

Salon magazine recently featured an article about the forthcoming Oscar-winner Alex Gibney’s explosive new HBO documentary “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.” I encourage my readers to view the article and the documentary about this horrific cult. It saddens me that life’s difficulties compel some people to turn to such nonsense for comfort. And it makes me sad that people exploit others who are having trouble.

Pursuant to the above paragraph, I thought my readers might be interested in this video. In it, L. Ron Hubbard’s great-grandson suggests that L. Ron was a disturbed charlatan. One can’t conclude that all religions start with psychopaths, but no doubt many did. (You know the old saying: “when a few people believe something crazy, it’s called a cult; when many people believe something crazy, it’s called a religion.”) What I do believe is that you can’t simply buy the answers to life’s big questions, the search for meaning is more difficult than that, as Spinoza noted 400 years ago:

“If the way which, as I have shown, leads hither seem very difficult, it can nevertheless be found. It must indeed be difficult, since it is so seldom discovered, for if salvation lay ready to hand and could be discovered without great labour, how could it be possible that it should be neglected almost by everybody ? But all noble things are as difficult as they are rare.”

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