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Prioryman: The Background and synopsis says "an internal letter in which he suggests that Scientology should pursue religious status for business reasons" ok this is taken from a reference, but that's a Washington Post review of a legal judgement. The actual passage in the book, is quite different from this person's opinion of what they want it to read. BFM page 179 quotes from a letter which does talk about business, yes, if you read the book it was just after several organisations had become insolvent, but then LRH says "I await your reaction on the religion angle.. In my opinion, we couldn't get worse public opinion than we have had or have less customers with what we have to sell" Note this does not suggest that becoming a religion would be good for business, it says things would be no worse than they are.
To get a little technical here, in Germany "the Federal Supreme Administrative Court decided that an association does not maintain a commercial business operation, if it offers services to its members in the realization of its idealistic purpose" Mission Neue Bruecke Stuttgart vs State of Baden-Wuerttemberg http://www.cesnur.org/testi/stuttgart_en.htm
You want to use original source as much as possible, therefore the book takes priority over opinions about the book three times removed from it in the Washington Post. And what better than the source, LRH, what he actually said in the letter referred to.
The comment about "his daughter" doesn't clarify the relationship, so I put that in. Its not opinion from me, its from the book.
Clearly the sources are all disaffected Scientologists so that bias is in the book and there is a passage where he quotes two sources about the same event and they said diametrically different things about LRH at the time.
BFM is quite an interesting book to a Scientologist who has sufficient grounding in the subject. Of course LRH was a man and had frailities. But the book puts in gratuitous vicious caracatures and in places is plainly wrong - example, he says LRH said he was Cecil Rhodes in a previous life but he didn't know Cecil Rhodes was a homosexual. Fact, I checked that out and the only known facts are that Rhodes did not marry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes#Sexuality This is an example of the hatchet job that Miller does from time to time through the book. Drg55 ( talk) 10:17, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
According to:
Bare-Faced Messiah is out of print now, but this argument remains no less strong. That is why I have reproduced the book on the Web, with Mr Miller's permission; not because I have any desire to damage the Church of Scientology but because I believe strongly that it is in the public interest to make his well-researched book available to a wider audience. Here for the first time, then, is an electronic version of Bare-Faced Messiah.
Cirt ( talk) 05:41, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
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Reviewer: Mark Arsten ( talk · contribs) 16:30, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
I wrote an early version of this article, which was quite good. No, let me not pretend to be modest. It was astoundingly good. My opinion of the current version is that it is too prolix. It's okay, though. Thanks for the hard work, everybody. -- TS 02:11, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
User:Drg55 has started a discussion on my Talk page about this book. I don't think that's the proper place for this discussion, so I am copy-and-pasting that user's points here, and also copying part of my reply.
Hi Martin, I wonder if you can help me? We are I suppose on opposite sides, I'm a Scientologist since 1974 and worked in PR to boot. However I have read Bare Faced Messiah and want to make some improvements to the Wikipedia page. I believe that you liked this book. I think I have been given a very hard time, I made an edit concerning the reference: " Among the private papers quoted in the book are a letter written by Hubbard to the FBI denouncing his wife as a Soviet spy, another in which he tells his daughter he is not really her father and an internal letter in which he suggests that Scientology should pursue religious status for business reasons.[12" in Background and synopsis. This is a lousy synopsis and its the opinion of a lawyer in a losing case in the US reported in the Washington Post. If you check you can see my edits of 14 June and 18 June which were arbitrarily deleted by Prioryman and Andrewman327. With regard to the first my point was that was not what was in the book. And the second, I don't see that saying that sources include "embittered Scientologists" is any different to saying that sources include FoI and stolen personal documents. It is fact not opinion. I made a few edits to the page in response to demonstrate how I felt I was being treated and have been accused by Prioryman of "disruptive editing" "June 2013" on my talk page.Drg55 (talk) 07:42, 19 June 2013 (UTC)
1. He seemed to get all the interesting FoI material that I recall was so hard to get, looks like a set up and the Church claims Hubbard's military record was doctored to remove his intelligence roles. We had a witness Fletcher Prouty. Heres a reference on that http://scientologymyths.com/hubbardww2.htm
2. The fact that the media backed the book looks like black propaganda ref http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SAUborWbPw Scientology continues to be against the abuse of psychiatric drugs which is worth billions internationally.
