RE: Christianity is the same as Scientology
April 7, 2017 at 8:41 am
(This post was last modified: April 7, 2017 at 8:42 am by Fake Messiah.)
Let's try to compare Scientology with Christianity and what is usually said by Christians.
- their god and mythology is obviously fake
But can you prove it? Can you prove Xenu never existed?
- they believe in nonsense.
I don't see how believing in Xenu is more nonsense then one man putting all animals in one boat and holding them closed for over a year. Or that a virgin gave birth to some guy that could do cheap tricks. And that every year a cup of blood gets liquefied if people pray enough.
- their holy book is stupid
Few Christians read Bible from start to finish. It's long, confusing, much of it is boring, and some parts are painfully tedious to get through. King James version is written in seventeenth-century English, which is pretty much a foreign language to most English-speaking people today. Even more troubling for would-be readers, the Bible contains numerous stories and laws that hopelessly contradict the popular image of Christianity as a religion that is about morality, peace, and love.
- they make it hard for you to leave Scientology
It's also not a pretty picture when Christians leave their faith in places like the Bible belt. We all saw how they get stigmatized as seduced by the devil, marriages frequently break and leavers get isolated by their families and friends. In fact there are many people pretend to be Christians just to avoid conflict with their parents, family and people around.
- it costs a lot of money to be Scientologist
Yes I guess that would be the biggest difference. LR Hubbard invented it to make money and is totally opposite to Jesus's ideology who was one of the most anti-capitalist thinkers this side of Karl Marx. Yet, most Christians are capitalists. What gives?
We find him telling wannabe followers to sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor, so it would be easy to conclude that most Christians live by making vows of poverty and shunning wealth like the plague. But that's not quite the way things play out.
Many Catholics had maintained a theology frowning on accumulation of wealth, but simply had chosen to ignore it in practice. Plenty of Protestants, instead, decided to feel better about the whole thing and banish hypocrisy by reinventing the economic ideology of Christianity. First step, conveniently skip the many, many passages mentioned about being poor. Second step, was to focus instead on the biblical passages (mostly in the Old Testament) approving of wealth. Step three was to argue that since nothing in the world happens without God willing it, economic success (or the lack of thereof) is a quantifiable way to judge how much God does or does not favor you.
Voila! The tables are turned and suddenly the obsession for money making has been recycled as a perfectly acceptable Christian endeavor. In the theology endorsed by some Christians accumulating wealth is not only justifiable but almost a Christian duty since material prosperity is God's reward for His faithful followers. The obvious upshot is that if you are poor, instead, it is probably because God hates your guts.
So to me the true difference is that Scientologists are honest, they tell you they want your money; while christians constantly wave with passages of being poor their Bibles but accumulate wealth nevertheless and their churches don't pay taxes. I mean "Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." Benjamin Franklin was a politician, not to mention non-believer.
- their god and mythology is obviously fake
But can you prove it? Can you prove Xenu never existed?
- they believe in nonsense.
I don't see how believing in Xenu is more nonsense then one man putting all animals in one boat and holding them closed for over a year. Or that a virgin gave birth to some guy that could do cheap tricks. And that every year a cup of blood gets liquefied if people pray enough.
- their holy book is stupid
Few Christians read Bible from start to finish. It's long, confusing, much of it is boring, and some parts are painfully tedious to get through. King James version is written in seventeenth-century English, which is pretty much a foreign language to most English-speaking people today. Even more troubling for would-be readers, the Bible contains numerous stories and laws that hopelessly contradict the popular image of Christianity as a religion that is about morality, peace, and love.
- they make it hard for you to leave Scientology
It's also not a pretty picture when Christians leave their faith in places like the Bible belt. We all saw how they get stigmatized as seduced by the devil, marriages frequently break and leavers get isolated by their families and friends. In fact there are many people pretend to be Christians just to avoid conflict with their parents, family and people around.
- it costs a lot of money to be Scientologist
Yes I guess that would be the biggest difference. LR Hubbard invented it to make money and is totally opposite to Jesus's ideology who was one of the most anti-capitalist thinkers this side of Karl Marx. Yet, most Christians are capitalists. What gives?
We find him telling wannabe followers to sell all their possessions and give the money to the poor, so it would be easy to conclude that most Christians live by making vows of poverty and shunning wealth like the plague. But that's not quite the way things play out.
Many Catholics had maintained a theology frowning on accumulation of wealth, but simply had chosen to ignore it in practice. Plenty of Protestants, instead, decided to feel better about the whole thing and banish hypocrisy by reinventing the economic ideology of Christianity. First step, conveniently skip the many, many passages mentioned about being poor. Second step, was to focus instead on the biblical passages (mostly in the Old Testament) approving of wealth. Step three was to argue that since nothing in the world happens without God willing it, economic success (or the lack of thereof) is a quantifiable way to judge how much God does or does not favor you.
Voila! The tables are turned and suddenly the obsession for money making has been recycled as a perfectly acceptable Christian endeavor. In the theology endorsed by some Christians accumulating wealth is not only justifiable but almost a Christian duty since material prosperity is God's reward for His faithful followers. The obvious upshot is that if you are poor, instead, it is probably because God hates your guts.
So to me the true difference is that Scientologists are honest, they tell you they want your money; while christians constantly wave with passages of being poor their Bibles but accumulate wealth nevertheless and their churches don't pay taxes. I mean "Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." Benjamin Franklin was a politician, not to mention non-believer.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
