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Eyes Wide Shut ‘Going Clear,’ Lawrence Wright’s Book on Scientology By MICHAEL KINSLEY
Published: January 17, 2013Â Â New York Times
Michael Kinsley is editor at large at The New Republic.
Related
- A Careful Writer Stalks the Truth About Scientology (January 3, 2013)
- Times Topic: Scientology
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/books/review/going-clear-lawrence-wrights-book-on-scientology.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20130118&_r=0&pagewanted=all
GOING CLEAR
Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
By Lawrence Wright
Illustrated. 430 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
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Ben Sklar for The New York Times
Lawrence Wright
Juan Naharro Gimenez/Getty Images
Tom Cruise, a prominent Scientologist.
Chad Batka for The New York Times
The director Paul Haggis, who broke with the church in 2009.
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Comments: 4
In one room there was a poker game going on with Ron among a few others. Martin Greenberg was one of the players. I remember one jibe at Ron mentioning where all his money came from. He replied religion is a great business. I didn't really put 2 and 2 together at the time. But some years later at a World convention in New York I met another friend who mentioned something similar and we ended up talking about it.
I believe that Scientology is a money making venture not really a religion or even a good belief system. I would rather have set down with Reverand Sun Myung Moon.
- John C. Finley timothy44 commenting under this CNN article
Traditional knowledge includes the potential range of the whole of human intelligence , while contemporary rational thought only uses one limited part of his mind and hence his potential knowing and learning . Knowledge is power so it has always been protected and restricted from being made accessible to those who have not been considered prepared to receive it and use it responsibly. Orthodox religions and other institutions allied with states have restricted knowledge to the few in order have power and control throughout history. However there have have also been groups who have transmitted knowledge in service of higher values and the general welfare. This always conforms to the essential nature of religion. Religions will persist while states and religious and other institutions that serve selfish aims fail and civilizations pass away; because the wisdom that traditional thought can transmit and represent contains the means and methods for humans achieving their potential and possible evolution. Many contemporary thinkers have described the abnormal conditions of contemporary civilization and what is required to create a sane and balanced one. This will require the reform and renewal of education in diverse nations and cultures.
Hubbard recognized the situation of contemporary humanity and exploited it for personal gain.
Jung had analyzed the emptiness of mass humanity well:
"In order to free the fiction of the sovereign State--in other words, the whims of the chieftains who manipulate it--from every wholesome restriction, all socio-political movements tending in this direction invariably try to cut the ground from under religion. For, in order to turn and individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything else must be taken from him. Religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience. These do not refer directly to social and physical conditions; they concern far more the individual's psychic attitude. But it is possible to have an attitude to the external conditions of life only when there is a point of reference outside them. Religion gives, or claims to give, such a standpoint, thereby enabling the individual to exercise his judgement and his power of decision. It builds up reserve, as it were, against the obvious and inevitable force of circumstances to which everyone is exposed who lives only in the outer world and has no other ground under his feet except the pavement. If statistical reality is the only one, then that is the sole authority. There is then only one condition, and since no contrary condition exists, judgement and decision are not only superfluous but impossible. Then the individual is bound to be a function of statistics and hence a function of the State or whatever the abstract principle of order may be called."
Carl Gustav Jung
Source: Civilization in Transition ((The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung Volume 10)), Pages: Paragraphs 505-506