3. It lacked critical evaluation of the material. By definition the testimonies are from disaffected people as no Scientologist in good standing would have cooperated. In one passage two conflicting versions of events are given by different people.
4. The book overlooks Hubbard's tremendous output of lectures and books, around 100,000 pages and more, which many people have found tremendously valuable. Instead it just gives the embittered person's manufactured resentments at a time he was making tremendous production (bit like a biography of Mozart with no music and just whining about unpaid tailor's bills. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=GnXy0TPigw4C&pg=PA408&lpg=PA408&dq=mozart+unpaid+tailors+bills&source=bl&ots=1rrufveT-J&sig=n_wtyF_kkGEV--h7u-Docz3UUJY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nefCUcPaEMTQiAfbqIGwBA&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mozart%20unpaid%20tailors%20bills&f=false
5. The stolen diaries etc have been edited to sensational reasons leaving out many positive things to be found in the Church's recently released 16 volume biography.
6. Miller throws in the odd invented insult. He mentions for instance that LRH said he was Cecil Rhodes in a former life, and then that Rhodes was homosexual. Checking this I found no evidence beyond Rhodes never married.
7. Miller is clearly biased and caricatures Hubbard viciously. He shows no understanding of our religion, and only seeks to make light of it. The material I am reading currently is from 1953 and I looked up what he was talking about, it was drawn from Neoplatonism. Other material from 1952 was based on 2000 year old gnostic beliefs. Scientology is very well grounded as a religion which is why most scholars of New Religions recognise us as acknowledged even by our enemies. And while the UK has not recognised us this is in part because of the Church of England, a state religion and using that to compare what is religious.
8. Much emphasis was made on money, yet when Hubbard left the ship on one occasion he ate fish fingers and watched TV all day. There's no real evidence in the book of abuse of funds. And at the end of the book it acknowledges that the majority of his money went to the Church. It may be with good reason from past experience that he didn't trust people to safeguard our reserves.Drg55 (talk) 11:34, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply, I'm just clarifying where I see things, raising directions that might be realised, you can judge me by the fact that my edits were quite simple. I tried to put an actual quote from the book into the BFM article which was not what was said by the attorney on the losing side of the case in the USA and is quoted as though its truth. I also just added in a couple of words about the disaffected sources which was cut out although its a fair summary of the book when put with the FoI data and stolen diaries. I think I also clarified about the daughter - again the book gives data which is different to this bad reference. These are mild edits and I'm researching good sources at the same time for future edits. I would like to deal reasonably with people, I know that Martin Poulter has a website where he boast that he is source for many wikipedia articles on Scientology (including BFM) and gives talks against Scientology around the UK http://infobomb.org/ also you are in with the Skeptics, which is a definite bias. However you will find that I am not a doctrinaire Scientologist. You are perhaps similar to Saint Paul when he was persecuting Christians, maybe one day you'll fall off your donkey and become one of us, then we'll really have a problem on our hands. Jokes aside I did psychology and Freud, neo Freudianism at university, (one of my lecturers I later found out selected over 300 people for lobotomies) I've worked with top professors QC's and the like. In fact a former psychologist on the advisory board of CCHR later became head of our national psychological society. I'm glad you want to improve the Scientology articles, so do I. Drg55 ( talk) 14:13, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
"The judges in the Scientology case, in describing religion, went beyond saying that an organisation would only be a religion if it centred on a belief in a Supreme Being. Mason ACJ and Brennan J concluded that what was required was a belief in a `supernatural Being, Thing or Principle'. This marked a move from the trend to that date and the trend still in Britain in favour of theism. Picarda notes that `the theistic theme has always been well to the fore in definitions of religion in American cases. And it has constituted the essence of modern pronouncements on religion in the English courts.'" http://www.cdi.gov.au/report/cdi_chap20.htm
Thanks for the reference, it proves my point because the law is based upon the Church of England, all that is regarded as religion is obviously primarily what they are used to and it is inevitable whether consciously or unconsciously that they are influenced by it. Just as there is an essential fascist nature to the religions of the book found in the commandment that you shall have no other gods before me see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments#Critical_historical_analysis -see the bit about Hittite treaties. I reorganised this section and wrote part of it, and had quite a battle with the other editors for some time as they refused to include archaeological evidence (from Israeli archaeologists) because there are political reasons for these myths. Now myths are important and I'm not knocking them, but they are usually not true. Whether Garden of Eden or Aboriginal Australian, they are cultural, moral dreamlike stories and should be seen in that way (and respected for those reasons). And by the way I have admiration for many parts of the Bible, and how do we say, its quite Theta in places.
