CoS dogma worships the me-me-me immortal thetan, which it disembodies not only from the body but from the brain itself. CoS sneers at the physical body as a "meat body," and certainly is happy to abuse the bodies of its out-of-favor Sea Org workers through hitting, sleep deprivation, rice and beans, overwork, etc. It warbles about the immortal thetan, CoS's version of the soul, and makes it the center of the student's hopes and dreams, trumping family and trampling on the special protections that children deserve. CoS feels children are grown-up thetans in children's bodies, so it is okay to make them work long hours for Sea Org, and statutory rape isn't really rape, according to some CoS executives, since the child's thetan is already an adult.

Of course, science doesn't acknowledge any thetan in the mind, that is undetectable by instruments. And, science is even moving away from the mind-is-separate-from-body theory that goes back to Descartes and earlier. Although Philosophies in the Flesh was published over a decade ago, it is still stimulating conversation

A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain, at http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gue ... our-brain/

NY Times excerpt at http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/la ... sophy.html

1999 Edge.com interview at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p1.html

I recently did some research, comparing Scientology with Buddhism, since "it's like Buddhism" is the almost automatic reply by Scilons as to why they should be considered a religion. Outside of Advance Magazine articles, Buddhism doesn't believe in thetans, or in Hubbard's version of reincarnation. The self is viewed as an integrated whole (which is a subset of the universe, having no existence independent of it), not as a weird alliance of distinct body/mind/spirit parts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodymind_% ... ditions%29

I won't hijack this thread by getting into the other, very profound differences, but this struck me as one very good example of that, so I thought I'd mention it.

Yes, there is NO dualism. Each of us is one biological unit, both mind(brain) and body.

It's funny that the article "Why You Are Not Your Brain" mainly refers to the brain.

BTW, here is something interesting (IBM research on synthetic brain)
http://www.gizmag.com/ibm-neurosynaptic ... ips/19562/
http://www.techmadly.com/neurosynaptic- ... -brain-yet

How Do You Build A Synthetic Brain?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 194151.htm

---------------------------------------------------------------
A-10 Thunderbolt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Thunderbolt_II

Late 1970s, I worked on software for an old Intel 8085 8-bit microprocessor that would
collect info from sensors on the engines for this aircraft. This was so that they could
better diagnose problems so that they wouldn't have to do a complete tear-down of the
engine to repair some types of problems. (Partly using FFT frequency analysis.)

This old 8-bit processor had nowhere near the power to drive the software on our
modern laptops. And nobody had personal computers that could do much of anything back then.

But now we have personal computing going on everywhere. Smart Phones, tablets, and laptops
with wireless communication everywhere.


IBM is now performing the beginnings of the emulation of brain neurons and synapsis.
Guess where this is going. (Hint: we are NOT spirits in a material world.)

Well, the problem we get into if we reduce the human being to something that emerges from molecular constellations is that we thereby effectively destroy the foundations of our concept of "person" that is the building block of what we call a society, the legal system, the economic system... basically most of what we base our life on and address with personal pronouns.
Unfortunately hardly any of the people who propose this seem to think it through.

Science reaches a singularity when we try to explain ourselves with it: It sets out to remove all subjective impressions from what it considers "true".
Which, by it's very nature, must of course declare subjective experience and our own influence on the course of things as irrelevant.
Spirituality starts right there of course: Subtracting the access you have to the subjectivity of another person from the access you have to your own subjectivity: For science, this difference is absolutely zero, it can only talk about human beings in third person, "you" and "me" don't matter.
Yet we are somehow here, supposedly locked up without having any effect on what happens to us at all.

Our interior perspective and the impression of free will that we live our lives by will not go away, no matter how irrelevant science might want to make it seem in order to get it out of the way so that it can complete its universe of "objective" causality.

Hubbard's ideology is probably the most evil example of over-emphasized "subjectivity" to the point where the physical universe is seen as "unreal" and the "subjects" become effectively locked up in an ideology to which L.Ron's lingo is sold as the only access. Follow his famous "bridge" straight into the ditch and sell your house along the way.

But the antidote is definitely not the type of Atheism that is currently wedging its way into the mainstream as represented by Dawkins, Dennet, Shermer etc.. This is in no way less ideologically blinded by the scientific method than any other fundamentalist religion is by its gospel.
I would in fact describe it as a cult in its own right with a very clear "us vs. them" mentality - the dark world of religion vs. what is described as an "objective truth" - a "light of reason and common sense" etc.
Unfortunately science has a very limited epistemological repertoire, and there are tons of things that it simply can not access, that it just pushes away as irrelevant. Or as in "we are going to deal with that later - maybe".

