Well, it's certainly not irrelevant. Scientology principles were used to manage the company and employees were partially evaluated on their friendliness to it [0]. It wasn't ever a major part of the content because of internal resistance by people like the other founders [1].
Managements' religious preferences can have a meaningful influence on how an organization operates, e.g. Hobby Lobby. I don't see why it'd be out of bounds here when it's legitimately relevant to how Neopets was run.
I worked at Age of Learning, which was headed by the founders of Neopets after they sold the company.
I definitely had some concerns about the Scientology stuff going into that job, but I never heard a word about it the entire time I worked there. The vibes were definitely a little weird, but nothing overt. The bigger problems were that they were a mess in terms of engineering - for example they didn't even use version control for the first few years that ABCMouse was in business.
It is not at all unique for random internet accounts to pop up and assert that Scientology is a normal religion just like all the other religions whenever it is mentioned even in passing, no.
It just doesn’t seem relevant to the topic at hand. We’re commenting on an article about the longevity, and someone comes out of the woodworks to share their astonishment that we haven’t not discussed the religious beliefs of the founder. It’s astonishing if that doesn’t seem divisive or bizarre to you, at least just a bit.
This is a good point. There’s basically zero current interest in the Scientologist “church” or its involvement in the personal and professional activities of its members. This is evidenced by any cursory googling of the church today. We are all best served by bringing up its equivalence with other churches upon seeing the word online as that serves the best interest of all curious parties.
Yeah. People’s moral values and breed of sacred cows do have an effect on their management and leadership style. Non-religious people are outnumbered here (here being the planet, not necessarily this specific website but maybe even that too), so being militantly against that sort of thing kind of isn’t worth our time, or I guess more correctly it is a poor investment of our time. Better to live and let live.
I definitely had some concerns about the Scientology stuff going into that job, but I never heard a word about it the entire time I worked there. The vibes were definitely a little weird, but nothing overt. The bigger problems were that they were a mess in terms of engineering - for example they didn't even use version control for the first few years that ABCMouse was in business.