I remember reading an article in Time magazine (Canadian edition) in the early 90’s ('94 I believe) on Scientology.
They were showed a picture of the current leader (I forget his name) and he was this phsyco looking guy (looked a lot like Gary Buesy, you know freaky eyes…). He was super paranoid about being poisoned, so he covered every glass he drank out of with plastic wrap.
Oh yea, he always carried a loaded .45 automatic.
MtM
I busted out laughing on that one. Nice.
FTR-I find Scientology to be revolting. IIRC didn’t he steal a lot of his ideas (about dianetics) from Freud?
I’ve heard a lot of urban legend-type stories about the Sciencefictiontologists. One is that they own (or at least founded) Earthlink? Is there any truth to that?
I’ve also heard that they control Graceland since Lisa Marie Presley/Jacko/Cage is a hard core believer. Anybody know the the dope on this? I’d hate to think that the money I pissed away on a dancing Elvis clock got funneled through the Cult of L. Ron.
Perhaps the MDs are really ODs (Doctors of Osteopathy). While many ODs (and some Chiropractors) are truly into real science, there are some who are into the psuedoscience (since ODism began as such).
Touch my chi, palpate my liquids, adjust my spine… oh for Pete’s sake, just give me a massage already, that’ll do.
Here’s what the Skeptic’s Dictionary says about osteopathy:
The previously mentioned Reed Slatkin wwas indeed one of the earliest large investors in Earthlink, before it merged with Mindspring. Hes is no longer associated with the company.
My mother made some inquires about Scientology in the eary to mid 50’s. She figured out that it was a cult and dropped them like a rock. As of the mid 70’s when I moved away from home, she was still getting 1 to 2 pieces of hand written mail per day from them.
This tells me that they A) have lots of people with too much time on their hands, and B) a big postage budget.
So if you like getting mail, my suggestion is ::: Ducks and runs as the bricks start to fly:::
Good call. There are quite a few osteopaths in our line of consultive work. In fact, they are preferred in that they can use the same medical coding and billing that chiropractic uses. However, we deal with all specialties in addition to Osteopaths.
FWIW, I believe OD is Doctor of Optometry–DO is Doctor of Osteopathy
In addition to Cecil’s column on the subject, there was an excellent discussion of Scientology on this message board back in October of 2001.
As noted already by several posters, Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was a prolific pulp science fiction writer, one who is generally thought to have made up in speed and quantity of output what he lacked in quality. He is said to have pounded out his book Dianetcs on a roll of IBM paper more-or-less spontaneously in just a few weeks.
While billed as “the new science of mind”, Hubbard’s theory fails to meet most definitions of science. Not only did he dispense with such nuisances as evidence and falsifiability, he began with the a priori notion that there must exist a single, all-encompass-ing explanation for human psychology which was amenable to discovery. This is similar to the alchemist’s approach of assuming that a way to transmute base metal into gold, and that he will find it, rather than seeking to test whether such a thing might be possible.
Since it is based on a pre-existing canon of tenets which need to be taken on faith, Scientology is more readily identified as a religion than as science in the conventional sense, even though the Church does not hold worship services as such. For a time the religion was banned in New Zealand as the high court there ruled that it was not a religion at all, but only medical quackery. It has been suggested many times that the movement reinvented itself as a church only because it had come under intense scrutiny from the FDA.
Scientology is based on the hair-raising belief that human fetuses, even at a very early stage of development, can hear what is going on around them, and understand it. Hubbard taught that there exists within the human brain a “reactive pool” which stores “engrams”. Prior to Hubbard, the term engram referred to the path a nerve impulse follows through the body. In Hubbard’s jargon, it roughly means neuroses and other defects which are encoded as circuitry in the brain.
