A cynic (me, for instance), would say that Scientology is apparently a dodge to protect a medical scam from government regulation.
Scientology began as Dianetics, and Hubbard’s book Dianetics: The New Science of Mind, remains the “bible” of the movement. Hubbard claimed that a fetus can hear–and understand–speech practically at the time of conception. Remember the scene in “Look Who’s Talking” where the sperm cells are having a conversation as they race towards the ova? That’s pretty much how a diehard Scientologist views nature. (Incidentally, the two stars of the film, Kirstie Alley and John Travolta, are both adherants).
Hubbard said that fetuses are also given to misunderstanding what they overhear. In the most notorious instance of such a claim, a Scientologist who had birthmarks on her buttocks determined that her mother had asked for an aspirin while carrying her, but she had misheard it as an “ass burn” and had grown the birthmarks as a result.
Scientologists use a device called an E-meter (a kind of scaled-down polygraph) and a style of highly manipulative interviewing which parodies psychoanalysis to lead adherants to believe they have uncovered their fetal memories, so that they can free themselves of the resulting “engrams”.
“Engram” was a legitimate word in medicine before Hubbard latched onto it. It refers to the path a nerve impulse takes through the body. According to Hubbard, however, an engram is a kind of circuit formed in the brain as the result of a traumatic fetal experience. And Scientologists have a lot of those. Years ahead of the rest of the country in the “recovered memory” movement, Scientologists have for decades discovered that their seemingly well adjusted mothers were continually trying to abort them and that their seemingly benign fathers beat their mothers senseless while pregnant.
Hubbard’s own take on fatherhood was unique. In the late 1940s, when practically everybody else had forgotten him, Hubbard wrote fan letters to occultist Aliester Crowley telling him that he had timed the conception of his son (who later wrote a scathing book about Hubbard), so that he would grow up to be the AntiChrist.
Scientology is illegal in New Zealand; the high court there ruled that, despite its religious trappings, it was just a system of medical quackery posing as a spiritual movement.
The earlier comparison to The Church of Latter-Day Saints is an interesting one. Like Mormons, Scientologists have an elaborate system of initiations into different stages in the movement, much the same as if one was a member of a lodge such as the Freemasons. The ultimate is to become a “clear”, someone with no neuroses whatever and perfect recall, no allergies, and a whole bunch of other cool traits.
John Campbell, longtime editor of the science fiction magazine Analog, credited Dianetics with having cured him of his asthma. He nevertheless continued to use an inhaler for the rest of his life.
Many of the early converts to Scientology were science fiction writers, and in the future of the first Star Trek series, it has apparently come to be regarded as science; in the episode where control of the Enterprise is given over to an experimental computer and it destroys another star ship, it turns out that it has its inventors engrams.
The movement has since shifted its focus to attracting show business celebrities. In addition to Alley and Travolta, Judy Norton-Taylor (the oldest daughter on The Waltons), and Nancy Cartwright, who does the voice of Bart Simpson, have been converts. So is Lisa Marie Presley, and it has been widely speculated that the Church engineered her marriage to Michael Jackson, who was given to hanging around a sort of social club they ran for church members in Hollywood.
A common dodge for recruitment the Church uses is to ask people if they would like to take a “free personality test”; I recall there was a time here in St. Louis where you couldn’t go to the art museum without someone hitting you up on your way in. The impression they gave (at least to me) was that they were college students looking for volunteers for their psychology class project. A friend of mine who took them up on it found they were reluctant to let her out of the “examining room” without first signing a pledge to assign a portion of all of her future earnings to the Church.
According to William Poundstone, author of the “Big Secrets” series, if one has the patience–and the money–to pass through enough degrees in the Church, you are eventually let in on the last and coolest secret: eons ago you were an all-powerful space alien. But you and the rest of these immortal space beings became bored with your omipotence, so you invented the Earth and had yourselves reincarnated as humans.