In Defence of Scientology

I've had two moments of personal connection to the media today.

One was whilst watching Lewis tonight on ITV and seeing the Mansfield College chapel made up as a sleazy night club called Kommunion. I wish it really was a nightclub. That would be good. All churches should become sleazy places at night (brothels, crack dens, killing floors, etc) so that when it's time to worship, there's some real sin to expunge. It's like a cleaner having to sweep the floor: it's much more satisfying when it's filthy. It seems like you're getting stuff done.

Of course, I've never been a cleaner. But it seems like that when I sweep up in our flat. I'm sure it would lose its therapeutic qualities if I had to do it for a career.

I like watching Lewis. It's usually quite fun, and there's the obvious feel-good element of recognising places and saying "we've been there!". It's obviously not as good as Inspector Morse, as it lacks the right level of exasperation, but Laurence Fox's character is good.

Today's episode was a bit of a mess, though. Lots of crazy soap-style expositionary dialogue, and some incredible gay stereotypes. Plus, I solved the mystery pretty early, whereas I'm usually really dense about these things, and have only just learned everyone's name by the time the murderer is revealed.

The second media mention was Adam and Joe reading out my email on their radio show (Saturday mornings on 6Music)! They read my name and everything! I just wish I'd had something more interesting to say... I was wondering if that's enough to get me my own radio show. I reckon it is.

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I'm not really going to defend Scientology (is it appeasment to capitalise it? - probably not, I'm sure you even capitalise cults). It's clearly insane.

But the trouble with people scoffing all the time when it's mentioned is that it makes this 'religion' sound crazy and out there, and separates it from the other religions. The established ones. The sensible ones. The ones with the fire and brimstone and talking snakes and flood myths and lightning bolt vengeance.

Scientology is ridiculous, but the only real difference between it and the proper religions is it hasn't been around as long. Maybe in a couple of hundred years, it will have respected institutions, and people will picket the courts if anyone criticises L. Ron Hubbard.

What's scary is that two thousand years, there was probably loads of people writing blogs on stone tablets, rolling their eyes when everyone talked about Jesus rising from the dead.

We'd better be careful.

Anyway, I suppose my point is you'd better not spend all your ridicule on one source, while other, equally deserving, sources are left unscorned.