I'm sure you've heard the news by now that
Chef has quit South Park, (presumably due to pressure from higher ups in Scientology) and the news that Tom Cruise pressured
Comedy Central to cancel a rerun of the Tom Cruise spoofing episode (downloadable in bit torrent
from Operation Clambake). Coincidentally, there's a long article about Scientology in the new issue of Rolling Stone, and happily
it's available online.
As I read that article, and skimmed once again over some of the very depressing Scientology articles on Xenu.net, I got to thinking. What's
the best way to rescue people from cults? And to keep them from joining up in the first place? Can anything really be done? After all, there will always be people with weaknesses and a need to be told what to do, or mentally unstable people, and there will always be controlling evil people who enjoy having power over others. In that light, aren't cults, of whatever scale, inevitable? They're almost symbiotic, in the relations they foster between controllers and controllees, and if good fortune (or time travel) had intervened and culled L. Ron "Leper Messiah" Hubbard back in the 50s, before he got the business of Scientology rolling, the people currently wasting their lives with its bad sci-fi bullshit would probably just be wasting their lives with some other type of nonsense. Besides, as far as cults go, Scientology is pretty harmless; they're a huge for-profit scam, and they fuck up your head horribly, but at least they're not stockpiling machine guns or marrying off 11 y/o's to some self-proclaimed prophet,
Branch Dividian style.
My question though, was what could be done about cults.
Postulate a modern, free nation run by enlightened atheists, or brights, or rationalists, or whatever you want to call them/us/me. So the leaders want to keep people from wasting their lives in thrall to various fairy tales. Who decides which cults/religions/superstitions are allowed? Is there a membership number cut off? Comparative evaluation of the potential legitimacy of their mythologies? Objective analysis of the positive and negative aspects of their belief systems and the behaviour of their adherents?
I don't see how any of those things would be remotely feasible, but just assuming that they were, and that dangerous cults were banned, and that there was some workable and legal definition of "dangerous" and "cult" ...how would it be enforced? You can't stop people from believing in something, so you'd have to go by their behavior, which would entail monitoring the movements of vast numbers of citizens, watching them to see where they went and who they hung out with, and making sure they didn't ongregate in unapproved locations. You'd also need an army of undercover operatives to infiltrate every organization, secret police to detain suspects for questioning, re-education camps to try and "cure" people of their delusions and illegal beliefs, etc. Congrats! You've just recreated Soviet Eastern Europe, and established every abhorrent aspect of a totalitarian regime, while trying only to help people.
To mangle a metaphor, when thought crime is enforced, only criminals will think.
In other words, there's not much any democratic government can do about cults or religions that's not being done now. Draconian crackdowns and controls on allowed beliefs are a greater evil than the cults themselves, and if you want to live in a free society you've got to allow free association and free belief/disbelief. You can obviously hold people responsible for their actions, and if a cult's stockpiling weapons and preaching race wars or armageddon, you can raid them and imprison their leaders. But how do you know what they're preaching if you don't infiltrate them with an undercover operative, and actually taking legal action is a very extreme case with a very high potential for disaster. Even assuming it doesn't turn into a massacre, and that they don't see you coming and blow away a bunch of inept ATF agents before holing up in their compound for a month or two. Besides, even if the raid goes off smoothly it might do more harm than good, as you decapitate the organization by arresting the leader, while inadvertantly sending his unbalanced disciples spinning off in a rage of persecution.
So yes, the central tenants of Scientology are even more ridiculous than those of other religions (though that's a fairly-debatable point), and it's a tragedy that tens of thousands of people have such a need to be told what to do and to think that they'll throw away decades of their lives and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to receive the wretched imaginings of 4th rate hack of a sci-fi writer. But in a free society, that's their right. They're even allowed to bring up their children in a brainwashed state, evil and immoral though their actions might seem to the rest of us.
In closing, here's a pithy, unsourced, and tangentially-related quote I read recently. "Atheism is a religion in the same way not collecting stamps is a hobby."
Labels: atheism, scientology
