There’s never a good time to start a new religion. While common hazards used to include stoning or crucifixion, today’s would-be prophets face a new hurdle: fact-checkers.
Lawrence Wright’s insightful, gripping, and ultimately tragic exposé of Scientology, “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief,’’ grew out of his 2011 New Yorker profile of Oscar-winning screenwriter/director and Scientology defector Paul Haggis, who told Wright plainly: “I was in a cult for thirty-four years.” During that time Haggis refrained from investigating anything negative he heard about his religion because he was “afraid of looking.”
Comments
So...Greta Van Susteren belongs to two cults. Scientology and Fox News.
There's a sucker born every minute. -- P.T. Barnum
"...the church’s aggressive policy against naysayers has been disturbingly effective." That might be true in specific instances, but it doesn't change the fact that the church's true nature is widely known and generally not, um, held in particularly high regard by the general public. Hollywood tends to be particularly insular and often not affected by trivial matters such as reality.