That wasn’t always public knowledge. It was a thing you only learned about later on when you were more indoctrinated. Then undercover reporters found out and South Park made it very public.
It was mostly publicized via Usenet by Arnaldo Lerma, Dennis Erlich, Karin Spaink, David Touretzky, and other activists and ex-Scientologists starting in the early 1990s. The South Park episode didn’t come out until over ten years later in 2005.
Gotta give them points for snake oil creativity though. Their nonsense is much more entertaining than hearing “invisible sky wizard did it” as the answer to every question for millennia.
Yes, a long time ago an evil alien enslaved people and crashed into a volcano on Earth where they became ghosts and possessed the primitive humans living there. South Park has a good explanation of this lunacy
I’ve always wondered if the “THIS IS REAL SCIENTOLOGIST BELIEF” ticker was something planned early on, or if there was a moment of taking the whole thing in and someone went “This is fuckin’ South Park. Everyone is going to think we’re being extreme. We need to clarify.”
But isn’t their whole operation snake oil? Aliens crashing into a volcano and possessing humans is pretty dumb.
That wasn’t always public knowledge. It was a thing you only learned about later on when you were more indoctrinated. Then undercover reporters found out and South Park made it very public.
It was mostly publicized via Usenet by Arnaldo Lerma, Dennis Erlich, Karin Spaink, David Touretzky, and other activists and ex-Scientologists starting in the early 1990s. The South Park episode didn’t come out until over ten years later in 2005.
They don’t lead with that and only reveal it when you are in deep enough to not recognize the sunk cost fallacy.
Gotta give them points for snake oil creativity though. Their nonsense is much more entertaining than hearing “invisible sky wizard did it” as the answer to every question for millennia.
Wait, their thing is alien volcano ghosts?
Yes, a long time ago an evil alien enslaved people and crashed into a volcano on Earth where they became ghosts and possessed the primitive humans living there. South Park has a good explanation of this lunacy
I’ve always wondered if the “THIS IS REAL SCIENTOLOGIST BELIEF” ticker was something planned early on, or if there was a moment of taking the whole thing in and someone went “This is fuckin’ South Park. Everyone is going to think we’re being extreme. We need to clarify.”
Yeah. But in a world where JFK is coming back or something, a volcano cult isn’t like stand-out crazy anymore.
Correct, but they want to keep plausible deniability.