by Salman Hameed

The Master is one of the best (and certainly one of the most interesting) films of the year! It is shot specularly and the acting is amazing. And it is one of those films where a second viewing simply enhances the pleasure tremendously.

But is it about the beginnings of Scientology? Well, yes and no. There are some elements of the film that seem to be inspired by the life of Scientology founder, L.Ron Hubbard. But that is just an inspiration. Rest of the movie goes in directions of its own.

Okay now to the actual discussion of the film. First we have a no-spoiler review (film autopsy) of The Master. For those who are interested in a further discussion of the movie, film professor, Kevin Anderson, and I also have a review essay titled, The Master: What is it all about? And yes, the latter discussion contains spoilers. [See all our reviews at Film Autopsy website]

Film Autopsy (review) of The Master:


Review Essay - The Master: What is it all about?

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by Salman Hameed

Somehow this doesn't surprises me at all. He is a fascinatingly creative guy, and I can see him experimenting with a new religion. This is from the review of a new Leonard Cohen biography, I'm Your Man:

And, it turns out, she tells us an enormous amount that even I, a Cohen aficionado, didn’t know, including exactly how Jewish Cohen’s upbringing was — he was steeped in Judaism — and that his religious exploration included a brief period as a Scientologist. This detail illuminates the line in Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Rain Coat,” “Did you ever go clear?,” an explicit reference to Scientology that until now was always opaque to me.

And here is the live version of the song from Leonard Cohen's last tour (and lyrics underneath it).


And here are the lyrics:

Famous Blue Raincoat

It's four in the morning, the end of December

I'm writing you now just to see if you're better

New York is cold, but I like where I'm living

There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert

You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.

Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair

She said that you gave it to her

That night that you planned to go clear

Did you ever go clear?

Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older

Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder

You'd been to the station to meet every train

And you came home without Lili Marlene

And you treated my woman to a flake of your life

And when she came back she was nobody's wife.

Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth

One more thin gypsy thief

Well I see Jane's awake

She sends her regards.

And what can I tell you my brother, my killer

What can I possibly say?

I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you

I'm glad you stood in my way.

If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me

And your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free.

Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes

I thought it was there for good so I never tried.

And Jane came by with a lock of your hair

She said that you gave it to her

That night that you planned to go clear

Sincerely L Cohen

Very cool! Also, see this post after I saw him perform live in a 2009 show.

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by Salman Hameed

Last month I had a chance to give a talk as part of TEDx Pioneer Valley program: How Learning Happens. It was actually a fantastic experience and had a chance to sit through some fascinating talks and interact with some very interesting people. I will be posting some other talks in the coming days. In the mean time, here is the video of my talk When Evidence is Powerless... (about 19 minutes). Here is a brief description:

Millions of individuals in the United States believe in UFOs and ghosts; yet we know that there is no credible evidence for any visitation from outer space or for dead souls hanging out in abandoned houses. In contrast, there is now overwhelming evidence that humans and other species on the planet have evolved over the past 4.5 billion years; yet 40 percent of Americans reject evolution. It seems that for many there is no connection between belief and evidence. If evidence is powerless, what are some other factors that shape their beliefs, and what are the implications for science education?

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by Salman Hameed

This week's New Yorker has a review of a new book on Malcolm X. The book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, seems to be a even-handed treatment of this fascinating figure. Unfortunately, the author of the book died a few days before the release of the book.

But this is not why I'm writing this post. Instead, the review in the New Yorker reminded me of some of the UFO-related beliefs of Nation of Islam. Now, I first encountered Nation back in early 1990s in my undergraduate days at Stony Brook. There was of course much confusion about the name Islam in their title. After talking to some of their members, it was quickly obvious that when they say Islam, they are talking about something completely different. Not a different sect, or a splinter group. Rather, it was a non-overlapping category.

I did vaguely remember some UFO component to the Nation of Islam. I'm currently teaching a class on Aliens, and this coming week, we will be talking about UFO and abduction related religions and spiritualities. In particular we are looking the Aetherius Society and the Unarius Academy of Science. The following week we'll get to Raelians. All of these religions are are a product of the age of science. Since science dominates every sphere of life, it is little surprise that they see super-powereful aliens as gods. Fascinatingly, there are also books that find the mention of UFOs in the Old and New Testaments, and in the Qur'an. It is the same drive. Bringing in old religions up to date with the paranormal phenomenon of the scientific age (I know, I know, there are a lot of contradictions in the previous sentence).

