brainpanhandler wrote:
Yah, I suppose a better thread title would have been, Mormonism is wack. I don't think I've ever actually known a mormon. I suppose the stuff they believe is not a whole lot wackier than many other religions and not nearly as wacky as scientology.
I guess I'd say that they were roughly comparable, all things told. But except incidentally, that's really a function of practice, not creed. All belief systems are wack, because belief is. So even if it were possible to determine how wack one religion was relative to another by comparing their bizarreness-to-belief ratios -- which I don't think it is, since how bizarre any belief is or isn't is, by definition, a question of belief -- I'm not sure it would be worth the trouble. It's always sufficiently a matter of degree that you'd mostly be looking at other factors in the end anyway. (In order to make a better-or-worse-than judgment call, I mean.)
...
It would be so wrong to say that was what
The Master was about that I practically just want to leave it at that. But that's probably mostly just because there's always something about his movies that makes it almost impossible for me to remember that movies don't have feelings, for some reason.
....
Hm. Well. Even having rid myself of the belief that in some dank, interrogation room somewhere, cruel men with floodlights are shouting: "What is your position on Scientology?" while
The Master cowers on the floor, whimpering, "Oh my God, please stop
asking me that, please!," I'm having a hard enough time articulating the thought in a form I can live with that it probably doesn't reflect well on the integrity of the thought.
But fwiw, I thought that it was more about what belief systems are and how they function than it was about what Scientology is and how it functions.
Incidentally, the main reasons I'm not pleased with that formulation are (a) I wouldn't say it was meaningless that the Cause is modeled on Scientology; and (b)
all of Paul Thomas Anderson's movies are about what belief systems are and how they function to a pretty fucking considerable extent, but exploring questions related to that isn't really the chief concern of any of them.
Except maybe
Magnolia.
I give up.