Tuesday 26 June 2007

In your face, Tom!

I don't, normally, advocate disparaging people or discriminating against them on the basis of a publicly held religious belief. I will make exceptions for the really kooky belief systems, but on the whole I am a lot more lenient in this regard than, say, Richard Dawkins or the authors of specifically skeptical blogs.

Which leads to a great deal of surprise by people when they discover that I am as militant as Dawkins himself when they try and justify a scientific attitude, legal position or moral belief using their religious beliefs. I have a very live-and-let-live-provided-you-shut-the-fuck-up-about-it attitude. So I will hope that John Travolta dies a long and painful lingering death if the reports of what I consider to be abusive neglect of his apparently autistic son are true, but I will quite happily remain friends with my church-going gay catholic friend, and restrict my abuse of his habits to the fact that he still smokes like a chimney despite his heart attack, steadily worsening diabetes and savagely painful chronic shoulder condition (hope the treatment today goes well, incidentally).

But one of the exceptions I will make is for scientology. There is nothing on earth that will convince me to let scientologists live and let live (especially considering their inability to do the same) in the light of a.) how fucking ridiculous their belief system actually is, b.) their hatred towards the mental health professions and c.) the numerous, questionable but repeated reports of L Ron Hubbard having stated "If you really want to make money, start a religion", when combined with the fact that every time you want to do something in Scientology, you have to pay for it.

So Germany, which refuses scientology religion status and considers it a money-making brainwashing charade of a cult, makes me very happy. And Germany threatening to ban filming of a film because it stars chief nutjob Tom Cruise makes me extremely fucking happy.

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