But then we have the Nation of Islam. It is also a religion predominantly of the 50s and 60s (though it started a bit earlier) - the height of the cold war, racial tensions in the US, and the UFO hype (these are not all equal in their hype). I find it very interesting that it used the UFO motif for racial construction of its narrative. This is all the more interesting, as most of the UFO religions are predominantly white. At the same time, the most widely cited abduction case, that of Betty and Barney Hill of New Hampshire, involved an inter-racial couple, and they did have a conversation with aliens about race relations in the US. This "encounter" took place in 1961. I had not thought about race and UFO religions before, but the New Yorker article about Malcolm X got me thinking in this direction.

Here is the bit about the origin story of Nation of Islam from the New Yorker:

If you are a believer (and very few are these days), the origins of the Nation of Islam stretch back thousands of years, to a time when blacks, the “original people,” were assaulted by a mutant white race created by an evil “Big Head” scientist named Yacub. The whites achieved dominion over the earth and blacks “went to sleep,” mentally and spiritually. The purpose of the Nation of Islam was to rouse the black man from his slumber. (Armed spaceships come into it, too.) Such were the teachings of Wallace D. Fard, an ex-con, silk salesman, and eccentric storefront preacher who turned up in a Detroit ghetto around 1930. Fard also had more earthly advice. He told his followers to avoid alcohol, to work hard and save money, to own their own businesses, and to regain a sense of the nobility of their race. His Nation of Islam represented a cultish offshoot of a venerable American movement, black nationalism.

And perhaps also an offshoot UFO religions. Read the full article here. Here is a speech by Louis Farrakhan from 2010 that includes a discussion of the the UFO Mothership and also references to the Bible (especially the Wheel of Ezekiel. It even has schematics of the Mothership (about 4 minutes in) about a mile long and is supposed to have contained 1500 bomber planes. He is a captivating speaker and this is nice demonstration of how religious views gets meshed in with the idea of UFOs. By the way, he even manages to L. Ron Hubbard - though not for his Church for Scientology. In any case, all of this is academically fascinating!

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The Guardian had this headline recently: UFO studies should be 'legitimate university subject', claims American professor. Well, first of all, Hellllo!! I have been teaching Aliens: Close Encounters of a Multidisciplinary Kind at Hampshire for the past couple of years (pdf syllabus here). We look at the history of UFO and alien abduction claims, look at psychology of human perception and the fickle nature of our memories, scientific search for life in the universe, and the social and cultural context of UFO-based religions. And I think all of these are still in the broad umbrella of "legitimate". But no love from the Guardian. Oh - wait. But this American Professor that the Guardian found is an anthropologist who seems to think that UFOs might be, or are, actual spaceships from other planets. Hmm...the evidence regarding that is a wee bit thin. On the contrary, evidence for the belief in UFOs is quite real, and that can be the source for a "legitimate" university subject. But to make it into the Guardian, I may have to crazify my course a bit more ;)

While we are on the subject, here is Jill Tartar's TED talk from last year. However, it was posted on CNN today alongside her article. If you are familiar with SETI, then you won't find anything specifically new in here. However, I liked her strong insistence on letting go of our species-specific ego and, what it would mean to us as humans, to look into an alien eye (of course, assuming that the evolution of our contactee aliens have also resulted in an organ for visual perception. Reasonable guess - but who knows). Much of this is in between 9 and 13 minutes of this 20min talk. Enjoy!

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What do they have all in common? Apparently they are all viewed negatively by Americans (according to Gallup). Here is the table with other religious groups:

Ok..so Scientologists have a serious PR problem, and Tom Cruise videos are not really working. But atheists with 45% negative rating! But, these views regarding atheists haven't really changed from the 2006 survey, when this was at 44%. This is a bit odd as the last two year hasve seen a substantial increase in the discussion over atheism in the media along with bestsellers from Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. So we should have expected some change one way or the other - but may be there is a lag and we will see an effect in the next couple of years. While, most religious groups have seen a decline in net positive value since 2006, Muslims take the cake - going down from 4% net negative in 2006 to 17%.

