Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

You should watch Going Clear. I'm critical of ~all religions, but Scientology really has achieved a unique mixture of scale and awfulness.

View on HN

>Scientology really has achieved a unique mixture of scale and awfulness.

This is what bothers me about criticism of Scientology. How many wars have been fought in its name? How many nations conquered and people enslaved? I'm an atheist but of all the lousy things done in the name of religions Scientology doesn't even make the top five.

Scientology started in 1950's. So lets limit ourselves to things that happened after that.

So answer your own question: "How many wars have been fought in its name? How many nations conquered and people enslaved?" for other religions? (People organizing along existing religions groupings during a war doesn't count.)

It's certainly not many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_war#Modern_period Seems like: Sudan, Yugoslav, Lebanon is debatable. Could maybe add ISIL.

On the other hand Scientologists have enslaved 5,000 to 10,000 today, right now.

The religious right-wing who have been driving the USA's criminal wars on Islam across the Middle-East surely also need to be factored into your evaluation...

We did not go to war with the desert because of religion, but rather much more boring and banal evils like "It will make me more likely to win the next election" and "it will be good for profits" and "my daddy was attacked by this guy"

I don't believe this - I think that the US' oligarchic/military-industrial classes are very definitely motivated by their religious beliefs, and this gives them the false moral altitude they require to blatantly, with impunity, commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and massive violations of human rights - in the name of their One True God™ ..

See also: the slavish devotion to maintaining the Palestinian peoples' suffering. A people deemed inferior by religious institutions which have their grasp deep, deep within the American ruling classes' psyche ..

I don’t think the complaint is that it’s engaged in the worst acts religion has ever committed. But it’s doing awful things continuously well under the “purview” of modern US law.

Lots of awful acts happen all over the world, but most of them are not occurring with impunity under functional legal regimes.

Scientology's not in the top five total, but on a per-capita basis it may be winning for number of people enslaved, although it's very difficult to get solid numbers. There are under 50,000 scientologists, and their "Sea Org" members who signed "billion year contracts" may have had as many as 5,000 people, so that's perhaps one slave for every 10 scientologists. But, again, reliable numbers are hard, so that estimate could easily be off by an order of magnitude.

You're comparing religions that have existed for thousands of years to ones that have existed for tens of years. I don't think they're exactly comparable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com