Scientology 101

I attended an Anonymous rally last Saturday. You know, Anonymous—the international internet-linked underground that protests Scientology. Anonymous sprang up on imageboards—notably Futaba and the infamous 4chan—in 2006. Project Chanology, the organized, ongoing protest against the Church of Scientology, began in 2008 with a press release and a famous YouTube video, and has since taken on a life of its own. Scientology, as DI readers probably already know, is a scam masquerading as a sort of religion/self-actualization movement hybrid. The Church of Scientology (CoS) was dreamed up by a guy named L. Ron Hubbard, who used to write a lot of pulp fiction. In 1950, Hubbard published a book called Dianetics, in which he claimed that neuroses and other problems are caused by engrams. Engrams are like little negative scripts that get encoded into the unconscious mind (Hubbard called it the “reactive mind”). These engrams take root, supposedly, because when we’re unconscious, the reactive mind hears whatever’s being said around us, and takes it literally. Even fetuses get engrams--from the moment of conception, they can hear everything that's being said in their mother's vicinity, and their little reactive minds are busy recording engrams which, without Dianetic treatment, will cause all manner of psychological trouble throughout their lives. I’m not making this up. L. Ron Hubbard made this up. And, sadly, he got some people to believe it. Enough people, in fact, that he was able to morph Dianetics from a mere self-help fad into a new "religion"--the Church of Scientology.

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The love of money may be the root of all evil.

I like money.  With money I can clothe myself, pay for my grandchildren’s piano lessons, drive a reliable car, eat some great food, and visit friends in faraway places.  I don‘t want a barter economy, especially since I have nothing physical to barter for necessities, unless you count the endless reams of paper I can generate.  But this American drive to get rich, and get rich now with a minimum of effort, is doing us in.

Some people use the lottery.  Lotteries, or gambling in general, do not particularly offend me.  I do think they are the resort of people who failed 6th grade math, and I dislike the false advertising claiming the lottery benefits our school systems (the percentage going to education is way too low to make that an advantage of lotteries).   But I don’t think they ought to be illegal (funny how they don’t pass laws requiring that we eat our Brussels sprouts, everyone is too busy trying to outlaw the fun things, like alcohol, sex, etc.).

Some people “collect” things, believing that if they buy every coffee mug with a logo on it, someday their ‘collection’ will be worth millions.  I think collections are junk that gather dust and requires me to buy shelves or boxes or storage space to put it (think of George Carlin’s monologue on buying so much stuff that you have to buy stuff to put your stuff in or sell some stuff to buy other stuff).  That doesn’t seem to be …

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Continue ReadingThe love of money may be the root of all evil.