Thattaboy, Tom Shakespeare!

This is from an article that was run on the Fashion Monitor Toronto’s web site on August 22^nd until it was mysteriously removed today. Not only removed, but wiped clean from their news archives. Hmmm, sounds a tad fishy to me. Perhaps Tommy Boy didn’t like the response from readers of the sane variety to what he had to say. I sent an e-mail to the website asking why the article just vanished. We’ll see if I get any semblance of a response. So, for the benefit of all mankind (me chuckles) I’ve pasted the text from the article below for your perusal. It would just be a shame for this tidbit to get swept under the rug so quickly…

From Fashion Monitor Toronto:

Scientologist Tom Cruise revealed that he is much older than the forty three years he has spent in his present body.

Tom Cruise noted that he is "old beyond reckoning." What's more, his current life is "probably one of the least satisfying" he has led.

"I was much happier in previous existences when I wrote plays, composed music, conquered nations, discovered continents, and developed cures for diseases," said Tom Cruise.

Cruise said he became aware that he "had been here before," when he read the complete works of Shakespeare in a month, despite being dyslexic, not long after dropping out of high school.

"Shakespeare was deja vu for me," said Tom Cruise. "It was so cool. I felt as if I had seen his words already, knew them all by heart. Then, after I began studying scientology, I realized the words had come from my heart in a previous life. That's why I say that as glorious and enviable as my present life is, making "War of the Worlds" and all those other great movies can't compare to writing "Romeo and Juliet" or the sonnets.

In addition to recognizing his days of future passed in the works of Shakespeare and Bach—and in the achievements of Columbus and Napoleon—Cruise recognizes the continuing reappearance of "Anti-Thetanic forces," such as Matt Lauer and Brooke Shields, with whom he has clashed in former lives.

So, before I get on and say my peace, I’ve gotta ask…he is saying that he was William Shakespeare in a past life, correct? And is there also an implication that he may have been Bach, Columbus and Napoleon as well? Wow. If I’ve mistakenly interpreted that, please someone set me straight…

Alrighty then, you may think I’m going to spend this time to mock and make fun of the Cruise ship sailing to Crazytown, eh? Wrong. Actually, I’m going to give ole Tom a big cyberspace pat on his back for the public service he’s been performing lately! I mean, could there possibly be a better spokesman to demonstrate how utterly and completely bonkers the Church of (Pseudo) Scientology (COS) is at its core? I think not.

I also won’t bore you with hashing out the history of how the COS was started pretty much on a dare by the sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard, or how their ‘faith’ involves an ancient evil galactic emperor named Xenu or that the COS believes all mental abnormalities to be the result of possession by the souls of bad aliens called the Thetans…just do a search on Google or Yahoo! and you can find all the facts and information you could possibly want about the COS (or more simply, go to 'Operation Clambake' posted in my links section). What I will devote some energy to, though, is a brief rant about the COS’ tax exempt status.

So, tell me, if I form a Church that worships the Prophet Spock (yes, the Star Trek Spock), strictly following the principles of the Vulcan IDIC (don't ask) and I get a huge following of people want to believe the same way (which could frighteningly happen with the vast number of Trekkies & Trekkers in the world), can I also eventually become eligible for tax-free status? And if not, how the Hell is that so different from what’s happened with the COS? Well, the answer to that is the COS spent years and years, along with tons of money, battling against the IRS in federal court in order to receive that special status and I’m, well, broke and minus a horde of culty followers.

Worse yet, the COS is a tiered pay-as-you-learn religion. The more you can pay, the more ‘truths’ will be revealed to you. Could that be any more contrary to a ‘not-for-profit’ status? So, I ask, how much longer can this be allowed to continue? What other revelations need to shine in order for our government to wake up and say, hey, that’s really bullshit, isn’t it? Unfortunately, that’ll never happen because the COS has accumulated more money than Xenu himself. And with that money (in this world of ours) comes the might of political power. Sadly, that makes for continued blue skies for the COS.

As I’ve said in other posts, I don’t mean to single out individual religions to bash. By their very definition, all organized religions are cults…only the degree of freakiness between them all varies. But groups like this one really piss me off in how they masturbate science all the way around into a religion. And I just hope in the case of the COS, people are paying attention to Tom’s proud slips of the tongue. If my brain functioned as his does, I wouldn’t want to believe those mental monsters were cause through solely psychological reasons… Jage

Note: If you don’t understand how people could have gotten sucked into the COS mentality, there’s a perfect example of another faux-science-oriented cult brewing right now in America. Go rent the film, ‘What the Bleep Do We Know?’ and be prepared for a frightening glimpse into the makings of a quasi-religion. Just remember that, as neat as the FX may look in the film, the science it promotes is of the fuzzy mash potato sort. The real skinny behind that flick is that it was created by the Ramtha School of Enlightenment (RSE) as a grassroots recruiting project. The three 'creators' of the film are devotees (or 'clients' as they prefer to be called) of the RSE, or more specifically to JZ Knight, who appears throughout the film to wax and wane universal truths (if you watch it, she’s the blond chick in the red guru jacket who loves to roll her rrrrr's). In sooth, Ms. Knight is the founder of the RSE who channels the 35,000 year old spirit of Ramtha into her body to reveal scientific insights (as shown in the movie) to her and her ‘clients’. In short, our old buddy Ramtha is a long-dead Atlantian warrior who seems to have developed a hunkering for lost Hollywood souls with cash to spare for his knowledge. Ah, the blood pressure rises once again…