Gallup first asked Americans to rate these religious groups in this fashion in an August 2006 panel survey, and since then, there have been declines in positive ratings for many of the more favorably viewed religious groups. For example, the net positive score for Catholics was +44 in the 2006 survey, compared to the current +32. But there were also declines in the net positive scores of Jews (from +54 to +42), Baptists (from +45 to +35), and Methodists (from +50 to +45).

It is unclear why the net positive ratings for most groups have declined, unless Americans are just less positive about religion overall today than they were two years ago. Groups such as atheists and Scientologists that rated negatively in 2006 are still rated negatively today, with similar scores over time in most cases. One exception concerns Muslims, who saw their net rating tumble from -4 in 2006 to -17 in the current survey.

Read more about the survey here, and here is a link to the 2006 survey. (tip from Framing Science)

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Two men have have filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Hawaii to stop work at the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, located in Europe. They fear that the collider may produce something(s) that may result in the destruction of the Earth, or worse, the destruction of the entire universe. Apart from the nuttiness of these suggestions, my first reaction is: hmm...a particle accelerator that can destroy the entire universe must be very cool (I mean the universe is really really really big, and us, tiny humans, can cause the end of the universe consisting of over a hundred billion galaxies!). But what is going on with the lawsuit:

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

And why have the lawsuit against a European collider in Hawaii?

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.

Wait a minute. The entire Earth is at risk, and these guys are trying to save expenses!! On a more serious note, physicists do talk about a remote possibility of the production of tiny black holes (which have never been seen before), but still do not expect them to last long (again a process which never been observed):

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.”

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would probably not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring all the possibilities of these fearsome black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been peer reviewed, Dr. Mangano said.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

And here I actually side with the lawsuit - we know dragons are dangerous and can wreak havoc on the planet. Apart from all the silliness, the collider seems awesome and it should be able to address some fundamental questions of particle physics, and, among other things, may even find the elusive Higgs boson. Read the full story here. If you have time, also read this excellent Scientific American article on the Large Hadron Collider.

On a related note of doomsday, some members of a Russian doomsday cult have been living in a cave for the past five months. The members believe that the world is going to end in May of this year. Hmm...and what is the starting date for the Large Hadron Collider? Just a coincidence? :) In any case, seven members of the sect have come out of the cave recently and renewed efforts are underway to get the remaining members out. Read about their latest situation here.
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Here is a round-up of Scientology related disaster news and views. Of course, the latest round of PR disaster started when the Church of Scientology tried to remove Tom Cruise's (creepy?) celebration of Scientology video from the internet website gawker.com. Now a group of cyber-hackers, called Anonymous, have decided to retaliate against the Church. (Its not all gloomy for the Church - Will Smith recently became a Scientologist - nooo!!). So here is a collection of different Scientology related items in one post.

First a summary from a Newsweek article about Anomymous:

These are unfriendly times to be a Scientologist. In December, Germany's Interior Ministry moved to ban the organization, which has tax-exempt religious status in the United States. In January, St. Martin's Press published Andrew Morton's salacious unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise, which describes the star as its de facto second in command. The church responded with a 15-page statement, calling the book "a bigoted, defamatory assault replete with lies" and saying Cruise "is a Scientology parishioner and holds no official or unofficial position in the Church hierarchy." Jenna Hill Miscavige, a niece of church leader David Miscavige who left the fold in 2005, this week came out in support of Morton and slammed the organization for, among other things, its practice of "disconnection--essentially severing contact with family members seen as hostile to the group.

Anonymous was planning its attack for today (Sunday) and here is a bit more about them:

Now, a loose-knit consortium of hackers and activists calling itself "Anonymous" has declared "war" on the organization. In a creepy YouTube clip addressed to the "leaders of Scientology," a robotic voice announces "with the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed." (The clip has been viewed more than 2 million times since it was posted Jan. 21.)