According to Hubbard, these engrams formed before birth are fundamental to explaining the formation of personality, and traumas suffered prior to birth are therefore the prime influence on human development. What’s more, Scientologists find that their life before birth was startlingly traumatic. Dianetics anticipated the “recovered memory” movement by several decades, and adherants have learned, time and again after being subjected to the Church’s highly manipulative system of therapy, that they their mothers were continually trying to abort them whenever their fathers were not beating them.
In addition to understanding English (or whatever other language it will eventually speak), an unborn human is said to be
extremely adept at puns. In one of the most notorious stories to come out of Dianetic counseling, a woman recovered a memory that her mother had asked for an aspirin while carrying her. The fetus, however, had misheard this as “ass burn”, which accounted for blemishes on the woman’s buttocks.
Hubbard’s own views on fatherhood were distinctive. Aliester Crowley received numerous letters from Hubbard in the late 1940s, when he was living in obscurity in Enlgand, a broken-down drug addict. In them Hubbard described how he was timing the conception of his son so that he would be destined to grow up to be the Antichrist.
Hubbard also devoted some time during the late 40s to something called “The Babalon Working”. This was a series of rituals engaged in by him and some other occultists in the California desert aimed at opening a door between this universe and a parrallel one of gods and monsters. This sounds, of course, a good deal like some of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly his story The Dunwich Horror. Some UFO enthusiasts (though not, I expect, many) have pointed out that flying saucer sightings first came into vogue at this time, and have suggested that there is somehow a connection.
(Incidentally, Lovecraft was himself so devod of faith in the occult that he wrote an angry letter of denunciation when his local paper began running an astrology column, complaining that it was reverting to dark age superstition.)
Hubbard and his son were, understandably, estranged in later years, and his son’s book on Hubbard is particularly scathing and denunciatory.
Many people’s first contact with the movement comes from being approached by someone of squeeky-clean demeanor who asks them if they want to take a free personality test. I recall that there was a time in the 1970s when it was virtually impossible to approach the city art museum in St. Louis without being hit up by a church member.
A friend of mine who took them up on this found it was difficult–but possible–to get out of their “church” without agreeing to sign away a portion of her future earnings for life to the Church. Another friend has described how the evaluation consisted mostly of using an “E-Meter”, which appeared to be basically a cheap knock-off of a polygraph.
The ultimate goal of an adherant to Scientology is to become a "clear’, this being a person who is free from all of their engrams. To become a clear requires a prolonged course of therapy from the Church (which denounces all conventional forms of psychiatry), and a good deal of money. A bit like Freemasonry, The Church of Latter-Day Saints, or various pyramid sales schemes, Scientologists rise through a series of levels within the movement, generally parting with money at each step.
It was long claimed that once one became a clear one would be a virtual superhuman, free of allergies and many other physical infirmities, possessing a perfect photographic memory, an astronomical I.Q., among other distinctions. Clears have been identified by the Church from time to time since the 60s, but if they possess powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal man, this has somehow escaped notice by the general public.
Hubbard was friends with a great many more prominent science fiction writers in the late 40s and early 50s. There are innumerable variations on an urban legend that Hubbard supposedly told one or more of them that he had decided that a"the real money" would be in inventing a religion. As noted before, however, Dianetics was not orginally couched in religious terms.
Some versions of the legend say that he made the remark to Robert Heinlein. There seems to be a general agreement among reviewers that the religious cult in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land was meant, at least in part, as a spoof on Scientology.
The Church itself, of course, denies that Hubbard ever made any such remark, and further says that it was actually said by novelist George Orwell. It certainly seems possible that more than one person has made the observation at some time.
Early enthusiasts of Dianetics included John Campbell, the long-time editor of the science fiction magazine Analog. As a writer, he is probably best-remembered as the author of Who Goes There?, the story which was the basis for the two movies entitled The Thing. Campbell credited Dianetics with having cured him of his asthma, although in his book The New Apocrypha science fiction writer John Thomas Sladek reports that he continued to use an inhaler for the remaining decades of his life.
