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This just in... apparently, the following is part of the "advanced spiritual training" that followers of the Church of Scientology receive at a high price (financial and emotional):
OT7-481. Find some plants, trees, etc., and communicate to them individually until you know they received your communication.
2. Go to a zoo or a place with many types of life and communicate with each of them until you know the communication is received and, if possible, returned.
I would have thought that this was too wacky even for Scientologists, and hence was possibly a forgery created by one of the many enemies of this "church," but its veracity was indicated by the fact that Helena Kobrin, attorney for the Church of Scientology, has e-mailed the person who posted the above excerpt to a newsgroup, threatening him with a lawsuit... not for libel or slander (as they might if somebody were spreading false documents allegedly and inaccurately describing church doctrines), but for violation of copyright and trade secret law (implying that the excerpt is, indeed, actually a work of the Scientologists). Here's the newsgroup message about it.
Unfortunately for the sue-happy Scientologists (who have lately been losing a lot more court cases than they have been winning), the fair use provision of copyright law allows the quoting of excerpts of copyrighted works in the course of review, satire, or criticism. And, exposing the wackiness of the Scientology cult is certainly a fair use!
Maybe the Scientologists can get better legal advice if they consult with some animals and vegetables, instead of their ill-advised attorneys!
The Church of Scientology has released their own adapted version of CyberSITTER that filters out all anti-Scientology sites, including this one. In fact, they blocked the entire server that this page used to be on, www.softdisk.com, even though this was the only page on that server that even mentions Scientology. (It's not on that server any more, anyway.) Can you say "overkill"? It's pretty sad that they think the only way they can keep their members is to keep them in ignorance, by letting them see only a censored version of the Internet with all differing views filtered out.
Article on the Scientologists' Filtering Software
List of sites and words filtered by the program
Go ahead, Scientologists... send me more nasty responses to this page so I can add more entries to this section!
For lots of interesting links, visit Tradenet. See their religion links page for lots of different religious and anti-religious sites.
P.S.: I apologize to any readers whose sincerely-held and peacefully-practiced beliefs happen to include a belief in the efficacy of communication with life forms of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and who might have been offended by my ridicule here. I have no quarrel with anyone wishing to freely hold and express beliefs, religious or otherwise, regardless of how wacky I might find them. But, when a group (such as the Church of Scientology or the Christian Coalition) seeks to use the force of law to impose its beliefs or to suppress those who criticize them, then I must speak out. See my Mount Carmel page, where I express opposition to what the government did to the Branch Davidians, irrespective of the fact that I think they, too, are wackos; in that case, it is the Davidian wackos who were peacefully minding their own business while the government agents stormed their place forcefully. The use of force is the issue, not the weirdness of the belief systems either supporting or opposing such force. (But, making fun of wacko religions can be an entertaining sideshow, however!)
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This page was first created 23 Jul 1995, and was last modified 26 Nov 2000.