VeeshanVault

Funkmasterr wrote:I agree he has gone kind of looney- but what I don't understand is these people who are trying to sound so intelligent and bash scientology keep calling it a religion when it isn't nor does any scientologist including L. Ron Hubbard claim that it is.

What is Scientology?
Scientology is an applied religious philosophy.
The fastest growing religious movement on earth, Scientology has become a firmly established and active force for positive change in the world in less than half a century. In a word, Scientology works.

And if you were to ask any Scientologist they would tell you it is a practical religion, with practical answers — tools that can be applied to achieve greater awareness and purpose in the here and now.

Nick wrote:I never realised quite how much a lunatic Tom Cruise was before this thread.

He should be fucking commited.

Funkmasterr wrote:I will have to look for the direct quote I have from the founder of it aslanna, because he clearly says that its not a religion. I personally think people are making a bigger deal out of it than it really is. I am no scientologist, but it is far from a cult.

Funkmasterr wrote:...but it is far from a cult.

In religion and sociology, a cult is a group of people (often a new religious movement) devoted to beliefs and goals which may be contradictory to those held by the majority of society. Its marginal status may come about either due to its novel belief system or due to idiosyncratic practices that cause the surrounding culture to regard it as far outside the mainstream.

The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part flimflam man. Born In Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the Navy during World War II and soon afterward complained to the Veterans Administration about his "suicidal inclinations" and his "seriously affected" mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a moderately successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years later, church brochures described him falsely as an "extensively decorated" World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in action, twice pronounced dead and miraculously cured through Scientology. Hubbard's "doctorate" from "Sequoia University" was a fake mall-order degree. In a I984 case in which the church sued a Hubbard biographical researcher, a California judge concluded that its founder was "a pathological liar."

Hubbard wrote one of Scientology's sacred texts, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it he introduced a crude psychotherapeutic technique he called "auditing." He also created a simplified lie detector (called an "E-meter") that was designed to measure electrical changes In the skin while subjects discussed intimate details of their past. Hubbard argued that unhappiness sprang from mental aberrations (or "engrams") caused by early traumas. Counseling sessions with the E-meter, he claimed, could knock out the engrams, cure blindness and even improve a person's intelligence and appearance.

Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers to climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made of clusters of spirits (or "thetans") who were banished to earth some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named Xenu. Naturally, those thetans had to be audited.