I just saw a commercial in which a girl acting in a school play suddenly breaks from the script and asks why soldiers should obey an unjust ruler’s order to go into battle, and why government should be allowed to serve only a few rather than everybody. Radical stuff, especially the former. (The latter is a pipe dream, though a well-intentioned one.)
So I went to the advertised website and discovered it’s some L. Ron Hubbard outfit. Does that mean the Scientologists are pushing military civil disobedience now? I didn’t know they swung that way.
Still, on said website one of the listed 21 Ethical Precepts is “Don’t Do Anything Illegal,” which would seem to conflict with the aforementioned suggestion of endorsing civil disobedience. Of course on a Socratic-Scholastic-Spoonerite understanding of law there’s no conflict, but is that what they mean?
I suppose I could satisfy my curiosity by shelling out 18 bucks for a bundle of booklets; but the last Hubbard tract I read did not awaken within me any desire to tackle another.
Back in the day when I was active in the LP in the Los Angeles/OC area, we seemed to have a disproportionate number of Scientologists in the party. I always suspected that the cult attracts people who have an interest in freedom (hey, there’s a “bridge to total freedom”, after all), and only after they’re in do they realize their freedom is instead radically circumscribed by the cult.
So when is some Scientologist going to form a dissident offshoot the way David Kelley did with the Objectivists?
“I always suspected that the cult attracts people who have an interest in freedom (hey, there’s a “bridge to total freedom”, after all), and only after they’re in do they realize their freedom is instead radically circumscribed by the cult.”
No discussion of “freedom”-related Scientology stuff is complete without a mention of the album “The Road to Freedom”:
http://www.ronthemusicmaker.org/music/listen.htm
FYI, dissident offshoots of Scientology/Dianetics do exist, this is the main one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Zone_(Scientology)
In fact, there’s one that’s still around from that broke off as early as 1950:
http://ca-da.org/
In looking around the site, I found that the commercial in question is online at the site (it’s part of a series with a different commercial for each ethical value in the list):
http://thewaytohappiness.org/video/player.html