I was amused to discover that Scientology, like Christianity, has its fundamentalists—in the former case, those who adhere scrupulously and literally to the loony writings of L. Ron Hubbard.

A friend sent me an article from the Independent about Mark (“Marty”) Rathbun, an apostate Scientologist who left the Church because he found its methods and financial misdeeds insupportable. Rathbun was a high official in the Church: the Inspector General of the Religious Technology Center, responsible for enforcing Church discipline and order. After he left, he helped journalists expose the Church’s questionable activities and was, of course, subject to severe harassment by Scientologists, who can’t abide people leaving their organization and revealing its dark side (the apostates are called “squirrels”).

Rathbun now runs a “halfway house” for disaffected Scientologists and a well-known website, “Moving on up a little higher,” which provides succor and information to ex-Scientologists. Curiously, he still believes in much of what Hubbard wrote, and continues to practice some Scientology activities, like auditing with the e-meter.

Anyway, that’s a long prologue to one bit of the article that struck me:

Marty argues that “corporate Scientology” is dominated by fundamentalists who mandate literalist readings of its theological texts, including a famous piece of literature by Hubbard which argues that mankind’s problems are the work of a despotic alien called Xenu who fought an intergalactic war 75 million years ago. Marty would prefer to see that story as allegorical, in the same way many Christians view the Old Testament. The Church counters: “This shows he is no longer a Scientologist. Scientologists are true to the writings of Mr. Hubbard.”

I wasn’t aware that there were both literalist and “metaphorizing” Scientologists! Don’t forget, though, what the literalists have to believe about Xenu (from Wikipedia) if they are to be “true to the writings of Mr. Hubbard”. Have a gander at this nonsense:

Hubbard wrote that Xenu was the ruler of a Galactic Confederacy 75 million years ago, which consisted of 26 stars and 76 planets including Earth, which was then known as “Teegeeack”. The planets were overpopulated, with an average population of 178 billion.The Galactic Confederacy’s civilization was comparable to our own, with aliens “walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute” and using cars, trains and boats looking exactly the same as those “circa 1950, 1960” on Earth. Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions of his citizens together under the pretense of income tax inspections, then paralyzed them and froze them in a mixture of alcohol and glycol to capture their souls. The kidnapped populace was loaded into spacecraft for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The appearance of these spacecraft would later be subconsciously expressed in the design of the Douglas DC-8, the only difference being: “the DC8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn’t”. When they had reached Teegeeack/Earth, the paralyzed citizens were unloaded around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were then lowered into the volcanoes and detonated simultaneously.Only a few aliens’ physical bodies survived. Hubbard described the scene in his film script, Revolt in the Stars: “Simultaneously, the planted charges erupted. Atomic blasts ballooned from the craters of Loa, Vesuvius, Shasta, Washington, Fujiyama, Etna, and many, many others. Arching higher and higher, up and outwards, towering clouds mushroomed, shot through with flashes of flame, waste and fission. Great winds raced tumultuously across the face of Earth, spreading tales of destruction …” — L. Ron Hubbard, Revolt in the Stars The now-disembodied victims’ souls, which Hubbard called thetans, were blown into the air by the blast. They were captured by Xenu’s forces using an “electronic ribbon” (“which also was a type of standing wave”) and sucked into “vacuum zones” around the world. The hundreds of billions of captured thetans were taken to a type of cinema, where they were forced to watch a “three-D, super colossal motion picture” for thirty-six days. This implanted what Hubbard termed “various misleading data”‘ (collectively termed the R6 implant) into the memories of the hapless thetans, “which has to do with God, the Devil, space opera, et cetera”. This included all world religions, with Hubbard specifically attributing Roman Catholicism and the image of the Crucifixion to the influence of Xenu. The two “implant stations” cited by Hubbard were said to have been located on Hawaii and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. In addition to implanting new beliefs in the thetans, the images deprived them of their sense of personal identity. When the thetans left the projection areas, they started to cluster together in groups of a few thousand, having lost the ability to differentiate between each other. Each cluster of thetans gathered into one of the few remaining bodies that survived the explosion. These became what are known as body thetans, which are said to be still clinging to and adversely affecting everyone except those Scientologists who have performed the necessary steps to remove them. A government faction known as the Loyal Officers finally overthrew Xenu and his renegades, and locked him away in “an electronic mountain trap” from which he still has not escaped. Although the location of Xenu is sometimes said to be the Pyrenees on Earth, this is actually the location Hubbard gave elsewhere for an ancient “Martian report station”. Teegeeack/Earth was subsequently abandoned by the Galactic Confederacy and remains a pariah “prison planet” to this day, although it has suffered repeatedly from incursions by alien “Invader Forces” since that time.

Sound ridiculous? But really, is it any more so than the tenets of Catholicism? If ever a religion was palpably man-made, it is Scientology, drawn directly from the science fiction fantasies of L. Ron Hubbard.

And don’t forget that Scientology, complete with the dogma above, is now a religion officially recognized by the United States government, ergo its enormous income is exempt from taxation.