… is to be completely, totally, and absolutely BUGSHIT NUTS:

That video is quite old, it dates back a good long way to when Tom Cruise received – and I’m not making this up – the International Association of Scientologist’s (IAS) Freedom Medal of Valor.

You have NO IDEA how difficult it was for me to write that with a straight face.That has to be one of the most bizarre, yet hilarious, sentences that I have ever come across in my entire life – not least because it has literally no meaning whatsoever.

If you haven’t seen the awards ceremony itself, that is worth watching too, just for giggles, because it is so monumentally stupid:

I mean, these people are absurd. They take themselves with a level of seriousness that I last displayed when I was thirteen years old, running around calling myself “Commander” in my middle school STAR WARS club.

(No, I’m not making that up. Longtime Readers may have surmised by now that the young Didact was kind of a prat.)

The difference between me and the numpties in the IAS is that I grew the hell up and got saved. I didn’t go around giving myself preposterous medals for bringing STAR WARS to lots of people – not that I did, anyway – and I didn’t go around pretending that I’d just unlocked the secrets of the human mind and had an obligation, a duty, a calling, to go around shouting in everyone’s ear about what I had discovered.

I sure as hell didn’t end up joining a creepy cult that believes that psychology and psychiatry are evil – though, in my personal opinion, both disciplines have a lot wrong with them – and I definitely didn’t get to the point where I started saluting posters of George Lucas and Sir Alec Guinness.

Actually, come to think of it, Tom Cruise may well be the greatest actor alive today.

Think about it. His Mission: Impossible films are a lot of fun to watch. I saw the latest one on my flight back from the UAE (which got diverted to Rangoon), and it was really quite good. I mean, yeah, it was stupid, you could only watch it by switching off your brain, but it was the good kind of stupid.

Tom Cruise managed to convince everyone watching that movie that he is not completely crazy and is, in fact, an ordinary and quite likable human being.

That takes some serious acting chops, man.

The funniest thing about that whole Scientology awards ceremony is the fact that the backing tracks from M:I2 were being played constantly during both the interview and the awards ceremony, during which time Mr. Cruise’s “outreach” efforts were being played up as though the man had somehow come up with a revolutionary cure for a terrible disease, all on his lonesome. It’s just preposterous, and yet these brainwashed loons are all sitting (or standing) in that room applauding the guy.

Let’s give Tom Cruise his due, though. He is undoubtedly an Alpha male. He has tremendous personal charm and charisma. He loves meeting people; his 4-hour movie premiere “walkabouts”, in which he meets and presses flesh with literally every person that he can, are legendary in Hollyweird. The man has an amazing ability to command a room, an audience, a theatre, or a movie set. And his star power and ability to consistently deliver chart-topping hits is beyond dispute.

The “Church” of Scientology, though – to call it a church is a slap in the face to Christians everywhere – is utterly ridiculous. And its ridiculousness is most obvious in the way that it treats its celebrity worshippers, as detailed by an ex-Scientologist:

In the end, Mr. Cruise’s movies should be judged on their own merit, and Mr. Cruise himself should be judged in the same way. It was and is his decision to follow a completely crazy set of ideas created by a loony second-rate sci-fi writer who insisted that he had discovered the secrets of the human mind, but provided no evidence whatsoever for his claims – and on the rare occasions that his wild and grandiose claims were actually testable, and therefore tested, they were found to be false.

One day we will all answer for our own follies and sins. Let us each take care to make sure that we do not commit the greatest sin of all, the only one that is unforgivable – to deny the power of the Holy Spirit.

Which, unfortunately, is precisely what Scientologists do.