Scientology is about being, not so much as a set of ideas. The early Christian Church was anarchical as described by Paul, it only took about 100 years to get in a structure of bishops and deacons and we end up with "Trust and obey". In practice we use processes which when correctly applied bring about realisations and a release of theta. In this sense theta is spiritual energy. You might call it life essence, but that only describes the genetic entity.In the UK case we probably didn't put our position as well as could have been, and I don't think the Charities Commission has the intellectual credibility for an issue like this.
But getting back to BFM, what is missing is the experience of Scientologists which we call theta, which is comparable to Gnostic ideas of the one ultimate source of all things. And it is questionable how under UK law Buddhism would be received. And it is a historical fact that religious refugees left the UK and Europe to go to America leaving unresolved in those societies the social repression, and we are not the only American originated faiths to have trouble in the old world today. We may have to get the law changed to get recognition, its clearly discriminatory and a violation of the UK's obligations under UN human rights conventions.
But while the idea of theta - which one gets a deeper understanding of as one goes up the Bridge may be absent from BFM there is plenty of "en theta" which is enturbulated theta. For me to add three words to the sources "disaffected former Scientologists" would be a statement of fact, self evident from the book. Recently Rupert Murdoch divorced and various comments were made about the marriage from sources described by a spokesman for Murdoch as "disgruntled former staff" http://www.smh.com.au/business/rupert-murdoch-to-divorce-wendi-deng-20130614-2o7lq.html If someone is disgruntled they may describe actual events but they tend to colour and interpret them in the negative.
OK if you are not religious I might have to call you "a priori man". Are you a skeptic like Martin? Drg55 ( talk) 05:38, 23 June 2013 (UTC)
Thanks Martin for being open about your activities. Being a Skeptic does give you a vested interest, and particularly your active campaigning against Scientology. That hardly fits with the neutral position that editors are required to adopt in Wikipedia. Skeptics believe that the world is material while the key beliefs of Scientologists are that it is spiritual (theta) and that theta is senior to Matter Energy Space and Time. Theta creates MEST in present time. Some skeptics are running a campaign to diminish religion in society. I would argue that there are not just one but many Gods. All I ask is that Wikipedia is fair and does not run propaganda. I have looked at some of your pages and they could be worse. They could also be a little better. I am of course researching some good sources and will be working on this for some time. I began this discussion with a personal appeal to you to intervene on what I perceived as capricious deletions of my edits. I believe in beginning any process of dispute with a reasonable approach. In particular could we restore my edit of 14 June. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology_editing_on_Wikipedia#Project_Chanology "A war between internet collective Anonymous and the Church of Scientology" had been "fought out largely on the battlefields of YouTube, Wikipedia and other websites" While edits from the church were easily identified the amorphous anonymous was less easily identified. Now in the spirit of openness, would the other Skeptics, Humanists or even Anonymous members please declare themselves. Drg55 ( talk) 07:17, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
{{user|Kage Acheron}, I disagree with this revert. In-line commentary from other sources is a frequent feature on Wikipedia for many works and subjects. Would you like me to dig up some examples? Grammar's Little Helper ( talk) 01:00, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
"Wikipedia is required to view those statements as facts" Say What?! Where did you get that idea? When sources conflict, we don't choose a couple and give them prominence just because they're claim they're right, that's nonsense. The added content was implying that these experts had the ability to fully confirm many complicated details of Hubbard's military history. To flatly say that Miller was wrong based on two obscure sources is non-neutral and undue. It's just way, way too vague a statement, and smacks of spin.
