Gawking at the Scientologists

The Tom Cruise video, is nothing too unusual. “Religious fruitcake makes mad pronouncements about the power of his beliefs” - apart from the particular context, it could have been anyone from the Pope to Paisley to plenty of people you meet each week. Although, you do get the feeling that each of those would call an ambulance if you had an accident.

What’s more interesting is the reaction of the Scientologists, who have been busy yanking the thing of video-hosting sites. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a leading Australian book distributor had already decided not to stock Andrew Morton’s unauthorised biography of Tom Cruise because it suggests that Scientology + Cruise = Severe Creepiness. So, this tactic wasn’t even novel to this week.

However, Gawker has refused to back down to the Scientolgists’ legal threats over their hosting of the video, and has instead printed the correspondence between them and the “authorities on the mind”.

It’s also worth reading the New Yorker’s piece, Chateau Scientology: Inside the Church’s Celebrity Centre:

Outside, a woman in work pants and a beige shirt maneuvered a wheelbarrow over a little bridge leading toward the Garden Pavilion. Earlier, Royce had said that if a non-artist or non-celebrity wanted to pursue Scientology at Celebrity Centre, “they wouldn’t be turned away, but we might recommend a different church.” Now she elaborated. “Here’s the big picture with Scientology and Dianetics,” she said. “The religion is expanding and expanding and there’s a particular public and that public has needs. Celebrities are just a special public. They are. There’s a celebrity public and a doctor public and a dentist public and a plumber public.” She rambled on a bit, before returning to her original point. “The celebrity is a special public,” she said. “We’ve got to help them.”

Be warned, there is little mention of aliens or trapped souls or Xenu in this article, except for this:

Shrouded in secrecy and said to be intended only for upper-level Operating Thetans, it involves a malevolent galactic warrior known as Xenu or Xemu. (When I asked Bob Adams about Xemu, he said, “A small fraction of our scriptures are confidential, and I don’t want to allude to something confidential.”)