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Japan: Goodness, Beauty & Benefit-But for Whom? (The World / JAPAN)
Japan's political parties were as rattled as if the Emperor had suddenly reclaimed his forsaken divinity. Soka Gakkai, a society of Buddhist laymen, already holds 15 seats in the 250-member upper house, plus some 4,000 seats on local councils. Soka Gakkai (the Value-Creation Society) is more than just another party; it is a militantly organized, crusading sect vaguely combining Buddhism with left-wing reform or perhaps revolutionary politics, and its confessed ambition is to convert Japan and then the world. Fuji's Foot. The movement mixes the evangelism of Moral Rearmament with the get-out-the-vote discipline of the Communist Party and lots of show biz. Founded in 1930, it was suppressed during World War II and began sweeping the nation in 1947 under a talented organizer and ex-schoolteacher named Josei Toda. Soka Gakkai now claims 13 million members and 100,000 converts a month. While some critics question these figures, there is no doubt that the movement is gaining impressively. Last month, at ceremonies featuring martial bands, a waltz-playing orchestra, an all-girl chorus and sutra-chanting priests, Soka Gakkai formally dedicated a $4,500,000 recreation-and-worship center at the foot of Mount Fuji. Soka Gakkai is tightly organized into squads (each composed of 20 to 30 families), companies (made up of six squads), districts (formed by ten companies) and regional chapters. In thou sands of local meetings held throughout Japan on any night of the week, members discuss their spiritual progress and prepare for their highest duty, which is shakubuku (literally, break and subdue), or gaining converts. Until some years ago shakubuku was accomplished by relays of devotees chanting sutras round the clock in a prospective recruit's home and literally wearing him down. In other cases, members burned a family's Shinto altar, or prevented a doctor from treating a sick devotee on grounds that faith alone would cure him. Because of public protest, Soka Gakkai eased off on such tactics, but even today it stresses obedience, and members must vote for the sect's political candidates as a religious duty. Highest Values. Just what its faith and its political program consist of is not easy to discern. The society propagates a simplified, modernized version of doctrines taught by the 13th century Buddhist reformer, Nichiren, who maintained that happiness consisted of pursuing the highest values in life—"goodness, beauty and benefit." Grandly promising its followers material as well as spiritual benefits, Soka Gakkai, operating through a political affiliate called Koseiren, is competing with Japan's Communists and Socialists for the support of the discontented urban poor, who have missed out on the country's industrial boom. A Tokyo newsman explains, "Soka Gakkai is more appealing because religion sounds better than Communism." Soka Gakkai collects no dues, instead selects 400,000 families a year to provide 1,000 yen ($2.78) apiece; being allowed to contribute is considered a great honor. The sect derives even more income from a vast publishing empire that puts out a newspaper, two monthly magazines, a picture magazine and a children's magazine, boasting a combined circulation of
5,000,000. Domestically, the society visualizes a powerful welfare state, attacks corruption, political bosses, waste of taxpayers' money and favoritism for big business. In the Diet, Soka Gakkai has supported aid to small businessmen and most welfare measures. In contrast to the easygoing approach of many of their fellow representatives, Soka Gakkai Deputies painstakingly investigate every bill, carefully compile factual data on which to base their support or opposition. In foreign policy, the society calls for diplomatic relations with both Nationalist China, which Japan already recognizes, and Red China, friendly relations with South Korea, and the return of U.S.-occupied Okinawa to Japanese control. Explains a Soka Gakkai spokesman: "We do not think it is good to be friendly to the U.S. and the Western nations to the exclusion of others." Fixing Fences. Many Japanese are sure that there is far more to the movement than this sort of crusading reform spirit. They worry about Soka Gakkai's militant organization, its occasional signs of fanaticism. Many hope that the movement may prove a passing phenomenon, but Japan's political pros are not so sure. One fact that particularly impresses them: the society's converts are mainly young adults under 30. Soka Gakkai's president, Daisaku Ikeda (no kin to Japan's Premier), is himself only 36. Before the war, Ikeda says, the Japanese did have an ideal of sorts—to conquer Asia by force. But since then his argument goes, nothing has been advanced to take its place. Says he: "We give the young a principle, a practical and sincere ideal." Just what that ideal is, and where it might lead, is another question. Last week Premier Hayato Ikeda's Liberal-Democratic Party, as well as the Socialists, began discussing ways to repair their political fences among the masses and counteract Soka Gakkai. |
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December 12, 1999
