UFO desk closes and some deliciously silly rumours.....

 If you thought the Greek Government's recent  shutting down of its national broadcaster was a bit drastic, it has nothing on this shocking revelation.. For the UK Department of Defence announced last week that it had shut down its UFO desk (employees: 2)!  In 2009!  We have been defenceless for 4 years and civilisation has been on the brink, blind and unprotected from invading aliens and reptiles from Planet X (arrival delayed).

The Desk had apparently been in operation for 50 years. After half a century of investigation into UFO reports it has drawn the not terribly surprise conclusion that there is not in fact anything to investigate ( apart from a number of mistakenly identified Chinese lanterns in Yorkshire)

This will be a bitter disappointment to many and in response we should probably see a spike in UFO sittings as ufologists, not to mention slighted UFO pilots, angrily protest at their declared redundancy, no doubt smelling government cover-ups and all manner of suspicious behind the scenes manoeuvring. After all, this sinister announcement has come just after the meeting of the Bilderberg Group and the G8, well known for their intergalactic dabbling and hostility to aliens, especially the tax dodging variety these days.  It's also suspiciously contemporaneous with all those leaks from Mr Snowden about how the US has been spying on us and reading all our emails.

Now, I'd hate to be one to start any unfounded rumours, but could Mr Snowden be about to reveal some new new groundbreaking facts about Area 51, e mails from outer space and aliens running the British Department of Defence?

Remember, you read it here first.......

JULIAN ASSANGE REAPPEARS

Over the past few days, Mr Julian Assange has oozed his way back into the headlines, managing to find a small patch of unoccupied media space, not too blood stained, in which to tell the now largely uninterested world of his struggles for justice (or more correctly how to avoid it).

 

What has triggered his reappearance? Was it his excitement at Lady Gaga, that icon of liberty and free speech, popping in for tea? Perhaps he thinks the NSA whistle-blower, Edward Snowden might soon be joining him? Or perhaps it was his excitement at words of support from no lesser figure than John Pilger, that man of letters, beacon of moderation and giant of intellectual prowess, who has accused President Obama of “being at war with truth-tellers and the world”.  At war with the world?! I must have blinked and missed that. Perhaps the mighty Mr Pilger could tempt timid Barack into doing something about Syria in that case…..

But back to Julian Assange.  Between numbing reports of horrific slaughter in Syria that rank almost beyond comprehension and other tales of mass demonstrations and brutal police repression in Turkey and so on, a rather sallow, greasy looking Assange emerged from his figurative bolt hole from justice, also known as the London Ecuadorian Embassy. He declared he would stay where he was for a further 5 years if need be and refuse to face accusation of allegedly sexually assaulting two women (or in his rather fevered imagination, threats of extradition to the USA to face charges of leaking its secrets). But why now – has the bulb in his sun tan lamp blown, or perhaps his hosts are getting tired of his presence?

Ecuador, who have given asylum to Assange in a strange fit of preoccupation with the right to free speech (as long as it’s not exercised in Ecuador), declared, with rather cheerful desperation, that the noxious Assange might even stay so long in their embassy that he could die there.  They also asked if poor Julian might  be allowed outside into the sunshine for a bit without being arrested. Are they worried about his vitamin D depletion?  Anyway, since the sun has not been seen in London since about 2010 this seemed a rather optimistic request to say the least.

When one thinks of the scale of suffering in places like the aforementioned Syria, to have to listen to Mr Assange bleating on about his (self-imposed) living conditions in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, it's enough to make you feel like agreeing to his request. Let him go, put him on a plane and send him to Damascus.  

SCIENTOLOGY - IT MIGHT SEEM STRANGE BY TODAY'S STANDARDS, BUT......

Why is it called Scientology? Presumably it means the science of science, but it’s not scientific in any commonly understood sense. In that way it's not so different to any other religion, but in other ways, it is very different.

For starters it's very new, which makes it interesting. We can look back over only 6 decades at the evolution from scratch of a brand new form of belief, one that unlike others, appears not to have a specific named deity at its core.

A very brief, lay summary of Scientology’s evolution goes something like this (I think). Scientology started off as a form of psychotherapy known as Dianetics in the 1950s, developed by a writer of science fiction called L Ron Hubbard. Very simply, Dianetics was a psychoanalytical process by which individuals were able to "audit" themselves to identify past traumas. Although widely derided by the medical mainstream as quackery, it was purely secular at this stage.

It's morphing from “psychology” into a belief-system was triggered (at least in part) by people, when going through the auditing process, claiming that some of the traumatic events they believed they had identified were from past lives. This is similar to what some people believe when under hypnosis and which is often used as evidence for reincarnation.  In the early 1950s L Ron (not to be confused with the elf out of Lord of the Rings) appears to have started adapting Dianetics by incorporating into it the element of reincarnation and past lives, some claim to take advantage of the tax concessions applicable to recognised religions.

A cosmological narrative?

