Scientologists beliveve that:
* Psychiatry and psychology are destructive fields which must be abolished.
* Spiritual beings ( thetans) live many lifetimes. Thetans lived among extraterrestrial cultures before becoming trapped in bodies on Earth. Thetans were brainwashed by these extraterrestrial cultures as a means of population control
* Thetans have existed for ???tens of trillions??? of years. During that time, thetans have been exposed to a vast number of traumatic incidents and have made a great many decisions that influence their present state. Thetans were conditioned by extraterrestrial dictatorships such as Helatrobus in an attempt to brainwash and control the population. These early events collectively are called "space opera."
* Xenu (sometimes Xemu) was the ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy." 75 million years ago Xenu brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs in the volcanoes. The thetans then clustered together, stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to do this today. Isolating thetans and neutralizing their ill effects are neccesary.
Christians believe that night and day existed before the sun, the earth was flat; and the earth is just a few...thousand years old and.... dinosaurs therefore roamed in peoples' backyards.
If you have average IQ and you research more into religions; probably you want to convert to...alcoholism
Democrats and Faith
Obama's challenge: getting Democratic secularists on board.
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It was a remarkable, moving speech by a presumptive Democratic nominee for president on promoting faith-based solutions to urgent human needs.
"The men and women who work in faith-and-values-based organizations," he explained, "are driven by their spiritual commitment; to serve their God, they have sustained the drug-addicted, the mentally ill, the homeless; they have trained them, educated them, cared for them, healed them. Most of all, they have done what government can never do; what it takes [is] God's help, sometimes, for all of us to manage; they have loved them—loved their neighbors, no matter how beaten down, how hopeless, how despairing." And he went on to make some revolutionary political implications: "I believe government should play a greater role in sustaining this quiet transformation—not by dictating solutions from above, but by supporting the effective new policies that are rising up from below."
That was Vice President Al Gore, speaking at the Salvation Army in Atlanta in 1999, before George W. Bush's "faith-based initiative" became a culture war divide. This week, Barack Obama echoed these themes in a speech delivered in Zanesville, Ohio. "The challenges we face today—from saving our planet to ending poverty—are simply too big for government to solve alone," Obama explained. He proposed a new effort to "empower faith-based organizations."
Reading both speeches, Gore's is (against all expectations) more emotional and compelling. But Obama's remarks, in some ways, are more impressive. He showed the political maturity to embrace an idea now closely associated with President Bush—a wisdom he has also demonstrated in supporting Bush's massive and successful AIDS initiative.
There is nothing exclusively Republican about the faith-based agenda. The main beneficiaries, contrary to some accusations, are established groups such as Catholic Charities or Lutheran Social Services, along with community ministries in distressed areas. The men and women who run these organizations are heroic and principled. They also tend to embrace political liberalism. The faith-based initiative could never properly be called a payoff to the religious right.
Supporting it does, however, require a rejection of orthodox secularism—a belief that government funds should never benefit religious groups, even in the provision of secular social services. The challenge for a Democratic presidential candidate is that secularists have become a significant portion of the Democratic electorate. Political scientists describe a new kind of voter—the anti-fundamentalist—who is motivated by a resentment of religious conservatives. In 2006 Democratic congressional candidates won 74 percent of the secular vote. According to some estimates, secularists now constitute a larger portion of the Democratic coalition than organized labor.
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