• DaCookeyMonsta@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That wasn’t always public knowledge. It was a thing you only learned about later on when you were more indoctrinated. Then undercover reporters found out and South Park made it very public.

      • fubo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It was mostly publicized via Usenet by Arnaldo Lerma, Dennis Erlich, Karin Spaink, David Touretzky, and other activists and ex-Scientologists starting in the early 1990s. The South Park episode didn’t come out until over ten years later in 2005.

    • MelodiousFunk@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Gotta give them points for snake oil creativity though. Their nonsense is much more entertaining than hearing “invisible sky wizard did it” as the answer to every question for millennia.

        • Rose Thorne(She/Her)@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I’ve always wondered if the “THIS IS REAL SCIENTOLOGIST BELIEF” ticker was something planned early on, or if there was a moment of taking the whole thing in and someone went “This is fuckin’ South Park. Everyone is going to think we’re being extreme. We need to clarify.”

          • mindbleach
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            1 year ago

            I think it was a callback to “All About Mormons,” but I might be misremembering.

            One example of clear last-minute sincerity was the two-parter with - and this is a real South Park episode - the manatees that write Family Guy and the prophet Mohammed. The black screen reading “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast of image of Mohammed on their network” was their, uh, compromise, when Comedy Central refused to broadcast the episode as delivered.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Yeah. But in a world where JFK is coming back or something, a volcano cult isn’t like stand-out crazy anymore.