There was an episode of the original Star Trek series which suggested, obliquely, that Scientology will be accepted as mainstream medicine in the future. There was a story where operation of The Enterprise was given over to a new experimental computer, and it destroys another star ship and everyone on board during a war game. It turns out it had malfunctioned because the scientist who designed the computer had programmed it with his own “engrams”. No one bothers to define the term, and everyone, including Dr. McCoy, acts as though it is a commonplace psychological concept.
In more recent times the Church has actively cultivated a relationship with Hollywood celebrities. It is interesting that Kirstie Alley and John Travolta are both adherants, as the opening scene of Look Who’s Talking?, in which sperm engage in a conversation, may have seemed to have had a documentary-like quality to them. Tom Cruise is also a Scientologist, as is Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson.
I am not sure if Lindsey Wanger, star of “The Bionic Woman” was ever a Scientologist. She comes to mind in this context, however, as she once told reporters about how she could remember “seeing” the movie Mildred Peirce before she was born. Wagner was reported to be greatly upset when, later, her mother told an interviewer she had never the movie in her life.
Lisa Marie Presley is a member, and it was suggested in the press after her surprise marriage to Michael Jackson that the Church may have engineered their union, as Jackson was well-known to hang out at a social club in Hollywood which the Church operates.
(Jackson has had his own, separate, problems with religious association; in the 80s there was a movement within the Jehovah’s Witnesses that claimed he was their long-awaited third incarnation of Christ. The archangel Michael was the first.)
In the 1960s and 70s Hubbard made a series of increasingly bizarre pronouncements. In one, he described having recently visited Heaven. It was his first time their in centuries, and he noted how the state of the gardening and overall maintenance had declined since his last visit.
Thereafter Hubbard took to living on his yacht full-time and became increasingly reclusive and ideosyncratic in ways which call to mind Howard Hughes, as well as Richard Nixon and Hugh Hefner in their loopier periods. He spent a good deal of his time producing enemies lists, devising lists of punishments for the staff of his yacht (various minor infractions required wearing a dirty rag affixed to one’s clothing, while major ones could invoke banishment and lifelong harrassment), and avoiding contact with all but a few close associates. The Church was, in fact, compelled at one time to announce that Hubbard had not actually been dead for years.
As noted before, membership in the Church involves a continual process of transition and billing. In one of his Big Secrets books William Poundstone states that people who have the patience and the wherewithall to pass to the highest stages of membership are eventually told the ultimate mystery of the faith. According to this, a race of all-but-omnipotent beings flew about the universe millions of years ago. These beings became bored with their god-like existence, however, so they built the planet earth and had themselves reincarnated as human beings. You are, in fact, one of these incredibly ancient god-like beings, but you, and the rest of your race, somehow forgot this.
I like it. We can tell the Scientologists the spammers are interested.
Here’s an article that discusses the church’s “Project Celebrity”, which began in 1955 with attempts to bring such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and Greta Garbo into the fold:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/la90/la90-2c.html
Testimonials from John Travolta, Chick Corea, and others:
http://www.scientology.org/wis/wiseng/17/17-01.htm
“[A] list of well-known Scientologists”:
Jerry Seinfeld??? That one surprised me.
Details!
Details!
You can NOT bring up that a splinter group of JW’s thought the gloved one was Jesus and not give us details!
I have to admit that I’ve always been annoyed by these claims. As I suggested above, Hubbard was not all that great a writer (I know – I’ve dug out and read a lot of his stuff, including things the CoS hasn’t been reprinting). Even the CoS only claims a relatively modest 260 works by him, the bulk of which hasn’t been reprinted.
The story about his writing on a continuous roll of paper, or using a special typewriter with words like “the” and “and” is, I’m willing to bet, a bit of hype that Hubbard made up, and has no basis in truth (even if Martin Gardner was taken in by it). It’s exactly the kind of thing he would have made up, and it resembles too closely fellow writer L. Sprague de Camp’s use of a typewriter with special keys for Greek letters. Such typewriters were available, and de Camp, who wrote history and historical fiction, had an excuse to buy and use one. Hubbard’s claim sounds like one-upmanship.
