WARNING: Religious thoughts... if you take offense easily, back away quickly.Apparently there is a new trend of Christ believing churches turning to the Church of Scientology in their teaching. Many of you remember CoS being in the news due to Tom Cruise's outrageous beliefs (i.e. postpartum depression isn't real, hiding his child, secluding Katie Holmes, being kicked out of Germany during a filming of some movie that no one will go see, etc).
Now this makes me wonder why churches would turn to such a cult (definition: a group in which the leader has an abnormal amount of control, many times leading to harm in its followers).
I would like to offer up the point that this "religion" (*cough* cult *cough*) was made up by a SCIENCE-FICTION WRITER (aka Hubbard). There's your first hint that this is not legitimate. Hello.... fiction writer!?!? And to be honest, it reads like science fiction (see below the dotted line for another blogger's take on the CoS)
Who would actually take him seriously?!? Beside of course crazy celebrities looking for some "religion" which allows all their craziness. So, again, I come back to the point.... why would ANY church EVER turn to this cult for answers???
Some quotes from the CNN article (linked above):
"Now Kennedy [a Florida pastor] uses "The Way to Happiness" [by Hubbard] as a how-to supplement to his sermons. He believes it is easier to understand and clearer to follow than ancient Scriptures taken from the Bible."Umm, "how-to-supplement"? Now come on mister, the Bible is still relevant. If your congregation is having issues understanding how to apply it there are more serious issues going on.... How about taking a step back and try explaining it yourself and giving them CHRISTIAN application... NOT applications from a cult, which is inherently against God.
When asked whether Scientology's values contradict the religion of Jesus Christ, Kennedy replies, "Sometimes yes. Sometimes no." But he says his congregation can relate to "The Way to Happiness.""Sometimes yes. Sometimes no." Hmm, see if your congregation is already having issues understanding the Bible leaving it to them to make this distinction is probably not in their best interest, or yours... I'm pretty sure that the Devil also uses things like this to lead people away... Oh wait, check out the CoS goal:
Critic Rick Ross, a court-certified Scientology expert, sees something more sinister at work. He warned that mainstream acceptance makes it easier for the Scientologists to achieve their ultimate goal -- new recruits."Their hope is that through these programs, people will become more interested in L. Ron Hubbard, what else Mr. Hubbard had to offer, and this will lead them eventually to Scientology," Ross said.
Yeah, news flash.... the CoS is and never will be compatible with the word of God. Firstly because the Word of God is truth, not fiction. And secondly, the CoS is using every angle possible to pull people to them... and away from the true God (aka Satan again!)
If you are going to a Christian Church who starts using the teaching of the Chruch of Scientology get out of there quickly!
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These materials, which the Church of Scientology has long struggled to keep secret, were published online by a former member in 1995 and have been widely circulated in the mainstream media, ranging from The New York Times to last year's South Park episode. They assert that 75 million years ago, an evil galactic warlord named Xenu controlled seventy-six planets in this corner of the galaxy, each of which was severely overpopulated. To solve this problem, Xenu rounded up 13.5 trillion beings and then flew them to Earth, where they were dumped into volcanoes around the globe and vaporized with bombs. This scattered their radioactive souls, or thetans, until they were caught in electronic traps set up around the atmosphere and "implanted" with a number of false ideas -- including the concepts of God, Christ and organized religion. Scientologists later learn that many of these entities attached themselves to human beings, where they remain to this day, creating not just the root of all of our emotional and physical problems but the root of all problems of the modern world.(taken from Krupsjustsayin)
"Hubbard thought it was important to have a story about how things got going, similar to the way both Jews and Christians did in the early chapters of Genesis," says UCLA's Bartchy. "All religion lives from the sense either that something in life is terribly wrong or is profoundly missing. For the most part, Christianity has claimed that people have rebelled against God with the result that they are 'sinners' in need of restoration and that the world is a very unjust place in need of healing. What Hubbard seems to be saying is that human beings are really something else -- thetans trapped in bodies in the material world -- and that Scientology can both wake them up and save them from this bad situation"...
Rinder has fielded questions on Scientology's beliefs for years. When I ask him whether there is any validity to the Xenu story, he gets red-faced, almost going into a tirade. "It is not a story, it is an auditing level," he says, neither confirming nor denying that this theology exists. He says that OT material -- and specifically the material on OT III -- comprises "a small percent" of what Scientology is all about. But it is carefully guarded. Scientologists on the OT levels often carry their materials in locked briefcases and are told to store them in special secure locations in their homes. They are also strictly forbidden from discussing any facet of the materials, even with their families. "I'm not explaining it to you, and I could not explain it to you," says Rinder heatedly. "You don't have a hope of understanding it."
Can you handle this:In his 1983 autobiography, Over My Shoulder: Reflections on a Science Fiction Era, the sci-fi writer Lloyd Eshbach describes meeting Hubbard in the late 1940s. "I'd like to start a religion," Eshbach recalls Hubbard saying. "That's where the money is."
