Tetherd Cow Ahead

Regular readers of The Cow will know that I don’t much go in for blog memes, but also that I do make the occasional exception. Yoo has thrown down the The Atheist Thirteen Gauntlet and so, in light of all the current religious insanity in these parts, and my increasing concern that rationality is being eroded faster than a sandcastle in a tsunami, I’m sitting in The Comfy Chair for this one. Mr Parkinson, let the questioning commence:

Q1. How would you define “atheism”?

Well, as I said in comments on my post God Creates Atheists I’m more inclined toward the Wikipedia definition that says that atheism ‘…as an explicit position, either affirms the nonexistence of gods or rejects theism. When defined more broadly, atheism is the absence of belief in deities, alternatively called nontheism’ than the more conservative Oxford Dictionary interpretation that it is ‘the belief that God does not exist’.

I believe that there is no persuasive evidence for the existence of a God or Gods, and no reason to expect that any such evidence is likely to be forthcoming. The Oxford definition implies the need for proof of a negative, which is scientifically foolish, so I try and avoid falling into that particular pitfall. I hold that the likelihood of there being such a creature as God, especially a personal God that has any interaction with me or cares about what I do, is as remote as the likelihood that there are fairies or angels or unicorns.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?

I was raised in an Anglican Christian church-going family and attended church every Sunday until about the age of 15 or 16, if I remember correctly. I sang in the boy’s choir and was ‘Confirmed’. In my teens I also believed that Tarot Cards could tell the future, that the Earth was being visited by aliens and that homeopathy could make my flu go away.

Q3. How would you describe “Intelligent Design”, using only one word?

Subversive.

Q4. What scientific endeavor really excites you?

The work by mathematicians like Stephen Wolfram and Stuart Kauffman on the theories of emergent complexity and their application to the way we understand the world. I am completely fascinated, perhaps to the point of obsession, with this subject. From following their work (which is substantiated by many other lines of research), I agree with them that is possible that very simple rules underpin all the extraordinary, vivacious, astonishing intricacy of the living universe.

(And if one more evangelizing Christian thinks that posing the question “Aha! Yes, but who made the rules!” is clever, or even pertinent, I may very well turn violent).

Q5. If you could change one thing about the “atheist community”, what would it be and why?

Well, I’ll interpret this question a little more widely than it might be intended, if I may, because my own view is that atheism follows on from adopting the basic tenets of proper critical thinking (although I know there are people who would disagree with me on that). So. If I had the means I would give the JREF and people like them billions of dollars in cold hard cash. Religions, especially the legacy religions like Catholicism and to a certain extent Islam, are cashed up in a manner that makes them extraordinarily powerful. The newer Evangelical religions, and whack-job cults like Scientology, are also rapidly gaining ground. Fear is a tremendous motivator when it comes to reinforcing religious belief, but there can be no doubt that in the Great Gears of the Irrational, money is the lubricant. The ‘atheist community’ (whatever that means), and more generally the skeptical community, both need money for education. Education is the best tool with which to fight superstition.

Q6. If your child came up to you and said “I’m joining the clergy”, what would be your first response?

“Here, my child, I’ve had your robes in the closet waiting for this moment. Welcome to the Church of the Tetherd Cow.”

Oh. Sorry, you meant a conventional religion didn’t you? Why would a child of mine ever want to do that? They’re not insane.

Q7. What’s your favourite theistic argument, and how do you usually refute it?

Favourite? Hmmm. Interesting word. It kind of depends so much on definition – Paul Davies, in his book The Goldilocks Enigma, puts up persuasive arguments for some kind of ‘creator’ of our universe, but it’s such a theoretical, distant and, to my mind, entirely inscrutable entity that it recedes into meaninglessness for any practical consideration. It’s a position that is quite literally irrefutable, and as a consequence, interesting to consider, perhaps, but pointless to debate.

