Yesterday’s New York Times reported that Tom Cruise has been “raising eyebrows” with his recent behavior — said behavior including his active promotion of Scientology. Supposedly, movie studio executives had to endure a four-hour promotion of Scientology in order to be able to talk contracts with the star. And Cruise was allowed to have a tent promoting Scientology on the set of his most recent movie, “War of the Worlds,” even though no one else was allowed to promote their religions on the set.<\/p>\n
But the Times missed the juiciest bit about Cruise’s recent promotion of Scientology, a new religious movement founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. The Times noted that Cruise has publicly criticized actress Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressants to help her with post-partum depression. But we had to turn to yesterday’s Chicago Tribune for the direct quotes, and Ms. Shields’s response.<\/p>\n
In a conversation with Access Hollywood, Cruise said Shields was “irresponsible” for taking meds to help with her depression, saying, “When someone says it has helped them, it is to cope. It didn’t cure anything. There is no science. There is nothing that can cure them whatsoever.” No, says Cruise (who must believe he’s some kind of expert on the subject), women should use exercise and vitamins to cure postpartum depression — and presumably, though this was left unsaid, he was hinting that Shields would have been best to join a local Church of Scientology.<\/p>\n
The Tribune quotes Shield’s response from a recent issue of People magazine: “Tom should stick to saving the world from aliens and let women who are experiencing postpartum depression decide what treatment options are best for them.”<\/p>\n
Ms. Shields was perhaps snarkier than she needed to be. I’d put it this way. Good manners dictates that Cruise may try to convince other people in private to give up modern medical science in favor of his religious alternative, but he may not go around making snide remarks in public about people who choose to follow other paths. Religious tolerance in our society depends on such good manners. I hope Tom Cruise learns some good manners, and learns that religious tolerance requires each of us to maintain good manners in public at all times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday’s New York Times reported that Tom Cruise has been “raising eyebrows” with his recent behavior — said behavior including his active promotion of Scientology. Supposedly, movie studio executives had to endure a four-hour promotion of Scientology in order to be able to talk contracts with the star. And Cruise was allowed to have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[75],"class_list":["post-365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberal-religion","tag-new-religious-movements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}