing on physical nature, you need to be more concerned about spiritual nature-like where you're headed after you die. Sure, all this being nice stuff is important, but knowing where you're headed after doing all of this is even more important, and that's where 'true' religion comes into play.
The Snow-Man
Scientology is deffinately one of those cases where truth is stranger than fiction. You read about the core ideas of Scientology and it sounds like something made up by a sci-fi writer..., oh wait, it was.
By the way, it irks me that my username has no choice but to be lowercase. I dream of a world..., or at least a blog, where I have a choice as to the case of my own name. Confound it, have we learned nothing from the course of human history. Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains or unable to make is username capitalized.
My friends and I came to the same conclusion about that Cake song! Great minds think alike... Anyway, check out these posts from YTMND about scientology:
http://theunfunnytruth.ytmnd.com/
http://theunfunnysequel.ytmnd.com/
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