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"On Saturday, November 26, 1977, at 5:10 p.m., a television news broadcast in the southern part of the United Kingdom was temporarily hijacked. While the video portion of the newscast remained unaffected, the audio was overridden by a strange electronic voice. The voice claimed to be an alien from outer space who called himself, "Vrillon of the Ashtar Galactic Command." Though evidence points strongly toward a hoax, many believe that Vrillon was an actual alien being from another world, and that ignoring his message has placed humanity at great peril..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gflfRrcn6QI

Sounds somewhat creepy, right? This, however, in itself, is not really disturbing. That is, until you consider the fact that there's a lunatic living somewhere that allowed this to happen:

http://www.angels-light.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xG2JNIs0Zo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPVTun9tG64

This is honestly pretty frightening to me. I can't help but feel that this could end in the same vein as Heaven's Gate. (Interestingly enough, their website is still up and running, remaining unchanged since the suicides.)

What's your take on these cult-like "UFO religions"? Given their past, should they be allowed to progress and recruit? I think people too easily dismiss these groups, but I find them pretty intimidating. What could happen when they go untouched for so long? (Re: Scientology) (Re:Re: Religion)

Furthermore, must we defend the benefit of free thought invariably, even by compromising human intellect, sanity, and life? It isn't a phenomenon for someone to fashion a macrocosm out of a microcosm, nor for a fairly substantial number of people to accept it. At what point do you think, if at all, should we intervene?

(In my opinion) Religion is an extremely archaic method of controlling people. In spite of its everlasting prevalence, I think society has matured, and is fully capable of relying on rational and scientific methods of instilling morality and ethics. At this point, shouldn't we try to stop these things before they start?

The Ashtar is here to disable THE MATRIX, the mass mind ?chip? that has controlled the human beings for all time.

Wait - I got confused. Was I watching iRobot, or a movie about Ashtar?

Yahoozy wrote: (In my opinion) Religion is an extremely archaic method of controlling people. In spite of its everlasting prevalence, I think society has matured, and is fully capable of relying on rational and scientific methods of instilling morality and ethics. At this point, shouldn't we try to stop these things before they start?

I don't have time to watch the Tube vids right now, so I'll only address this. I think it's not so much that society has matured beyond needing religion, but that religion is what's stopping us from maturing. I can't honestly look around the world and call what I see "mature"--it's time humanity got off the crutch of religion.

But we knew that already.

Saying religion helps foster a crippling culture acting against individual human happiness and success is an elementary way of perceiving the world, as truthful as it sounds, and sometimes seems to be. Imagine a popular and powerful figure of religion telling a civilization that they would have to kill a man in order to appease their god both today and one thousand years ago; the casualties of the former would be far less than the latter. If you look at the world from a completely unbiased perspective, you'd see that, in spite of religion, most of the population acts in accordance with humanity, and not God.

That being said, these more cult-like religions work exactly the opposite. That's where the danger lies.

Yahoozy wrote:That being said, these more cult-like religions work exactly the opposite. That's where the danger lies.

Agreed.

Now I'm going to go ahead and say something completely ridiculous, yet kinda true.

Any religion that exercises suicide as part of its practices is just natural selection in action.

Shit, I'm failing to remember something related... someone help me out if this sparks a memory. There were some cultists were big on burning themselves to death, and it was found that many of the cultists who "killed themselves" in this way had the decency to bind themselves and drug themselves into unconsciousness before dragging themselves into sheds and starting the fires. Y'know, much in the same way that someone might accidentally shoot himself in the back of the head and then throw the casing onto a rooftop 200 yards away. Tragic stuff.

Tsukatu wrote:S had the decency to bind themselves and drug themselves into unconsciousness before dragging themselves into sheds and starting the fires.

The first time I read that, my thought was 'makes sense, then you wouldn't feel yourself getting burned alive, which is probably rather painful'.

Shh, it is 1 am, I'm tired.

I lost six uncles to the Max Headroom mass suicides of '88. Probably why Dukakis lost the election.

SlappyMcGee wrote:I lost six uncles to the Max Headroom mass suicides of '88. Probably why Dukakis lost the election.

My thought exactly! it turns out that hijacking television stations (especially those that are still analogue) is almost trivially easy. Even modern stations that use wired digital links to the broadcast building are easily hijacked by a compromised employee, who may never be caught (think about the several Comcast porning incidents - they know it was an inside job, but they've never caught the employee responsible).

Anyway, on to the more philosophical topic. There are certainly situations where religions are just plain dangerous. Choosing to legally restrict religions is an extremely dangerous business, though. It comes down to the issue of where you draw the line, and in who's opinion. If we were to ask Tsukatu to prepare the list, I think he'd strike out everything from Anglicanism to Zoroastrianism. Ask one of the more Christian members around here, though, and they're likely to be lenient on the Christian side and immediately dismissive of the left-hand path (despite the fact that the "satanism" and "left-hand path" terms are largely inaccurate pejoratives).

There are governments that tried to protect their people from dangerous religions. These days we refer to them as communists.

Sure, that was a cheap shot. But the point stands - trying to protect your people from dangerous thought is a very iffy business. It's a slippery slope (it almost pains me to say this, but it's true) from banning UFO suicide cults to selecting the "correct" religion (or banning religion altogether).