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.