Cult News

Tom Cruise has taken up a somewhat strange venue. Instead of another installment of couch jumping on the talk show circuit, he’s seemingly taken up speaking in cafeterias.

That’s right, the “World’s Greatest Movie Star” accepted a speaking engagement at the lunch room of Yahoo, the second best search engine on the Internet reports NBC 11.com.

Does “Number Two” Yahoo think that “Number One” Cruise can help it to overtake its rival Google?

The media was not allowed in, but some Yahoo employees managed to get a few photos out through their cell phones.

Isn’t the Internet wonderful?

Well, Scientology doesn’t always seem to think so. 

Groups called “cults” most often like what they control and don’t like what they don’t control, and Scientology has a love/hate relationship with the Internet and search engines like Yahoo.

Scientology, dubbed the “Cult of Greed” by Time magazine, loves to promote itself, its projects and programs through the ubiquitous Internet, but seems to hate the fact that the “Information Highway” is a “two-way street.”

Is the controversial church using its “Top Gun” to groom Yahoo’s CEO Terry Semmel for some favor later on?

Cruise could potentially be a surrogate for Scientology and call up Semmel, and say request that Yahoo drop a critical Web site off its search results. After all, rumor has it that he persuaded Viacom to drop a South Park episode last week that he and Scientology didn’t like.

Scientology attempted to get Google to drop certain Web pages, though the preeminent Internet search engine said, “the company had only removed certain pages from the site because of a copyright dispute.”

Well, if that’s the way Scientology handles number one, how would it treat number two?

And isn’t that what Scientology’s crusading stars are really for, either to recruit powerful people or to play them?

It’s much more likely that the Tom Cruise appearance at Yahoo’s campus cafeteria was about garnering influence for his church rather than encouraging fans to support Mission Impossible III.