Also, as his article hints at, J. Gordon Melton is very, very far from being uncontroversial himself, and his opinion should be treated with caution. Melton's opinion might possibly be usable in this article, but probably cannot be regarded as entirely neutral here, and needs to be contextualized.
As for Frenschowski, his brief, largely vague comments about the book in the source strongly suggest that he's going by the completely unverified Navel records that were put forth by the CoS, and match no known officially released records. In the cited source, he specifically says there were made public after the publication of the book. Maybe he has some other records that were made public? If so, he hasn't explained what they are, or shared them, or even commented on them beyond a couple of sentences, so it's very misleading bordering on deceptive to simple say that "Miller was wrong end-of-story." Providing "both, side by side" is false balance. Viewpoints are presented according to weight, not according to contrast, and these two sources are far too light-weight to meet DUE. Grayfell ( talk) 07:30, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I am convinced by reason of my own professional training and scholarly research that the apostate should not be accepted uncritically by the mass media, the scholarly community, the legal system, or governmental agencies as a reliable source of information about new religious movements. The apostate must always be regarded as an individual who is predisposed to render a biased account of the religious beliefs and practices of his or her former religious associations and activities. [3] --Lonnie D. Kliever, Ph.D., Professor of Religious Studies, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.
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|
This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus. |
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Prioryman: The Background and synopsis says "an internal letter in which he suggests that Scientology should pursue religious status for business reasons" ok this is taken from a reference, but that's a Washington Post review of a legal judgement. The actual passage in the book, is quite different from this person's opinion of what they want it to read. BFM page 179 quotes from a letter which does talk about business, yes, if you read the book it was just after several organisations had become insolvent, but then LRH says "I await your reaction on the religion angle.. In my opinion, we couldn't get worse public opinion than we have had or have less customers with what we have to sell" Note this does not suggest that becoming a religion would be good for business, it says things would be no worse than they are.
To get a little technical here, in Germany "the Federal Supreme Administrative Court decided that an association does not maintain a commercial business operation, if it offers services to its members in the realization of its idealistic purpose" Mission Neue Bruecke Stuttgart vs State of Baden-Wuerttemberg http://www.cesnur.org/testi/stuttgart_en.htm
You want to use original source as much as possible, therefore the book takes priority over opinions about the book three times removed from it in the Washington Post. And what better than the source, LRH, what he actually said in the letter referred to.
The comment about "his daughter" doesn't clarify the relationship, so I put that in. Its not opinion from me, its from the book.
Clearly the sources are all disaffected Scientologists so that bias is in the book and there is a passage where he quotes two sources about the same event and they said diametrically different things about LRH at the time.
BFM is quite an interesting book to a Scientologist who has sufficient grounding in the subject. Of course LRH was a man and had frailities. But the book puts in gratuitous vicious caracatures and in places is plainly wrong - example, he says LRH said he was Cecil Rhodes in a previous life but he didn't know Cecil Rhodes was a homosexual. Fact, I checked that out and the only known facts are that Rhodes did not marry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes#Sexuality This is an example of the hatchet job that Miller does from time to time through the book. Drg55 ( talk) 10:17, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
According to:
Bare-Faced Messiah is out of print now, but this argument remains no less strong. That is why I have reproduced the book on the Web, with Mr Miller's permission; not because I have any desire to damage the Church of Scientology but because I believe strongly that it is in the public interest to make his well-researched book available to a wider audience. Here for the first time, then, is an electronic version of Bare-Faced Messiah.
