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XI. Scientology (or “L. Ron Hubbardism”) The “Church of Scientology” is the end product of a long-line of deceptions. The name L. Ron Hubbard and his system of "Dianetics" (lit. “through the soul”) are almost household words, due to the impact of media advertising and the ignorance of the masses. While the deceased Hubbard's life was filled with controversy and legal scrapes, his "religion" (the Church of Scientology) is worldwide and numbers its membership in the millions. What is it that has been packaged in a paperback book and revolutionizes lives? A good source for information on L. Ron Hubbard’s life is the online Wikipedia article.[1] L. Ron Hubbard Scholar? - Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986), better known as L. Ron Hubbard, was born in Tilden, Nebraska. After graduating from Woodward School for Boys in 1930, he enrolled at The George Washington University, where he took a course in civil engineering. However, his grades were consistently poor and university records show that he attended for only two years, was on academic probation, failed in physics, and dropped out in 1931. One of his classes was on "atomic and molecular phenomena” and on the basis of this, he later claimed to have been a "nuclear physicist", though his records showed that he only scored an F in this class. Hubbard later claimed to have been awarded a Ph.D by Sequoia University in California. However, this non-accredited body was later investigated by the Californian state authorities on the grounds of being a mail-order "degree mill" and Hubbard later publicly "resigned" his degree after it had become the subject of comment in the British press. Pulp Fiction Writer - Hubbard next pursued writing, publishing many stories and novellas in pulp magazines during the 1930s. He became a well-known author in the science fiction and fantasy genres, and also published westerns and adventure stories. Critics often cite Final Blackout, set in a war-ravaged future Europe, and Fear, a psychological horror story, as the best examples of Hubbard's pulp fiction. His 1938 manuscript "Excalibur" contained many concepts and ideas that later turned up in Scientology. War Hero? - In June 1941, with war looming, Hubbard joined the United States Navy as a lieutenant junior grade. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he was posted to Australia but was returned home, possibly after quarrelling with the US Naval Attaché, who rated him "unsatisfactory for any assignment." Subsequently, he was given command of the harbor protection vessel USS YP-422, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Again, he fell out with his superior officer, who rated him "not temperamentally fitted for independent command." These statements are in stark contrast with official Scientologist literature, which portrays Hubbard as a brave and heroic figure during the war. Hubbard was relieved of command and transferred to a naval school in Florida where he was trained in anti-submarine warfare. On graduating, he was given command of the newly built subchaser USS PC-815 (based in Astoria, Oregon). Shortly after taking the PC-815 on her maiden voyage from Astoria to San Diego, California, his crew detected what he believed to be two Japanese submarines near the mouth of the Columbia River. They spent the next three days bombarding the area with depth charges, after which Hubbard claimed at least one Japanese submarine had been sunk. A subsequent investigation by the US Navy concluded Hubbard's vessel had in fact been attacking a "known magnetic deposit" on the seabed, and postwar casualty assessments found no Japanese submarines had been anywhere near the Columbia River at the time. Shortly after reaching San Diego, Hubbard ordered his crew to practice their gunnery by shelling one of the Coronado Islands, a small Mexican archipelago off the northwest coast of Baja California, in the belief it was uninhabited and belonged to the United States. Neither assumption was correct. The Mexican government complained and following a brief investigation, Hubbard was relieved of command with a sharp letter of admonition. Most of Hubbard's wartime service was spent ashore in the continental United States. He was mustered out of the active service list in late 1945, and continued to draw disability pay for arthritis, bursitis, and conjunctivitis for years afterwards, long after he claimed to have discovered the secret of how to cure these ailments. In June 1947 the Navy attempted to promote him to Lieutenant Commander, but Hubbard appears not to have learned of this and so never accepted it; consequently he remained a Lieutenant. He resigned his commission in 1950. In later years, Hubbard made a number of claims about his military record that are difficult to reconcile with the government's documentation of his service years. The Church of Scientology has circulated a US Navy notice of separation (a form numbered DD214, completed on leaving active duty) as evidence of Hubbard's wartime service. However, the US Navy's copy of Hubbard's DD214 is very different, listing a much more modest record. The Scientology version, signed by a nonexistent Lt. Cmdr. Howard D. Thompson, shows Hubbard being awarded medals that do not exist, boasts academic qualifications Hubbard did not earn, and places Hubbard in command of vessels not in the service of the US Navy. “Fiction” seems to be the key word to understanding Hubbard’s life, writings, and religion. Dianetics
Dianetics was a hit, selling 150,000 copies within a year of publication. With success, Dianetics became an object of critical scrutiny by the press and the medical establishment. In September 1950, The New York Times published a cautionary statement on the topic by the American Psychological Association that read in part, "the association calls attention to the fact that these claims are not supported by empirical evidence," and went on to recommend against use of "the techniques peculiar to Dianetics" until such time it had been validated by scientific testing. Consumer Reports, in an August 1951 assessment of Dianetics, dryly noted "one looks in vain in Dianetics for the modesty usually associated with announcement of a medical or scientific discovery," and stated that the book had become "the basis for a new cult." The article observed "in a study of L. Ron Hubbard's text, one is impressed from the very beginning by a tendency to generalization and authoritative declarations unsupported by evidence or facts." Consumer Reports warned its readers against the "possibility of serious harm resulting from the abuse of intimacies and confidences associated with the relationship between auditor and patient," an especially serious risk, they concluded, "in a cult without professional traditions." On the heels of the book's first wave of popularity, the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation was incorporated in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Branch offices were opened in five other US cities before the end of 1950 (though most folded within a year). Hubbard soon abandoned the Foundation, denouncing a number of his former associates as “communists.” Hubbard's private behavior became the subject of unflattering headlines when his second wife, Sara Northrup, filed for divorce in late 1950, citing that Hubbard was, unknown to her, still married to his first wife at the time he married Sara. Her divorce papers also accused Hubbard of kidnapping their baby daughter Alexis, and of conducting "systematic torture, beatings, strangulations and scientific torture experiments." Scientology
