Blog
SCIENTOLOGY RELIGION
In just about every society on earth, we humans are handed nothing but limits from the time we are born. The limits of popular opinion, culture, and thought along with authorities to appeal to, permissions to ask, expectations to meet.
MEDIA & ETHICS
The couple’s public statement is a shot across the bow at a disturbing trend that has become the new normal over recent decades: the overt and covert catering of too much of the mass media toward the prurient and the suggestive, at the expense of facts, and with no thought of consequences other than circulation.
MEDIA & ETHICS
The article contained no controversy, no sensationalism, no drama, and most of all, no bias. How refreshing to view something online about my religion without being moved to hurl my chamomile tea at the screen. How lovely to not have to field a phone call from a concerned non-Scientologist relative or friend about the latest canard to hit cyberspace.
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
We sat in front of the rabbi that day in 1977, my wife and I, a bit sheepishly explaining how we had run off and gotten married a year earlier after just a week of dating—and how she wasn’t Jewish at the time, and how she still wasn’t Jewish, and how now she needed to convert so that we could have a Jewish ceremony so that my observant Jewish mom and dad would speak to us.
RELIGIOUS LITERACY
The fear and suspicion of the sudden influx of foreigners in general and Irish-Catholics in particular spawned a political movement known variously as the “Native American Party” or the “American Party,” but more broadly as the “Know-Nothing Party.”
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
If someone were to make a list of the top 10 least funny things, “bigotry” would undoubtedly make the cut. There’s very little that’s funny about bigotry. That’s all the more unfortunate because everyone tells me laughter is the best remedy.
TOLERANCE
The very essence of our spiritual side is the ability to create. It is and always will be completely under our control.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
A bill currently pending in the Ohio state legislature has resulted in statements that, if it becomes law, students would be allowed to give “wrong” answers in class should scientific findings conflict with their religious beliefs. One opponent was quoted as saying that if a student gave a biblically based answer of 6,000 years as the age of the earth, a teacher would be forced to accept it. Others have made similar charges.
TOLERANCE
As time went on and more people criticized others in my presence, I started worrying more and more about what others thought of me. After all, the persons being criticized had no idea they were sinning so dramatically. If they were blissfully clueless of their wild indiscretions, how could I know if I ever was accidentally committing some?
SCIENTOLOGY RELIGION
When I moved from a small town in upstate New York to the San Francisco Bay area at the age of 11, I found myself at the beginning of a cultural revolution. A few miles away, the hippie movement was getting started in the hills above Palo Alto. Although I was oblivious to it in the first couple of years after the move, it became obvious as time went on:
