When the law places Scientology, Christianity and secular humanism in the same protected category, it is not blessing them all. It is refusing to rank them. The older religions are not being honoured. They are being neutralised.
Tag: religious-privilege
What Religions Know About Each Other
Religious institutions are often at their clearest when exposing invention, revision, and self-interest in rival faiths. The privilege they claim is simpler and uglier: the right to inspect rival revelation as history while presenting their own history as revelation.
Scientology and the Machinery Made Visible
Scientology is often dismissed as a pseudo religion, a fake faith too recent and too obvious to be taken seriously. That is a mistake. If an institution claims religious authority, grounds that authority in claims that cannot be publicly tested, and seeks the deference or protection religion is granted, then it belongs inside the criticism. What makes Scientology useful is not that it is uniquely strange, but that it makes the machinery unusually visible.