Within the context of the Scientology belief system, anyone who says anything remotely negative about Scientology is an SP – a suppressive person. Anyone who is even remotely connected with an SP is PTS-- a potential trouble source. There a strict rules for dealing with people like this. Say, for example you happened to mention to an auditor that your mother mentioned some quote of LRH’s about “working the religion angle.” This puts things on radical new terms. You are deemed PTS, and you have an SP mother. There are two routes: A “Handling” or a “Disconnect”. “Handling” is an attempt to bring her into affinity with the tenets of Scientology. A “Disconnect” is, well, pretty obvious, I guess. It’s very important for the rube to acknowledge that they are PTS. It’s their responsibility and duty to get straightened out, even if it means cutting everyone that they used to know dead.
Another device that the organization uses to facilitate this is the “PTS Rundown” Scientology teaches that many physical ailments are due to the malign influence of SP’s. If you’ve got a cold, it’s not because you’ve been exposed to nasty germs, (which are a silly outdated notion,) but rather because you’ve been exposed to nasty ideas. When the entire planet is “cleared”, there will be no more influenza, and everyone will have great hair and teeth like John Travolta. Okay, I made that last bit up.
I don’t know… they kept up their acquaintance well enough, and I think RAH was enough of a cynic that he thought gullible people deserved whatever they got. Heinlein’s none-too-subtle dig at Hubbard at the end of Number of the Beast was actually pretty gentle & humourous.
A) I’d never seen that correspondence: thanks for the link!
B) Th’ problem is that while I can see an older, cynical Heinlein thinking that gullible people should get what they deserve, I don’t see the social activist Heinlein of the '50s (he wrote a book about grassroots politics and dirty tricks) or the '60s (he took out ads in papers to inform people of what he saw as impending disasters) as willing or able to do stay quiet. And every date I’ve seen on that quote has put it before about 1965.
Like I said, I can’t prove it, but hell, if nothing else, I can’t imagine Heinlein not mentioning it in Grumbles from the Grave, if only to confirm the quote.
Nor have I; and like you, I’ve heard that he said it to any number of different science fiction writers.
The oddest variant I heard–and the one that first made me think the whole story was bunk–was from a friend who insisted that Hubbard, Heinlein, and Frank Herbert had a bet to see who could make the most money by starting his own religion. Hubbard got the job done so quickly, the others never had a chance to start.
It took me six months to convince my friend that this was not true.
This page goes into a bit of detail about the rumor that Hubbard admitted he was starting a religion to make money; apparently, Theodore Sturgeon has claimed that Hubbard said it to him, but that it was nothing more than an off-hand joke.
Actually, Sturgeon at least makes some sense in terms of the time frame and Sturgeon doesn’t have the same kind of axe to grind that say, DeCamp would have had. I’d swear that Ellison said that Hubbard said it to him*, but for reasons listed above, I don’t buy it.
Fenris
*I can’t swear that I remember Ellison saying this: I’m going on a 20-some year old memory, so take my recollection with a grain or ten of salt
At one time, my wife’s uncle Bob Guinn was the publisher of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine. At a certain point in time – in the 1950’s I think, or the early 1960’s – Guinn made a decision not to accept certain stuff from Hubbard. I’m a little foggy now, but IIRC what he would no longer accept was advertisements. Unfortunately, Bob Guinn passed away some years ago, and I never got the exact story as to what his reasons were or any other details.
First off, as I am an atheist, none of them are my tales.
Secondly, I stand by what I said. They are believable in that order. The reason is complexity. If you strip away alot of the trappings of Christian mythology, (present mostly because the religion was born of ancient Judaism, and not essential parts of the religion if they are considered part of it at all), then Christianity is relatively simple. Monotheism is simpler than polythiesm, thus more believable.
$cientology is so frickin’ complex they issue huge dictionaries of terms to their members. In the daily practice of their studies, they actually have to refer to that dictionary often. As a worldview, it’s so jumbled and incoherent that they have to put everything together with a patchwork quilt of terminology and labels. Stuff about cherubim and how many classes of angels there are is pretty silly, but it’s not really essential to either Christianity or the Judaism from which it originated. The Xenu story is essential to fitting together all the odd bits and parts of $cientology. In the essentials, one is simpler and thus more credible.