As far as arguments for a personal God go, then the best one that I’ve ever had advanced to me came from a dear personal friend who once studied to be a Catholic priest (and who is still quite devout, despite being a gay man and therefore an abomination in the church in which he worships – go figure). This is how he put it (it was much more skillfully rendered than this, so I apologize to him for making it simplistic for the sake of brevity. I think he would agree that the essence is the same):

If your car breaks down (assuming you know nothing of mechanics) you take it to a mechanic who will have the knowledge to diagnose the problem, the ability to tell you what’s gone wrong, and the skill to fix it. You don’t need to understand much at all about the process to be able to get back in your car and drive away happily. What you do have to do, though, is put your trust in someone with more knowledge and skill than yourself in an area in which your expertise is limited. So, says my friend, we should use that same reasoning when it comes to God. In other words he argues that we should listen to those people who have thought more deeply and studied more widely, when it comes to religion, than perhaps we have done. And trust their judgement.

It’s a cogent point of view. And it’s not entirely easy to refute, if you think about it. But its weakness, in my view rests on a problem that besets religions and all other irrational belief systems at their very core. It is this: human beings are so very easily deceived by themselves and others, especially when the payoff is perceived to be high. For instance, if your mechanic does a bad job, your car starts sputtering and groaning and you take it back for another look. It’s pretty obvious, as is the quality of his work. If it keeps happening, you go find another mechanic. But if your priest does a bad job, and screws up the absolution of your sins, how are you ever going to know? “Just trust me,” says your priest – but unlike the mechanic, he is unable to offer you any graspable proof that he’s doing his job to the best of his ability. Or at all. He could be fooling you – how would you know? Worse, he could be fooling himself – how would either of you know…? Of course, he says that he has studied Aquinas and Paley and Hume and Pascal, and you know he speaks fluent Latin and has kissed the Pope’s ring, but really, he is just a human man and as easily deceived as anyone else. As are all the people he has studied. I think you can see where I’m going with this.

And if you think you’re the kind of person who can’t be fooled, you’re wrong.

Q8. What’s your most “controversial” (as far as general attitudes amongst other atheists goes) viewpoint?

I’m not sure what this question’s getting at. It seems to me that the only ‘controversial’ viewpoint an atheist could really hold (among an atheist community) is a belief in something irrational. I try not to hold such beliefs.

(I do maintain that the Earth is hollow and home to a superior race of lizard-like Supreme Overbeings, but that’s obviously a matter of fact, not an irrational claim).

Q9. Of the “Four Horsemen” (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris) who is your favourite, and why?

I don’t really do ‘favourites’, but Harris plays to my sensibilities best I guess. Dawkins is a little brash, if completely coherent, Dennett rather rarified, but indisputably eloquent, and Hitchens a little too ‘rock star’ but amusing and credible. Personally, I think we should try very hard not be divisive, but instead use our common strengths to allow us to put forward simple and effective arguments in favour of critical thinking.

Q10. If you could convince just one theistic person to abandon their beliefs, who would it be?

I don’t believe it would make a jot of difference to convince just one theistic person. Think about it: if The Pope renounced God tomorrow, they’d simply replace him, no matter what his reasons or how good an argument he put up. Single people do not make religions. Religions are created by a mass need for belonging. We have to supplant ‘religion’ as the fulfillment of that need with a stronger and greater respect for Humanity on its own terms. We need to outgrow superstition and look squarely into the face of truth. It’s a frightening prospect to embrace. I should know – I did it and it scared the crap out of me, and still does.

But one thing it didn’t do is turn me into an axe-wielding hedonistic anarchistic psychopath with loose morals, bankrupt ethics and a coke habit.

I was already one of those.

___________________________________________________________________________

So there you have it. I’m not going to tag anyone with this – if you feel like it would be helpful to wave the flag, feel free to have at it and let us know.

Now that pretty much everything you can imagine has been turned into a movie monster, from the recombined pieces of corpses through cars, atmospheric moisture, dolls, dogs and dinosaurs, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, director of such memorable moving pictures as, well, OK, only The Sixth Sense, has turned, for his latest effort, to that ultimate Creature of the Night: the larch. Yes folks, I’m giving away the plot. In his new film, The Happening, the trees did it.

You will recall that some time ago I wrote that I wasn’t going to get into the habit of reviewing movies here on The Cow unless they were very very special movies…? Well, this is a very very special movie. Oh yes – ‘special’ in the way we used to be told to refer to the kids with learning disabilities in school.

