Scientologists at War

Ha, the Hollywood elite at Sundance have a documentary on Scientology and it's causing divide by zero errors. Coming to HBO soon!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/26/going-clear-scientology-movie_n_6546316.html
After Alex Gibney's new documentary, "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief," debuted to a standing ovation at this year's Sundance Film Festival, representatives for the Church of Scientology slammed the film as "false information."
...As for the film itself, critics were enamored with Gibney's work. "Going Clear" was hailed as "jaw-dropping" and a "game changer." It will air on HBO in March. "We have probably 160 lawyers [looking at the film]," HBO’s president of documentary films, Sheila Nevins, told The Hollywood Reporter in December.
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Thruth said:
There are all kinds of religious nuts, Islam does not hold the monopoly on that. But they are the only religion, it seems to me, wanting to drag western society down to their goatherd level while forgetting what Arab society has done for the world (albeit a very long long time ago)

It would be like Christians wanting to return to the dark ages where they fucked up science and civilization that had come before.
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So, the Christians "fucked up science and civilization that had come before"? My heavens, here I have a Ph. D. in ancient history, with a dissertation in Roman history, to be more precise, and I never knew that. The fact is, the ancient world was very static scientifically and technologically. A lot of the "science" in Aristotle, despite his genius, is absolute crap. Pliny, writing 400 years later, was at least as bad, if not worse. Speaking of the Western Empire, which fell to the Germanic invaders in the 5th century, if it hadn't been for the efforts of the monks, a great deal more, probably all, the legacy of Latin civilization would have been destroyed.

This leads to an interesting point: If the pagans had prevailed and Christianity had remained an oppressed minority religion, would Islam have arisen? Islam in many ways is nothing more than a deviant form of Christianity. For example, if you look at the literature of the Islamic State, they are very big on the Second Coming of Jesus.
 
Good points. Certainly there was a lot of bunk in terms of scientific and medical thought. But there were also surgical techniques that had been developed - crude that it may be by today's standards - that were turned away from because of the Church. In fact, surgical techniques invented by Muslim medical types.

Monks were the learned ones and in many cases did surgical procedures or even removed teeth. Proclamations forbade them from doing any kind of surgical intervention where bloodletting was involved; leaches and beyond. It was the barbers who, having seen these procedures, took over this role creating the guild of barber surgeons. This morphed to surgeons and dentists
 
Any body of "knowledge" that claims to explain the world thru faith is bound to disrupt scientific development out of fear it may contradict the fantasy.
 
Oh puhleeze, we're pretending that science isn't riddled by it's own tenets and orthodoxies? Need I point out how the Vatican realized that Galileo's circular orbits didn't line up with known observation?

Politics getting into science is a bigger bung than anything.
 
Thruth said:
Good points. Certainly there was a lot of bunk in terms of scientific and medical thought. But there were also surgical techniques that had been developed - crude that it may be by today's standards - that were turned away from because of the Church. In fact, surgical techniques invented by Muslim medical types.

Monks were the learned ones and in many cases did surgical procedures or even removed teeth. Proclamations forbade them from doing any kind of surgical intervention where bloodletting was involved; leaches and beyond. It was the barbers who, having seen these procedures, took over this role creating the guild of barber surgeons. This morphed to surgeons and dentists
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When it comes to medicine in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World, let's give the Jews a lot of credit. They were widely esteemed as the best physicians of their day and held this eminence for centuries. They were also esteemed and valued in the Moslem world, the best example being Maimonides.

The bottom line is that down to the 19th century all medical practice was pretty crude.

On the matter of the decline of medical skills in the Christian West, let us bear in mind that nearly all the medical literature in the classical period was in Greek, in authors like Galen and Hippocrates. When the knowledge of Greek was lost, so too was the ability to consult this literature. This really didn't have anything to do with religion.
 
Jan Libourel said:
When it comes to medicine in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World, let's give the Jews a lot of credit. They were widely esteemed as the best physicians of their day and held this eminence for centuries. They were also esteemed and valued in the Moslem world, the best example being Maimonides.

The bottom line is that down to the 19th century all medical practice was pretty crude.
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Agreed.
 
Jan Libourel said:
When it comes to medicine in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World, let's give the Jews a lot of credit. They were widely esteemed as the best physicians of their day and held this eminence for centuries. They were also esteemed and valued in the Moslem world, the best example being Maimonides.

The bottom line is that down to the 19th century all medical practice was pretty crude.

On the matter of the decline of medical skills in the Christian West, let us bear in mind that nearly all the medical literature in the classical period was in Greek, in authors like Galen and Hippocrates. When the knowledge of Greek was lost, so too was the ability to consult this literature. This really didn't have anything to do with religion.
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....but superseding a secular path with a religious one holds back discovery
 
Russell Street said:
Oh puhleeze, we're pretending that science isn't riddled by it's own tenets and orthodoxies? Need I point out how the Vatican realized that Galileo's circular orbits didn't line up with known observation?

Politics getting into science is a bigger bung than anything.
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:mog:

The Vatican is home base for a religion. It's not a political party, though the esoteric argument can be made.
 
Russell Street said:
Oh puhleeze, we're pretending that science isn't riddled by it's own tenets and orthodoxies? Need I point out how the Vatican realized that Galileo's circular orbits didn't line up with known observation?

Politics getting into science is a bigger bung than anything.
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I've been getting into the whole "invasive species" debate. Holy shit is some of the "science" involved fucking terrible. Like the UN quotes on their page that invasive species cost $1.3 trillion dollars per year. Yet when you drill down, it's based on an extrapolation of one country, and the one country's figures are complete bullshit. (The largest dollar amount is from arguing the brown rat eats billions of dollars in rice per year, yet the brown rat may be native and completely ignoring the almost certainty that the black rat would be eating similar quantities of rice).

Too many people just cut-and-paste shit without bothering to examine it critically.
 
fucking brown rats! I knew it. Rice-eating motherfuckers!

There are lies, damn lies & statistics
 
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