Scientology may be a little "weird," but then again, so is the rest of the world

 

This country is full of “deviant” people and organizations, regardless of their position in society. Take for instance, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, who seems to represent a district full of deviants who vote for the most deviant candidate of a deviant political party.  This guy and his MAGA Freedom Caucus colleagues make former Reagan Interior Secretary James Watt look like Mr. Rogers; the other day he expectorated in a newsletter about his version of the January 6 riot:

After the riot was in full swing, the Chief’s request for National Guard was finally approved. But even after approval was given, General Milley, the homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist Chairman of the military joint chiefs, delayed. Of course, we now know that the deviant Milley was coordinating with Nancy Pelosi to hurt President Trump, and treasonously working behind Trump’s back. In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.

But at least this deviant hasn’t (yet) beaten someone with a cane on the House floor…

 

…like this “frail” 76-year-old Maryland woman did to death on her house floor to her 72-year-old husband:

 

And then there is so-called "journalist" Ava Santina, whose "function" appears to be to make Piers Morgan seem "rational." On one of his recent discussions, she asserted that men deserve to be "terrified" by someone like the  "hammer woman," Eleanor Williams, a racist who accused two Indian men of kidnapping her and holding her hostage in a house where she was gang raped and beaten about the head with a hammer. 

Williams eventually admitted her claims were all lies, admitting that she hit herself with a hammer video cameras showed her purchasing the day of the alleged incident. Santina also made light of the imprisoned Indian men's consideration of suicide over the false accusations.  Yet Dan Wootton was now only being "fired" after  he didn't "disagree" with a guest on his show who joked about anyone marrying a misandrist like Santina? My question is why is it "OK" for women to make sick statements advocating domestic violence against men and not receive some kind of repercussion?

So where to find peace and tranquility on a hostile planet? Not many land options left unless you want to burn or freeze to death.

Now, one organization regarded as "deviating" from the norm is the “church” of Scientology, which has gotten a lot more bad press than usual, particularly as it relates to the Danny Masterson rape trial. Before it was regarded in the media and its detractors as a “cult,” which many people bring up whenever negative stories are attached to its better known members in Hollywood.

Scientology is believed to involve pseudo-scientific mysticism with followers spouting the “wisdom” of some guru-like “master” as words to live by; to be honest, that is mostly true. It probably isn’t surprising that a lot of actors names are attached to Scientology, since the first “church” was founded in Los Angeles 70 years ago, and thus is well established there and has had plenty of time to spread its tentacles out to those looking for “meaning” in their lives otherwise largely defined by their images on-screen.

The founder of the Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, was not an unfamiliar name when I was growing up, mostly in relation to his book Dianetics, with that erupting volcano on the cover in a mid-70s edition:

 

Society in the  Seventies were a lot more “experimental” than most people give it credit for, especially with sexual expression on film, which would likely get filmmakers (at least in this country) arrested in today’s arrested development times. People were actually curious about things outside their experience…

 

…although it would only be to people today “nonsense” or boring diversions from their text-messaging and self-serving complaints.

Now, according to Wiki’s biographical page, Hubbard had an “interesting” life to say the least; his served in the navy and briefly captained two naval vessels before being hospitalized for what where apparently mental-health related issues.  He was also was a prolific writer of fiction in a variety of genres; he obviously had a certain amount of imagination and "intellect" that some people regarded as off in left field somewhere. One suspects that he saw life as a free-for-all, and he needed to “justify” it psychologically, and Dianetics was apparently written for that purpose.

I have to admit that just a mere “perusal” of the Scientology website is an exhaustive exercise, with a lot of pseudo-science and self-improvement mumbo-jumbo. You'll find a lot of simplistic pronouncements that don't seem offensive on their face, but then again we live in a society where we just walk past people with problems on city streets as mere annoyances who we don't have the time or inclination to help. To be honest, to be a "true" Scientologist requires the kind of mental "discipline" that most people don't have.

But why would Scientology appeal to anyone? It claims to be non-judgmental as long as you remain a member. You can believe in any religion or God you want, because in the end the only real “deity” you need to answer to is yourself. Scientology claims it gives you the “tools” to be all you can be, as long as you follow its rules.

However, if you choose to be an apostate and leave the “church,” you are to be ostracized and condemned. Most people who leave do so on bad terms, not trusting that their “problems” will be dealt with satisfactorily internally; of course as we have learned, “problems” that were supposedly “handled” even decades ago can be taken “outside” to be adjudicated. In the Masterson case, his guilt is less the issue but the fact that his accusers didn’t like seeing him living his life as if nothing had happened, which had suited a "cult" that wanted to avoid bad press.

You will find plenty of people on YouTube attacking Scientology as a dangerous “cult,” and now we learn that so-called comedian Leah Remini, whose mother joined Scientology when she was 8 and she remained a member for over three decades, is now suing it and its current leader for, basically, making her what she is today—meaning mostly unemployable. 

Remini apparently has a bad relationship with her family, accusing her father of being, well, anything bad she can think of, ignored her sister who died of cancer and didn’t bother going to her memorial service, apparently oversaw a toxic work environment with personal assistants likening it to a “nightmare” world of “psychologically damaging” fault-finding, temper tantrums and various demeaning four-letter invective.  

Needing someone or something to blame for her behavior, Remini claims in her lawsuit that “For 17 years, Scientology and David Miscavige have subjected me to what I believe to be psychological torture, defamation, surveillance, harassment, and intimidation, significantly impacting my life and career. I believe I am not the first person targeted by Scientology and its operations, but I intend to be the last.”

