That strikes me as a perfectly good argument for taking on less well-established Faith-frauds before the bigger ones. Choose winnable battles.
In practice, the CoS does hit back, at anyone designated as a Suppressive Person
Evangelical pastors only turn out to be closeted, self-hating gay men who dabble in massage from men and meth.
That’s a bad thing? Better I inform my physical therapist…
I realise that placing the “S” and “D” close together actually serves to divide up the words “Haus” and “der”; but that sign really pokes me in the OCD bone.
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It is if your bread and butter is denouncing homosexuals on stage while secretly getting handjobs from other men.
John Safran.
Louis Theroux.
Bill Maher.
Richard Dawkins.
Chris Hitchens.
As well as writing “Going Clear”, Lawrence Wright “documented the Jonestown massacre, explored allegations of Satan worship, profiled brimstone-tinged gospel preachers, and, of course, tracked the histories of al-Qaeda and the Church of Scientology.”
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Worst cabaret act EVAH.
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I forgot to mention that although the Haus der Kunst is a butt-ugly building, its next door neighbor is even uglier: the Consulate of the United States of America. A cinderblock surrounded by a fence that screams paranoia.
Yes, the Haus der Kunst is located right next door to the US Consulate in Munich. And both are butt-ugly eyesores in an otherwise beautiful neighborhood.
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“Going Clear” was quite good and well written.
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Secretly getting handjobs on stage? Wow, I’ll never look at a lectern the same way again.
You said it worked, which is an implicit endorsement.
[quote=“FirstLast, post:33, topic:96371”]
That you cite neuro-linguistic programming, an unsupported psuedo-science further proves that you are not an expert [/quote]
I understood Logruszed to be including NLP among the “bunch of hookey bullshit” that ‘works’ – in the sense of exploiting the vulnerabilities of subjects “with certain pathologies and dispositions”.
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exactly. It “functions within the aims of the person applying it given certain parameters”
sympathetic-magic (voodoo, some Santeria practices, others) function in the same way.
works for the purposes of brainwashing the right kind of person.
If you’re freebasing cocaine and I can get you to stop by using fucked up brainwashing techniques on you because you’re susceptible then “it worked”. “working” and being “good” are detached concepts.
Louis is the only one on that list that I can’t really think of anything problematic about or really biased. I don’t know Safran at all.
Marr and Dawkins go in hard on numerous targets but both are very problematic and seem to emphasize things which are convenient to the argument they are making at the time but when a new argument comes along it seems like they will apply a different rubric out of convenience.
Obviously Marr is a comic and an entertainer and I try to be aware of his need to service that professionally. And Dawkins has the disadvantage of having a lot of material presented out of order and by people who don’t like him personally. So I don’t get a true idea of his philosophical growth as a human being. Also he’s often very unpleasant or uncivil in his interactions and that always prejudiced an observer.
Nevertheless, I will argue that (say) Dawkins and Hitchens were even-handed in applying a constant value of logical rigor to the CoS and to other religions, that constant value being “ranty obsessive belligerence”.
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