There’s no doubt which “religion” this video is mocking, and it wouldn’t have been possible fifteen years ago, before it was dangerous to criticize Scientology because you’d either be sued, harassed, or stalked. Such is the power of the Internet!
How many references can you get? Do you know the billion-year-contract? Did you see the picture of the alien? The video is replete with references to features of the faith and the peccadillos or L. Ron. Hubbard and his minions.
h/t: Krishan
very cute…….
Glad to see Going Clear is starting to spawn spoofs like this. I just watched it last night, and it was the best documentary I’ve seen in a long time.
O what a darling h o. o. o. o. t for this gloomy Monday afternoon!
Love the “personalized” entitlings including, Professor, that goo(f)iest: “ … … currently covered in fruit flies! ”
Blue
Toby Ortega is your journalistic friend over at his Underground Bunker http://tonyortega.org/2015/04/05/saturday-night-lives-genius-spoof-of-scientology-last-night-lyrics-and-images/
I meant *Tony Ortega
My compliments and best wishes for Katie Holmes, rescuing her daughter Suri Holmes from Tom Cruise and scientology. She may be a catholic, but I would prefer catholicism over scientology any time.
*Suri Cruise
If you want something to give you pause…the earliest mentions we have of Christianity from Pagans amount to ridiculing them in much the same way….
b&
They don’t seem to have tripped up the Christians doing that. I wonder if the Web will be more effective.
They didn’t have internet. 🙂
Of course, Christians received a significant boost when Emperor Constantine decided that if he could control Christianity and give it a boost by legalizing it, he could better control his farflung empire, and a bigger boost when Emperor Theodsius banned all non-Christian religions, as well as all unorthodox versions of Christianity, as defined by the council he convened, in 381. Hopefully, things won’t get so bad that by, say, 2381 an emperor rules North America and forces everyone to convert to his brand of Scientology and give him all their money. I’m sure no Romans in the year 115 figured that some knuckleheads who believed that their god impregnated a virgin to give birth to himself so he could be sacrified to himself to appease his anger at his own creation would wind up taking over the empire and spread their delusions across the world.
Well, when you put that way, of course it sounds crazy.
Right on.
Isn’t ironic than more than half of the people in that video surely believe in another man-made religion/faith?
Good point.
“I wonder that a soothsayer doesn’t laugh whenever he sees another soothsayer.” Cicero. x
I like that!
“Sorry, the uploader has not made this video available in your country.”
My gawd it’s maddening being a Canadian on the internet. It’s like the internet was made for the USA.
Same in NZ. Very frustrating.
I use Hola here in Scotland. On this occasion I had to go to YouTube for it to work.
Try this:
https://www.filterbypass.me/
It’s of limited use against many blocking schemes; but it seems to work with most Youtube files. Best to go onto Youtube, get the original URL and then paste it into the filterbypass field. (Be warned: it’s often slow to load.)
Thanks! It works!
Where does the blocking reside? On your ISP? On the US servers? Somewhere else? I’m curious.
It seems weird to me.
YouTube itself snoops origins to play nice with the content folks.
It ~was~. It was called the ARPANET.
The World Wide Web was developed at CERN.
The reason for the USAnian dominance of content control probably has more to do with the MPAA and RIAA (damn them to hell) than the nuts and bolts of the Internet.
The WWW is very much a latecomer to the Internet. Tim developed it on a third-generation NeXT workstation, which was Job’s midlife crisis company long after the Mac had revolutionized desktop publishing.
By then, all the infrastructure for the Internet was completely developed, and there were well-established proto-WWW networks on top of the Internet — most especially Gopher. USENET and BITNET developed in parallel with DARPANET, but especially USENET and increasingly BITNET were using the Internet for transport rather than their native networks.
And all that development took place either with physical hard-wired networks in the States or with ad-hoc modem-to-modem networks amongst mostly American institutions.
And the commercialization of the Internet…happened with American companies, especially COMPUSERV and AOL. (Remember what the “A” in “AOL” stands for? Remember September?)
b&
OK, I’ll ask – did ‘websites’ exist before the WWW protocols?
I’ll concede Usenet and BBS-based systems were primarily US-based. But I stand by my comment that “This video not available in your area”, like the indefensible stupidity of DVD ‘region coding’, owes more to corporate greed spearheaded by the MPAA and RIAA, than it does to the origins of the Internet.
Well, of course, all the “you’re a funny furriner who doesn’t pay bribes to us in the form of taxes so we won’t let you watch it” bullshit comes from the MAFIAA.
The only “WWW protocols” are HTTP and HTML, though you can add recent footnotes for things like JavaScript and the DOM and the like. The World Wide Web wasn’t called that before Berners-Lee built his NCSA Mosaic, but we had Gopher and all sorts of other sorts of world-wide interconnected networks woven together long before then. It’s kinda like asking if we had fridges before Frigidaire or jeeps before Jeep or xeroxes before Xerox or hoovers before Hoover or kleenexes before Kleenex. Yes, we had those sorts of things, but we didn’t call them that before the brand name.
b&
Damn – I figured SNL would be a repeat this past weekend.