Like Danny Boyle’s execrable Sunshine, Shyamalan’s The Happening commits the Number 1 Crime of science fiction; it is dumb. And, as if it’s trying to get one up on Sunshine, it also commits the Number 1 Crime of movies-in-general: it is boring. This film is dumb and boring. And annoying.† About twenty minutes into The Happening I contemplated emulating one of the film’s pheromone-addled humans and seeing if I could stuff enough popcorn up my nostrils to kill myself.

The story begins with a relatively intriguing stage-setting sequence in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park where a young woman begins babbling incoherently to a friend and then meticulously removes a chopstick-sized hairpin from her hair and inexplicably plunges it into her jugular. Other people around the park seem bewildered and disoriented, and screams echo from somewhere in the distance. Elsewhere in the city, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlburg) a science teacher in a local high school, is enquiring of his class if they’ve ever heard of Bee Colony Collapse Disorder (a mysterious catastrophe that is, in actual fact, devastating honey bee colonies in the USA) and asking the students to put forth some explanations for this baffling phenomenon. The first kid to come up with a suggestion – “Some kind of disease?” – is in all probability right on the money, but this does not deter M. Night, via Marky Mark, from plunging headlong into the ridiculous.* Nope, Colony Collapse Disorder is nothing we could ever imagine: “It is,” pontificates Elliot weightily, “An Unexplained Act of Nature!™”

This scene, so very early in the piece, is an alarm bell that presages a series of inane pop-science clichés and baseless myths that will form the framework of the film. As Elliot strides around his classroom, attempting lamely to be Cool Mr Science Geek, all I could think was “Well, if American science teachers are anything like this, I now completely understand the success of the Intelligent Design movement in US schools”. It is true that Colony Collapse Disorder is perplexing and unexplained, but SO WHAT? Lots of things are perplexing and unexplained. Shyamalan quite obviously wants us to think that in this case it means that science is, somehow, inadequate for the job of providing any interpretation of CCD, and that is w-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o… SPOOKY!!!. Spare me.

It’s a real shame, because the premise of the film – that plants might evolve to react to humans as a threat, and consequently take measures to eliminate them – is actually reasonably original, The Day of the Triffids notwithstanding. It even has some slight basis in the natural world. It’s the kind of thing that a writer with more skill might have made into a decent yarn.

Meanwhile, in the picture’s only truly unsettling sequence, across town a bunch of construction workers start throwing themselves off the top of a building. It appears that the city is suffering some kind of mysterious pandemic (which in the paranoid US lexicon automatically means ‘an attack by terrorists’). It’s about here that the film turns rapidly brainless. And never recovers. News reports inform us that some kind of airborne agent is causing people in the city area to kill themselves. Early warning signs of contamination are confused behaviour and incoherent speech. The teachers in Elliot’s school are told to send their kids home and lay low. Elliot and his teacher pal Julian (John Leguizamo) decide to grab their families and head out of town.

We are next introduced to Elliot’s wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) who appears from the very start to have been affected by the terrorist mind chemical, but as it turns out, that’s just her acting style and/or the witless script. Elliot calls by to collect her and they head off by train with Julian and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) in tow.

The train gets stopped in Nowhereseville USA, and after what seems like an interminable series of explanatory scenes, Elliot & Co manage to hitch a lift with a goofy guy and his wife who are some sort of horticulturalists. Goofy Guy is the first to offer the idea that maybe the source of the mysterious toxin which is affecting the humans comes from trees. On the way to a place that the group has perceived as ‘safe’ (Wha? Did anyone else understand how these fruitcakes decided this?) they stop by Goofy Guy’s greenhouse where we discover that he has a penchant for hotdogs (what the crap was that about?) and that he talks to his plants (and plays music to them).

“They respond to human voices!” he exclaims, rolling his buggy eyes around, “It’s a scientific fact!” And suddenly I see what he’s getting at – by now it is plain that the performances from the plants in this film are considerably less wooden than those of the actors, and this could be readily explained if you care to speculate that maybe M. Night Shyamalan spent more time on the set talking to the trees than to the people. Seriously. The dialogue and the acting in this picture must conspire to be some of the worst to hit the screen since Robot Monster or Plan Nine From Outer Space. Let me give you an example:

Elliot (talking about Goofy Guy’s theory that the trees are responsible): Maybe that guy was right…
Alma: What do you mean?
Elliot: I don’t know.