Even if we only see religion as emerging from the sick brain of the human being without any "reality" to it at all, prayer, meditation, etc. are still a way to deal with one's own unconscious, of which also science should know that it does a lot of work for us every split second.

I'm all for reason and science mind you, just against fundamentalism.
The closest thing to a religion for me is probably Paul Feyerabend (e.g. "Against Method").

Nothing is destroyed by telling the truth about this. It just means that one has to re-think this.




I beg to differ. There is no such thing as TOTAL free will.
Take a look at this (watch the whole thing):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0J4F_UEs94




Okay. You tell me what you mostly rely upon when you want the truth.
Tell me what you rely upon to get to the truth on anything.




Please don't play that "fundamentalism" card.
That's a "cop out" if I ever heard one.
(Sorry for being so blunt.)

The Supreme Court already did that when it decided that Citizens United was more of a person than you or I. I can't see what harm could come from insisting that persons must have bodies.

But the whole issue of whether there is a spirit or not, doesn't enter into what Don Carlo brought up, only the unity of the mind and body. This was a problem for me when I was a Scientologist, because the idea that the mind was an indestructable fixture attached to the thetan made no sense. I was told that the nervous system was used for control of the body, and nothing more. Yet, if my body got drunk, so did my mind. If my brain were injured, so would be my mind. I've known people who were completely colorblind, and they could not imagine colors under any circumstances, even though they REALLY wanted to. There are many, many reasons to see mind and body as united, rather than take the Hubbardian view that, were I incarnated as a gnat, or as something with a brain the size of a house, my mind would be the same as I possess right now.

AFAIK, no religion shares Hubbard's view. A Buddhist would say that the mind and body live and die together, and Western monotheistic traditions put any and all forms of immortality into the hands of the deity. If I don't feel as mentally sharp as I did in my younger days, or if I am autistic, or I have ever been intoxicated, this poses no philosophical dilemma -- unless I'm a Scientologist, in which case it becomes inexplicable.

When I ditched my Scientology beliefs, life made much more sense, and it became possible to embrace my own humanity, and the humanity of others. I think that's a good thing.

CoS's "meat body'" insult always seemed anti-human to me.

Also "homo sap."

The anti-human slur, "meat body" quote by Hubbard:

("Routine 3N: Line Plots", HCOB 14 July 1963)
So, this line got picked up by CoS staff as descriptive of all bodies, including Scientologist bodies.

A second anti-human slur: "Homo sap," quote by Hubbard
LRH, From the taped lecture
"Flows: Patterns of Interaction" 10 December 1952

A third slur, this against new Scientology students: "Raw meat," came from June 28, 1961, when L. Ron Hubbard gave a lecture, 'Raw Meat-Trouble-shooting Cases'.

Thanks for the references. (although I had heard them decades ago on the PDC lecture tapes.)

The age of our universe is between 13 to 14 billion years (Hubbard's Scientology not-withstanding).

The Age of the Universe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyGBar3kYFc

The Scientology auditing processes of "date and locate" are ridiculous and unscientific (even though Hubbard insisted that Scientology is scientific).
Scientology auditing eventually leads a person down a "rabbit hole" of delusion.

According to Russell, god is as real as a teapot between Earth and Mars.
But have you ever looked inside of your brain to find "you" in there? From the same perspective for which god is not real, you are not real either.
So how can something that is not real be made accountable for something?
For example, for murder.
What if there is nothing in your brain that can be made accountable... it all happens just like rain, water flowing down the river, apples falling from the tree. Complete non-intentionality: That is what science is working toward according to it's own a-priori removal of anything "subjective".


Derren Brown would show you anything if it just catches your attention.
I don't see any scientific basis for free will either. But I definitely experience it. For example, I am choosing to write this comment right now. Try to explain that one away if you will
But of course our "subconsciousness" is very strong, and religion is one way of getting in contact with it.
Whether you believe there actually is a connection to something larger through it, or whether you think it is just a gigantic unknown entity inside of ourselves that we have the most intimate connection with.
.


I do like to quote Paul Feyerabend in this case, who said: "Anything Goes". Whatever is the strongest and most workable thing is what we do.
Of course empirical science is really great! It's just that there are things I am dealing with (such as my relationship to my unconscious for example) that science doesn't provide me an answer for. Instead, it pushes me out of my brain and says I don't really matter.
...hello? I'm still here. (...and will be with some luck for the next 40-60 years... Sorry.)


