Weirdness in the World of Religion

Well, my 1:00 appointment found an excuse not to show up. Since I moved offices to the opposite side of the campus (and am now rooming with my boss - sigh!), I've had difficulty having these guys show up. However, this has given me some free time to spend with other floors and patients, or to surf the web, which is nice.

Today I found some very interesting events going on in the world of religion, starting with the 400+ children and adults taken from the Fundamentalist LDS compound in West Texas.

In case you didn't catch this, the raid started when authorities received a call from a 16-year-old woman who claimed to be the wife of a 40-year-old man. She gave birth to his child when she was 15. As if that weren't bad enough, according to the article (use the link above to get to it), it looks like it will take years of intensive therapy for these young women to approach anything resembling normalcy in their lives. Think about it - these girls were basically kept in a controlled environment, unable to make decisions for themselves, and forced to accept whatever their leaders decided. Not only that, but they were also instructed to be afraid of the outside world and told that "non-believers" (everyone who is not a part of their very small cult) would be sure to do far worse to them than what they were experiencing inside to compound. I only can hope and pray that this is the end of that group, considering that their leader, Warren Jeffs, is incarcerated after being found guilty of being an accomplice to rape when he arranged the marriage of a 14-year-old girl to a 19-year-old man.

Maybe now that the compound has been raided and Jeffs is locked away, that will be the end of that. Not likely, though, since the hold that cult leaders have on their followers tends to be very strong indeed.

Moving along from the scary / serious to the scary / silly, Religion Clause reports that a copy of the Scientology "Bible" has been leaked to the internet. Yep, all 612 pages of The Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology can be yours without having to go through all the E-Meter readings and spending your children's college fund! Want to see what's got Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and the guy who did the voice of Chef on South Park (Isaac Hayes) all excited? Then run over to Wikileaks and check it out before the Scientology lawyers earn their pay. Oops, too late.

Well, I've seen the text, and although I only took a quick gander, I have to say that as far as esoteric texts go, it's not much. You can find better stuff here or here.

More later, as life gets interesting. For now, though, I need to get back to pretending to work.

Peace out.