I know a guy who is confident that he is Napoleon. Another who knows where Elvis is living. What we are looking at with Scientologists is the confidence of the ignorant. Blessed are the blinkered.
My point is that confidence, like everything else, can be negative and it can enable people to do silly or horrible things. The fact Cruise is "confident" doesn't somehow absolve him or his silly faith from their disreputable essence. And as I suggested earlier, one imagines it's much easier to be confident when they have tens of millions of dollars in the bank...
Talk to any diehard Christian and you will hear the same tone and message of helping others (and often, the same wailing against those who oppress them). Why is is only "perverse zealotry" when Tom Cruise does it? He's proud of his religion and believes in it (and believes it gives him strength). Scientologists have some wacky, wacky beliefs, imo, but none of them came up in that clip. What I saw there was not much different in urgency or tone than what I'd expect of an evangelical Christian discussing his faith with other evangelical Christians. There were a few Scientology buzzwords that made it sound strange...but Christians have buzzwords too, it's just that I happen to be more familiar (and comfortable) with theirs. The only really bad quotes were (i) the "and you know you're the only one who can help" one and (ii) won't it be great when SPs are just in history books. Quote (i) could well be a misstatement, and sounds like it. I'm sure Cruise is aware that non-Scientologist EMTs could also be of help, but he was likely speaking a bit figuratively. Quote (ii) I don't know what he meant. The end of SP's might not mean that everyone is a Scientologist. If a Jewish person told me he looked forward to the days when antisemitism was confined to the history books, I doubt I'd think he was a zealot who wanted the whole world converted to Judaism.
Excellent points Panda. Tom is nutty but it's hard to ignore the hypocrisy. The sunday morning tv shows with evangelists are worse than this clip.
First, another zany clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVL4EdI_gU It isn't. I'm against perverse zealotry no matter what it's form is, but first you need to demonstrate "diehard" Christians are perverse zealots. For the sake of argument, I'm willing to admit diehards of any brand are pretty similar, but even so, one has to assess the effects of their behavior. Is counseling people in Islam, Buddism or Christianity the same as counseling them in Scientology? I don't think it is — here's why (I assume you missed this the first time I wrote it): "While I am no big believer in faith, I cannot ignore the reality of nuance and lump all faiths together the way someone like Christopher Hitchens does. All regions, to be sure, have strange and questionable teachings that challenge rational thought. But that does not mean they are all equally zany, if one chooses to disbelieve in them all. Some seem more rational than others. Or at least some seem less likely to be false than others. As is the case with Mormonism, there are core tenets in the founding of Scientology and core beliefs that are much easier to dismiss than events that may or may not have happened several thousand years ago. Nobody can prove or disprove the Red Sea parted, for example, but it's been proven that some of Smith's translations of Egyptian papyrus that were used to craft the Book of Mormon are completely erroneous. Thus, belief in the papyrus is patently more absurd than belief in the more nebulous incidents in the bible, which conveniently cannot be investigated (this is where "faith" comes in, some would say)." To which I would add, scientology, with its fraudulent E-meter is another fine example of easily debunked malarky masquerading as faith... And here you seem to be admitting to the context I previously accused you of ignoring. One can speak rationally about irrational things, as the clip shows. Given that you seem to have problems with scientology, the video should confirm for you, as it does for me, how problamtic its adherents really are. In other words, use your outside knowledge here, and quit ignoring the bigger picture... I also think dubbing scientology a religion is somewhat problematic. There is no diety in Scientology, but I am aware religions can be little more than belief systems. Cults, according to my dictionary, display devoted attachement to an individual, and that would seem to fit the case here, what with Scientology's obession with a hack science fiction writer...