Apocalypse Now? By Nicholas D. Kristof Destroying the World to Save It Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. By Robert Jay Lifton. 374 pp. New York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $26. If all had gone according to plan, November 1995 would have been quite a month. According to Japanese officials and prosecutors, the cult of Aum Shinrikyo was preparing to make tons of sarin nerve gas and release it in major Japanese cities (and possibly American ones as well). Aum is said to have intended to use its Russian-made military helicopter and two smaller crop-dusting helicopters to spread the nerve gas, and security experts estimate that hundreds of thousands could have been killed. Instead, early that same year, Aum murdered one of its enemies in a particularly obvious way, and the police began to close in. The cult's leader, Shoko Asahara, allegedly ordered his aides to release sarin in the Tokyo subway system to distract the authorities, but at the time Aum's best chemist was busy with religious rituals. His substitute was rushed, and turned out low-grade sarin, so when Aum followers released the impure gas in the Tokyo subway system on March 20, 1995, it killed only 11 people and injured only a few thousand. And Asahara is remembered as only a modest mass murderer, far short of the Hitlerian scale to which he aspired. Robert Jay Lifton, a prominent American psychiatrist and author, warns in ''Destroying the World to Save It'' that other groups may pursue the Aum model: not just predicting an apocalypse but trying to bring it about. ''Asahara and Aum have changed the world, and not for the better,'' Lifton argues, and he explains, ''Its members can claim the distinction of being the first group in history to combine ultimate fanaticism with ultimate weapons in a project to destroy the world.'' Lifton continues, ''The next group of disciples to try might not be quite as small as Aum, or as inept, or as encumbered by its own madness.'' The story of Aum's rise and fall -- replete with sex, drugs and violence, with the guru forcing friend to kill friend, with the cult simmering old women in steaming hot baths, with cult leaders administering LSD and then claiming credit for the visions -- is mind-boggling. But it is already the subject of a fine narrative, David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall's ''Cult at the End of the World.'' The emphasis here is different, neither a simple recounting of Aum's rise nor a detailed exploration of the security issues involved. Instead, Lifton has zeroed in on Aum's theology and on the psychology of the cult's members. This reflects Lifton's own expertise, for he had earlier studied Nazi doctors as well as other cultlike phenomena. Unfortunately, what Asahara thought is rather duller than what he did. Instead of scenes of Aum leaders breaking into the home of an enemy lawyer and killing him and his wife and baby, we get dry theorizing like this: ''This megalomanic guruism, the claim to possess and control immediate and distant reality, was not only wild fantasy but a form of desymbolization -- a loss, that is, of the symbolizing function that characterizes the healthy human mind.'' This focus on the duller side of Aum -- its theology and psychology -- would have worked better if Lifton had had access to Aum leaders. But Lifton acknowledges up front that he spoke in depth to only 10 former cult members, none of whom were high-ranking or involved in illegal behavior. They were simply, like the vast majority of the Aum members in Japan, sincere young people looking for spiritual answers, credulous rather than criminal. Although Lifton never met Asahara, he draws a persuasive portrait of him, working from solid research in press reports and trial statements. Lifton describes the young guru, partly blind but able to see better than the other children at his school for the blind, bullying and dominating his classmates. He also earned a black belt in judo and developed a love of drama. Some commentators have suggested that in Aum Shinrikyo he tried to recreate the environment of his boyhood. Lifton is at his best in explaining the mixed-up feeling of Asahara's disciples, the confusion that led them to obey the guru or rationalize what he did. When Lifton discusses some larger issues, his discussion is invariably thoughtful and informed. Yet I often found his arguments unpersuasive. Most significantly, I am skeptical of the idea that Asahara has carried us across some Rubicon, changing the world in a fundamental way. Millenary cults have been around for millenniums, and it seems unlikely that any new guru will prove as deadly as the man in mid-19th-century China who proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus and led the Taiping rebellion. That uprising resulted in the deaths of countless millions of people and contributed to the collapse of imperial China. And it would take quite a remarkable effort to match the biological weapons of the European settlers in America. Their introduction of smallpox -- mainly by accident but also by use of deliberately infected blankets -- helped wipe out much of the native population in the New World. I am also unconvinced that cults are quite as dangerous as Lifton seems to suggest. The main surprise about Aum was that it managed to go on for as long as it did without being stopped. This had to do with an exceptional circumstance: in Japan, police and journalists alike are extremely wary of probing any religious organization for fear of being accused of religious persecution. My guess is that if sarin or similar weapons are used to kill vast numbers of people any time soon, the source will probably be not a cult but North Korea, which Western intelligence experts believe has countless tons of pure sarin and whose artillery can easily reach Seoul, the capital of South Korea. Moreover, Aum demonstrated that biological weapons are hard to get right, more so than chemical weapons. The cult devoted millions of dollars and many years to developing anthrax and other biological weapons, and though it released them, apparently no one was infected. None of this is to minimize the risks, and Lifton is right that a hate group may eventually emerge with chemical or biological weapons whose power matches its rage. But as worries go, he does not demonstrate that this should be near the top of our list of concerns. |
