Subject:	WIS? observations
Author:	keshet@cyberpass.net (keshet)
Date:	2000/02/13
Forum:	alt.religion.scientology
Msg-ID:	<88610f02akt @enews2.newsguy.com>

Thumbing through the 1998 edition of What Is Scientology?, I was noticing how nicely Co$ had photographed various Orgs around the world. All the biggies are there: Clearwater, Los Angeles (I love that Celebrity Centre photo), Washington, Boston, Toronto, Sussex.

There are [a] few included, though, that puzzle me because they are rarely, if ever, mentioned on the newsgroup.

What's the size of the Org in Tokyo, for instance? Are there any Japanese critics? Is anything happening at the Miami Org? Did they get into this photo collage simply because they have photogenic buildings?

My personal favorite is the photo of the Org in Durban, South Africa. It's nice, but rather nondescript and unimpressive compared to the others. It makes me curious about the condition of the churches in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria that excluded them from WIS?.

The interesting thing is that the Scientologists in the picture, chatting out front on a lovely sunny day, are conspicuously white (and blonde!). I assume that Durban has a good-sized white population but given that blacks greatly outnumber whites in the KwaZulu-Natal region and Durban is home to the largest Indian population outside India, I wonder why there are no people of color in the photo? Especially troubling because Scientology claims "that all men [but not women??] of whatever race, color or creed were created with equal rights." A nice concept, surely, but there's little evidence of its application in the cult.

Keshet

--
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