But the thing that bugs me the most is how everyone calls L. Ron a “science fiction” writer. I think one reason it bugs me is that it’s intended as a put-down, as if being a science fiction writer already made one partially suspect, and removed from reality. As a big SF fan, I can’t buy that.
Because the truth is that L. Ron wrote little science fiction, especially if you consider his output before his “comeback” Battlefield Earth. Most of his output was adventure, Westerns, and fantasy. His best-known stuff was fantasy – Fear, Typewriter in the Sky, The Slaves of Sleep and so on. There wa a suggestion that John Campbell started up the magazine “Unknown” just to have a showcase for L. Ron’s work, since it didn’t fit the “hard science” requirements of Amazing/Analog. (The SF Encyclopedia and other sources don’t believe this, however) And his fantasy (and SF, for that matter) is cynical and MEAN. Read L. Sprague de Camp’s essay “Elron and the City of Brass”. I don’t find him at all an attractive writer, entirely apart from his Scientology/Dianetics.
As for science, he was shockingly ill-informed. He got very poor grades in physics in college (despite his claims), and it shows in his books. Of course, you can write good SF without knowing a lot of science – look at Fredric Brown or Robert Sheckley or Jack Chalker. But to call L. Ron a good SF author or a major SF author is ludicrous. Just try reading his stuff – “Beyond the Black Nebula”, or Battlefield Earth or the interminable Mission Earth. It’s significant that his books (until Bridge Publications, the Church publisher) started reprinting his stuff it was pretty hard to dig up any of his books. There was never a “Best of L. Ron Hubbard” volume. He was never a guest at any science fiction cons.
For the record, although all faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a “The Mormons”) are asked to donate 10% of their income to the church as “tithing,” there are no “pyramid sales schemes” involved and members do not have to part with money as they rise through various levels.
I appreciate your taking the time to provide so much detail on the subject of Scientology. Unfortunately, reading such blatant misrepresentations such as the one quoted above regarding the LDS Church (of which I am a former member) makes me wonder how much of the rest of what you wrote is true. A few citations wouldn’t hurt your credibility either, to be honest. I have no personal experience with the Church of Scientology whatsoever, but I have had enough experience as a member of the Mormon Church to know that people often slam a religion based on hearsay, half-truths, and plain old mean spiritedness.
I am not claiming that everything you said about the Church of Scientology is false. In fact, it may all be 100% true. But, as I said, the fact that you are willing to slander one religious group based on incorrect information makes me question the validity of everything else you have to say about Scientology.
Regards,
Barry
godzillatemple, my read on that is that all of those organizations have a layered structure, and members can focus on rising within that layering. I don’t think the modifying clause `generally parting with money at each step’ binds on the examples, just on Scientology.
Yeah, me too. However Great Van Susteren surprised me even more. She seems way too smart and logical.
Nancy Cartwright severely disappointed me since the rest I could live without, but I couldn’t bring myself to boycott the Simpsons.
And as for the rest of the list, it reads as a who’s who of the flakes of entertainia.
They’re watching. They’re taking notes. They’re going to spam and threaten us.
Having seen the list of celebrity Scientologists, I now know for certain who I should go to in order to sell my products.
I dunno, I’ve seen John Travolta in a few interviews, and I’d say he’s definitely “clear”. Tom Cruise too.
If you have read about $cientology, the death of L.Ron Hubbard was very starnge. According to what I read, the guy had been living incognito for years. When he did croak, his followers had the body cremated post-haste.
One wonders who inherited all of the money…at the time of (Hubbard’s) death, this scam was estimated to be raking in $20 million/year!
I’m sure that Hubbard had a huge amount of cash…but where did it all go?