That’s the only one I can remember verbatim, but there are dozens of these kinds of clunkers. Mark Wahlburg, who is usually quite capable of turning in a reasonable performance, seems to spend most of the picture barely keeping the effect of the mind-altering plant toxins at bay. He stumbles around the countryside (and the film in general), as the ad hoc ‘leader’ of his little group, like a clueless boy scout about to fail his orienteering badge. In one memorable and quite absurd sequence he shouts over and over “Give me a second! Just give me a second! Why don’t you give me a second to think?! Just give me a second!!!”

All of which takes up more than a few seconds of his thinking time, but gives the audience plenty of time to think that they should have gone next door to see Kung Fu Panda. What Marky Mark comes up with in his thinking time is the brilliant strategy that the group should try and outrun the wind. I’m not kidding. This guy teaches science.

I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow of the rest of the story.‡ And it truly is boring. Just imagine a confused road movie with panicked groups of people driving around the bucolic Pennsylvania landscape stumbling alternately across corpses and unhinged-people-who-will-eventually-become-corpses. When one victim throws himself under an industrial lawn-mower I was right there with him.

It’s hard to believe that a film can be quite this awful. With the vacuous substitution of scene changes and spectacle (in the form of shock-tactic suicides) for plot, and mawkish sentimentality for emotion, the movie plays to the dimmest of the dim. It mixes up scientific fact and the truth about natural events with hokum and nonsense in a mad mélange of glib throwaway hippie philosophy and post Cold War paranoid hysteria. It’s like Walt Whitman rewrote The Day of the Triffids after watching What the Bleep Do We Know? On crack. And, inexcusably these days for a science fiction film, it perpetuates the idea that scientists are either mad or bumbling, and that science itself is clueless and ineffectual. Or evil. These things are bad enough, but unbelievably, it’s even worse than just that. At times during the film Shyamalan seems not to know whether he is making a sci-fi thriller or a comedy. A bizarre scene with Elliot talking to a house plant is played, confusingly, first for tension then for laughs. In the cinema where I saw The Happening, the audience was laughing at, not with. Portmanteaus of people committing suicide in bizarre ways (a guy offering his limbs to lions in the zoo; the man lying in front of the lawn mower) are so blackly humourous that it’s hard to believe Shyamalan was oblivious to the effect they might have on the audience. If he was aware of this, one is forced to ask the question: “Why? What the heck is he getting at?” Sequences which I presume are intended to be symbolic and ‘meaningful’ (the Exhibition home with its fake sushi plates and prop wine glasses; the solitary ‘Earth Mother’ in her isolated homestead; the lame horror feint involving a rope-swing on a creaky branch) are flat and stupid and go nowhere.††

And the obligatory Shyamalan ‘twist’ ending, so obvious and soporific that it would have been rejected from the lamest episode of The Twilight Zone, is made even worse by ringing loud with a cinematic “Tsk tsk tsk: you humans don’t know nuthin’!”

As I said at the outset, M.Night Shyamalan’s The Happening is a movie with learning disabilities; it is to the science fiction oeuvre what Basil Fawlty is to the hospitality industry: an uncoordinated, unlikeable, nonsensical caricature that is a peerless example of what not to do if you at all concerned about pleasing your customers.

Did I mention it was dumb?

Right.

___________________________________________________________________________

*”Good theory Timmy,” says Marky Mark, metaphorically tousling the kid’s hair, “But it doesn’t explain why it’s happening everywhere at once!” No it doesn’t. That’s because, in all likelihood, Colony Collapse Disorder had already spread widely before it was noticed. It’s distinctly probable that it’s happening ‘everywhere at once’ in the same way as, say, AIDS is happening everywhere at once if you examine it right now. It does not mean that it didn’t start somewhere. Read about CCD here and get some understanding of how science is actually approaching this problem. (One is forced to conjecture that for a person writing about a phenomenon of nature and science and offering it up dressed in the robes of plausibility, M. Night Shyamalan was actually not terribly concerned with those pesky things like facts…)

†The film is peppered with scenes of people committing suicide in graphic and novel ways. It is the filmic equivalent of someone poking you every time you’re just about to doze off to a nice comfy sleep.

‡And there are SO many risible scenes to choose from: such as when Elliot confronts the train guards about why they’ve stopped in some remote town:

††If you want to see a movie about what an inexplicable event like this would be really like if it happened, try Michael Haneke’s Wolfzeit (The Time of the Wolf). I guarantee you won’t leave that film laughing.

