"Religion" In Review: Scientology

Every 4 or 5 months or so TDX has an "In Review" post. I think the last one was City in Review: Philadelphia, but I'm not going back to look. Today I'm going to review Scientology for two reasons: (1) it's mentioned in 1 of 4 posts on every gossip blog and (2) I want to know whether it's Scientology making Tom Cruise seem insane, or if it's Tom Cruise making Scientology seem like a religion for the insane. Either way, I feel really bad for Katie Holmes. Maybe she got confused and thought she was marrying Christian Bale and at the last second the switched him for Tom. Notice we never hear anything about her. I guess that marriage/children contract came with a gag order. I wonder who Suri's real father is? I'd pay for the paternity test, they can't cost that much right?

I think the hardest part about the Church of Scientology is not being able to find a concrete, relatively concise statement about the religion. All I could find from the "official" website was a lot of ambiguity. For example under "What is Scientology":
Scientology is the study and handling of the spirit in relationship to itself, others and all of life. The religion comprises a body of knowledge extending from certain fundamental truths. Prime among these:
Man is an immortal, spiritual being. His experience extends well beyond a single lifetime. His capabilities are unlimited, even if not presently realized — and those capabilities can be realized. He is able to not only solve his own problems, accomplish his goals and gain lasting happiness, but also achieve new, higher states of awareness and ability.
In Scientology no one is asked to accept anything as belief or on faith. That which is true for you is what you have observed to be true. An individual discovers for himself that Scientology works by personally applying its principles and observing or experiencing results.
Through Scientology, people all over the world are achieving the long-sought goal of true spiritual release and freedom.

At the same time I've found sites posting so-called "secret" documents that reveal the "creationist" belief of Scientology. Here's what the document says, paraphrased: Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack.
Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were overpopulated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.
Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyse them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).
These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralysed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.
The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).
After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".
When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.
As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xenu is still alive today.
That is the end of the story. And so today everyone is full of these clusters of souls called "body thetans". And if we are to be a free soul then we have to remove all these "body thetans" and pay lots of money to do so. And the only reason people believe in God and Christ was because it was in the film their body thetans saw 75 million years ago.


Trying to mesh the "belief" (or non-belief) with the ambiguous statements is as difficult as mixing oil and water (peanut butter and ladies). At some point, the oily crap will have to separate and float to the top.

The website clearly states that you need not accept anything as belief or on faith, yet when you finally reach the point where you learn about your alien heritage, you've already invested copious amounts of money and time. How pissed are you going to be. It'll be like the time I trained to be a ninja and found out that once I reached the upper levels of my training, I couldn't fart a cloud of smoke and disappear, or fly through the air, leaping from treetop to treetop. Obviously once I learned that, I quit my ninja training and am now studying to be a member of the Matrix.

Ultimately from what I've gathered, Scientology is not a religion. It is a philosophy that L. Ron Hubbard Sr. was able to infuse into his science fiction (Dianetics), and then found a way to make money selling it to people as religion. In 1983 Penthouse published an interview with L. Ron Hubbard Jr. who had feared for his life and confirmed that his father was a con-artist and a wife-beater.

What did I learn from this? I'm not really sure. One of 3 things. Either (1) I'm way off on my information and this is all made up mumbo jumbo; (2) Tom Cruise really is insane; and/or (3) cults are just very influential - or they drugged and raped Tom Cruise and replaced him with a robot.

Speaking of crazy celebs, did you see that Britney might be schizophrenic?