Well, science only allows a very specific set of methodologies to get to "the way things really work". They involve graphs, formulas, equations etc.
It is in fact quite fundamentalist this way. Storytelling, artistic expression, music, dance, chanting, a good dinner, flowers, and a lot of other things are not permitted, yet very relevant to my life.
That is why I would call the scientific method a fundamentalistic ideology.
I like it, but I also like to find some nice looking chrysanthemes. Of course it can all be delegated to evolution somehow. That might be fascinating, but don't forget the flowers over it, here they are!! yay

No worries about the bluntness, I know these discussions can get quite passionate! We should probably continue this somewhere else, the last thing I would want is to water this board down with meaningless discussions, or to sound apologetic toward "Hubbard".

imho attacking Scientology through an acceptance of its self-labeling as "religion" - (by saying all religions are nonsense and unnecessary because we now have science) - is a dangerous and potentially hurtful path.
I would rather frame it as a totalitarian mind-ideology, and its primary outcome is the surrendering of control over one's life/wallet/family to the Scientology organization.
Just my 5 cent...

*peace*

Scientology pushes you out of your brain, by saying the physical brain and body don't matter. I started the thread not to argue about spirituality in general, but about Scientology teaching you contempt for your body and even your rational mind. By their fruits you shall know them, says the Bible. The "fruits" of Scientology are abused workers, underage exploitation, and covered-up statutory rape.

Didn't you watch Carl Sagan? He put astronomy and evolution to music.

Dance? These scientists dance, and they even criticize Scientology partway. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009 ... rip_to.php

Science poems at http://www.firstscience.com/home/poems- ... poems.html

Storytelling? Read How the Shaman Stole the Moon: In Search of Ancient Prophet-Scientists from Stonehenge to the Grand Canyon, http://www.amazon.com/How-Shaman-Stole- ... 0595166938

Scientists & fine dining? http://seas.harvard.edu/cooking

Flowers? Scientists have devoted their careers to flowers. http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... have-scent

Rather than falsely claiming the pleasures of XYZ "are not permitted" to science, try googling "XYZ" + "science" and you'll find scientists exploring every avenue of delight.

Sconetale, it's various RELIGIONS that have attacked song, dance, and other delights. Google "might lead to dancing" to find all the jokes that premarital sex, or sex-standing-up, are banned by Baptists because it "might lead to dancing." Trappist monks are mostly forbidden to TALK. The Mormons prohibit coffee and tea. The mullahs in Iran tried without success to ban pop music and kite-flying. The Wahabi fundamentalist religious leaders in Saudi Arabia have banned many delights; they think it's idolatrous to revere Mohammed's birthplace and other locales, so they actively wish to bulldoze them.*

Richard Dawkins: .**

While scientists have revealed cigarette smoking causes cancer, and obesity can lead to diabetes and heart disease, that's truth-telling to protect health, not joy-killing for the fun of joy-killing. What delights have scientists "not permitted?"

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_early_Islamic_heritage_sites
** The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, p. 214.

Logically speaking, the mind and the body are inseparable because the mind is a collective term for the body experiences and events that occur outside the body -- this is, definitely, not a Scientology proposition.
According to Buddha, spirits (thetans), souls, etc, do not exist because they cannot be observed -- this is so-called non-atman doctrine (the word “atman” means "soul" in Sanskrit). Buddhism is even further from Scientology than Christianity because Christians think that the soul exists.

This may be off-topic, but I read a book recently called a "A Whole New Mind" by Daniel Pink and in it he uses the brain as a metaphor for what skills are becoming more essential as we transit from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The metaphor he uses is the very real discoveries between "right brain" directed thinking versus "left brain" directed thinking and how these two skill sets affect what we do in the future. After reading this book, I think it's wrong to equate spirituality with religion because they are two completely different things. (I think) the problem with religion is that it thinks it is using rationality (left brain skill) to explain reality. For example, Christians think people who do not accept Jesus as their personal Savior are simply irrational, considering all the "evidence" that points to the sacrifice God made for them, etc. I think religion creates an unhealthy delusion for a person, that their beliefs and spirituality are "rational", when they are not supposed to be. Spirituality actually comes from the right side of the brain, which has nothing to do the with the rational, linear thinking of the left side. Spirituality includes the understanding that personal "belief" is part of the mind's (brain's) creative process. True spirituality involves personal belief and does not require the conversion of others, at all.

Then you say, wait- religion and spirituality comes from our brains? Yes it does, and that is body influencing mind.


That's right. Good example of Hubbardian slight-of-hand.