___________________________________________________________________________

About a quarter of Australia’s population is self-declared as Christian Catholic.* Over the last few decades, the younger part of the population has been demonstrating a slow inclination to drift away from the conventional Christian Church (and indeed, organized religion altogether) but in about 20 days time in Sydney, the Catholic Church will attempt to reddress that trend by exerting its influence over the waning faith of the young people of Australia and holding an event that they are calling (some might say duplicitously) World ‘Youth’ Day.

Tourism New South Wales’s ‘Sydney’ page breathlessly gushes:

New South Wales looks forward to welcoming young people for World Youth Day 2008, the biggest event to be held in Australia, ever.

Poster and radio advertising around Sydney is urging people who are ‘not involved’ with World Youth Day to take a holiday or stay off the roads. The NSW Government is spending a small fortune on the event and the Catholic Church, notably the oleaginous and unpalatable Cardinal George Pell, is of course smirking all over the media.

I’m not entirely sure why, but if it is true that this is ‘the biggest event to be held in Australia, ever’† this makes me incredibly depressed. I intended to make this post a kind of jocular look at a silly phenomenon, in keeping with The Pope’s Cologne and Mother Teresa’s Breath Mist, but you know, I just don’t find it funny that at the beginning of the 21st Century, a two-thousand year old superstitious belief system has enough currency (metaphorically, practically and politically) to bring an entire modern city to a standstill. It’s particularly disheartening that this exercise is nominally aimed at young people – it’s hard not to be cynical about such things.

I often hear the argument, when it comes to religion, that it does no harm, and people should be able to make up their own minds about what they believe. While I disagree strongly that religion does no harm, I certainly approve of the concept that a person should be able to make up their own mind about it – with the caveat that they should also be given the tools to make their decision an informed one. This particularly applies to the young.

The Catholic Church has never been particularly squeamish about converting non-believers so I don’t expect that an event masquerading as Australia’s Biggest Sleepover is going to even register a blip on their moral radar, but in my opinion this is a sneaky, disingenuous ruse to attempt to lever more religious thought into a country that has been until recently making a slow but encouraging trek toward secularism (inherited religions notwithstanding).

I put this thought to you Cardinal Pell and Pope Benedict: if you’re really confident that God will come through with the goods, and you are morally committed to the betterment of young people as you claim, concentrate your efforts on giving them a proper education and the ability to make up their minds based on what we know to be true instead of attempting to indoctrinate them with intangible, absurd mythology while they are still impressionable. Give them the data and the brain tools and let them decide, when they come of age, whether or not to believe in a two-millennium-old fairy tale.

Surely, if you are right, and God really does exist, then you have nothing at all to be afraid of.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Statistics from the 2006 Australian census.

†I guess it depends on your definitions of ‘biggest’, ‘event’ and ‘ever’…

___________________________________________________________________________

Whilst browsing the Rogues Gallery recently, I learned of a newly available product that I know is going to greatly interest all Cow readers: Roland-Deese Productions’ Ghost In A Bottle.

Yes, Cowpokes, for forking out a mere $US20.00 you too can have a bottle containing a ‘ghost’ ‘captured from a reported haunted establishment, (house, hotel, ship, cemetery, etc), by our Ghost Hunters’.

“But Reverend,” I hear you cry, “There are so many crooks, thieves and swindlers out in the wide world! How can I be sure that I’m getting a real ghost in my bottle?! What’s to stop Roland-Deese Productions from selling me some cheap empty bottle and merely saying there’s a ghost in it?”

Well, Cowmrades, you can be sure you’re getting the Real Deal because along with your bottle-imprisoned-ghost you get a ‘Ghost Certificate’ which is signed by the Ghost Hunter that has ‘captured’ the ghost! In addition, the bottle (‘Sealed for Your Protection*: WE CANNOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY MISFORTUNE TO BEFALL YOU SHOULD YOU TAKE POSSESSION OF THIS OBJECT’) comes with a List of Dire Warnings of Hideous Things that Might Happen if you open your bottle, like, oh, ‘your car keys might go missing…’ or ‘you might smell an unfamiliar cologne or perfume…’. Roland-Deese Productions would surely not just make things like that up!