In December 1953, Hubbard declared Scientology a religion and the first Church of Scientology was founded in Camden, New Jersey. He moved to England at about the same time, and during the remainder of the 1950s he supervised the growing organization from an office in London. In 1959, he bought Saint Hill Manor near the Sussex town of East Grinstead, a Georgian manor house owned by the Maharajah of Jaipur. This became the world headquarters of Scientology. Scientology is presented as the "supreme truth," to which Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, and Christianity were but forerunners! Thetans - Hubbard claimed to have conducted years of intensive research into the nature of human existence; to describe his findings, he developed an elaborate vocabulary with many newly coined terms. He codified a set of "axioms" and an "applied religious philosophy" that promised to improve the condition of the human spirit, which he called the "Thetan." The bulk of Scientology focuses on the "rehabilitation" of the thetan. According to Hubbard (a science-fiction writer), Thetans are immortal spirits that created the universe, eventually became ensnared in their creation and forgot their true status, and are capable of reincarnation. A Thetan enters a human body at physical conception, bringing with it all of the engrams (mental blocks which limit engrams from recognizing and using their enormous potential powers) it has picked up so far. Each Preclear (a new convert to Scientology) needs to be audited (examined with an E-meter) and discover his engrams, so they can be cleared through Dianetic techniques. After becoming a Clear, the Thetan is again free to participate in astral travel, regression into past lives, and emphasize the spiritual existence. Death is only the passage of the thetan from one physical body into the next one.
Aliens and Xenu - The “science fiction” element in all of this really becomes obvious when it comes to Scientology’s teachings about space, aliens, and the distant past. In the materials for OT III (Operating Thetan level 3), Hubbard wrote that, 75 million years ago, the head of the Galactic Federation, made up of 76 planets, was a being named Xenu. The Galactic Confederacy's civilization was comparable to our own, with people "walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute" and using cars, trains and boats looking exactly the same as those "circa 1950, 1960" on Earth. Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of "renegades," he defeated the populace and the "Loyal Officers," a force for good that was opposed to Xenu. Then, with the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions of people to paralyse them with injections of alcohol and glycol, under the pretense that they were being called for "income tax inspections." The kidnapped populace was loaded into space planes for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The space planes were exact copies of Douglas DC-8s, "except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't." DC-8s have jet engines, not propellers, although Hubbard may have meant the turbine fans. When the space planes had reached Teegeeack/Earth, the paralysed people were unloaded and stacked around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were lowered into the volcanoes, and all were detonated simultaneously. Only a few people's physical bodies survived. The now-disembodied victims' souls, which Hubbard called thetans, were blown into the air by the blast. They were captured by Xenu's forces using an "electronic ribbon" ("which also was a type of standing wave") and sucked into "vacuum zones" around the world. The hundreds of billions of captured thetans were taken to a type of cinema, where they were forced to watch a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for 36 days. This implanted what Hubbard termed "various misleading data" (collectively termed the R6 implant) into the memories of the hapless thetans, "which has to do with God, the Devil, space opera, etcetera". This included all world religions, with Hubbard specifically attributing Roman Catholicism and the image of the Crucifixion to the influence of Xenu. The interior decoration of "all modern theaters" is also said by Hubbard to be due to an unconscious recollection of Xenu's implants. The two "implant stations" cited by Hubbard were said to have been located on Hawaii and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. In addition to implanting new beliefs in the thetans, the images deprived them of their sense of personal identity. When the thetans left the projection areas, they started to cluster together in groups of a few thousand, having lost the ability to differentiate between each other. Each cluster of thetans gathered into one of the few remaining bodies that survived the explosion. These became what are known as body thetans, which are said to be still clinging to and adversely affecting everyone except those Scientologists who have performed the necessary steps to remove them. The Loyal Officers finally overthrew Xenu and locked him away in a mountain, where he was imprisoned forever by a force field powered by an eternal battery. (Some have suggested that Xenu is imprisoned on Earth in the Pyrenees, but Hubbard merely refers to "one of these planets" [of the Galactic Confederacy]; he does, however, refer to the Pyrenees as being the site of the last operating "Martian report station", which is probably the source of this particular confusion.) Teegeeack/Earth was subsequently abandoned by the Galactic Confederacy and remains a pariah "prison planet" to this day, although it has suffered repeatedly from incursions by alien "Invader Forces" since that time. Scientology asserts that the spirits of thetans now infest our bodies - Hubbard claims that "One's body is a mass of individual thetans stuck to oneself or to the body." Scientologists at this level try to rid themselves of these thetans (spirits) by helping each one to remember the painful experiences of being blown up like that.