Hope everyone caught the “Currently covered in fruit flies” at the end.
Sub
See? SNL sometimes no longer sucks.
You think this would not have been possible 15 years ago? How about a feature film savagely parodying Scientology that took the #2 spot on its opening weekend in late 1999?
Yep, a key plot point in Bowfinger is that one of the characters is a member of a controlling and creepy organization called MindHead. In the film MindHead even has a “celebrity retreat” just like Scientology’s celebrity center.
Great movie. Steve Marting and Eddie Murphy at their best, and a solid performance from all the supporting cast, most notably from Christine Baranski.
And it’s directed by Frank Oz.
One of my top ten favorite comedies.
peccadillos? is that some sort of twisted Dr. Moreau cross of a peccary and an armadillo?
Only when you cook ’em and stuff ’em in a quesadilla.
b&
I watched both Going Clear and The Walking Dead season finale on the same night and couldn’t decide which was scarier.
“Sorry, the uploader has not made this video available in your country.”
Maybe this can help: http://proxy-youtube.net/
That works fine, thanks!
Everything in that video is a reference to people or events in Scientology.
A pyramid and slavery scheme dreamed up a bi-polar egomaniac with delusions of grandeur.
They are probably more blatant about exploiting their adherents; but to be fair, most religions (at least “western” ones) started out that way as well.
Like Mormonism, Scientology has not fared well in the most intense glare of history (relative to the older religions whose equivalent crap is lost in the fog of the distant past).
I do strongly urge all to read Going Clear by Lawrence Wright. He does not sneer at them at all; but lays it out for us non-believers to read. And be amazed by (not the Elrond Hubbard intended though).
Especially in the transcribed words of a religious scholar who supported Scientology’s (successful) reapplication for tax-exempt status as a religion (rather than a commercial operation, which they are), it is obvious that Scientology is really little different from any other religion. No less unbelievable. No less exploitative. It’s only that it has fewer wrinkles, fewer age spots; it’s too new and therefore easy for the believers of other religions to dismiss as nonsense. Even though their own beliefs are every bit as nonsensical.
I’ve been following $cientology and its scandals since the 80’s. It’s interesting at long last to see the general public react to a more public revelation.
Scientology is a gnostic religion which relies heavily on faith and the need to believe in ‘something higher.’ It doesn’t matter if it originated in a con trick, madness, or both. It took on its own genuine life in the self-abdicating and self-aggrandizing attitude of the followers.
It is gratifying though to see that the public fetishizing of faith apparently has some limits.
Yes, I agree but there’s another aspect to it: The completely cynical leadership systematically exploiting and black-mailing their “flock”.
I imagine it seems particularly obnoxious only because we can see it better than we can see the origins of Xianity or Islam. Mormonism is intermediate, seen from the distance of only 150 or so years.
Yes, Scientology has many of the high-control characteristics which define a ‘cult.’
Though it was interesting to see how even the leadership seems to have swallowed their own kool-aid. When the people who had been manipulating, lying, and exploiting the membership were eventually sent to the same hellhole gualg they’d been sending others, the general reaction seemed to be submission, guilt, and doubling down on faith.
Unfortunately, there really is a field of study known as Neurotology, a medical sub-specialty of otolaryngology (ENT) that deals with disorders of the inner ear (including cochlear implants, currently my main focus of research). Oh, SNL, couldn’t you have chosen a different name??! 🙂
As someone who has had some contact with the Deaf community, I am queasy about the very gung-ho treatment of cochlear implants, especially for children. How many more tear-jerking “first switching-on” videos can we take? We don’t know what they are hearing, but we can be very sure it’s not much like normal hearing. We never hear about the downsides; the lifelong dependence on high tech, periodic re-operations, destruction of residual hearing, and what culturally Deaf people consider the cultural genocide of their linguistic community by the Hearing majority.
I am aware of those issues, both professionally and socially. But my contribution to this thread was the recognition of an existing field of medicine known as “Neurotology”, which focuses on a variety of inner ear disorders impacting hearing and balance.
Thanks for connecting. I appreciate the chance for dialogue. To me it is important to discuss issues without getting caught up in personality.
My intention is not to be condesending but to open up a cknversation. However I do notice that a lot of people do not engage in critical thought and tend to confuse opinion with fact and I point it out when I see it.
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From:”Why Evolution Is True” Date:Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 4:46 PM Subject:[New post] Saturday Night Live parodies Scientology
whyevolutionistrue posted: “There’s no doubt which “religion” this video is mocking, and it wouldn’t have been possible fifteen years ago, before it was dangerous to criticize Scientology because you’d either be sued, harassed, or stalked. Such is the power of the Internet! How m”