A true story about Scientology, Science fiction and a fruit cake called Hubbard

A news headline caught my eye today - “John Travolta donates cash to Scientology”. Now I know that Travolta is not the phenomenon that he used to be in his hey day, but still, it makes you ask (at least it did for me) – isn’t that the religion cooked up by a fraudster with the deliberate intention of swindling money from foolish religion seekers? The short answer to that question (I found after hours of research) is – yes, it is. Next question – so how do so many educated semi-intelligent celebrities get caught up in this nonsense and get swindled out of millions of dollars? But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me first give you a brief, summarised story (in my customary tongue-in-cheek style) of how Scientology came about.

The story starts with a guy called L. Ron Hubbard, born in Nebraska, USA. Hubbard did poorly in school and went on to do poorly at university studying civil engineering. Afterwards, Hubbard had a poor career in the navy from which he retired unceremoniously. He attempted a bit of prospecting for gold in Puerto Rico but came back empty handed. I think you get the point - Hubbard had a tough life.

One thing Hubbard discovered he was good at though, was writing. He established himself as a writer in the Science fiction and Fantasy genres writing cheap novels of the kind we now see, for example, on the magazine rack at Checkers. Despite this humble yet steady career in writing, poor Hubbard and his family struggled bitterly to make ends meet.

In 1949, using bits and pieces he had picked up from a chat he had had with a mate on Freudian analysis, Hubbard wrote a book on psychological rehabilitation (who would have seen that coming?!) He tried to peddle his “research” to a few respectable medical institutions but his innovative new rehabilitative “techniques” didn’t fly well with them (they complained that his theories had very little empirical evidence). Refusing to be dissuaded, Hubbard turned to his trustworthy editor John Campbell instead and what resulted was another book (essentially a self-help book) called, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It was an immediate commercial success, Hubbard had finally struck gold!

Unfortunately for him, Hubbard’s newfound product ran foul on a few challenges. Firstly, his materials were not patented and so what resulted was a wholesale distribution of his material with no remuneration. Secondly, the flood of medical lawsuits were getting expensive. Finally, tax was just killing him! Refusing to let these teething troubles keep him down, the ever resourceful Hubbard reorganised and repackaged his material as a religion! Scientology emerged. As such, all his profits would be tax-free and revenue could be collected in a centralized and controlled manner. The biggest benefit was that this would be the end of all those annoying medical lawsuits because it was not a psychological practice any more but a religious one. Brilliant!

Drawing extensively on his background in Science fiction, Hubbard engineered his religion to incorporate several stages of spiritual enlightenment, each more fantastical and expensive than the previous one. Each new level unlocks “deep mysteries” about the history of the universe (naturally this involves aliens, distant galaxies and other extraterrestrial anomalies). Over time he refined his money making machine and amassed a huge amount of wealth which he spent quietly for the rest of his days at his mansion in California, dodging his debtors and government tax collectors until the day he died.

So why do celebrities buy into this stuff (literally, they pay millions of dollars)? They buy into it because it is fashionable to be spiritual. They buy into it because they believe the lie which says ‘whatever religion you believe is true for you’, no matter how nonsensical it may be. How foolish it is to say that all religions are equal. By implication, this religion, which is essentially "a lunatic revision of Freudian psychology" (J. Williamson) preached by a man who suffered (and ultimately died) from the very maladies that his religion was proclaimed to heal, is equal with any other. Even equal in merit with the words of the Son of God who brought himself back to life after being killed for speaking the truth! Some doctrine comes from God, the others come from demons and fraudsters. The story of Scientology proves that it really does matter what you believe. I believe the words of the man who walked out of his own grave because he said he could give me life too.