However, I suspect that what they were “targeting” was a person going off the rails and giving Scientology a “bad name” as if it wasn’t bad enough. The Scientology “newsroom” issued a “statement,”  accusing Remini of being solely to blame if she “can no longer get a job…Obviously everybody in Hollywood now knows what we already knew: That Remini is a horrible person and toxic to so many who have the misfortune to come in contact with her.”

What this means, I suppose, is that not "everyone" in what members call a "church" believes  they are  nutcases like Remini, and the “witnesses” like her against Scientology are not all “reliable” ones and may have bigger problems than just their association with the supposed “cult.” 

I suppose that members of the “cult” find it more intellectually “stimulating” than most “religions.” Remini dropped out of high school at 14 to become a “star”; maybe she thought of herself as a “deity” unto herself soon, and somehow I doubt her intellectual capacity and maturity had reached a point where she was capable of following the creed…

 

…with a certain level of wisdom and discretion; by the way,reading this sounds like libertarianism on steroids if you ignore the “golden rule” vibe. My impression is that Remini is a person who cannot control her impulses (maybe due to those "engrams"), and blaming Scientology is just too easy. 

That of course brings up the question if Scientology really is to blame for the moral failures of people like Masterson; I mean not all members of the “church” have been accused of rape. My impression of accusations concerning Tom Cruise and his relationships that went south were simply because of his insistence that the family follow a way of life they thought was too "controlling" of their behavior and beliefs.

I’m not “defending” Scientology; for all its talk of “personal freedom,” there are certainly limits to it that it tolerates from its members. I suppose its “teachings” can lead to “self-improvement” if you believe in it hard enough,  and those on the “outside” who have opinions about what they hear about it just don't "get it."Not that I "get it," but I have a hard time believing that this would be a "better" world without it.

I only know Dianetics (the "bible" of Scientology) from its cover, but a writer for Salon, Laura Miller, decided in 2007 to find out what was actually in this book. Miller found that Hubbard pontificates in “spectacularly dull” fashion that he has all the “answers” utilizing his revolutionary “modern science of mental health” which she says reads more like Hubbard’s own personal struggle with mental health issues, which a perusal of his biography may suggest. 

Miller observes that Hubbard displayed a fixation, sprinkled throughout the book, with domestic violence as “examples” of how “evil engrams” invade even a fetus’ being and taking control of it, but he has discovered the way to overcome that. Hubbard seems obsessed with his own childhood without saying so explicitly; Miller notes that if you splice the stories together that appear randomly throughout the book, the story goes something like this:

It involves an adulterous wife and a brutal husband. The wife becomes pregnant (presumably by her lover) and fears discovery of the affair. She tries repeatedly to abort the pregnancy on her own, using orange sticks and other household objects. Her husband, suspecting the truth, beats her, punching her pregnant belly, calling her a "whore" and "no good." When the child is born, the parents pretend it was wanted, but the child's only true ally is a grandmother, who thwarted the mother's attempt to abort him and cares for the child when he's sick. Eventually, the mother starts beating the child, using many of the same insults her husband has flung at her.

Now, one presumes that is not the “point” of the book, at least according to adherents to Scientology who see no peculiarities in its founder; in Dianetics, to the "unbiased" mind, Hubbard simply provides a means to what it claims to do: since man is motivated solely by “survival,” those forces that prevent survival—largely “psychosomatic” in nature—must be counteracted in order for man to be “clear” of it, or at least that is my reading of it. 

What prevents a “clear” mind is not memories (being abused as a child, for example) but these “engrams,” which are stored at the “cellular level,” and are triggered by “stimuli” similar to that which created it, which I  suppose is like an “instinctual” reactions to various negative stimuli.Well, OK, whatever you say.

We recall Johnny Depp’s testimony that he instinctively “ducked” whenever his mother was near, and later his “instinct” was to just get away from Amber Heard whenever she was in one of her demon-possessed states; one suspects that it is people like Depp who could have been easy targets if they had come into contact with  a true believer. 

Dianetics at its “best” is essentially a “self-help” tome that was “way off the reservation” for its time, which “explained” an initial fascination when the book (and subsequently Scientology) when it first came out around 1950, although it was quickly denounced by the professional community as quack psychology that could be “dangerous.”

Of course, most people with a superficial knowledge of what Scientology is considers its teachings “brainwashing” and the steeped in science fiction nonsense; this seemed borne out by the critical mauling of the film Battlefield Earth, based on the novel by Hubbard and turned into a wish fulfillment project by Scientologist John Travolta. But as Roger Ebert observed, there was no obvious Scientology propaganda in it despite the claims of those who those who accused the project of such before its release; it was just a “bad” movie.

However, Miller notes that there is indeed some “science fiction” in Scientology; you are just not told about it until you are deemed a “true believer”:

Critics say the church hushes up this story -- it involves an evil demiurge who, 75 million years ago, blew up 178 billion souls with hydrogen bombs planted in Earth's volcanoes, trapped them on "electrical strips," brainwashed them and packaged them into clusters that now cling to every human being and mess with our bodies and heads -- for two reasons. One is that the church needs a sufficiently dramatic payoff after stringing members along through years of courses and trainings, all costing upward of a quarter of a million dollars. The other reason is fear that revealing this fantasia of kooky stories might turn off potential converts -- but, hey, that never hurt the Old Testament.

Make of it what you will, but I suppose there is a reason why Scientologists prefer to keep things “all in the family.” Personally, it seems a little too weird for me, but calling it "dangerous" is a little hypocritical in a world defined by hypocrisy.