I’m not quite at the point where I climb into a closet with a video camera and start crying, but I am starting to get a little annoyed at the recent response to Tom Cruise and Scientology in general. In case you haven’t been following, Tom and Scientology have been getting a lot of ridicule lately. People have been stealing internal videos from the Church and throwing them online, I suppose so that the whole world can point and laugh. Not that there isn’t anything there that begs to be laughed at, of course. If you want people to leave you alone, it’s best not to go around talking about “thetans”, “orcs”, past lives, and denying psychology. Of course, you’d also not want to talk about your magic underwear, 17 virgins in heaven, or about angels, devils, heaven, hell, holy ghosts, transubstantiation, trinities, people rising from the dead, etc.

You could put any religion into a YouTube clip for everyone else to laugh at, it’s just that in this case we have the perfect storm of the most visible people in society (movie stars) having whacky, irrational believes that the rest of the population doesn’t generally hold. So, how about we laugh at irrationality in general instead of targeting one single example and giving legitimacy to everything else?