Celebrity Status - “Guilt by Association” can also be generated as “credibility by association” and this is why Scientology focuses on attracting high-profile celebrities, such as: Anne Archer, Edgar Winter, Greta Van Susteren, Isaac Hayes, Jenna Elfman, John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, Lisa Marie Presley, Tom Cruise.
Front Groups - Scientology also works through a number of “front Groups,” such as the drug treatment “sound-alike” Narconon, The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, etc.
Ruthlessness - Scientology gathers information like a government and has been known to employ harassment, legal pressure, and even death in some cases to deter or silence critics. Scientology has come under repeated criticism for its greed and, possibly, violence to cover its trail.[2] Various nations have prosecuted crimes perpetrated by Scientologists - Ireland, Greece, Italy, France, Canada, USA. The crimes include the following - fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion, illegally practicing medicine, and taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people." Conclusions At the surface level, Scientology appears to have sprung from the lie-filled life of a science fiction writer. It is hard to take Scientology as anything more than “science fiction” gone to seed. Even the goofiest ideas seem credible to some if you can get some Hollywood celebrities to endorse them. At a deeper level, it is not hard to see another “author of false ideas” working behind Hubbard and this shows up in the similarities between Mormonism, Scientology, and New Age thinking - man is god, naturally good and only in need of developing his own inner consciousness and abilities, and death is unreal (Genesis 3:1-6). Like the “deeper” things of Mormon theology, the credibility of Scientology as a valid “religion” bottoms out when their “theology” comes out in the open. --------------------------------------------------------- Charles E. McCoy 2006/06/06 [1] L. Ron Hubbard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.mht [2] “The Thriving Cult of Power and Greed,” Time (6 May 1991), pp. 50-57.
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In
May 1950, Hubbard published a comic book containing and an article
describing a self-improvement technique called Dianetics: The
Modern Science of Mental Health. With Dianetics, Hubbard
introduced the concept of "auditing," a two-person
question-and-answer therapy that focused on painful memories.
According to Hubbard, dianetic auditing could eliminate emotional
problems, cure physical illnesses, and increase intelligence. In his
introduction to Dianetics, Hubbard declared that "the
creation of dianetics is a milestone for man comparable to his
discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and
arch."
Unable
to elicit interest from mainstream publishers or medical
professionals, Hubbard turned to the legendary science fiction
editor John W. Campbell, who had for years published Hubbard's
science fiction stories. Beginning in late 1949, Campbell
publicized Dianetics in the pages of Astounding Science
Fiction. Hubbard publicized “Dianetics” through his own pulp
fiction works (left). The science fiction community was divided
about the merits of Hubbard's claims. Campbell's star author Isaac
Asimov criticised Dianetics' unscientific aspects, and
veteran author Jack Williamson described Dianetics as "a
lunatic revision of Freudian psychology" that "had the look of a
wonderfully rewarding scam." But Campbell and novelist A. E. van
Vogt enthusiastically embraced Dianetics - Campbell became
Hubbard's treasurer, and van Vogt - convinced his wife's health had
been transformed for the better by auditing - interrupted his
writing career to run the first Los Angeles Dianetics center.
In
mid-1952, Hubbard expanded Dianetics into a secular
philosophy that he called Scientology. Hubbard also married
his third wife that year, Mary Sue Whipp, to whom he remained
married for the rest of his life. With Mary Sue, Hubbard fathered
four more children—Diana, Quentin, Suzette and Arthur—over the next
six years.
E-Meters
- Hubbard's followers believed his "technology" gave them access to
their past lives, the traumas of which led to failures in the
present unless they were audited. By this time, Hubbard had
introduced a biofeedback device to the auditing process, which he
called a "Hubbard Electropsychometer" or "E-meter." It was invented
in the 1940s by a chiropractor and Dianetics enthusiast named Volney
Mathison. This machine, related to the electronic lie detectors of
the time, is used by Scientologists in auditing to evaluate "mental
masses" surrounding the thetan. These "masses" are claimed to
impede the thetan from realizing its full potential.
