Critical Q&A

The weekly show where I answer viewer questions based on what is left for me in the comments section of my Q&A videos or sent to me by email at AskChrisShelton@gmail.com. This week, the questions I take up are:

(1) It would be interesting to hear a discussion of TR-L, shore stories, safe pointing and such. Precept #7 in Hubbard’s re-definition of ethics – The Way to Happiness – seems awfully convenient: “Seek to live with the truth.” Lots of wiggle room there, even for a pathological liar such as Hubbard. Speaking of WTH, another one of my favorites is #11: Do not harm a person of good will. Which is to say: If you define them to be “not of good will,” harm away as you see fit!

(2) This week you said “I can exchange with you guys”. Do you realize you were using Scientology vocabulary? Non-Scios would rarely use the word “exchange with” to describe offering products for sale. Amazon, for instance, doesn’t “exchange with” its customers. But Scientology does.

(3) When I first came across Scientology I knew instinctively it was a scam when I saw the pictures of L. Ron Hubbard. You know the silly pictures of him in the captain hats, the one with the ascot as he looks into the sky or the one where he poses with the quill feather pen at a desk. I could see it was a silly con without knowing about Xenu or the ton of other nonsense. I hate to question your view of this but what was your thoughts on these pictures as you entered and grew in your career in the Sea Org? I can’t imagine doing all the work you did for years for pennies an hour and then standing in front of those portraits, paintings and sculptures and yelling “Hip Hip Hooray!” to this ridiculous man pretending to be an admiral with his sailor hats and ascots.

(4) There is a policy about how Hubbard’s words are not to be changed, modified, embellished or restated in any way. I ran afoul of this once when I came across something he wrote (I forget exactly what it was) that was a direct restatement of “form follows function.” When I pointed this out to a course super, saying that it was an old engineering maxim, she took me to task (and ethics) saying something about how, if LRH said a thing he meant THAT THING, and not a restatement of it. Hmmm.
So my question is, given that policy dictates no embellishment, modification, change or restatement, how is it that DMSMH & etc can be translated to Cyrillic, Kanju, Spanish, Basque, several dialects of French, Portuguese and so on, yet keep not only the meaning but also the exact way it was originally stated?

(5) As a jazz musician myself I”m infuriated by pianist Chick Corea, who’s been a long time poster boy for the Church. Indisputably, he’s one of the giants in the jazz world, a long-respected and admired musician. It bugs me that while Tom Cruise and John Travolta have been exposed by the media, Chick Corea seems to slip in under the radar. The jazz world seems to give him a free pass because he’s such a great artist – or maybe most musicians don’t really know just how evil CO$ really is. In any case, I’d welcome your comments on Mr. Corea.

(6) Do you think that Oprah Winfrey is making things worse by promoting people like Deepak Chopra, John Edward and others like them?

(7) Re OT phenomena: I have frequently observed that certain sports teams do better when I watch them, and others do better when I don’t watch them. This was so common that I actually had friends beg me not to watch a game, or ask me a day after a game if I had the audacity to start watching in the middle of the 3d quarter when their team blew a lead. Now, you and I know that my watching TV does not affect a sporting event but if I were a Scientologist, I would credit this as OT phenomena, wouldn’t I?

(8) What is the significance of the numbers on the Tone Scale (“Tone 40”, “1.1” etc…) Are they just arbitrary numbers, or are you supposed to be able to measure them, e.g. on a meter?

The post Critical Q&A #78 appeared first on Chris Shelton - Critical Thinker at Large.