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Reverend Roadkill, you are a new breed: Trolls who get by on accusing others of trolling.

I like the trademark on Holiness. Is it sold as a unit or by the ounce? Now please, your holiness, stop derailing this discussion just because I phrased one response a little curtly. You've made way too many assumptions about me based on it and are really just being the instigator that you so readily see in me. Why do you suppose people get so emotionally attached to assumptions?

Reverend Roadkill, your first word on this subject was "Balls" and now you're trying to accuse me of assholery? If you're so hurt feel free to stop participating; I like everyone's participation I'm just trying to goad it in the original direction. I would give this right to anyone whose post I was commenting on.

Well coming off like an asshole was certainly not my intent. Sincerest apologies all around if offended. I am actually pleased we all agree on the subject but I am just trying to get a little further than just describing the situation in numerous ways.

Lord Cataplanga, you still have failed to move this forward. Great, you have a word, "neophile", for someone who challenges their own beliefs. But still, why don't more people. If you read my original post I'm lamenting the invasion of this into intellectual circles. Also people exhibit this behavior in many more realms than just political.

OK I think you have opened a really wide discussion. Permit me to put what you are saying into my own language. Basically you are asking whether we are ever really justified in judging someone else's viewpoint if they really are convinced of it, right?  Well in your example, for instance, we CAN judge whether there is any reasonable chance someone should believe this organization is some ancient thing that tried to save the world and it will come back. I know that we are speaking of metaphysical things and not everything is under the jurisdiction of scientific scrutiny but aspects of it will be. If we are truly objective in all things when we analyze something I believe we can approach an understanding and even agree that our viewpoints part but we see where and how and why they part. Typically after a little digging we can find really one or two things that lead us down certain paths. I realized I've moved to more general discussion. I'll more directly respond in my next paragraph.

OK, what makes your question a little cyclical is that you are starting with the assumption that the fundamental subject is indeed part of a false belief and is brainwashed-"They may be living in a socially constructed reality and effectively brainwashed. But, they believe the Church of Scientology's teachings." This already puts our experience as more objective than theirs.
 
Does there come a point where levels of exploitation get so high that it is impossible to believe the person being exploited anymore - where the observers perception of reality trumps the experience and the attitudes of the person actually having the experience? Of course. This person's beliefs are eventually going to lead them to something in the objective world which can be analyzed. If your beliefs can be directly refuted then they are refuted.

1. How far do we linguistically parse what they are saying so that we can convince ourselves that, deep down, they agree with us about their situation, despite what it looks what they are saying on the surface is in direct opposition to our view? I'm afraid I need clarification here. Why are we trying to convince ourselves they agree with us?

2. What happens when we start lowering down the exploitation, say to the level of Jehovah's Witnesses, AAA baseball or any other example you care to think of? Again if someone is exploited to the point of being objectively disconnected from reality then that's that.

3. You can avoid the trap of "soft paternalism" by you yourself being objective in your views. Also Sea Org is only more defensible than the other in that it is less falsifiable and therefore less objective and useful.

OK thanks for chiming in, all. BUT. We didn't take the discussion as far as I was trying to go into. You all agreed that even relatively intelligent people will react emotionally rather than rationally when confronted with an idea that actually challenges an assumption they have based a lot on. But why? Why is it I was attracted to such things and others aren't? I mean I could go into genetics and how large populations of our relative recent ancestors were bred to be submissive to an idea.

It seems that people are still under the yoke we've just been given the freedom to chose a yoke. I mean huge movements of thought will sweep our population (which is a new phenomenon, as far as how common that has become) but can possibly be useless when put up to actual intellectual scrutiny. In short, we seem to have given ignorance a veneer of intelligence. I believe this to be dangerous in that people are electing officials into power who are pandering to these thoughts. Please continue.

I've noticed in recent years a disparity between certain types of thinking. There's ideas which are basically further expounding on a base of agreed-upon assumptions and then there's things that analyze those assumptions. It seems the world is chock full of the former and, as a fellow who is all about the latter, it seems that when I try to get someone to see that our differences are based simply on different fundamental ideas they treat me like I suddenly started spouting gibberish. Is even the intellectual world being infested with ignorance, intolerance and a general lack of self realization?

I'll throw a nice, juicy, inflammatory example that is near and dear to me. I often differ with a lot of people who think that men are more sexually motivated than women (I feel this is a widely accepted idea in our society as well). I try to point out that the real scientific data (Reich, The Function of the Orgasm, The Invasion of Compulsory Sex Morality) suggests that women are actually just as sexually motivated and all the other behaviors around the idea that they are not is really a social convention. It is usually at this point that someone starts treating me as though I just exited a spaceship and am pointing what is obviously a death ray at them. Why is this? I believe that people basically still treat their ideas like religion. They have merely supplanted something they PERCEIVE as more intellectual or scientific and they are just as irrational about it as a religious fanatic. Sometimes someone will appear to be quite intelligent at first and then behave this way. Please discuss and expound