If her "primary" motivation is financial, then she's picked one of the WORST business models imaginable.
Quoting: **ZetaMax**Tell that to L. Ron Hubbard, and successors.
Which - contrary to debunker "assertions" - SUGGESTS that it is indeed ****NOT**** her PRIMARY motivation.
Quoting: **ZetaMax**No.
It merely suggests she FAILED at it.
>>
Tell that to L. Ron Hubbard, and successors.WHAT are talking you about? Did you even READ my post? Someone suggested that some shills are actually software responses from the NSA. After reading that reply, I can almost believe it!
Ad Hominem noted.
L. Ron Hubbard would fall into the J.Z. Knight, Elizabeth Claire Prophet bucket. Scientology is registered as a church, and has memberships that require increasing levels of financial, material, and social committment the deeper you get involved.
That is ***NOT*** the ZetaTalk model at all, AND NEVER HAS BEEN. Not from day one.
Quoting: **ZetaMax**Precisely what model do you think Scientology fit into in, say, it's first year?
Now, compare that to Zetatalk in ITS infancy. I expect you'll find they were quite similar.
Now, imagine if Nancy's cult had *really* taken off. Say she had hundreds of thousands of followers in 2002. What do you imagine that would have looked like?
However, Nancy lacked the drive, luck, chutzpah, or charisma of Hubbard, and the people he collected around himself. But I suspect you'll find both cults eerily similar in their beginnings. Lieder's failed. Hubbard's did not.
You're failing to make a distinction between ANY of them, when in fact the differences are MUCH greater than the similarities.
Quoting: **ZetaMax**I have been asking for qualitative differences for *years.* Yet, I have never seen an adequate answer. Zetatalk fits nicely into the cult mold -- albeit, a failed one. It just never caught on THAT strongly, and continually failed whenever dates were involved, among other failures.
That response is the PUREST form of "disinformation" response I've seen you post to date. Congratulations on OUTING yourself 74444.
Quoting: **ZetaMax**Ad hominem noted again. I find the comparisons between Zetatalk and Scientology striking -- as, obviously, do *you* given your strong reaction. That's quite interesting.
>> It merely suggests she FAILED at it.
That's like saying I've failed at ballet dancing - when in fact I've NEVER tried it. Nancy never even TRIED to build a "cult" the likes of the above mentioned, ESPECIALLY and including Scientology.
Quoting: **ZetaMax**I disagree. The Troubled Times, the chats, the control issues she continually has all point to the same sort of mindset. But, thankfully, she never had what it took for her cult to really take off. Scientology *did* take off. But the origins seems quite similar. Sorry that offends you so much, but there it is.
In order to create a cult, you actually have to attempt activities designed to bring about that reality.
Nancy has NEVER engaged or pursued such "activities" that would logically in ANY way result in such an organization.
Quoting: **ZetaMax**Except Troubled Times, Inc.
Furthermore, her VERY WORDS peppered liberally throughout the ZetaTalk material (all free online) assert forcefully that she was NOT the scion of any "member" based organization.
Quoting: **ZetaMax**I concede that she could merely be a figurehead in such an organization, with strings being pulled by someone else, but the result is the same. The Zetatalk message was built around the same ideas as MANY doomsday cults in history. It adopted many of the same 'thought contagions' as other, more successful religions. The fact that it largely failed is irrelevant.
Aaron Lynch, a writer who attempted modeling how beliefs spread through societies and populations, wrote:
Thought contagions resemble computer viruses in one key respect: they "program" for their own transmission. Such beliefs self-propagate by inducing evangelism, abundant child raising, and dropout prevention. Beliefs harnessing these human functions most effectively out-propagate the "weaker" variants. Evolving like life forms through natural selection, thought contagions vie for ever stronger influence in human lives.
The similarities to biological evolution even inspired Zoologist Richard Dawkins to coin the word "meme," rhyming with "dream," to denote a gene-like or virus-like unit of culture. Memes range from socially positive to outright destructive, much as microbes run the gamut from beneficial to harmful. Especially powerful in matters of religion, sexuality, reproductive issues, family life, and health, meme contagions reach deeply into our personal lives. An increasingly robust theory known as memetics can express this in mathematical and symbolic terms without biological metaphors. However, it does not take equations to see that memes exert major effects on the information health of society.
A classic example of thought contagion comes from Christianity, which has a large complex of memes motivating adherents to spread the faith. The idea that unbelievers go to hell moves believer to spread the faith to anyone they care about. This idea spreads faster in combination with various other beliefs. For example, the hell meme combined with a "love your neighbor" meme inspires adherents to convert more than just friends and family, indeed anyone yet unconverted. Memetic evolution does not "care" if it is mixing a negative idea like hell with a socially positive, beneficial meme like neighborly love. All that matters to memetic evolution is the result: more converts won per host per year than for the competing Pagan and Jewish beliefs.
Combining with a third belief that "the end is near" spreads even faster still, by telling adherents that the time is running out to "save" friends and loved ones. Many evangelical sects believe that the end is near, and they rank among the fastest growing varieties of Christianity in modern times. Taking the idea very seriously, they even name the time leading up to apocalypse with a proper noun: the End Times. Ancient Christians also thought that time was very quickly running out, and this belief helped Christianity out-propagate Paganism and Judaism. Initially, the idea served a purpose to those who viewed the end of time as better than Roman rule. That got the idea started and accepted by an early audience. From there, it took on a life of its own by urging believers to hurry their efforts to "save" others.
After Christianity spread across Europe, the apocalypse belief lost much of its contagion. The preaching it inspired would mostly reach those already converted and those who had heard but rejected the message. With persuadable adults scarce, the main avenue to spreading the faith became child raising. So memetic evolution tilted further toward the big family doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, which where already spreading in Roman times. Because the hell idea still moved people to pass the faith to their children, it never faded. And as generations grew up with no experience of early evangelism or failed doomsaying, fresh waves of doomsday fervor could again sweep the continent. Major outbreaks happened before the year 1000 and the year 1033, as documented by scholars at the Center for Millennial Studies. Lesser outbreaks focused on dates all the way up to the present. But the more memorable the apocalypse date, the longer people retained it and the more easily they spread it. This favored ideas of apocalypse on the century and on the millennium. The Biblical book of Revelation played a big part, by prophesying an End Times era of a thousand years. Just one little detail held beliefs in check: the world refused to end on schedule. So the apocalypse memes hardy enough to pass down over the generations asserted an imminent end, but without a definite date. This keeps some sense of urgency while preventing the dropouts that happen whenever a precisely scheduled doomsday does not happen.
Quoting: Aaron Lynch [
link to www.loveblender.com]
Does that sound the least bit familiar to a certain group of individuals at a certain date in 2003?
I believe I understand your anger, ZM. I might point out, however, that you seem to be merely misdirecting it.
