Keith Olbermann’s Crazy Friend Tom

I’ve heard about that Tom Cruise Scientology video. I think this is the real thing (there are a lot of spoofs and parodies on YouTube):

I’ve only watched the first few minutes of it. He is very intense about his faith, but if you’ve ever seen evangelical ministers on tv they get pretty en fuego, too.

I read a very interesting piece on Scientology in The New Yorker, Château Scientology
Inside the Church’s Celebrity Centre:

From the outset, the conversion of celebrities was important to Scientology. An internal newsletter produced by the Hubbard Communications Office, probably in the mid-fifties, asserts, “There are many to whom America and the world listens. On the backs of these are carried most of the enthusiasms on which the society runs.” It goes on, “It is obvious what would happen to America if we helped its leaders to help others. Project Celebrity is part of that program. It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefitting from it would mention it now and then.”

Hmm. “Prime communicators.” That’s kind of like getting Bob Costas and Kobe Bryant to drop “passion bucket.”

This is also weird: To achieve salvation you have to pay up:

Celebrity Centre is used for Scientology courses and for “auditing,” a mainstay of the religion, in which a person undergoes a guided talk-therapy session, usually while holding a device known as an E-Meter, which is supposed to measure one’s spiritual state. … An initial twelve-and-a-half-hour auditing session costs between six and seven hundred dollars, Greg LaClaire, a vice-president of Celebrity Centre, says. (Aspiring Scientologists can mitigate the expense by choosing to be audited by a fellow initiate rather than by a staff member.) In the Holiday 2007 Dianetics and Scientology catalogue, a deluxe Planetary Dissemination Edition E-Meter—billed as a “tool for Golden Age of Tech certainty,” to assist in “faster progress up The Bridge”—was offered, in “Diamond Blue,” for five thousand five hundred dollars.

Other religions use the practice of tithing or passing around the collection plate. But charging a fee to monitor someone’s progress on the road to salvation? How can anyone take that seriously?

I don’t know much about the church, but it strikes me as really odd that any faith would grant preference to celebrities. Whatever happened to “We are all equal before the Lord?” OK, well I guess that’s a Christian concept. I’m very skeptical of an institution that categorizes its worshippers based on fame and fortune.

It’s not too far off from politics. You can vote for some candidate over and over, but there’s no way you’re getting into the Lincoln bedroom unless you donate a ton of bucks.