15 May 2007

Somehow, You Can't Imagine The Church of England Behaving Like This

If you're in North America, all you probably heard about today-- before Reverent Teletubby's passing-- was the Church of Scientology's YouTube attempts to expose the insidious nature of the report done on it by the BBC's John Sweeney for Panorama. Well, you can watch the report here, and you can judge for yourselves who's right and who's wrong, or some complex admixture in-between. May also be worth casting a glance at the comments here: The Guardian's position is clearly to knock Sweeney, but the audience's response strikes me as constituting a pretty sharp rebuke to it.

Now, given room for editing-- that Sweeney may well have, and in fact probably did at least somewhat, reframe things for his own purposes-- I can't blame Sweeney for exploding. I, with very little doubt, would probably have clocked the malignant little twerp, repeatedly and bloodily, until my knuckles turned into something roughly akin to melted cheese. But maybe that's just me....

I hesitate, only slightly however, to note that, historically, most of the major religions have done exactly the same stuff the CofS seems to be doing. (Can we say Torquemada, boys and girls? I knew you could.) And yet we call them "religions," some of us much more reluctantly than others.

4 comments:

Pious Labours said...

For some reason I can't get any sound from the BBC website, so I watched Sweeney's out of context paroxysm on youtube. I didn't understand a single word, but i was rolling in the aisles when he inserted a calm "do you understand me," followed by more unintelligible yelling! That was gold. I'd love to see what set him off like that.

Anonymous said...

ha, I forgot about falwell's problem with tinky-winky! I think it's great that what he'll be remembered for was having a hissy fit about a children's show mascot carrying a man-purse.

The Guardian readers have a good point about Sweeney not being able to keep his cool -I'd have clubbed that guy to death and that's one of the (many) reasons I'd make a poor journalist.
I think that scientology guy has seen the matrix too many times, he's channeling agent smith.

Dr J said...

@ PL: The context is clear enough: after being followed, harassed and generally nannied by the CofS twerp, Sweeney (Agonistes?) lost it. Can't blame him, really.

@ nic: I'll always remember JF for much worse, but the Tinky-Winky thing was just absurder than absurd. Kinda like the Matrix. ;-)

Anonymous said...

nic : forgot about that teletubby thingy for ages! and they had top viewership in britain despite those erm allegations; heard the psychology students actually watched episodes of teletubbies after that, then again, they watched panaroma's interview of diana whilst analysing her expressions...

dr j : channelling eliot? oh boy, scientology and eliot , lethal combination. true, religions usually have less than "glamorous" origins but pardon the skepticism that greets one with tom cruise as potential high priest -maybe dan brown could write another book on that!btw, think that the guardian's reputation has been declining over the last few years

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