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SCIENTOLOGY RELIGION
You are talking to a percentage of the population that would hate YOU if you caught their attention enough.
RELIGIOUS LITERACY
Well, is religion that dangerous or irrelevant? Should we consider being evangelical about the gospel of Nothingness? Shall we take John Lennon at his word and “imagine” no religion, no heaven above, “living only for today?”
MEDIA & ETHICS
It got me thinking: who actually works at tabloids like that? What are their story pitch meetings like? Do they know that what they’re doing is hurtful and destructive? They must, right? Do they just laugh it all off or make justifications to convince themselves they’re still good people, and that it’s “just for entertainment”?
COMBATING BIGOTRY & HATE
This is how it played out: At around midday on November 22, a passenger sitting in the train pulled out his phone to film an incident occurring in front of him. The footage (which immediately went viral) reveals a man reading passages from the Bible out loud to a young boy wearing a yarmulke, sitting beside him.
TOLERANCE
I was, however, “open-minded.” Cue the air quotes, please. There is a difference between open-minded and “open-minded.” When one is simply and honestly open-minded, it indicates a willingness to try new things, to hear other viewpoints, in short, to learn something new and be OK with that.
MEDIA & ETHICS
I actually saw this question in an online forum the other day: “If I wanted to start my own cult, how would I do it?” Now to begin with, the word “cult” is simply a pejorative word for some group the person using it doesn't like.
TOLERANCE
Humankind at its finest sees a tree not as a green blob, but a Maple, its leaves individually defined, each one a bit different from the others—in all their variety and beauty, part of a larger and complex unity.
RELIGIOUS LITERACY
No one’s religion was cause for offense. No difference in color, social standing, job or education impacted the way we interacted.
SCIENTOLOGY RELIGION
The thing that Scientologists take issue with is the lack of science behind so much of the psychiatric community’s categorizations and diagnoses of these obvious behavioral issues. And even more important, what possible good comes from merely naming a condition when there’s no hard science to prove it, and no cure? All that happens is people are turned into life-long “patients” who come to define themselves and their human experience through the distorted lens of a “condition” they have been told they have.
TOLERANCE
Many years ago, at the dawn of the personal computer era, I had a nerdy friend who always seemed to be happy. One day I asked him what his secret was. He said, “Easy. Every morning when I get up, I say to myself, ‘Reset. Start.’” Reset: To return something to its initial state; to set to zero.
