Talk:Bare-faced Messiah

message: Prioryman:  The Background and synopsis says "an internal letter in which he suggests that Scientology should pursue religious status for business reasons"  ok this is taken from a reference, but that's a Washington Post review of a legal judgement.  The actual passage in the book, is quite different from this person's opinion of what they want it to read.  BFM page 179 quotes from a letter which does talk about business, yes, if you read the book it was just after several organisations had become insolvent, but then LRH says "I await your reaction on the religion angle.. In my opinion, we couldn't get worse public opinion than we have had or have less customers with what we have to sell"  Note this does not suggest that becoming a religion would be good for business, it says things would be no worse than they are.   
To get a little technical here, in Germany "the Federal Supreme Administrative Court decided that an association does not maintain a commercial business operation, if it offers services to its members in the realization of its idealistic purpose" Mission Neue Bruecke Stuttgart vs State of Baden-Wuerttemberg http://www.cesnur.org/testi/stuttgart_en.htm
You want to use original source as much as possible, therefore the book takes priority over opinions about the book three times removed from it in the Washington Post.  And what better than the source, LRH, what he actually said in the letter referred to.  
The comment about "his daughter" doesn't clarify the relationship, so I put that in.  Its not opinion from me, its from the book.
Clearly the sources are all disaffected Scientologists so that bias is in the book and there is a passage where he quotes two sources about the same event and they said diametrically different things about LRH at the time.
BFM is quite an interesting book to a Scientologist who has sufficient grounding in the subject.  Of course LRH was a man and had frailities.  But the book puts in gratuitous vicious caracatures and in places is plainly wrong - example, he says LRH said he was Cecil Rhodes in a previous life but he didn't know Cecil Rhodes was a homosexual.  Fact, I checked that out and the only known facts are that Rhodes did not marry.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes#Sexuality  This is an example of the hatchet job that Miller does from time to time through the book.Drg55 (talk) 10:17, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Non factual opinions

message: According to:
Bare-Faced Messiah is out of print now, but this argument remains no less strong. That is why I have reproduced the book on the Web, with Mr Miller's permission; not because I have any desire to damage the Church of Scientology but because I believe strongly that it is in the public interest to make his well-researched book available to a wider audience. Here for the first time, then, is an electronic version of Bare-Faced Messiah.
*Chris Owen - Bare-Faced Messiah: Foreword
Cirt (talk) 05:41, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Funny, as this book is by far no well-researched book at all. It is that alone by statement and claim. This can be verified in various ways. Check up on the actual referencing supplied in the back of the book. Many are from interviews, which accounts for subjective and in essence unverified information. You also find very many entries that are in fact not referenced at all! Just do your own research on this. Today various can easily and quickly get confirmed via a simple Internet search, which was not possible at such time that the book was published back in mid-1987. The times-they're-a-changing', yes indeed. --Olberon (talk) 19:18, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

text: The last time that this played out, a compromise was arrived at where links to an identical copy of BFM at a site like Marburg or similar were substituted for xenu.net. As long as it's the same online version and it matches my hard cover copy, I don't care that much which site it goes to. AndroidCat (talk) 06:04, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Permission of author to reproduce book on the Internet 

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thread_title:  External links modified