Family Forum / Parenting / Mothers / June 2005

I didn't hear that it was a bet before. He did say "the best way to get
rich is to start a religion" though.
Boy is it funny watching the ex-scientologists rant about the CoS. It's
the crazies vs the crazies.

Oh? Please explain.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Fishman/time-behar.html

Time magazine article about Scientology from 1991.
More at the URL

The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part flimflam
man. Born In Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the Navy
during World War II and soon afterward complained to the
Veterans Administration about his "suicidal inclinations" and
his "seriously affected" mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a
moderately successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years
later, church brochures described him falsely as an "extensively
decorated" World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in
action, twice pronounced dead and miraculously cured through
Scientology. Hubbard's "doctorate" from "Sequoia University"
was a fake mall-order degree. In a I984 case in which the church
sued a Hubbard biographical researcher, a California judge
concluded that its founder was "a pathological liar."

Hubbard wrote one of Scientology's sacred texts, Dianetics:
The Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it he
introduced a crude psychotherapeutic technique he called
"auditing." He also created a simplified lie detector (called an
"E-meter") that was designed to measure electrical changes In
the skin while subjects discussed intimate details of their past.
Hubbard argued that unhappiness sprang from mental
aberrations (or "engrams") caused by early traumas.
Counseling sessions with the E-meter, he claimed, could knock
out the engrams, cure blindness and even improve a person's
intelligence and appearance.

Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers
to climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made
of clusters of spirits (or "thetans") who were banished to earth
some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named
Xenu. Naturally, those thetans had to be audited.

An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped
Scientology's mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal
court ruled in 1971 that Hubbard's medical claims were bogus
and that E-meter auditing could no longer be called a scientific
treatment. Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking
First Amendment protection for Scien- tology's strange rites.
His counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were
built, franchises became "missions," fees became "fixed
donations," and Hubbard's comic-book cosmology became
"sacred scriptures.'

During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing
sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of
dollars from the church, laundering the money through dummy
corporations in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts.
Moreover, church members stole IRS documents, filed false tax
returns and harassed the agency's employees. By late 1985,
with high-level defectors accusing Hubbard of having stolen as
much as S200 million from the church, the IRS was seeking an
indictment of Hubbard for tax fraud. Scientology members
"worked day and night" shredding documents the IRS sought,
according to defector Aznaran, who took part in the scheme.
Hubbard, who had been in hiding for five years, died before
the criminal case could be prosecuted.

Today the church invents costly new services with all the zeal
of its founder. Scientology doctrine warns that even adherents
who are "cleared" of engrams face grave spiritual dangers
unless they are pushed to higher and more expensive levels.
According to the church's latest price list, recruits -- "raw
meat," as Hubbard called them -- take auditing sessions that
cost as much as $1,000 an hour, or $12,500 for a 12 1/2-hour
"intensive."

Psychiatrists say these sessions can produce a drugged-like,
mind-controlled euphoria that keeps customers coming back
for more. To pay their fees, newcomers can earn commissions
by recruiting new members, become auditors themselves
(Miscavige did so at age 12), or join the church staff and
receive free counseling in exchange for what their written
contracts describe as a "billion years" of labor. "Make sure
that lots of bodies move through the shop," implored Hubbard
in one of his bulletins to officials. "Make money. Make more
money. Make others produce so as to make money . . . However
you get them in or why, just do it."

--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

The christian church don't consider their beliefs "trade secrets" and
sue people who disclose them. They don't ask for hundreds of thousands
of dollars before you can be "saved" either. Some of them do pester you
just as much though.

For the same reason people type p0rn, or pr0n. $cientologists troll the net
for references to their cult, and target people as such.
Not that I'm afraid of them in any way.

He is surely scary Nan.  While I don't embrace what Kat is saying about
$cientology not being a cult I do think that she is right that this man has
taken it to an extreme and is out of the norm.  He is a hedonist.

Anni