Indeed, as Murray, of Apple Valley, California says in the testimonials:

Just like your instructions advised, I beleive I have seen all signs of my ghost. I’m thinking of moving out of my apartment, it’s now haunted. The Ghost Bottle is a very entertaining novelty!

It would appear that Murray’s ghost isn’t so much haunting him out of his apartment, as entertaining him out! One can only speculate as to whose spirit he got.

Not only might something from the long list of Warnings happen to you, should you open your Ghost Bottle, but Roland-Deese further advises that ‘You may experience other Ghostly situations not stated above.’ I guess that would cover:

• Hideous face deformation and body contortions
• Having your soul sucked out through your mouth
• Attacks by swarms of flies
• The desire to throw yourself out a thirteenth floor window
• Getting sucked into the TV

…and all the other things that ghosts really† do that the purveyors of the Ghost Bottles are not keen to detail in their list, for some reason. Of course, Roland-Deese Productions Ghost Hunters are professionals and therefore in no danger themselves when they bottle their wraiths:

There is a special technology that takes place when our Ghost Hunting professionals capture the Ghosts.

That special technology is of course called Bullshit™ and is used extensively throughout the world of ‘psychic’ commerce.

All that being said, faithful Acowlytes, it will probably come as no surprise to you that agents‡ for TCA Enterprises, ever on the lookout for a new marketing opportunity, have come up with an even better idea than a Ghost in Bottle: a Ghost SHIP in a Bottle!

(Sorry folks. No matter how hard I try, I simply can’t present you with artwork as terrible as the Ghost in a Bottle site)

Yes, that’s right! Selected readers of Tetherd Cow Ahead are eligible†† for their very own highly collectible Fantom Frigate in a Flagon! Using genuine naval ectoplasm,‡‡ TCA artisans have lovingly crafted exact replicas of your favourite mystery ships, including the Andrea Doria, the Octavius, the Flying Dutchman and the Mary Celeste, had them cursed by Certified African Witchdoctors** and then stuck in a jar. Of course, that’s exactly where you should leave them, because, should you open your Fantom Frigate Flagon, you may experience:

• Flooded drains
• Shortages of rum in the liquor cabinet
• ‘Mysterious’ parrot droppings around the house
• Unexplained attacks of scurvy
• Voices singing sea-shanties in another room
• Huge splintered wooden holes in your walls
• ‘Salty’ tasting coffee
• Other things not stated above that might be associated with ghost ships, or the sea, or pirates, or water, or films about ghost ships, or salt beef, or smuggling, or gold doubloons, or films about water, or wooden legs, or Moby Dick, or the moon on a cloudy night. Etc.

And remember, when you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and a water-logged, rag-draped skeleton leaps out of your bathtub and lunges at you with a rusty sabre – make sure you have a good ol’ chuckle. After all, it’s just entertainment…

___________________________________________________________________________

*The bottle is sealed with wax, for Pete’s sake. What kind of third-rate spook is going to let a little glob of red wax get in the way of eating your brains?

†They don’t really do those things. Ghosts don’t exist. In case you were, like, taking me seriously or anything.

‡I shamelessly stole this idea from Jim Shaver over at Rogues Gallery, Thanks Jim!

††Bribes Conditions apply.

‡‡Spiritualism joke.

**From Nigeria. It wasn’t at all difficult to find experts there in the ‘special technology’ that Roland-Deese uses.

★A special thanks to Ralph Elzholz at Virtual Room for the Schooner model.

___________________________________________________________________________

I keep promising to turn the scathing bovine eye of The Cow onto Scientology at some point but whenever attempt to pick up my quill on that particular subject my brain just turns to custard. It should be just like shooting fish in a barrel, but heck, it’s such a small barrel and there are so many big fish and if I wanted to do something futile and time-wasting I could just go play another level of BioShock and have a LOT more fun …

Anyways, Atlas Cerise brings my attention to this story in the Guardian about some recent antics involving the Church* of Scientology. To synopsize: a young man picketing the CoS headquarters in London as part of a peaceful demonstration by the anti-Scientology group Anonymous was arrested and is facing prosecution for calling Scientology a ‘cult’.

