Anonycat
Crusader
The IDEA World Fitness Convention is the country’s largest annual gathering of instructors, personalities, and products in the fitness industry. You attend to check out the touring circuit of top professionals as well as educate yourself on groundbreaking ideas and platforms in the exercise world. So it was rather surprising to find Scientology manning a booth at the downtown Los Angeles convention in the summer of 2015.
There’s plenty of pseudoscience and nonsensical trends at these conventions, such as the notion that chocolate milk and juice cleanses are healthy and the idea that hand weights in an indoor cycling class is anything but a biomechanical nightmare. Players in the fitness industry maximize profits wherever possible regardless of ethical, anatomical, and physiological missteps. Lack of oversight in this industry is rampant.
But the fact that the convention itself took money from a program that preaches spirits—thetans—heal injuries and illness is beyond bad form. Scientology’s booth, Nerve Assists, featured a woman practicing some sort of massage, armed with the cult’s infamous E-meter and copies of Dianetics. L. Ron Hubbard’s Assist programs are not only applicable to the living; such touch and vocal commands, barked in boot camp style glossolalia, is marketed as bringing dead bodies back to life as well.
This program, advertised at IDEA as ‘Scientology Solutions for Athletes,’ is but one of the many crafty ways the cult embeds itself in seemingly helpful industries in attempts of winning converts. Given the many lumps the organization has taken since the proliferation of the Internet, church leaders have spread its wings far and wide to save face. Nerve Assists is just one of its many programs.
Full article: http://bigthink.com/21st-century-spirituality/the-insidious-nature-of-scientologys-outreach-programs
Last edited: