The Wall of Fire
An Exploration of Scientology
This page takes a brief look at Scientology and the practices of the organisation. While it would be preferable to be even-handed, a touch of bias may be observed here.
No direct links to the Church or to its vocal opposition are offered here, but the Church's pages and a few of the pages put up by its vocal detractors may be found on Yahoo!
For a thorough personal account of what it means to be inside the church, read D.J. Carter's essay (a 51K web page) or download a zip file of the page to read at your leisure.
Dianetics
Scientology, like most religions, originated from the vision of one man, Lafayette Ron Hubbard. Hubbard was a writer of speculative fiction (or Sci-Fi) who somehow stumbled onto the principle that the id (which he called the 'reactive mind') is full of linear associations that subconsciously warp the average person's behaviour. These associations, called 'engrams', are formed during unpleasant or painful events (for example, when one has a bad accident, there will be a portion of that event where memory of the event is hazy) and purportedly serve to prevent us from re-experiencing similar events by causing instinctive avoidance responses to cues that the reactive mind recorded during the bad event.
'Dianetics' is a practice, with similarities to hypnosis and psycho-analysis, in which the individual attempts to resolve the associations in order to discover, and thus disable, the underlying engram. Whether it works or not is an open question, although there has been a scientific study which failed to demonstrate the reactive mind's purported ability to precisely record events (a crucial tenet of Dianetics and Scientology).
Dianetic processing (called 'auditing') requires a great deal of skill and expense - this is, in fact, where the church makes most of its money. Oddly, if an error in auditing is discovered and more auditing is required to correct it, the liability for the error is charged to the person being audited rather than to the erring auditor.
The Church of Scientology
The church has been around for about 45 years or so. Interestingly, a number of colleagues of Hubbard (other writers of speculative fiction) reportedly heard him say, some years before the founding of the church, that there was no money in writing, if one wanted to get really rich, one would found a religion. Whether or not this is true has become largely a matter of opinion. But what is true is that the church displays the attributes of a machine geared toward making money.
When it became obvious that Dianetics was a dead end - that is, the end result of auditing, a reactive mind 'cleared' of all engrams requiring no further auditing - Hubbard began to explore avenues beyond dianetics. This led to fantastical journeys into the past and the discovery of ethereal entities clustered around the individual. Scientology has become a series of hurdles that ever reduce the limitations of the acolyte and ultimately provide superhuman powers to the person who masters all the trials.
There is an old proverb: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is [too good to be true]. The passage through the upper levels of Scientology is tricky and fraught with peril, not to mention prohibitively expensive (there are numerous accounts of people who have given unthinkable amounts of money to the church and reaped little gain).
Beyond that, the documents relating to the upper levels of Scientologous practice read, well, like they were written by a Sci-Fi hack. (That some of the facts put forth in at least one of the documents are scientifically questionable might simply be written off as another case where religion has run afoul of science - or it may be that the theories of the scientific community were undergoing major revision at the very time that the religious documents were being completed.) These documents are not provided to the neophyte because great harm might come to them if the neophyte reads them before being properly prepared (thoroughly indoctrinated, perhaps?).
There are a number of famous individuals who are Scientologists, and the church seems to go to great effort to recruit them. Most are performers, however - there is little record of any great writers, researchers, athletes, philosophers or diplomats who have reached high levels in the church of Scientology. This would suggest either that the possession of superhuman powers tends to suppress creativity, that persons who give matters careful thought tend away from Scientology, or that the church is striving to enlist members of the highest profile (and income) to maximise its visibility.The church claims a membership of eight million people. This may be accurate or it may be inflated (other sources report the active membership in Scientology to be more along the lines of fifty thousand worldwide), but in any case, even eight million is a fairly small minority.
The Disaffected
The church has acquired a fair number of very vocal critics. Most of these are people who have suffered from their membership in the church or have had family members who have suffered, been separated from them or suffered or even died due to neglegence or malice on the part of the church.
One of the first avenues of attack for critics of the church is to make public the contents or summaries of the contents of the documents relating to the higher levels of Scientologous practice. And the church is quick to respond, often by accusing the critics of bigotry or hounding them with meretorious or frivolous lawsuits. One of the tactics used by the legal department of the church when pursuing a suit is to obtain as much material on the character of the individual who is being sued in order to make the process as visibly uncomfortable as possible.
The church of Scientology probably spends proportionally more money on legal counsel than any other religious organisation. The accounts of their extreme and bizarre behaviour are abundant; evidence of the superhuman powers of their members is not.
Personal Observation
Yes, I have my own personal greivance with Scientology, and I choose not to speak of it here (if you are curious, you can ask me about it).
We all have our faults, and I think I can reasonably attribute some of mine to the fanatical excesses of Scientology. Every religion attempts to recruit members through indoctrination at an early age or through salemanship (deception). I think it is fair that an individual have access to any information they need to make an informed decision, so, in this respect, I support the efforts of the Disaffected to make this information available, and in addition, I support any effort to protect children from indoctrination into any religion before they are old enough to make their own informed choice.
About the image: The symbol depicted in the image at the top of the page is a caricature of an emblem used by the church of Scientology. The small spars in the middle of the emblem represent an 'X' - in other words, the emblem is a cross being crossed-out (eradicated). The background to the image is a representation of the 'Wall of Fire', a major hurdle in the upper levels of Scientologous practice around which much of the controversy revolves.
