Scientology poses some awkward questions to the other world religions

Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Kirstie Allie, Beck (yes, Beck) and millions of others believe the Church of Scientology to be the One True Church, and that L Ron Hubbard is its prophet. For you and me and the non-Scientologist majority, L Ron Hubbard appears to have been either a genius huckster or a paranoid schizophrenic, or possibly both. As a New York secular humanist, my question for people of faith is this: What makes you right and the Scientologists wrong? Why does your creation myth make more sense than theirs? Why does your morality stand on a firmer foundation than theirs?

From the Scientology web site:

Even with the vast amounts of technology and science available to man, many have felt powerless to stop the decay and decline seen all around us:

• Families torn by drug abuse.
• Broken marriages.
• The decline of our cities and neighborhoods.
• The rise of illiteracy.
• The destruction of the environment.
• The threat of war.

Why?

Simply put, man has not had a real understanding of LIFE itself, how it works and how to make it better.

Is it possible to approach the vast subject of the mind, the spirit and life and arrive at the basic principles which not only explain the deepest mysteries, but provide exact, measurable way to free yourself from them?

The answer is yes!

These basic principles can not only be known, they can be used to improve all aspects of your life.

So far, I find everything they've said here to be unobjectionably true. But so now the sales pitch begins:

In the book Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought, you get to know the basic principles of Scientology which are in essence the basic principles of LIFE itself.

They are simple, and yet so powerful that just by reading and applying them you will transform your life and the lives of those around you.

For what is written in this book is truth.

And you will recognize it like a long lost friend.

Find out about Scientology's greatest discovery — the source of life itself.

You will discover:

• The actual laws of understanding and how to use them to improve communication with others.
• The triangle that is the KEYSTONE to all life associations.
• The three conditions of existence that comprise life and how these affect a person's ability to enjoy it.
• The anatomy of problems and how to resolve them.
• The eight basic urges in life and how, by not having them in alignment, can bring about your downfall.
• How to treat life as a game — and win.
• The three classes of universes and how these influence you.

If you disagree with how things are, if you want a better life, then this book will take you on a journey where there is no limit to what you can accomplish, no end to what you can achieve.

Your search is over, but the adventure has just began.

Scientology provides practical answers.

No mumbo jumbo. No initiation. No human sacrifices. Just the facts.

And they pack more punch than anything you ever studied on the subject of the mind, spirit and life.

Real answers work. They lead somewhere. You can use them. That's Scientology.

Scientology is used by people of all walks, races and faiths. It can restore honesty and trust, create happiness, raise I.Q. and improve personality.

"My father thought Scientology was mumbo-jumbo and he was antagonistic to my involvement. One day his hand was injured in a construction accident. It was locked in a grip-like position and he couldn't move it. He was told, by the very best authorities, that he would require surgery. I asked him if he would like some help and managed with quite some effort to get a grudging 'yes.' I applied one of the processes from the chapter 'Exact Processes' out of Fundamentals of Thought. Within five minutes he had restored full use of his hand. He was amazed and said, 'This is mind over matter, where's that book? I have to read it!'"
— D.L.

And so forth. What follows is an introduction to the faith and its basic tenets. Scientology scripture makes for excruciatingly awful reading, but it's worth drawing your attention to one of their founding myths, "Incident II", Scientology's equivalent to the book of Genesis. L Ron Hubbard detailed the story in Operating Thetan level III (OT III) in 1967, famously warning that R6 was "calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) anyone who attempts to solve it." OT III is very high-level stuff, and to gain access to it takes years of study and many thousands of dollars in fees. The 1997 members' price for OT III alone was $19,500. The Church has battled vigorously to keep their intellectual property out of the public eye, but thanks to the Internet, it's hard to keep anything a secret. Save yourself $19,500 and enjoy. The quotes are from Hubbard himself.

Seventy-five million years ago, a Galactic Confederacy comprising twenty-six stars and seventy-six planets, including Earth, was ruled by a being named Xenu. The planets were overpopulated, each having, on average, 178 billion people. The Galactic Confederacy's civilization was similar to our own, with people "walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute" and using cars, trains and boats looking exactly the same as those "circa 1950, 1960" on Earth.

Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of "renegades", he defeated the populace and the "Loyal Officers", a force for good that was opposed to Xenu. Then, with the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions of people to paralyze them with injections of alcohol and glycol, under the pretense that they were being called for "income tax inspections". The kidnapped populace was loaded into space planes for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The space planes were exact copies of Douglas DC-8s, "except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't."

When the space planes had reached Teegeeack/Earth, the paralyzed people were unloaded and stacked around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were lowered into the volcanoes, and all were detonated simultaneously. Only a few people's physical bodies survived. "Simultaneously, the planted charges erupted. Atomic blasts ballooned from the craters of Loa, Vesuvius, Shasta, Washington, Fujiyama, Etna, and many, many others. Arching higher and higher, up and outwards, towering clouds mushroomed, shot through with flashes of flame, waste and fission. Great winds raced tumultuously across the face of Earth, spreading tales of destruction. Debris-studded, and sickly yellow, the atomic clouds followed close on the heels of the winds. Their bow-shaped fronts encroached inexorably upon forest, city and mankind, they delivered their gifts of death and radiation. A skyscraper, tall and arrow-straight, bent over to form a question mark to the very idea of humanity before crumbling into the screaming city below..."

The now-disembodied victims' souls, thetans, were blown into the air by the blast. They were captured by Xenu's forces using an "electronic ribbon" ("which also was a type of standing wave") and sucked into "vacuum zones" around the world. The hundreds of billions of captured thetans were taken to a type of cinema, where they were forced to watch a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for thirty-six days. This implanted "various misleading data" into the memories of the hapless thetans, "which has to do with God, the Devil, space opera, etcetera". The interior decoration of "all modern theaters" is said by Hubbard to be due to an unconscious recollection of Xenu's implants. The two "implant stations" were said by Hubbard to have been located on Hawaii and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. (Many holy sites in Scientology are sunny tropical locales frequented by Hubbard in his, no joke, fleet of yachts.)

In addition to implanting new beliefs in the thetans, the imprinted images deprived them of their sense of personal identity. When the thetans left the projection areas, they started to cluster together in groups of a few thousand, having lost the ability to differentiate between each other. Each cluster of thetans gathered into one of the few remaining bodies that survived the explosion. These became what are known as body thetans, which are said to be still clinging to and adversely affecting everyone except those Scientologists who have performed the necessary steps to remove them.

The Loyal Officers finally overthrew Xenu and locked him away in a mountain, where he was imprisoned forever by a force field powered by an eternal battery. Some have suggested that Xenu is imprisoned on Earth in the Pyrenees, but Hubbard merely refers to "one of these planets" of the Galactic Confederacy. Hubbard does refer to the Pyrenees as being the site of the last operating "Martian report station", which is probably the source of this particular confusion. Teegeeack/Earth was subsequently abandoned by the Galactic Confederacy and remains a pariah "prison planet" to this day, although it has suffered repeatedly from incursions by alien "Invader Forces" since that time.

OT III also deals with Incident I, set four quadrillion years ago. In Incident I, the unsuspecting thetan was subjected to a loud snapping noise followed by a flood of luminescence, then saw a chariot followed by a trumpeting cherub. After a loud set of snaps, the thetan was overwhelmed by darkness. This is described as the implant offering the gateway to this universe, meaning that these traumatic memories are what separate thetans from their static (natural, godlike) state.

Like Islam, Scientology even incorporates and reinterprets Christ. "Everyman is then shown to have been crucified so don't think that it's an accident that this crucifixion, they found out that this applied. Somebody somewhere on this planet, back about 600 BC, found some pieces of R6, and I don't know how they found it, either by watching madmen or something, but since that time they have used it and it became what is known as Christianity. The man on the Cross. There was no Christ. But the man on the cross is shown as Everyman."

What's the best medicine for this kind of berserk craziness? Trey Parker and Matt Stone have made it a personal campaign to report on Scientology, making them the focus of much legal saber-rattling on the church's part. So far, though, they haven't managed to keep any South Park episodes off the air, at best delaying them. A full-page ad in Daily Variety:

“So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!”

- Trey Parker and Matt Stone, servants of the dark lord Xenu

You might say that all this mockery of an extremely easy target is childish, but I say, if it brings more public attention and scrutiny to Scientology, then Matt and Trey are on the side of the angels. Exploiting desperately unhappy people is not okay, especially if the exploitees aren't aware they're being exploited.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top