Fruit and Nut Cases

I wrote about this subject earlier in the week - see post dated 3 July 2012 : 'Mission Impossible'.

But I also enjoyed this article by David Aronovitch writing in The Times - heaven forfend a News International newspaper - although that doesn't seem to prevent some of its journalists having interesting and intelligent things observations on life.

I noticed by the way that a journalist from The Mirror is now 'helping police with their enquiries' - over allegations of bribing public officials. 

To my mind all organised religions are barking mad - Scientology gets a bad press for sure, but is it really any nuttier than all the rest?   

Nutty, yes. But judge them by their actions

by David Aronovotich

Scientology has its bizarre beliefs, as have all other religions, but that is not enough for us to condemn it

The story so far: beautiful young Katie apparently wants to rescue her innocent daughter from the clutches of the bizarre cult to which her much older film-star husband belongs. If she fails, the girl may be sent to a “military-esque compound” called the Sea Organisation, swearing allegiance to the cult “for a billion years” (which at least suggests that it is an optimistic kinda cult), and could be disciplined by being thrown into a “punishment trailer”.

Well, whose side are you on? Katie’s or the cult’s? It isn’t a hard choice when you’re reminded what the Church of Scientology believes in. Pretty much invented in postwar America by a science fiction writer called L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology reveals to its adepts the story of an intergalactic despot called Xenu who transported the first people to the Earth 75 million years ago and then — capriciously, you may think — blew them up with H bombs. In that explosive process negative forces, bad Thetans, were freed, floated around and attached themselves to human beings, and everything since then has been the history of our struggle to overcome negative Thetans. This article has, so far, probably been a pretty good example of bad Thetan behaviour.

But there are plenty of stages before Scientology believers get to Xenu. They start having their personalities tested for free, are then drawn into social programmes organised by the Church and can soon find themselves contributing amounts of time, money and energy that would shame even the most devout Trotskyite sectlet. On the way they can visit James Bond-type HQs and country houses owned by the Church, and hope to catch sight of Katie’s estranged husband Tom Cruise, or John Travolta or Scientology’s effective leader, David Miscavige.

Now, in November there is a pretty good chance that the former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney will become President of the United States. Mr Romney is, of course, a Mormon. Is Mormonism a cult, or is it a bona fide religion? I don’t mean legally, I mean in the sense that most of us understand that term. Is it an eddy in the sea of faith?

Tricky. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is — despite the prescribed underwear — one of the fastest-growing religions in the world. Founded 150-odd years ago it believes that the Prophet Joseph Smith was guided by the angel Moroni to a place in upstate New York, where he found some gold plates buried in a hillside. On them was written, in hieroglyphs, the Book of Mormon. Back home Smith would use special glasses to read these hieroglyphs from afar, while on the other side of a curtain his wife would take down the dictated scripture. The book tells a complicated story of how Jesus came to America and of various fights between good and evil.

Mormons have been around longer than Scientologists. Some of their original eccentricities, such as polygamy, have been recanted. Other less obviously disruptive ones — such as marrying the dead to each other — persist. But on what basis would we allow that Mormonism is a proper “faith” and Scientology is not?

The cleaving to manifest absurdity can’t, on its own, be enough to disqualify a religion. Forget for a moment the basic and antique biblical stories of burning bushes, parted seas, mass smitings, virgin births, resurrections and so on. Only two years ago the current Pope canonised a dead Canadian Catholic called Alfred Bessette, who became St André. Bessette had been beatified in 1982, and his supporting miracle was cited as that of a cancer sufferer called Giuseppe Carlo Audino who in 1958 had prayed to Bessette (then dead for 21 years) and had been cured. For canonisation another miracle was required, and this one was a car-crash victim whose parents received similar good news after praying.

Why Catholicism and not Mormonism? Why Mormonism and not Scientology? Is it age? Or numbers of followers? At what point do we find an absence of rationality acceptable enough to go through life alongside it without too much worry?

Let’s try a thought exercise. Suppose that there was not and had never been any male circumcision for religious or cultural reasons. Never been heard of. Then a small, new but fast-growing religious organisation was discovered that required its adherents to bring in its sons at a week old or at eight years old and have a bloke in a hat do some public surgery.

While we’re pondering that, we can remind ourselves that last week a court in Cologne, sitting in the case of a Muslim circumcision that had gone wrong, declared the child’s “fundamental right to bodily integrity” to be more important than the parents’ religious rights, which in any case it thought were not really impaired by non-circumcision.

The faith balloon went up. Jews and Muslims felt attacked by the judgment and the Catholic and Evangelical Churches weighed in on the side of the circumcisers. Guido Westerwelle, the liberal Foreign Minister, told the press that “religious freedom is firmly established and religious traditions such as circumcision are considered an expression of religious pluralism”.

I have some sympathy for Mr Westerwelle’s argument. Readers may have guessed over the years that I am not a religious man. But I have, over the same years, become happier for others to carry on their entire lives not agreeing with me. I think circumcising an infant is an odd thing to do, and I vaguely hope that one day it’ll be regarded as unnecessary. But there are millions of men walking round who manage to cope with their truncated situations, and there are millions more for whom a ban on the practice would cause real (if irrational) distress. On balance I’d permit the snip.

Why then be so nasty about Scientologists or Mormons? Most of what we call cults are simply new competing religions, and most of them will disappear or be modified. Allowing for the periodic moral panic about their practices, I think it best to judge them and their adherents in exactly the way we judge other faiths — not on their beliefs (which are, to me, always bizarre) but on their behaviour. And that means accepting that most Scientologists — as those who have studied them point out — make a choice to go in and a choice to stay in. And if it proves otherwise — that they are genuinely abused or coerced — then that’s the moment to object and to condemn.

So we shouldn’t be on Katie’s side and against Tom simply because we think L. Ron Hubbard was a bit of a nutter. Anyway, that’s what my bad Thetan thinks.