Bernie on his web site is criticizing what he believes to be the position of many critics:

"An example in this category would be the attempt to reduce the whole philosophy of Scientology to that of a nut UFO cult by depicting it has hardly more than the Xenu incident - claiming it is the core belief of Scientology when at least 90% of Scientologists don't even know about it."

To say that most Scientologists do not know about Xenu is very misleading.

The core of the upper level doctrine in Scientology revolves around the removal of Body Thetans, plus the fact that Xenu is the key to their supposed origin. Most Scientologists may not know about the core teachings of the upper levels simply because the teachings are kept confidential until they reach those levels, and so the percentage of Scientologists who don't know is misleading, since it is artificially created, which is to say most Scientologists WOULD know if it were not for the doctrine's confidentiality. But it is the core teachings in the doctrine, not what Bernie considers to be a core belief, is ALL that is important. Body Thetans are key to upper level doctrine, which is to say they are at the core of this doctrine, and any statement to the effect that they are not core beliefs is misleading on Bernie's part, a simple fact which Bernie, in his effort to be "balanced", fails to mention.

And this leads to another point: Bernie seems to be going out of his way to present a "balanced" viewpoint, but it must be noted that any degree of so-called "balance" does not, in and of itself, automatically mean such views are more truthful than anyone else's, though, by virtue of such, they may give the appearance of it. Any effort to be "balanced" is not much better than to be biased one way or the other, since being "balanced" is to assume beforehand that there is probably an equal amount of pros as well as cons regarding an issue. The truth may very well be heavier on one side of the equation. The better approach is just to look and let the chips fall where they may.

Bias is still bias, whether it be bias towards the pro, the con, or towards the middle.

Phineas

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