The attack, says Anonymous, was spurred at least in part by what they consider to be the latest example of the church's secretive and litigious nature. Earlier this year, an internal 2004 church interview with Tom Cruise was leaked online. The actor, who called being a Scientologist a "blast," was seen railing against the practice of psychiatry and boasting, among other things, "we are the authorities of the mind ... we can bring peace and unite communities." The church attempted to have the videos taken down from the gossip site Gawker, claiming the material was copyrighted, selectively edited and that Cruise's performance was meant for private consumption. It's an argument that does have legal merit.

Read the full article here.

It has been tricky to deal with Scientology. I have been of the opinion that Scientology has perhaps been singled out unfairly (I have a soft spot for most UFO religions - c'mon...how can you not like Unarians and their Interplanetary Concave of Light celebration??). The German ban on Scientology, especially, seemed a bit extreme and raised the question of how do you really differentiate between cults and religions and who gets to decide that? Perhaps the focus should be on certain practices of a cult or a religion (why should mainstream religions escape that criticism?). I don't know if this was made pubic, but Germany should have provided a list of explicit complaints about Scientology. This can lead to explicit debate about specific practices - such as Disconnection or whether they prevent access to certain essential medicine, etc. Even then, one can ban certain practices and not necessarily the entire religion (for example, polygamy in the US for Mormons). If they don't comply, then impose a ban - but let them have freedom of practice of their religion.

That said, some of the concerns I had were answered in this excellent Point of Inquiry podcast interview with a former Scientology member, Tory Christman. I really liked the questions that the host of the show, D.J. Grothe, raised, especially about the reasons for singling out Scientology. I don't think all of the questions were answered, but still, the interview provided a good snapshot of the organization and reasons to be worried about it. Here is the interview: Anti-Science Scientology?

And now back to Tom Cruise video. Of course, within days it also generated spoofs. Here is one by Jerry O'Connell (but to appreciate it, please first see the original Tom Cruise video).


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Germany is planning to ban Scientology in the country because of its "cult-like" practices. From a BBC news story:

Germany's federal and state interior ministers have declared the Church of Scientology unconstitutional, clearing the way for a possible ban.

The ministers have asked Germany's domestic intelligence agency to examine whether the Church's legal status as an association could be challenged.

Scientology is not recognised as a religion in Germany.

I'm not clear how do they differentiate between cults and religions. Yes, Scientology is weird, but does it deserve to be banned? Some of it will indeed come out in the actual legal challenge, but I do feel that Scientology gets an unusually harsh treatment compared to other new religions. But the legal battle will be an interesting one to watch.

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Yes, the End is near again. This time the prediction is coming from a Russian cult, whose 30 members have barricaded themselves in a cave 400 miles south-east of Moscow, and are threatening to blow it up if approached by the police.

The group calls itself the "True Russian Orthodox Church". Members are waiting for the end of the world, which they are expecting to happen next May.

They say they have enough food and water to last out the winter, as well as large quantities of petrol.

The problem is that this group also includes four small children. But the cult leader did not join them (yes, he was indeed the smart one).

The group was founded by a former engineer, Pyotr Kuznetsov, who had fallen out with the Russian Orthodox Church.

He is thought to have ordered his followers into the cave but did not join them. He is now in custody and is undergoing psychiatric examinations.

Read the full story here. And while at it, here is a brief description of the classic text, When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festinger about a social and psychological study of a doomsday cult and here is wiki-description of his theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
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A BBC reporter completely lost his head during the filming of a documentary about Scientology - the UFO religion of Ron L. Hubbard and has several high profile followers, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta. Yes, Scientology is a bit scary (and so is Sweeney in this video)...but whatever the reason, there is no excuse for such an outburst. It raises other issues also: How does one go about defining religion? Who makes that decision? And should the treatment of its members be different simply because of nomenclature?

So is Scientology a cult or a religion? Does it really matter?

Here is the BBC story on the controversy and here is coverage from Telegraph

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This is an interesting news story reporting on an article published in the March issue of Consciousness & Cognition:

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.

The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to implausible reincarnation claims in the first place.

Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

and here is the connection with claims of alien abductions:

Past life memories are not the only type of implausible memories that have been studied in this manner. Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, has found that self-proclaimed alien abductees are also twice as likely to commit source monitoring errors.

And why do some people make such errors:

As for what might make people more prone to committing such errors to begin with, McNally says that it could be the byproduct of especially vivid imagery skills. He has found that people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.

Read the full story here
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