Cirt ( talk) 05:41, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
---|
Reviewing |
Reviewer: Mark Arsten ( talk · contribs) 16:30, 27 May 2012 (UTC)
I wrote an early version of this article, which was quite good. No, let me not pretend to be modest. It was astoundingly good. My opinion of the current version is that it is too prolix. It's okay, though. Thanks for the hard work, everybody. -- TS 02:11, 30 May 2012 (UTC)
User:Drg55 has started a discussion on my Talk page about this book. I don't think that's the proper place for this discussion, so I am copy-and-pasting that user's points here, and also copying part of my reply.
Hi Martin, I wonder if you can help me? We are I suppose on opposite sides, I'm a Scientologist since 1974 and worked in PR to boot. However I have read Bare Faced Messiah and want to make some improvements to the Wikipedia page. I believe that you liked this book. I think I have been given a very hard time, I made an edit concerning the reference: " Among the private papers quoted in the book are a letter written by Hubbard to the FBI denouncing his wife as a Soviet spy, another in which he tells his daughter he is not really her father and an internal letter in which he suggests that Scientology should pursue religious status for business reasons.[12" in Background and synopsis. This is a lousy synopsis and its the opinion of a lawyer in a losing case in the US reported in the Washington Post. If you check you can see my edits of 14 June and 18 June which were arbitrarily deleted by Prioryman and Andrewman327. With regard to the first my point was that was not what was in the book. And the second, I don't see that saying that sources include "embittered Scientologists" is any different to saying that sources include FoI and stolen personal documents. It is fact not opinion. I made a few edits to the page in response to demonstrate how I felt I was being treated and have been accused by Prioryman of "disruptive editing" "June 2013" on my talk page.Drg55 (talk) 07:42, 19 June 2013 (UTC)
1. He seemed to get all the interesting FoI material that I recall was so hard to get, looks like a set up and the Church claims Hubbard's military record was doctored to remove his intelligence roles. We had a witness Fletcher Prouty. Heres a reference on that http://scientologymyths.com/hubbardww2.htm
2. The fact that the media backed the book looks like black propaganda ref http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SAUborWbPw Scientology continues to be against the abuse of psychiatric drugs which is worth billions internationally.
3. It lacked critical evaluation of the material. By definition the testimonies are from disaffected people as no Scientologist in good standing would have cooperated. In one passage two conflicting versions of events are given by different people.
4. The book overlooks Hubbard's tremendous output of lectures and books, around 100,000 pages and more, which many people have found tremendously valuable. Instead it just gives the embittered person's manufactured resentments at a time he was making tremendous production (bit like a biography of Mozart with no music and just whining about unpaid tailor's bills. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=GnXy0TPigw4C&pg=PA408&lpg=PA408&dq=mozart+unpaid+tailors+bills&source=bl&ots=1rrufveT-J&sig=n_wtyF_kkGEV--h7u-Docz3UUJY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nefCUcPaEMTQiAfbqIGwBA&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=mozart%20unpaid%20tailors%20bills&f=false
5. The stolen diaries etc have been edited to sensational reasons leaving out many positive things to be found in the Church's recently released 16 volume biography.
6. Miller throws in the odd invented insult. He mentions for instance that LRH said he was Cecil Rhodes in a former life, and then that Rhodes was homosexual. Checking this I found no evidence beyond Rhodes never married.
7. Miller is clearly biased and caricatures Hubbard viciously. He shows no understanding of our religion, and only seeks to make light of it. The material I am reading currently is from 1953 and I looked up what he was talking about, it was drawn from Neoplatonism. Other material from 1952 was based on 2000 year old gnostic beliefs. Scientology is very well grounded as a religion which is why most scholars of New Religions recognise us as acknowledged even by our enemies. And while the UK has not recognised us this is in part because of the Church of England, a state religion and using that to compare what is religious.
