‘You may be ambassador to England or France

You may like to gamble, you might like to dance

You may be the heavyweight champion of the world

You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls,

But you gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed

You gonna have to serve somebody,

It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord

But you gonna have to serve somebody.’   Bob Dylan

 

Although I have watched several documentaries regarding the Church of Scientology, the one that I watched last night, on Netflix, was extremely revealing.

The film, My Scientology Movie by Louis Theroux, was captivating in it’s examination of the power of mind control that the current Church leader, David Miscavige, has over the group.

One of the succinct points ,of the engaging piece of cinema, was the fact that the members of the church felt compelled to act and speak in only the manner that was approved by Miscavige.

Apparently, according to the film, Miscavige is prone to extreme mood swings…and is given to physical punishment of members…for the slightest perceived infraction or deviation from his norm…if you can discern what his norm is at any given moment.

I have watched, Presidential Spokesman, Sean Spicer, and his associate, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, seemingly perform for an audience of one.  Many of the assertions that they present as fact…are illogical and border on the absurd.  It is obvious that they are performing for the President alone.

How often have you been involved in an endeavor, be it church…or your employment…or your relationships, where you struggled to emulate or speak or act as a person in your life had indicated or instructed you to do?

How often have you, truly, wanted to say or do or act, in a manner that represented…who you are…and how you feel…and your honest thoughts on the matter?

There is something so refreshing when you meet an original human being!

Someone who is not saying or acting or mindlessly accepting what the, Boss, or the Preacher, or the President, told them to do.

A Lemming will follow their fellow Lemmings off a cliff

When something seems illogical or immoral or un-ethical…it probably is.

The freest and most enjoyable life that I know of is a life lived on your own terms…thinking for yourself…and acting on your personal convictions.

One of my best friends told me recently, that it appeared that I really did my own thing.  He is right…and I appreciated the great compliment.

Another friend, regrettably of my past, told me that I was a Renaissance Man,…of which I was honored and humbled.

Group Think and Mind Control are insidious aliments of our human family.

‘There are not may kinds of historical events in the world that are near impossible to comprehend.  Genocides, however, will always be one of them.  Possibly the most horrid and systematic genocide was the Holocaust, Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Jewish people in the 1930’s  and 1940’s.  There are many different arguments behind the causes of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime’s rise to power, but the problem is there is no one specific cause.  However, it could be argued that one of the most prominent causes was the psychological state of mind of everyone involved at the time.  Hitler’s anger and the country’s general anti-semitism, groupthink, fear and defense mechanisms, and deception are a number of key factors in an unstable psychological balance.  Though there were a lot of external causes, it was the way people reacted to these causes that truly infiltrated the Holocaust,’   according to Philadelphia University: Germany 2012

We must ask ourselves; are groups of people to be ostracized because our group says that they should be…is faith the ‘substance of things hoped for and the evidence of thing not seen’  or is it the marginalizing of large groups of our fellow human beings?

Is God so small that he created the Heaven and the Earth…and yet only cares about a fraction of his creation?