Talk:Csil

The Fellowship and Real Religions

I remember in the days of Usenet a lot of chatter about how the Fellowship seemed rather a lot like Scientology for its hostility to magic, but I don't remember seeing any confirmation that this connection was intentional. I haven't heard of any since and this page, which is pretty rich with references, has some for every element of trivia, but not the last one. The Fellowship article also doesn't have references and doesn't describe the Fellowship in exactly the same way. I think we need to be very sure about this, since we're bringing real religions into it. The Ultra-Mind 16:57, 2 January 2012 (PST)

I'm pretty sure Richard Garriott has stated this was the intention, but I don't have a direct link to an interview available at the moment. Dungy 17:18, 2 January 2012 (PST)

It was indeed the intention. He talks about it in the Avatar Adventures interview, which I used as a reference in the trivia section of the Ultima VII article. --Terilem 03:24, 4 January 2012 (PST)

One of the russian dragons posted a huge treaty about the fellowship some years ago - in short, he said that the fellowship was much more like a socialist regime than scientology. but thats very likely not canonical.

I've been to the Avatar Adventures PDF and the only paragraph where I can find Scientology mentioned is on page 381 and it relates to a pretty narrow scope of the Fellowship. It's certainly very compelling to extend Scientology's entire nature to the Fellowship, as that blog entry does (which I don't think is reference-worthy) but is there any reason to know that the entire Fellowship is modeled after Scientology?

Then there's still the problem of JWs and Christian Scientists. The Ultra-Mind 19:48, 5 January 2012 (PST)

I'm inclined to feel there is enough evidence to make a sufficiently educated guess that several aspects of the Fellowship are a parody of Scientology, but I admit that none of it can be referenced from official sources save for that one interview. Then again, we can't reference anything saying the NPCs in Serpent's Hold are a blatant parody of Star Trek: The Next Generation, either. At any rate, I'll reword the trivia in the U7 and Fellowship articles to be less specific in the meantime. As for this article, I wouldn't take issue with losing the parts about JWs and Christianity, but the parallel between the Fellowship's distrust of healers and Scientology's infamous views toward psychiatry is difficult to ignore. --Terilem 21:34, 5 January 2012 (PST)

The Star Trek characters is so overwhelmingly obvious it would be the elephant in the room not to acknowledge it. In the same way, I should think we could agree that the Fellowship is Scientology through and through, but not w/out a bit of debate first and the stakes are a lot higher with a religious issue than they are w/a Star Trek one (for most). The Ultra-Mind 20:13, 6 January 2012 (PST)

While I do agree the stakes are higher, I think the Fellowship-Scientology thing is pretty obvious too. If there were just one or two similarities then I'd be shaky about it, but we have a whole pile of them (albeit some stronger than others) as well as Richard Garriott on record comparing the two organizations with regards to at least one fundamental aspect. I thought that was pretty telling, and it's far more than what we get with most cultural references detailed on the wiki. --Terilem 20:29, 6 January 2012 (PST)