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November 1, 1999
BOOKS OF THE TIMES BOOKS OF THE TIMES; New Things to Fear From an Old Type of Madman By RICHARD BERNSTEIN DESTROYING THE WORLD TO SAVE IT Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence and the New Global Terrorism By Robert Jay Lifton 374 pages. Metropolitan Books. $26. Robert Jay Lifton, professor of psychology and psychiatry at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has spent a good part of his life studying apocalyptic evil and its consequences. In 1969 his ''Death in Life'' explored the psychospiritual aftereffects of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan. ''The Nazi Doctors'' tried to answer the question, How did German physicians allow themselves to be so morally deformed that they put their knowledge of healing to the service of Nazi cruelty and murder? There are many echoes of Mr. Lifton's earlier themes in his new book, ''Destroying the World to Save It,'' which is mostly a study of Aum Shinrikyo, the messianic Japanese cult that carried out a nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995. Mr. Lifton's subject once again is the nature of self-justifying evil, the way in which those who carry out acts of lunatic criminality are persuaded of the higher good of their actions. But he takes this theme a step forward as he compares Aum Shinrikyo to other cults, especially American ones like the Peoples Temple and Heaven's Gate, to reach an alarming conclusion: that the combination of apocalyptic, paranoid groups and readily available weapons of mass destruction poses a dreadful new style of menace. ''Aum's danger to the world -- and its greatest significance -- lay in its joining of megalomania to ultimate weapons,'' Mr. Lifton writes. As with all of Mr. Lifton's reflections on politics and psychology, this one has many powerful and compelling insights. And yet these insights mingle with a certain intellectual overreaching and a rhetorical vagueness that sap the argument of its power and persuasiveness. There is an abstractness to Mr. Lifton's line of analysis, the use of a lot of fancy clinical language that doesn't quite hit the explanatory bull's-eye. Mr. Lifton cites various notions that he finds common to the otherwise dissimilar cults that he studied -- their adherents' idea that death is purifying; their paranoid belief in the existence of evil forces that are persecuting them; their overriding need for spiritual meaning, immortality, power. But one has the sense that these terms are not quite up to solving the mysteries that Mr. Lifton himself evokes. Mr. Lifton is best at description, and he begins with a long and richly detailed one of Aum Shinrikyo and its charismatic, probably schizophrenic leader, Shoko Asahara. As most will remember, Mr. Asahara's nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway killed a dozen people, but the goal was to achieve (if that is the word) far more than that. Mr. Asahara wanted to bring about a mass global slaughter after which only he, the brilliant prophet, and his followers would remain. ''For the first time in history,'' Mr. Lifton writes, striking his main theme, ''end-time religious fanaticism allied itself with weapons capable of destroying the world and a group embarked on the mad project of doing just that.'' Mr. Lifton interviewed former members of Aum Shinrikyo and compiled the information available on it to produce a portrait of the cult and its guru that is truly hair-raising. Mr. Asahara was the kind of lunatic visionary who could visit the oldest pyramid in Egypt and seriously declare not only that he had seen it before but that ''I designed it myself a long time ago.'' Using an amalgam of Buddhist ideas, Shintoism, pseudoscience and charisma, he was able to attract talented men and women to his cause, including doctors and scientists. One of them was a reputable cardiac surgeon named Ikuo Hayashi, who abandoned real medicine for what Mr. Lifton sensibly calls ''medicalized criminality.'' Among other things, Dr. Hayashi invented what he called ''new narco,'' in which he used a sequence of thiopental injections to produce semi-comatose states, then used five to seven electrical shocks followed by more thiopental to bring about memory loss among cult members who had committed crimes for the group. Mr. Lifton's reporting on the Aum cult and on the distance otherwise intelligent people are able to travel toward the annihilation of a genuine moral self is very good. It is when Mr. Lifton turns to the reasons that these people lose the self in the totalistic doctrine of the cult that his language becomes blandly and mistily clinical. ''We cannot say how much of a prior tendency toward dissociation he brought to his pre-Aum medical career,'' Mr. Lifton writes of Dr. Hayashi, ''but he certainly experienced in Aum a powerful fusing of the all-encompassing answer he sought with a dissociative response -- doubling, the formation of two selves that are morally and functionally antithetical although part of the same psyche.'' Such phrases somehow do not explain how a man of science could wreck lives in the service of mumbo jumbo. A similar sort of nonspecific quality surrounds Mr. Lifton's