8. Much emphasis was made on money, yet when Hubbard left the ship on one occasion he ate fish fingers and watched TV all day. There's no real evidence in the book of abuse of funds. And at the end of the book it acknowledges that the majority of his money went to the Church. It may be with good reason from past experience that he didn't trust people to safeguard our reserves.Drg55 (talk) 11:34, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply, I'm just clarifying where I see things, raising directions that might be realised, you can judge me by the fact that my edits were quite simple. I tried to put an actual quote from the book into the BFM article which was not what was said by the attorney on the losing side of the case in the USA and is quoted as though its truth. I also just added in a couple of words about the disaffected sources which was cut out although its a fair summary of the book when put with the FoI data and stolen diaries. I think I also clarified about the daughter - again the book gives data which is different to this bad reference. These are mild edits and I'm researching good sources at the same time for future edits. I would like to deal reasonably with people, I know that Martin Poulter has a website where he boast that he is source for many wikipedia articles on Scientology (including BFM) and gives talks against Scientology around the UK http://infobomb.org/ also you are in with the Skeptics, which is a definite bias. However you will find that I am not a doctrinaire Scientologist. You are perhaps similar to Saint Paul when he was persecuting Christians, maybe one day you'll fall off your donkey and become one of us, then we'll really have a problem on our hands. Jokes aside I did psychology and Freud, neo Freudianism at university, (one of my lecturers I later found out selected over 300 people for lobotomies) I've worked with top professors QC's and the like. In fact a former psychologist on the advisory board of CCHR later became head of our national psychological society. I'm glad you want to improve the Scientology articles, so do I. Drg55 ( talk) 14:13, 20 June 2013 (UTC)
"The judges in the Scientology case, in describing religion, went beyond saying that an organisation would only be a religion if it centred on a belief in a Supreme Being. Mason ACJ and Brennan J concluded that what was required was a belief in a `supernatural Being, Thing or Principle'. This marked a move from the trend to that date and the trend still in Britain in favour of theism. Picarda notes that `the theistic theme has always been well to the fore in definitions of religion in American cases. And it has constituted the essence of modern pronouncements on religion in the English courts.'" http://www.cdi.gov.au/report/cdi_chap20.htm
Thanks for the reference, it proves my point because the law is based upon the Church of England, all that is regarded as religion is obviously primarily what they are used to and it is inevitable whether consciously or unconsciously that they are influenced by it. Just as there is an essential fascist nature to the religions of the book found in the commandment that you shall have no other gods before me see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments#Critical_historical_analysis -see the bit about Hittite treaties. I reorganised this section and wrote part of it, and had quite a battle with the other editors for some time as they refused to include archaeological evidence (from Israeli archaeologists) because there are political reasons for these myths. Now myths are important and I'm not knocking them, but they are usually not true. Whether Garden of Eden or Aboriginal Australian, they are cultural, moral dreamlike stories and should be seen in that way (and respected for those reasons). And by the way I have admiration for many parts of the Bible, and how do we say, its quite Theta in places.
Scientology is about being, not so much as a set of ideas. The early Christian Church was anarchical as described by Paul, it only took about 100 years to get in a structure of bishops and deacons and we end up with "Trust and obey". In practice we use processes which when correctly applied bring about realisations and a release of theta. In this sense theta is spiritual energy. You might call it life essence, but that only describes the genetic entity.In the UK case we probably didn't put our position as well as could have been, and I don't think the Charities Commission has the intellectual credibility for an issue like this.
But getting back to BFM, what is missing is the experience of Scientologists which we call theta, which is comparable to Gnostic ideas of the one ultimate source of all things. And it is questionable how under UK law Buddhism would be received. And it is a historical fact that religious refugees left the UK and Europe to go to America leaving unresolved in those societies the social repression, and we are not the only American originated faiths to have trouble in the old world today. We may have to get the law changed to get recognition, its clearly discriminatory and a violation of the UK's obligations under UN human rights conventions.
