Who the heck is forced or coerced to learn about Scientology, attend their classes & pay for it???
Your disagreement doesn't change facts. Priests & preachers are con artists with parents, family & society as duped deluded abettors. They induce people into feeling they have no choice but to donate. And/or that it's the right thing to do, which is the chief tactic of the con artist.
Is this a problem? I mean come on, I've been to many MANY church services where the preacher spends about half the time talking about the importance of tithing 10% and the other half about eternal fires of hell damnation as just about the right place for the tight-arse who don't tithe!
This is to CHILDREN mind you. Heck, one must wonder how many trillions of dollars were scared out of people's hands!
The Scientologists probably just says you'll live a miserable life unless you pay to play?
The point is - THEY ALL DO IT!
I find both these comments both insulting and rather uninformed of the more ancient and established world religions. It is patently absurd to even attempt to draw a parallel between "Scientology" and religions like Catholicism or Islam. Would Scientology ever set up a Madrasa and school a whole communities children for free? Think of all the relief work and aid that the Catholic Church does in South America and Africa.
These two posts that want to draw a parallel and claim that these ancient organizations are in it for the money? eh. . . it's dubious at best. I really don't think these posters have any real experience with a legitimate organized religion that has a long and deep history.
I am not religious. Not one bit. I do however study spirituality and find religion interesting as a matter of hobby, and I likewise find as we enter an age when quantum physics posits multiple dimensions, it is time to do away with this nonsensical notion that there should be a separation between physics and metaphysics, simply because of our limited scientific instrumentation. Can't empirical observation be good enough for now?
But I can clearly see a false parallel being drawn when one is being made. Though the oldest of the world's religions are filled with as much politics and B.S. as there is wisdom and truth, they are NOT primarily "con artists with parents, family & society." Nor do "THEY ALL DO IT!" These statements seem to stem from ignorance, and a real negativity toward religion. Isn't this precisely what religion has warned about for millenniums? No matter which religion? That if you turn from them you become soulless and negative? And here, you only prove to become the very thing you claim that their "fairy tales" are talking gibberish about. Seems there might be some wisdom in all those assorted tombs after all, eh?
Aside from their ignorance, their divisiveness, their backwardness, etc. they do give lots of people hope, joy, love, a sense of community, and most of all, an outlet for doing good works throughout the planet. THIS is what the worlds oldest and most respected religions primarily do. They were not set up thousands of years ago as fabulous pyramid schemes, get real.
