Scientology is creeping me out
I’ve been reading Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
It’s painful. Hubbard was so clearly delusional and so malevolently manipulative that you find it hard to believe people actually do fall for this nonsense, and fall for it hard. People put up with shocking abuse for years, decades even, all the while apologizing for their behavior, making excuses for the church, and even voluntarily submitting to the most degrading punishments. For instance, Scientology maintains something called the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), which is little more than confinement and humiliation. People who question the dogma or annoy David Miscavage (the head of the religion now that Hubbard is dead) or sometimes just on a whim are tossed into basements or kept in trailers with no furnishings, no means of communication, and fed on slops, with frequent punishment drills. It’s like a horrible caricature of a banana republican prison — it is a prison.
But there aren’t locks on the doors. The inmates stay there, punishing themselves, begging for more, all in the hopes of achieving redemption in the eyes of the psychotics running the show. The whole book is a lesson on how human psychology can be warped and used by religion, leading people to submit to commands that I can’t imagine ever respecting…but they are led step by step into an earthly hell, all the while thinking it’s paradise.
One thing that struck me is that Scientology is a pathological extreme, but in substance it’s no different than other religions. And this was confirmed in a discussion of the numerous court cases that challenged Scientology. Scientology had its tax exemption as a religion stripped from it for a long while, and fought hard to get it back (and they eventually did, in a craven capitulation by the IRS). One of their allies in these trials was a former Franciscan friar and product of the Harvard Divinity School, Frank Flinn, who happily defined religion for the courts and pointed out that Scientology was just like Catholicism.
Flinn defined religion as a system of beliefs of a spiritual nature. There must be norms for behavior — positive commands, and negative prohibitions or taboos — as well as rites and ceremonies, such as initiations, prayers, and services for weddings and funerals. By these means, the believers are united into an identifiable community that seeks to live in harmony with what they perceive as the ultimate meaning of life. Flinn argued that Scientology amply fulfilled these requirements, even if it different in expression of them from traditional denominations.
Like Catholicism, Flinn explained, Scientology is a hierarchical religion. He compared L. Ron Hubbard to the founders of Catholic religious orders, including his own, started by Saint Francis of Assisi, whose followers adopted a vow of poverty. Financial disparities within a church are not unusual. Within the hierarchy of Catholicism, for instance, bishops often enjoy a mansion, limousines, servants, and housekeepers; the papacy itself maintains thousands of people on its staff, including the Swiss Guards who protect the pope, and an entire order of nuns dedicated to being housekeepers for the papal apartments.
The Catholic Church also maintains houses of rehabilitation (like the RPF) for errant priests hoping to reform themselves. Flinn saw the RPF as being entirely voluntary and even tame compared to what he experienced as a friar in the Franciscan Order. He willingly submitted to the religious practice of flagellation on Fridays, whipping his legs and back in emulation of the suffering of Jesus before his crucifixion.
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