discussion of the factors in Japan that gave rise to Aum. Among these are ''psychohistorical dislocation, a breakdown of the social and institutional arrangements'' whose roots, in Mr. Lifton's view, are in Japan's defeat in World War II and the experience of the atomic bomb. Mr. Lifton has interesting things to say about Japan here. Yet the fact remains that Aum Shinrikyo was never more than an isolated, ultra-fringe phenomenon in Japan, which despite its ''psychohistorical dislocation'' and its ''individual and collective shape-shifting'' (whatever that is) is in general a prosperous, law-abiding and stable democracy. As for the danger that a new form of global terrorism is upon us, it would of course be foolish for the world's police forces not to be on guard for the private makers of sarin or for those who dream, as Mr. Asahara did, of obtaining nuclear weapons. He didn't succeed, of course. In fact, he never came remotely close to achieving his apocalyptic objectives, nor could he have. Aum and the other cults discussed in this book did shocking things. Still, Mr. Lifton does not make the case that there is anything especially new or more globally menacing than what the world has faced from the troubling phenomenon of psychotic megalomania in the past. |
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Koppel: And we're back once again with David Miscavige. I'm going to let you get to the point you want to get to, but I was astonished, during the break you told me you had never heard that tape before, the L. Ron Hubbard tape.
Miscavige: No, I'd never heard that. No. I'm not-- I mean, it may exist here, but I haven't heard it. I mean, I don't know if you understand, there are 6,000 lectures by Mr Hubbard. There are over 20 million words of printed words in Scientology, and all of these have been made available in Scientology, so if it is there, we'll find it. I don't think anything's being hidden, either. I just personally haven't heard that tape, no. Koppel: Okay. Now, you wanted to get back to the issue of the psychiatrists. Miscavige: Yes. Koppel: And let me, if I may, by way of introduction to that, I did not interrupt you before, but you were talking about the use of psychiatry in Nazi Germany, the use of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. Miscavige: Yes. Koppel: I would argue, and I think most psychiatrists in this country would argue, that what we're talking about here was the misuse of psychiatry in both those countries. Miscavige: Well, okay. And if we're talking about the misuse, fine. In any event, I think any use that ends up killing people is a misuse, and I think that's a hell of a record to have. But let me get back to where I was, because it does tie in. You say the misuse, but I don't know if you're aware that there was a plan in 1955 in this country, Ted, to repeat what was done in Russia. There was going to be a Siberia, U.S.A., set up on a million acres in Alaska to send mental patients. They were going to lessen the commitment laws. You could basically get into an argument with somebody and be sent up there. This sounds very odd. Nobody's ever heard about it. That's in no small part thanks to the Church of Scientology. I must say, though, that when that bill was killed in Congress, the war was on with psychiatry where they declared war on us, and I want you to understand something-- Koppel: Let me just ask you to be specific on that. You are talking about a bill having been brought into Congress for the setting aside of a million acres in Alaska-- Miscavige: You got it. Koppel: …for people-- Miscavige: To send a mental health center. Koppel: …to send mental health patients? What was-- Who was the sponsor of that bill? What was the bill number? I mean, we'd-- I'm sure we're going to-- (crosstalk) Miscavige: Well, I have a copy of it, and if you want it I can give it to you. All of these documents-- Koppel: I would. Let me see it. Miscavige: All of these documents were made available to Forrest. If they're not on here, I don't know why, but I do have them and I will make it available to you. Koppel: Okay. Now, was that bill ever voted on? Did it ever come out of committee? Miscavige: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. It was a major, major, major flap for the psychiatrists when it got voted down, because then the slogan around the country began, "Siberia USA," and it was really the first time that psychiatry had been denigrated publicly, that they weren't the science that they had been promoting themselves to be. And they took it upon themselves then to start dealing with anybody who would oppose them. They definitely saw Dianetics and Scientology as opposing them, not only in terms of their brutal treatments, such as electric shock and prefrontal lobotomy, which are specific things that we're against, but also for the fact of the people that were going to Dianetics and Scientology and not there. They went to the Food and Drug Administration, they went to the American Medical Association, they arranged an informant to go into our headquarters here in Washington, D.C., and infiltrate the organization over the next five years. I have documents on this, too. They wanted to get somebody in the church to recommend medical treatment, couldn't get them to do it, walk in and say, "I want to be cured medically." People wouldn't do it. They finally went so far as getting the head of the D.C. morals, the moral department of the D.C. police to send his daughter in as an informant, pregnant, to get an abortion, to ask the church to do it, a frame job. The church didn't go for it. They did then raid the church.