A tale of truly mind-boggling sci-fi like proportions was then developed to explain its origins. Until it was leaked (evidently by an angry ex-member), this was supposed to have been top secret. Scientology claims that our past lives reach back for millions of years and that...(wait for it)….billions of our descendants were brought to earth 75 million years ago in spaceships resembling DC-8s from distant planets where there was an overpopulation problem. This was done by a figure called Xenu, a tyrannical ruler of a galactic confederacy who was aided by psychiatrists (I wasn’t expecting that twist either) who tricked the over-populated with some rues about their taxation. But, on to more serious matters. Xenu killed all these billions of people by first freezing and paralysing them before the space journey and then, once earth was reached, apparently stacking them around volcanoes and detonating hydrogen bombs inside the volcanos.

This genocide then released their thetans (souls in scientology speak), which were then all “captured” somehow, sent to places resembling vast cinemas and forced to watch a sort of 3D film for 36 days and “implanted with misleading data”.

Still with me? 

And so it goes on. Hubbard’s religion parallels the development of a sci-fi novel and events contemporaneous with the times of the 1950s: Cold wars, nuclear shadows, taxation and McDonnell Douglas aircraft.

Ok, very interesting, but what it the point of all this?

The evolution of a new religion

The actual finer details of Scientology are complex and hard to follow. It's also very different to the narratives of established religions. However that is because we are witnessing, in real time, the evolution of a religion from its first uncertain steps through to it rapidly developing a philosophy over the course of a few decades.

Scientology appears to have approximately 50 000 followers. In overall terms, this is miniscule and may not constitute a critical mass to sustain it in the long term or even the decades ahead. It has been required to aggressively defend its position and to fight to sustain its tax privileges. As a new and radically different system of beliefs it is of course challenging the orthodoxy. Unsurprisingly established religions strongly reject its deeply implausible ideas. Of course, they strongly reject each other’s ideas and beliefs too.

This may be similar to what has happened previously when new religions tried to take hold. When “modern” Christianity was taking its first steps around 2500 millennia ago, it was challenging the dominant and established religions of the ancient classical world, from Greece to Rome to Egypt. In the case of the latter, this was a belief system that had existed and evolved over a period of 3 millennia. Christianity was a monotheist religion, challenging the prevailing orthodoxies that subscribed to polytheism, each normally embracing a sufficient number of gods to populate a small town. It’s easy to imagine the audacity of those early Christians suggesting, “No, you’re wrong, there aren’t 50 gods, there is only 1”. It can’t have gone down to well.

What is so interesting though is how Scientology has adopted the props of the 20th century around which to build its narrative. With space travel, nuclear annihilation, overpopulation, taxation and psychotherapy all playing a role, what we are seeing is a religion (or cult) being developed to reflect the modern world, and a cold war one at that, yet still relying upon an inevitable great cataclysm event in its foundation story. In this case, the great flood myth so common to ancient religions updated to be an ancient nuclear war.

Yet no religion can escape being a product of its time, thus its narrative cannot exceed the contemporaneous state of the world’s assumed “knowledge”. It cannot be what it does not know. Current dominant religions were developed when it was believed the earth was flat, that the sun revolved around it and that gods had magical powers over nature and the hevans. So people could come back from the dead, virgins gave birth, magic wands parted oceans and God’s servants only carried swords because, of course, guns hadn’t been invented.

Scientology 3000 AD

Suspend your disbelief (just for a second or two), imagine its 3000 AD and Scientology has grown from its current tiny following into a mainstream faith. After its first century, in which it has settled its narrative, it has endured without substantial further amendment, save only to respond to unavoidable new challenges, as  do the other long standing religions of today. It would have moved from "wild new cult" to established orthodoxy. Assuming all this, then we may find that Scientology's core beliefs will for so long have been ingrained into the mainstream that it might seem as plausible in 3000 AD as any of our current beliefs do in 2013.

Perhaps there is nothing that unusual about the trajectory of scientology's evolving story and development as a religion. It may only be following a similar course to countless religions developed before it over many millennia. The historically well documented persecution of the early Christian faith shows how hostile a reception no doubt awaited the relatively defenceless followers of all new religions and gods.  This intolerance of not just new, but sometimes only slightly differing beliefs, reaches its apogee in the bloodletting in the Middle East where competing religious ideologies settle their differing interpretations with bombs and blood (the irony of this is that they all espouse tolerance and a love of peace).

So, who is right?

Just because it’s one of the latest beliefs (at the moment), does that mean it is any less likely to be the “truth”, for every new religion or belief system must find itself in this sort of positionat the same stage in its journey.

What would the ancient Romans have thought of Christianity if they could have looked 2000 years ahead? If you were an ancient Egyptian alive today, might you wonder how for 3000 years, your countrymen believed something which by any modern standard, is such obvious, palpable nonsense.

Likewise, if you could look back 1000 years from now, what would the prevailing view be of today’s “ancient” beliefs?

Makes you think doesn’t it….