Cult Corner – Scientology

Scientology has always defended its beliefs with an army of well paid lawyers and a rabid indignation if non-believers should attack the central pillars of their belief system. These central pillars, or secrets, were usually only accessible to the highest levels of the “church” and only then after adherents had invested large amounts of time and money on working their way towards becoming one of the exalted few to whom these revelations were made.

But has the internet begun to undermine Scientology? And, if so, how long will it last if the secrets, which were for so many years inaccessible to non-initiates, are now freely available online and open to scrutiny?

The Church has always stuck with the line that the mystical secrets surrounding Xenu (the dictator of the Galactic Confederacy) are too dangerous for unprepared readers and may be harmful if consumed out of context. (The only way to prepare yourself, by the way, is to spend years paying for Scientology “audits” which will eventually help clear the subject from the reactive mind’s accumulated crap known as “engrams” and enable the subject to become “clear”.)

No doubt learning of Xenu, who brought billions of people to Earth, placed them around volcanoes and then detoneted nuclear bombs around them, could be confusing to a regular human. Knowledge of the everlasting battery which keeps Xenu imprisoned within an unspecified mountain here on Earth could be dangerous to us too, in case we all go bonkers and start digging up mountain ranges in order to find the once leader of Galactic Confederacy.

Or perhaps it is dangerous to the leading Scientologists who would find their belief system, and cash cow, gradually eroded.

It certainly seems the French Courts have decided to have a say in the matter as Scientology has recently been found guilty of defrauding its members on a massive scale after a judge debunked the use of the e-meter, a device which some may be familiar with as the crypto-scientific device used in high street “personality tests” for years.

So is the “Church” doomed? Perhaps not.

In France, Scientology has been deemed a sect rather than a religion and so is required to produce evidence to prove their wacky claims. In other, perhaps more religiously tolerant, societies like the United States, it was granted tax-exempt status as befitting a religion in 1993 and other countries such as Italy, Sweden, Spain and Portugal followed suit. Seeing as it is currently unlikely that “official” religions such as Catholicism will be required to prove that communion wafers magically become the flesh of a man who died 2,000 years ago or our good friends the Van Impes (and we’ll be looking at them again soon) will be asked to prove that God fills them in daily on the upcoming biblical apocalypse, it seems the Operating Thetans among the Scientologist brigade will be allowed to continue to ply their trade.

We can but hope the distribution of their dangerous secrets allow us to be a touch more discriminating about which religious fantasy we wish to subscribe to, however.

Oh, and if you haven’t seen Martin Bashir’s interview with Scientologist’s chief spokesman Tommy Davis, it’s worth taking a look at how the Church deals with questions from outsiders.