Re: Skirmish over YT video of Mike Rinder black PRing Gerry Armstrong and Graham Berr
First, arguably the vast majority of people on the planet are not terribly interested in waging a war against scientology.
Mark A. Baker
Well, I would have to say that MOST people, if given honest and accurate information about the
Church of Scientology, would feel some distaste and disgust at how it does what it does, while lying and deceiving at every step along the way.
"War against scientology". What does that even mean? The
subject of Scientology? A local
church of Scientology? A
book about Scientology? A
staff member at some
mission of Scientology?
There is no such thing as "scientology" without some
qualifier - at least not as anything other than some VERY vague abstract IDEA.
Point to "scientology". It can't be done because there is no such thing. Not outside the imagination of some person's mind.
Without some sort of a qualifier, it does not exist in the physical universe! Not anywhere.
Just as you cannot point to a "christianity". It is a horrendously ABSTRACT idea, doesn't actually exist anywhere "out there", and people who talk and wallow in these lofty mental high-level generalizations are victims of their own "think".
There might be a "member" of some branch of Christianity. Or a
ritual of Christianity. Or, a
child born into some version of Christianity. But, the word "Christianity" is always and only a mental creation - an abstract idea.
The same with "scientology".
Now Hubbard tried to define and make "scientology" exist as somethig other than an
abstract idea, but that was ONLY trickery.
From
Wikipedia on Abstraction:
"Thinking in abstractions is considered to be one of the key traits in modern human behaviour, which is believed to have developed between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, probably before the modern human exodus from Africa. Its development is likely to have been closely connected with the development of human language, which (whether spoken or written) appears to both involve and facilitate abstract thinking."
"In philosophical terminology, abstraction is the thought process wherein ideas[3] are distanced from objects."
"Abstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal ("real" or "concrete") concepts, first principles, or other methods. "An abstraction" is the product of this process – a concept that acts as a super-categorical noun for all subordinate concepts, and connects any related concepts as a group, field, or category.
"Abstractions may be formed by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to the more general idea of a ball retains only the information on general ball attributes and behavior, eliminating the other characteristics of that particular ball."