Scientology 101

We know that Tom Cruise and so are many celebrities but how much do we know about The Church Of Happyology.If there is any scientologists here it would be a great help to explain your relgion.

edited 25th Sep '11 9:21:21 AM by joyflower

...We had a Useful Notes page on this, but it got nuked from orbit to get rid of flame wars.

edited 25th Sep '11 11:40:32 AM by Yej

Scientology in the strictest sense is simply thus:

In practice, something like 99% of all scientologists belong to the Church of Scientology, which is a governing body and is the source of most of Scientology's problems.

You need to make monetary donations to reach the higher echelons of the church, and what you get is, as far as we can tell, accurately portrayed in that South Park episode except that the planes were stacked inside the volcanoes and nuked rather than dropped directly in.

Here is their cosmology, at least in regards to Earth, straight from Hubbard:

[[youtube:Aa7OebkEmNU&NR=1]]

Consider for a moment that a guy deliberately came up with it as part of a bet/scam with another author. Does Scientology really deserve to be called a religion? And not some scary cult that leads to situations that make me think of a small scale Jonestown?

Ace@I'm on board with you. Anyone who makes a relgion just to scam people is just wrong.Although all this stuff would make for a good science fiction story which I think you could get into.

edited 25th Sep '11 1:34:51 PM by joyflower

To be fair to Scientologists (thought it's hard to do so): they apparently do not believe that it is a scam.

Ununilium was a Scientologist, but he hasn't been here for quite a while.

Scientology is a scam—specifically, what happens when people abuse their civil rights to religious freedom for fun and profit.

Solution:

• Take their non-profit status, if we haven't already (because they aren't really non-profit, IMO).
• ???
• PROFIT! (literally, because now we get more tax money)

We have no way of knowing this isn't the case with every other religion. Hypothetically, Jesus and Buddha could have been going off the same kind of bet.

In Scientology's case, it's the only one where we know it was such, but that's not going to matter a lot to the people who believe it anyway.

Even still, it means we know for a fact that Scientology isn't real. The other ones are just maybe's given the evidence we lack.

Scientology's mythology isn't any inherently more ridiculous than any other religion's. Have you read the Bible recently? Or for that matter, pretty much any piece of Hindu mythology?

I will not ever defend the Church of Scientology, but I will certainly defend the religion itself for the sake of the less than 1% that follow it under some banner other than the Church's.

OK, folks, I'm going to lock this down, for one reason: While the name is a snowclone of the other "<Religion> 101" threads, and therefore the thread is presenting itself as the same type of thread, the content and tone couldn't be more different. Rather than being a Scientologist explaining what they do believe, it's a lot of people who don't know, speculating and bashing.

We don't need that.

If a Scientologist (current or past) wants to make a Scientology 101 thread in keeping with the tone and content of the other "<Religion> 101" threads, that will be fine, and anyone who posts in it will be expected to remain civil and not post simply to snipe or bash.