Koppel: When you say "they," you're talking about who now? Miscavige: I am talking-- This is the APA, AMA, Food and Drug Administration. These people were all coordinated doing these activities, and it went on for five years, Ted, and you have to understand, we only find this out recently. They then proceed to raid our church. Now, the following takes place. They killed one of our executive directors. They literally murdered-- The Food and Drug Administration hired an informant to go into our organization in Seattle, Wash., his wife was there. He wasn't for Scientology, she was. They said, "Great, report on her and report on Scientology." He proceeded to do so. Several weeks later, murdered the head of our organization. The Food and Drug Administration never told us that it was their informant. Instead -- wait -- instead, they got with the D.C.-- I mean, with the Seattle Police, and went undercover in the organization on the homicide investigation to rifle our files. At that same time -- and here's where the media comes in -- a man interviewed L. Ron Hubbard for The Saturday Evening Post. He came out with an unbelievably bad article in that magazine. Of course, Scientology said, "You're part of this Food and Drug Administration thing," and of course, he said, "Oh, excuse me, you just sound like the fringe," which is very easy to say. What do I find out 20 years later through the Freedom of Information Act? I find out that this man, a man named James Phelan, had been, well, The Saturday Evening Post had been written to by the Food and Drug Administration to get a discrediting article written on Mr. Hubbard and Scientology to help their case against us, that this man then went and interviewed Mr. Hubbard. He interviewed him for two days. Mr. Hubbard provided him with tapes and transcripts. The man came back here to the United States. Mr. Hubbard was in England and provided those transcripts to the Food and Drug Administration for their case a full week before he ever wrote his article. Koppel: We have got to take another break. We'll continue our discussion in a moment. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) |
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Koppel: During one of Forrest Sawyer's pieces a moment ago, we heard one of your colleagues talking about psychiatry, right?
Miscavige: Right. Koppel: You guys are deaf on psychiatry. The criticism that was made was that this is foreign to the United States. He referred to its origin in Nazism and Communism. And that your religion, Scientology, is an "American" religion. Fair enough so far?
