RELIGIOUS WANKERS
Note: This piece was slightly censored when first published. In order to avoid giving offence, all bad words have now been put back in.
I think it's great that someone's taking the Church of Scientology to court. They're a really worrying lot, with their 'personality tests' and patently insane belief system. Did you know it was all started by L. Ron Hubbard, a (very bad) science fiction writer? He did it for a joke, or possibly a bet. "If I wanted to I could start a religion and get thousands of followers!" And he did. You have to admire his sheer panache, but it was a pretty damn cynical thing to do. You could say he's only going to get the dimwits who'd fall for some other form of bottled moonshine, and maybe that's true, but it still seems like an immoral way to earn a living.
They tried it on with me once, when I was a teenager. I was in London, working for the summer, and while sheltering from the rain outside a Scientologists' shop front I was invited in to do a 'personality test'. I took it that this was something like an aptitude test, which I quite enjoyed; I didn't have the nous at the time to spot the sinister drift behind the questions. Basically, however you filled in this test the answer was going to be "Oh dear, you're in a bad way. Your personality is wrong on so many fronts. But don't worry, we can help you." And it would have been right of course. Apart from the bit about helping.
If I hadn't been under eighteen and therefore unable to sign the disclaimer at the end, God knows where it could have ended. Ron knows. And what was that disclaimer anyway? To think that I might have signed a contract given to me by a Scientologist... They'd probably own my house now.
They use nasty methods to get into your head, 'assessing' your personality being just a start. Isolating you from non-believers (i.e., anyone with a brain) is the next step. No wonder this woman wants to sue them. I hope she wins. Not just because the Scientologists deserve it, but because of the very interesting precedent it will set.
I mean, where do you draw the line?
A certain organisation, under the pretext of giving me an education, attempted to indoctrinate me into quite a strange and lurid belief system involving dead gods and eternal hellfire. I think we know who we're talking about here. What gave them the right to do that?
Okay, the customs and norms of our society. There's that, yeah. But apart from that, who gave them the right? How dare they indoctrinate me with education before I'm an adult and can make an ... educated choice. I can see I've taken on a tricky one here. But I think it may be possible to get together a class action suit against the Catholic Church. I'm not talking about for abuse or anything topical like that, but for the indoctrination itself. It is, after all, not all healthy. While some of the moral precepts seem sensible and good, others are worryingly bizarre. I mean, they made masturbation a sin. What was that about? Whoever harmed anyone by wanking? It doesn't even say it's wrong in the bible. Masturbation is sometimes referred to as 'the sin of Onan.' But Onan's misdeed, referred to coyly as 'spilling his seed on the ground' was in fact using coitus interruptus as a form of contraception. Oddly, the church actually allows coitus interruptus as a form of contraception. The naughty part was that he did this in order to stop his brother's wife getting pregnant. Which is an odd sin.
Actually his brother was dead. Under Jewish law at this time, a widow had the right to expect sex from the brothers of her late husband. That way she could have a son who would be considered the legal heir of the dead man. Weird, but it worked. And it was very bad of Onan not to give her a baby, you can see that. But he could wank as much as he liked. Who should care?
One can only imagine that the ban came about because of monasticism. Let's face it, if the monks were allowed to do it, they'd probably do little else. But the church has always had this strange tendency to think "Well if it's good for celibate clergy and monastic orders, it must be good for everybody." Though they never quite extended that as far as "We don't have to work to earn a living, so nobody else should either." Funny, that.
When you think about, people would probably sin less if they masturbated more. Especially the really bad sins like rape and sexual abuse. Wank enough and you wouldn't want to do those things. Indeed, you wouldn't be able. Instead of a sin, maybe the church should have made it a sacrament.