What is Scientology?

It was a religion cooked up by the scifi author L.Ron Hubbard on a bet with another author. It has its own philosophy, rituals, everything you would expect an older religion to have. For the most part, I don't think they are that bad a set of rules... though they tend to get more than a little weird and creepy at times. No worse than with most religions though.

It is currently (one of?) the world's fastest growing religions.
 
Scientology is capitalism in action. There's an old rumor that Hubbard invented Scientology as the result of a drunken wager, although I've never heard specifically what that bet would have been. ("I can pull a major religion out of my ass"?)

Additionally, Scientology is a private corporation, The Church of Scientology, Inc.

It is, essentially, as far as I understand, the establishment of psychobabble as a religion under a myth that involves ancient cosmic wars between alien species.
 
Gotta hand it to him... it takes something to pull a global religion out of your ass and have people practically worship you. Hell, I would do it if I thought I could.

If I remember correctly, they believe in a sort of spiritual transcendence and the reaching of 'higher levels' of mind.
 
Clockwood said:
Gotta hand it to him... it takes something to pull a global religion out of your ass and have people practically worship you. Hell, I would do it if I thought I could.
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Nah. It only takes the certainty that a lot of people are retarded and ready to fall for any grotesque "enlightenment" you can conjure up.
 
fadeaway humper said:
Nah. It only takes the certainty that a lot of people are retarded and ready to fall for any grotesque "enlightenment" you can conjure up.
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Yeah... but so many of those people are already taken. Major religions, ufo groups, and political actavist organazations are all drinking out of the same pool. It takes work if you are starting from scratch. To get a good population, you have to dredge from those who are prettymuch sane.
 
Clockwood said:
Yeah... but so many of those people are already taken. Major religions, ufo groups, and political actavist organazations are all drinking out of the same pool. It takes work if you are starting from scratch. To get a good population, you have to dredge from those who are prettymuch sane.
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I still think the pool is almost inexhaustible. You talk about "pretty much sane" people. How many pretty much sane people are going to buy into a cosmology that rivals the worst B-series sci-fi plot? Face it, all it takes is a convenient breeding ground.
 
I read the scientology Holy Scripture as it was on display in the window. It looked very much like a Humanist view and I agreed with a lot of what it said. I just don't agree with forming a religion out of it. And of course, it eventually led John Travolta to make an almighty fool of himself when he produced and starred (as the villian) in the grotesque turkey Battlefield Earth.
 
Silas: I read the scientology Holy Scripture as it was on display in the window. It looked very much like a Humanist view and I agreed with a lot of what it said. I just don't agree with forming a religion out of it. And of course, it eventually led John Travolta to make an almighty fool of himself when he produced and starred (as the villian) in the grotesque turkey Battlefield Earth.
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M*W: There's quite a few Hollywoodites embracing Scientology. To name a few:

John H. Richardson - Catch a Rising Star
Tom Cruise - Top Gun, Far and Away, etc.
Nicole Kidman - Scientologist returned to Catholicism
Michael Ovitz, called the most powerful man in Hollywood
David Miscavige - most powerful man in the Church of Scientology
Wife of Clarence Thomas - Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
Pat Ryan - Daughter of US Rep. Leo Ryan killed in Guyana
Orson Welles
Danny Kaye
James Stewart
Greta Garbo
Walt Disney
Darryl F. Zanuck
Cecil B. DeMille
Priscilla Presley
Lisa Marie Presley
Anne Archer
Juliette Lewis
Kelly Preston - John Travolta's wife
Mimi Rogers - ex-wife of Tom Cruise
Karen Black
Kirstie Alley
Lee Purcell - Big Wednesday
Jeff Pomerantz - General Hospital
Geoffrey Lewis - Juliette's dad
Judy Norton-Taylor - The Waltons
Nancy Cartwright - voice of Bart Simpson
Vonni Ribisi - My Two Dads
Michael Wiseman - Predator 2
Kimberley Kates -Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
Michael D. Roberts -Rain Man
Gary Imhoff - Thumbelina
Floyd Mutrux - screenwriter of Dick Tracy
Mark Isham - A River Runs Through It
Manu Tupou (Hawaii) - acting teacher
Dror Soref - The Seventh Coin
Milton Katselas - heads the Beverly Hills Playhouse
Jerry Seinfeld - former member
Patrick Swayze - former member
Don Simpson - Top Gun producer
Brad Pitt
Ernest Lehman - screenwriter of The Sound of Music
Arnold Schwarzenegger - Calif Gov. & husband of Maria Shriver
Michael Keaton - Board member along with Schwarzenegger
R. Michael Wisner - CEO of Walt Disney Enterprises
Edgar Winter - musician
Brian Grazer - screenwriter
Bob Dolman - screenwriter
Michael D. Roberts - actor
Emilio Estevez - actor
John Candy - Delirious
Tom Mankiewicz - director
Richard Donner - director of the Lethal Weapon series
Emma Samms - actor
Chick Corea
Jeffrey Scott - helped develop Jim Henson's Muppet Babies
Peggy Lipton - The Mod Squad
Bobby Lipyon - Peggy's brother
Judy Canova - commedienne
Freddie Prinze - committed suicide
Peter Horton - thirtysomething
John Travolta
Kelly Preston - Travolta's wife
Charlie Sheen
Mimi Rogers - Tom Cruise's ex-wife
Frances Farmer - Titanic (ex-lover of Clint Eastwood)
 
People are always talking about how many Hollywood actors are members of Hubbard's joke of a religion as if that's supposed ot mean something of merit.
So what?
There are even more morons and half-wits in Hollywood as just about anywhere else, I never did understand why anyone cares what they think.

I think them all joining the same church is more of a social thing anway.
The pathetic "me too" tendency is grossly over-active in Hollywood, plus the appeal of all the neo-hippy psycho-babble that Hubbard spills out is a magnet in California.

If anything, I'd sway away from something if it had Hollywood's endorsement.
 
one_raven: People are always talking about how many Hollywood actors are members of Hubbard's joke of a religion as if that's supposed ot mean something of merit.
So what?
There are even more morons and half-wits in Hollywood as just about anywhere else, I never did understand why anyone cares what they think.

I think them all joining the same church is more of a social thing anway.
The pathetic "me too" tendency is grossly over-active in Hollywood, plus the appeal of all the neo-hippy psycho-babble that Hubbard spills out is a magnet in California.

If anything, I'd sway away from something if it had Hollywood's endorsement.
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M*W: Me, too. BTW, I'm still waiting for Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon to pack up and leave the USA since Bush won the election. Buh-bye!
 
Scientology is BS... from to what I've heard, it's a dangerous cult disguised as a "religion".
 
Is'nt it the religion that you have to pay loads of cash to move up a level, to hear more babble ?
 
Raithere: Cris and I both have had some personal experience with Scientology. We discussed it in this thread if you'd like to take a look:

http://sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=8378&highlight=scientology

~Raithere
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M*W: Thanks for the link. I've just been reading where Tom Cruise is the poster boy for Scientology. That was one reason Nicole left him. She returned to Roman Catholicism. Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other.
 
Interestingly enough, reading the thread Raithere posted reminded me of early phsychotherapy, including Jung. Now, I dont know that much about phsychotherapy etc, but it looks to me like scientology has ripped off what works and formulated a nice religious business about it.
I let myself be inveigled into a scientology raodshow thingy a few years ago wehn I was a student. A hairy wild eyed believer persuaded me to go in, and I mean he was hariy wild eyed, his didnt blink much and had the "true believer" look in his eyes.
Then it was round a wee exhibition showing nice photos of the good scientology did, the anti-drugs clinics, etc, and I got to hold a lie detector. The man standing beside it asked me to think of something painful (I think, it was a few years ago) and it twitched. Yeah, so lie detectors work, great. The fact that the needle then began to drop down the scale and I thought I could make it drop faster and it did drop faster, and that the operator then took the hand electrodes off me makes me wonder. I'd like to have one to play about with for a while. After that I took the test, and it said I was not very good and performing below potential, blah blah blah, in the best phsychobabble generalisation manner. So when the woman selling it all to me said they could help, I kind of looked vaguely interested, but when I tried to back out she said I shouldnt turn down the chance to fix myself, and generally made it clear that I was doomed if I didnt join up with them. So I left. When they'd gotten my address out of me I put down a slightly wrong one so they couldnt really trace me properly.

After leaving, I thought for a wee while about what i had been through and the people I had met. What seemed clear was that they were all religious believer types. I had met similar kinds of people in various churches I had frequented before I became an agnostic. However, the scientology people seemed even more rabid and desperate. So I put it down as a set up appealing to a small proportion of society, the kind of people who buy the cover story, and generally forgot about it.


This is one of the central anti-scientology websites on the net:
http://www.xenu.net/
 
Medicine Woman said:
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M*W: Can anyone explain what this is?
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It is yet another Man Made Religion that they made a mistake by putting the name of sciece in the title. They should called it the world according to L. Ron Hubberd.
 
The core teaching of scientology is that a very long time ago an alien tyrant named Xenu gathered a bunch of people from around the galaxy and brought them to earth, where he tried to kill them with nuclear weapons. The souls or ghosts of these beings (which scientologists refer to as ‘thetans’) are still around on earth, and inhabit your body. This causes all sorts of problems for you, so naturally the main purpose of scientology is to get rid of the nasty thetans that are causing whatever problems you happen to be experiencing.

Of course it’s difficult to imagine how any rational person could believe such a far-fetched theory, but apparently the scientologists don’t actually tell you about Xenu and the thetans until you’re very deep into scientology. It keeps the newbies from being scared off, I guess.

http://www.xenu.net/roland-intro.html
 
Nasor said:
The core teaching of scientology is that a very long time ago an alien tyrant named Xenu gathered a bunch of people from around the galaxy and brought them to earth, where he tried to kill them with nuclear weapons. The souls or ghosts of these beings (which scientologists refer to as ‘thetans’) are still around on earth, and inhabit your body. This causes all sorts of problems for you, so naturally the main purpose of scientology is to get rid of the nasty thetans that are causing whatever problems you happen to be experiencing.

Of course it’s difficult to imagine how any rational person could believe such a far-fetched theory, but apparently the scientologists don’t actually tell you about Xenu and the thetans until you’re very deep into scientology. It keeps the newbies from being scared off, I guess.

http://www.xenu.net/roland-intro.html
Click to expand...

Thank you for the insite. You just saved me alot of research. I dred to think about how many of their church services I would have to attend to find that out. I went to a church of Scientology once and it did not take long for me to realize it had little to do with Science. I do not know why I was expecting anything different from any other Religion.
 
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