“Scientology” has 2 main components.
One seems pretty sensible, and goes something like this:
Though life’s unavoidable pains and misfortune, and occasionally the malicious acts of others, one’s mind gets messed up. One can, through a sort of “cognitive therapy” known as “Auditing”, fix this, reaching a state called “Clear”.
The next part is pretty supernatural. Once one gets Clear, one gains a series of extraordinary abilities, beginning with being smart, charismatic, and happy, advancing to being able to remember all of history, having total mastery over time and space, and other abilities so wondrous as to be either secret or simply indescribable to the uninitiated. This is called being an “Operating Thetan”, which can be roughly translated as “liberated soul”.
Some Scientologists seem to thrive in its practice – a lot of people (some prominent actors and writers among them) credit Scientology with their success. Some don’t – the internet is full of account of people who feel defrauded and betrayed by it. Unlike many religions, one can spend a lot of money being a Scientologist, which appears to strongly contribute to the bad experiences many people have with it.
I find Scientology much less interesting than a biography and character study of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Because students of his life tend to be either Scientologists or anti-Scientologists, one can easily get a distorted account (I’d brand
the religioustollerance.org article a distorted, pro account,
Arnie Lerma’s website a distorted, anti one). There are, however, many good, objective studies of him (
wikipedia has a pretty good, brief one) and the many equally fascinating people he interacted with, notably John “Jack” Parsons (from whom he allegedly stole two boats and one woman!).
Though an accomplished (IMO) SF writer, Hubbard was not a competent scientist (1930-31, he tried, but failed, to earn an Engineering degree from GWU), but clearly admired scientists and engineers. A common theme in his fiction is the triumph of down-to-earth scientists and engineers over conniving bureaucrats and politicians. Despite (or perhaps because of) being a convicted con-man and professional stretcher-of-the-truth, he was likable and charismatic. He is known (though many Scientologists fiercely dispute the claim) to have bragged "I'm going to invent a religion that's going to make me a fortune. I'm tired of writing for a penny a word."
When asked “who, if you could have a conversation with any person, living or dead, would you choose?” I inevitably find myself skipping past the expected answers such as "Albert Einstein", and answering “L. Ron Hubbard”.
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L.Ron Hubbard