Miscavige: Well, American-of-the-mind. Yeah. That's right. Koppel: What does that do for Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and all the other isms that also did not-- Miscavige: Oh, I think-- Koppel: …originate in this country? Miscavige: Well, no, that isn't really the point. The point there is this -- that those people, the Fascists, the Communists, have used psychiatry to further their ends. That's just a fact. I mean, you want to look at the studies that brought about the Holocaust of the Jews, that the Nazis justified killing the Jews, they were done at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Leipzig, Germany, and that justified the killing of six million people. If you look at the report that even Forrest Sawyer did on mental institutions in Russia -- several months ago he did this -- you saw that that was a tool of the state. That's the point he's making there. But let me tell you what our real problem is. Number one, understand this. Psychiatry, psychology, that comes from the word psyche. Psyche means soul. These people have preempted the field of religion, not just Scientology, every other religion. They right now practice and preach the fact that man is an animal, and I guess that is where philosophically we're at odds with them. But to understand what this war is, this is not something that we started. In fact, 22 days after "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health" came out, the attacks from the American Psychiatric Association started. This was the first popular book on the mind ever in existence, it was running up the best-seller list, it was popular with the people. I have the letter sent out by the man who was in the American Psychiatric Association asking for ad hominum reviews on the subject of Dianetics. These people absolutely felt that we were cutting across their vested interests, and the lengths with which they have gone to destroy Scientology and Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard is absolutely mind-boggling. They attempted to do so through the 1950s. First they tried to attack L. Ron Hubbard's credibility, then they recruited the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration, and they then proceeded to infiltrate our organization. Koppel: May I-- Miscavige: No, no, let me finish-- Koppel: May I stop you just for a moment? Because, you know, when you talk about undermining L. Ron Hubbard's credibility -- and again, I have no idea whether that video and the tape that we heard-- Miscavige: Yeah, but why don't touch on that? Koppel: …that we heard was representative of L. Ron Hubbard. But when I hear about a man talking about having been taken out to the Van Allen space radiation belt of space ships that were essentially the same thing as the DC-8, I've got to tell you, I mean, if we're talking about this man's credibility, that certainly raises some questions in my mind about his credibility. Miscavige: Okay. Well, let me ask you, have you read any books on Dianetics or Scientology? Koppel: I've been reading little else over the last two days. Miscavige: You see, here-- Koppel: I must confess, I'm not a student of-- Miscavige: But you haven't read "Dianetics" or any books on Scientology? Koppel: You're absolutely right.
Miscavige: Okay, fine. Then that's why you would make a comment like that? I mean, let's not joke around here. That bit that Forrest did there pulled out of context items. And let's not forget something else, by the way. I told Forrest Sawyer -- and I was open about this the whole time, I have been in communication with "Nightline" numerous times -- I said, "Forrest, if something comes up, you want to bring me up an allegation, you confront me it before this so I can do away with this garbage and not have to do it on the program." "Dave, I promise you I'll do it." Numerous calls have been put in to him. I have never heard it from him. I never heard about these. To do that is take anything out of context. Ted, when I talk about-- Koppel: Can you-- Miscavige: No, but let me just give you an analogy. Koppel: You know that there are going to be a lot of folks out there -- and I'm sure there are a lot of Scientologists, and I don't want to offend anyone who truly believes this -- but there are a lot of people out there who will look at that. You say it was taken out of context. Take a minute, if you would, and see if you can put it into context for us so that it does not sound ridiculous. Because, quite frankly, the way it sounded there, it sounded ridiculous. Miscavige: Okay. Well, let me tell you-- Let me ask you to do this, then: I want you to take the Catholic Church and take right now and explain to me, to make sense that the Virgin Mary was a virgin, scientifically impossible, unless we're talking about something-- Okay, I'll be like you. I'll be the cynic. If we're talking about artificial insemination, how could that be? If you're talking about going out to heaven, xcept we have a space shuttle going out there, we have the Apollo going out there, you do that. I'm not here-- Koppel: I will-- Miscavige: Wait-- Koppel: I will-- Miscavige: I'm not here to talk-- Koppel: Let me do it, and you're-- You were a Catholic as a child, right? Miscavige: Yeah. Koppel: So you know full well that those issues are questions of faith. Are you telling me that what we have heard L. Ron Hubbard say on this broadcast this evening, that they, to Scientologists, are issues of faith? If that's what you tell me, then that's fine. Miscavige: No, no. As a matter of fact-- Koppel: Then it doesn't have to be explained logically. (crosstalk) Miscavige: Talk about the Van Allen Belt or whatever is that, that forms no part of current Scientology, none whatsoever. Koppel: But what did he mean when he was talking about it? Miscavige: Well, you know, quite frankly, this tape here, he's talking about the origins of the universe, and I think you're going to find that in any, any, any religion, and I think you can make the same mockery of it. I think it's offensive that you're doing it here, because I don't think you'd do it somewhere else. Koppel: I'm not mocking it. I'm asking you a question, and you know, you turn it around and ask me about Catholicism. I say we're talking about areas of faith. Miscavige: Well, it's not even a matter of faith, because Scientology is about you, yourself and what you do. You're bringing up something that isn't part of current Scientology, that isn't something that Scientologists study, that is part of some tape taken from, I have no idea, and asking me about it and asking me to put it in context. That I can't do. Koppel: All right. So this has nothing to do with your faith today? Miscavige: If you read any books on Scien-- No. Van Allen Belt? Absolutely not. Nothing. Koppel: All right. Okay. We're going to continue our discussion in just a moment. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) |