Not all false ideas are equally credible. If I started saying that waves were transmitted through the vacuum of space by an invisible medium called the “ether”, I might get some high school kids to believe it. If I claimed that waves were transmitted through the vacuum of space on the backs of magical pixies who can fly at the speed of light, nobody would believe that. Both are false, one is more believable than the other.
The people who founded and spread Christianity might have gotten free room and board from some villager once and awhile, if they managed not to get stoned, but I hardly think they were in it for the money. Mohammed was a battle-leader of some sort, by the time he realized he was “starting a religion” (if he ever did) he proabably already had everything he ever wanted out of life in terms of money and power. I agree that Mormonism’s founding sounds like a bit of a scam at first, but it wasn’t all wine and roses for the first Mormon leaders. They got kicked out of just about every place they ever tried to settle, losing plenty of wealth and property along the way before they made it to Utah.
See Larry Mudd’s post for how they prevent people from leaving. The psychological power of a cult over its members is not to be underestimated. For those who are less wealthy they move “up the bridge”, advancing through the levels of $cientology, by working off their fees. That means endless hours of labor at the Orgs, where they usually live, isolated from the community and surrounded only by other cientologists. Should they break the cult's hold on them, they may leave only to find themselves being battered with lawsuits over allegedly unpaid fees. And by the time you escape, you might have spent the last few years cutting yourself off from all your non-Co friends and family who might be in position to help you make the transition. There are other ways to hold someone against their will than physical restraint and physical force, though the Co$ is not above using those methods either.
But your perception of complexity is based on familiarity. Polytheism is less complex than monotheism, it doesn’t suffer the problem of evil nearly as much and generally has a better analogy of scale from humans to the gods.
I’ll agree that Scientology is far more unwieldly and distant from reality than most other religions, probably because other religions are honest attempts to understand the world where as Scientology is not. The difference isn’t so simple as just calling one more complex than another.
That said if Scientology is was just about Xenu, getting clear and thetans it wouldn’t be bad at all. They could go do there thing and no one would care except to be occasionally mean about the silliness of the beliefs. The problem isn’t the beliefs but the practices. The actions of the CoS are unforgivable of any entity and at times approach the insane levels of villiany one finds Catholicism accused of in Chick tracts.
The main beliefs in Christianity is that Christ rose from the dead and is the son of god. That is believable by any sane person? I understand your point about some things being more believable than others, but fantasy is fantasy as far as I’m concerned. Now if you want to argue about the affects of ones belief in their particular fantasy, that is another matter entirely. But you can’t convince me that Christians are any more rational than Scientologists when it comes to their beliefs, they just have had 2000 years to mellow out (somewhat).
Maybe they were in it because they didn’t like working at all? Wandering around the countryside chatting up the chicks and getting free meals certainly would look quite a bit better than slaving away at a regular job especially back then.
**
Given all the pronouncements he made and the Koran which came directly from his mouth, I would think he was trying to start a religion. And he slaughtered those who got in his way. I prefer lawsuits over being slaughtered any day.
The Tim and Uzi essentially nailed it.
-Christianism isn’t less complex than polytheistic beliefs. It’s not just because there are more gods that a religion is more complex.
There are a lot of basic concepts which really aren’t easy to grasp in this religion (except for people who are familiar with its tenets). If some of the christian dogmas had to be declared “mysteries” (impossible to understand rationnally) by theologians, it’s for a reason. A god pissed at you because you didn’t make the proper sacrifices is quite easy to understand, on the other hand.
-Even if christianism were less complex, I don’t see in what way it would make it more believable. Actually, I perceive no relationship between these two characteristics.
-The basic tenets of christianism are totally unbelievable as already pointed out.
Those were the only direct quotes I could find. I do believe he said it, though not necessarily at those times. Whether he truly meant it or was just joking at those time, I don’t know. Obviously he started to believe it eventually.
