公号【璐璐的英文小酒馆】或者添加【luluxjg2】咨询课程or加入社群，查看文稿和其他精彩内容哦~Hi, everyone. And welcome back to Geek Time. 欢迎回来【极客时间】. Hi, Brad.

Hey, lulu, how's it going?

Yeah. Yean. It's going all right. And can I propose a topic today?

All right, what do you think?

You know, we talked about cults before, right? 我们之前谈过邪教这个话题.

Mhm.

I would like for us to talk about one of probably the more notorious, I don't wanna say well-known, I just wanna say infamous modern day cults there is in the US, and it's favored by a lot of Hollywood stars.

Ah. You're talking about Scientology.

Yeah, okay. Before we get into this topic Scientology这个山达基教。I'm pretty sure some of you have read things about this.

Before we start, I just want to say it very categorically. First of all, this is tagged, this is categorized as a cult in China and in many other countries. And we're not here to spread any messages, it’s really more, think of it as a warning, and think of it as just giving you some information, so that you can watch out for.

Yeah, in America like Scientology isn't considered a cult by like the government. But many people see it as a cult like the general outlook of most Americans is that Scientology is a cult.

I see. So in the basic episode, let's do a little bit of background intro. Who started it? It's a modern thing. So it's not, the history isn't even that long, is it?

No, it's actually started by a man named L. Ron Hubbard, ‘which’ is a science or ‘who’, I should say ‘who’ is a science fiction writer.

Okay, all right. Let me guess, he wasn't very successful in writing science fiction stories, so he decided to start his own religion.

Well, he wasn't like that terrible at writing science fiction, his science fiction isn't the best, but he wanted to create religion as a way to kind of make money.

A lot of people look at Scientology as a scam to make money just because of the things that he has said in the past. However, there are a lot of people who say that the whole world is wrong about Scientology. And usually that's just because Scientology gets such a loud voice. And just as you mentioned, we'll talk a little bit about their Hollywood connections later. When you get Hollywood connections, you get a lot of star power. And so that's kind of help them spread the word. Even if so many people look so poorly on it.

I think this is really the danger of cults, especially when it has celebrity endorsement, because obviously they have a lot more impact than average folks, and then when they are there to sort of speak up like Tom Cruise did, well, I'm not saying everyone would tend to believe it more, but there will be some people getting tricked into believing it. But I think you said that Scientology was basically believed to be, by a lot of people, as a scam to make money, but so do a lot of cults.

The cult leaders, they're not necessarily even believing in their message. A lot of them started that so that they can trick people into believing in something and so that they collect the money.