[Marxism] $cientology

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Shane Mage wrote:

> Last time I looked, fraud (extracting money on false pretences) is a
crime.
> A "religion" based on extracting money on false pretences is a criminal
gang.

To which John replied: 

Yep, so prosecute the fraudsters, not the scientologists. If the the
organisation can be proved to be committing fraud, charge it for that, not
for being scientologists. If the cult can survive without fraud or
extortion, let it.

*  *  *

The problem is, of course, that ALL cults are in a very real sense frauds,
even if among the victims are its leaders. And, contrary to what some have
said, ALL religions are cults (so much so that in Spanish, freedom of
religion is called "libertad de culto," freedom in choosing your cult.

Yet many if not most folks familiar with scientology have great difficulty
accepting it alongside more traditional religious cults. 

In part I think this is because "scientology" appears to have become a
"religion" mostly for legal and tax reasons. Originally it was started by a
not-too-talented pulp sci-fi writer named L. Ron Hubbard. He claimed to have
discovered or developed "dianetics," a science of the mind at the heart of
which is a pseudo-scientific psychoanalysis called "auditing." Much of the
Church's activities --and income-- still revolve around and derive from this
bogus psychology of "dianetics."

While both mental health professionals and priests may claim to offer the
same benefits or results, the former are held to very different standards
than the latter. A lot of the animus against scientology springs from
precisely that they claim to offer a scientific mental-health-type program
but shield it behind the barrier (in the U.S.) of church-state separation so
their practices can't be tested or analyzed along traditional scientific
lines.

They also use the legal system very aggressively, including trademarks and
copyrights, against their critics. These lawsuits may often be quite bogus,
but under the medieval US legal system, it is very difficult to recover
costs defending yourself in a lawsuit even though you win. 

What re-enforces all this is that Hubbard decided to switch from a straight
pseudo-scientific cult to a "religious" one late in the game, a few years
after publishing his crackpot books about his "science" of the mind and
beginning "audits" (treatments). This religious conversion conveniently
freed him from having to answer to licensing boards or tax authorities. 

But to effect the magical transformation from pseudo-science to religion,
he had to graft a "space opera" about the souls of extraterrestrials who
haunt us and are the reason you have to go through "auditing"
(scientological treatment -- at an increasingly steep price), which was the
substance of the earlier-revealed "science" of dianetics. 

The result is a rather Frankensteinian doctrine where the sutures are all
quite visible, but also what is essentially a bait-and-switch: they claim to
offer "scientific" mental therapy but in fact give you what they themselves
admit is religion. But at the beginning they don't tell you anything about
the strictly religious part, they claim to be offering a scientifically
grounded therapy. It is ONLY AFTER you have been in for a while and are
"ready" --i.e., firmly under the cult's influence-- and thousands of dollars
poorer but with some thousands still available, that the reason you had to
be "audited" (given mental therapy) is revealed: "The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." 

No that wasn't L. Ron Hubbard: he was as clumsy a writer as he was a
theologian, and never expressed himself with much eloquence or originality.
And most on this list will recognize it as Marx, and Marx riffing on Hegel,
in the 18th Brummaire. I cite it to show that not even the bridge Hubbard
built to smuggle medical/scientific "dianetics" into a protected sanctuary
was original. The only thing that Hubbard varied was that the folks whose
nightmarish weight on the living he was concerned about were
extraterrestrials. Put aboard craft that looked like wingless DC-8's, they
were all dumped on earth 75 million years ago on the sides of volcanoes that
then had hydrogen bombs exploded inside them.

WTF? DC8? Volcanoes? Hydrogen Bombs? Well, what did you expect from third
rate 1950's science fiction? I'm surprised there isn't a Japanese monster
somewhere in there.

So given all this, it really doesn't work very well to say, prosecute the
fraudsters but not the church, for the core of the fraud is at the center of
tne creation of the scientology "religion."

As for the worry of some that this is an attack on freedom of religion or
freedom of speech, I'd be leery of defending the specific actions of this
French government, especially without knowing what the exact charges are,
what laws are being used (and therefore re-enforced), etc. But I am very far
from signing up as a sponsor of the committee to defend the scientology
seventeen, nor anything like that.

Joaquin