Let me make it quite clear what’s happening here, because it’s way more scary than the usual dumbo stuff that the Scientologists themselves manage to concoct: the CoS itself is not bringing this accusation against the teenager responsible; it’s the City of London Police who have charged the boy. He was told by an officer that the word ‘cult’ was ‘abusive and insulting’ and that he could not carry a placard which read ‘Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.’

This is how the Ask Oxford online dictionary defines the word ‘cult’:

cult • noun 1 a system of religious worship directed towards a particular figure or object. 2 a small religious group regarded as strange or as imposing excessive control over members. 3 something popular or fashionable among a particular section of society.

Hands up who thinks the Bill are going to pull this one off?

What’s deeply worrying is that the best proper accusation that the UK Law can bring against this boy would appear to be that he was airing an opinion. If that kind of thing is encouraged, then Scientologists and all the other loonies like them will get a free ticket to legitimacy.

If you’re not scared about that, you should be.

UPDATE: Well, I don’t know why it surprises me to find out† that, in fact, it seems that the CoS was involved in the above incident. Not directly, but certainly implicitly. It turns out that for some time now the City of London Police have been, shall we say, receptive to offers of entertainment and donations from L. Ron’s flock. It appears that the laws under which the young man I mentioned above were detained are almost never actually acted upon, except, perhaps when you have friends in the right places.

Let there be no mistake: Dotty belief combined with money & influence always equals setbacks for the human species. Just look at the havoc the Catholic Church has managed in its time.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Even though I am in no way religiously inclined, something really grates on me having to refer to these loons as a ‘church’. They are no more a church than the entire fandom of Dungeons & Dragons is a church, only a lot less rooted in reality.

†Thanks to the Skeptical Rogues.

___________________________________________________________________________

It seems that somehow* despite my best efforts to the avoid him, Peter Popoff has tracked me down to my new address. So after a brief respite, I am again receiving his pearls of wisdom.† And his obsession with me, and the need to reveal the fluctuations of his every bodily function has, quite incredibly, become even worse.

So now it’s 2.00 am bowel rumblings in addition to his previously mentioned 5.30 am flowings. Show of hands: who thinks it’s demonic forces? OK, and who thinks it’s last night’s curry? Yeah, that’s what I figured. Seriously, getting a complete rundown of the biology of this guy’s early morning hours makes me feel extremely queasy.

Mysteriously, with this latest epistle Prophet Pete has included three coloured rubber bands.

I’m sure there is some hare-brained reason for this, but I gotta tell you people, this time the usual infinity-pages-long incoherent letter went straight to the trash. I’ve recently been reading‡ the pdfs of the Scientology Operating Thetan Levels I – VIII on Wikileaks and I’ve finally discovered that there’s a point beyond which** the human brain completely rejects the addition of any further ludicrous gibberish. Trying to read this junk is a lot like taking Valium: you know there’s stuff going on, but you simply don’t care. Only Valium is rather more pleasant.

My fuse for the tolerance of religious idiocy is becoming increasingly short lately, possibly in direct proportion to the escalating exposure these yo-yos seem to be getting and the seemingly almost endless capacity for people to be swindled by the most extraordinarily daft nonsense. I mean, I knew Scientology was brainless, but folks, the scrawlings of L. Ron make the ramblings of Prophet Pete look like Bertrand Russell.

With so many people evidently believing all this vapid twaddle, I suddenly see myself finding uses for last post’s gadgetry.

___________________________________________________________________________

*As if I didn’t know. But be warned: a secret alias will be no protection and since I have your address too, Prophet Pete might also be warming your bowels heart a little in the months to come.

†Well, pearls not so much. Pearls are dainty and pretty and subtly lustrous gems. If we were picking an analogy to some form of organically-produced petrified matter to describe Prophet Pete’s wisdom, a 4 kilo coprolite would be a better fit.

‡I say ‘reading’ with quite some scorn. The OT material, the Scientology ‘Bible’ as some have said, is simply utterly incomprehensible. And not incomprehensible in the way that, oh, Stephen Hawking’s writing about astrophysics is, where you know there’s some deep meaning going on there but your brain just doesn’t have the neuron power to grasp it. This is more the kind of incomprehensible you get where you’re wondering, between when you hit your thumb with a hammer and when the pain strikes, how the hell you were stupid enough to do that.

**It happened about one third the way down page one, if you anyone was curious.

___________________________________________________________________________