But while the idea of theta - which one gets a deeper understanding of as one goes up the Bridge may be absent from BFM there is plenty of "en theta" which is enturbulated theta. For me to add three words to the sources "disaffected former Scientologists" would be a statement of fact, self evident from the book. Recently Rupert Murdoch divorced and various comments were made about the marriage from sources described by a spokesman for Murdoch as "disgruntled former staff" http://www.smh.com.au/business/rupert-murdoch-to-divorce-wendi-deng-20130614-2o7lq.html If someone is disgruntled they may describe actual events but they tend to colour and interpret them in the negative.
OK if you are not religious I might have to call you "a priori man". Are you a skeptic like Martin? Drg55 ( talk) 05:38, 23 June 2013 (UTC)
Thanks Martin for being open about your activities. Being a Skeptic does give you a vested interest, and particularly your active campaigning against Scientology. That hardly fits with the neutral position that editors are required to adopt in Wikipedia. Skeptics believe that the world is material while the key beliefs of Scientologists are that it is spiritual (theta) and that theta is senior to Matter Energy Space and Time. Theta creates MEST in present time. Some skeptics are running a campaign to diminish religion in society. I would argue that there are not just one but many Gods. All I ask is that Wikipedia is fair and does not run propaganda. I have looked at some of your pages and they could be worse. They could also be a little better. I am of course researching some good sources and will be working on this for some time. I began this discussion with a personal appeal to you to intervene on what I perceived as capricious deletions of my edits. I believe in beginning any process of dispute with a reasonable approach. In particular could we restore my edit of 14 June. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scientology_editing_on_Wikipedia#Project_Chanology "A war between internet collective Anonymous and the Church of Scientology" had been "fought out largely on the battlefields of YouTube, Wikipedia and other websites" While edits from the church were easily identified the amorphous anonymous was less easily identified. Now in the spirit of openness, would the other Skeptics, Humanists or even Anonymous members please declare themselves. Drg55 ( talk) 07:17, 26 June 2013 (UTC)
{{user|Kage Acheron}, I disagree with this revert. In-line commentary from other sources is a frequent feature on Wikipedia for many works and subjects. Would you like me to dig up some examples? Grammar's Little Helper ( talk) 01:00, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
"Wikipedia is required to view those statements as facts" Say What?! Where did you get that idea? When sources conflict, we don't choose a couple and give them prominence just because they're claim they're right, that's nonsense. The added content was implying that these experts had the ability to fully confirm many complicated details of Hubbard's military history. To flatly say that Miller was wrong based on two obscure sources is non-neutral and undue. It's just way, way too vague a statement, and smacks of spin.
Also, as his article hints at, J. Gordon Melton is very, very far from being uncontroversial himself, and his opinion should be treated with caution. Melton's opinion might possibly be usable in this article, but probably cannot be regarded as entirely neutral here, and needs to be contextualized.
As for Frenschowski, his brief, largely vague comments about the book in the source strongly suggest that he's going by the completely unverified Navel records that were put forth by the CoS, and match no known officially released records. In the cited source, he specifically says there were made public after the publication of the book. Maybe he has some other records that were made public? If so, he hasn't explained what they are, or shared them, or even commented on them beyond a couple of sentences, so it's very misleading bordering on deceptive to simple say that "Miller was wrong end-of-story." Providing "both, side by side" is false balance. Viewpoints are presented according to weight, not according to contrast, and these two sources are far too light-weight to meet DUE. Grayfell ( talk) 07:30, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I am convinced by reason of my own professional training and scholarly research that the apostate should not be accepted uncritically by the mass media, the scholarly community, the legal system, or governmental agencies as a reliable source of information about new religious movements. The apostate must always be regarded as an individual who is predisposed to render a biased account of the religious beliefs and practices of his or her former religious associations and activities. [3] --Lonnie D. Kliever, Ph.D., Professor of Religious Studies, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.
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