And yet it used to. Weird how that works, almost like they’ve evolved over time, meanwhile Scientology has only existed for the past 50 years.

(picks mic back up) No you can’t. Tithing, zakat, is considered to be a devotional activity second only to prayer.

Public school teachers? The actual faculty of the universities? Firefighters? Police? Those are just off the top of my head. I’m not suggesting that coaches shouldn’t be paid, just that I find it kind of obscene that they’re paid quite so much.

But again, we forget how recently that whole idea of religion came about. Until a few hundred years ago you couldn’t own the books because it was prohibitively expensive, and even if you could you probably couldn’t read them. Your access was based entirely on what a single priest (since you likely didn’t go far from…

I want to reply to this in full but I’m honestly running out of gas at this point, so I’m just going to say check out the history of Cluniac monasteries, a system that came to dominate France largely on the basis that if you paid them or gave them some land, you’d get extra prayers for your soul after you died. …

Yeah that’s the crazy thing to me. It’s not especially offensive, but it also isn’t even remotely funny, at least not without context. Seems like a weird hill to die on.

And I believe if you go back far enough into history you find examples of that in other religions. Maybe you don’t have to pay for direct access to the religion itself, but people who can pay more can afford to own the text in medieval times, people who can pay more can afford indulgences, people who can pay more can…

Well again, I think history helps us here. Until recently, all people would know of their own religion was what their clergy said from the pulpit since they couldn’t read or own the actual texts themselves. So its not a perfect equivalence, but you go back a couple hundred years and it doesn’t look SO different.

I mean yeah, some of that is weird, but you never signed up for a religion where being physically beaten could be an every day part of the praxis, having your confessions recorded on video, et cetera. All religions have done weird, shitty things at some point or another in their histories and most are still doing…

That hasn’t always been the case. Religions had plenty of income even before the modern version of tithing existed.

No, most Scientologists do not do that stuff if you’ve done any research on the subject, and that’s a big part of the problem. Everyone just assumes that all scientologists are these secretive, ultra-wealthy Hollywood types and it just isn’t true, which serves to make the whole exercise that much more tragic.

All this proves is that the equivalence isn’t perfect, but I never claimed it was. One man’s sect is another man’s religion, one man’s religion is another man’s cult. I just wanted to inject a little historical perspective into the conversation about Scientology so that we can have a clear eyed view of what it is…

To me it’s mainly the shit that they’re willing to take in, for example, the SeaOrg for no benefit whatsoever. I mean we’re talking about being practically locked in prisons here.

Islam’s origins are a grafting of native Arabian religions with Abrahamic ritual, texts, and practices, largely engineered by Muhammad and his claims of being a prophet. I think you know what I meant.

I guess my point, boiled down to one sentence, is that what we consider modern religions today, someone would have considered a dangerous cult thousands of years ago and just because scientology was founded in a time when they ought to know better it doesn’t meant that they DO know better.

I said this to someone else: there are people out there who are using electro shock therapy on gay kids, clergy who are sexually abusing children, people blowing themselves up in crowded markets, people who are marrying seventeen women, half of whom are underaged, all of whom are involved in the major religions and…

This is a valid point, and again, I think Scientology is fucking awful. But at the same time, we’re still living in a time with gay conversion therapy, plural marriage in Utah, child abuse by high ranking clergy, etc all by people involved in the major religions who should have the same perspective, no? Nothing and…

Christianity began as a breakaway sect of Judaism (and the Jews in turn considered them to be crazies and extremists) and considered itself to be so until a pretty long time after Jesus died. Islam in its earliest form was practically a private army under Muhammad’s command. The Jews who killed themselves at Masada…

Only because the faith broke apart into sects upon the death of Muhammad. I’m having trouble understanding how you can make that argument when the religion literally had its start on the basis of ONE guy’s prophecies. Again, its cherry picking based on what the religion looks like today, whcih is what I want to get…

I think you’re being a little nitpicky on that score. The point is that cost has been a barrier to religion, or parts of religion (not everyone pays as much for Scientology as Tom Cruise, remember) for a long, long time.