SCIENTOLOGY: RELIGION, CULT AND IDEOLOGY

Ron Hubbard IS scientology. One cannot remain if the other falls (page 19, Cults of Unreason).

Hubbard claimed to have been seriously wounded in the Second World War but there is no evidence that it is true according to a Navy Department spokesman (24).

One of his wives, Sarah Northrup, was accused of being insane in his Dianetics: Axioms, and denied a few times that he was ever married to her (27).

Times he wrote the most incredible madness himself. Once he said that he paid Heaven a visit twice and saw gates and statues there and well-kept gardens (page 28).

His book, Dianetics, has much incomplete and incoherent logic and pretends to make new discoveries which have already been made but which it gives new names to in its unusual jargon (34).

He teaches the idea of the person not being the same as the body. The mind is the real person and the body is not the person but is its house (34). The fact that when the brain is damaged the mind cannot function properly though it should if it is not the body does not bother him.

Hubbard believed that the mind collected bad memories and hurtful experiences that came back on it in the form of mental illness and even physical illness. These were what he meant by engrams (35). The engram makes the trauma repeat itself in some other form. Dianetics was about curing the engrams and in the early days it claimed to be able to cure madness and depression and that the cure of cancer was possible (35). It was said that if a baby in its mother’s womb heard its mother being beaten by a man saying, “Take that!” that this would be registered as a command in the brain and make the child a thief when it grows up (36).

The therapy was originally just a person rambling on anything that came into his mind so that the cause of an engram could be discovered. But like fortune-telling, the therapy was very general and vague. The “Take that!”, the baby heard could lead to it becoming a violent person or one who has a compulsion to say, “Take that” or to it giving things away too generously to others expecting them to take it all. With all that haze and multiple-meaning it would be impossible to trace an engram to its root.

The person who is cured of his engrams is called a Clear. It was thought that clears would be able to cure their bad eyesight, and heal wounds rapidly and do other kinds of marvellous things (40).
  
In 1951 The Wichita Foundation demanded over five hundred dollars for a day and a half of therapy (40) which was scandalous. And nobody knew how long they would have to pay. There was a problem: there were no Clears created yet so nobody knew how long it would take to expect the treatment to be finished. At that time, Hubbard came up with the idea of the Thetan which is your consciousness being consciousness that it is conscious and it is spiritual and immortal. The Thetan collects many engrams through countless incarnations which is the reason why Thetans take bodies and suffer and cannot use their power to make a perfect and immortal body to enter. This meant that Dianetics was not about clearing engrams just for this life any more but also for countless previous ones (41) which meant that one could spend thousands a year until the end of his life on therapy and not get very far. Hubbard’s followers hoped to become Operating Thetans or beings with miraculous powers. The Thetans were so bored being immortal that they took bodies and did harm causing one another to develop engrams (43). We can get bored listening to our favourite song too much but that is because of the way we are made. We could have been made in such a way that we would not get bored. A drinker wouldn't get bored having the same vodka every Saturday. Hubbard believed the Thetan had magical and omnipotent powers which makes his theory totally absurd.

In his The History of Man, Hubbard said that the Martians had a report station in the Pyrenees! (46). The terrifying thing about this book was that its sales went into the hundreds of thousands.

Jack Horner in 1952 said that a fifteen year old girl became a clear and rapidly cured all the small scars on her body. No evidence was given for these claims(54). It is disturbing how the system pays no attention to the possibility that the cures are caused by the Placebo effect. Optimism and belief that you are better or will be can do wonders to heal you and make you better. They make the body produce chemicals that assist in healing. Scientology has the Thetan leaving the body but when out they cannot prove that they are out by going into a different room or anything and seeing things there that they could not have otherwise known about. Scientologists glibly say that they don’t want to do such feats (60). Anybody could say they have magic powers and don’t want to use them.

It is a pity that Dianetics which stressed that we should become Superpeople and poured disdain on the religious systems implicitly (76) gave the criticising up. It did plenty of this in the early days but then Hubbard ruined the system by making it too illogical and fantastical thus undermining the value it could have.

The cult used the E-meter not for treating illness but for diagnosing. In the early days it was £5 to make and sold for £50. The machine was useless (82) but it is an essential tool in Scientology practice.

Hubbard was quoted as saying that anybody who lost their faith in Scientology and betrayed it may be lied to and cheated or destroyed (101).

Those who worked on Hubbard’s Sea-Orgs when he had to live on sea for he was banned from the countries had to sign a document agreeing to work for the next billion years (102). His employees were subjected to abuse and overworked and there was no escape if it became too much.
 
Hubbard founded a cult when he founded Scientology. Scientology is still a cult.
 
WORKS CONSULTED
 
A Piece Of Blue Sky, Jon Atack, Lyle Stuart, New York, 1990
Concise Guide to Today’s Religions, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Scripture Press, Bucks, 1983
Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, Norman Cohn, Yale University Press, 1994
Cults and Isms J. Oswald Sanders, Zondervan Publishers, Grand Rapids, MI, 1962
Dianetics, The Modern Science Of Mental Health L Ron Hubbard New Era Publications, Surrey 1986
Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, Ecclesiastical Parties and Schools of Religious Thought, by Blunt, Gale Research Company, Book Tower, Detroit, undated
Spying in Guru Land, William Shaw, Fourth Estate, London, 1994
Studies on Islam, Jack Budd, Red Sea Mission Team, Northants, 1994
The Challenge of the Cults, Maurice C Burrell, IVP, Leicester, 1983
The New Cults, Walter Martin, Vision House, Santa Ana, California, 1980
The Pope’s Armada, Gordon Urquhart, Bantam Press, London, 1995
The Religion of Ancient Persia, Professor A J Carnoy, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1959
The Secret World of Cults, Jean Ritchie, Angus and Robertson, London, 1991
The World’s Religions, Lion, Herts, 1982