That's what the fascinating,
ten-page article is called on the Village Voice website. I disagree; the moral I took away from the article is that the "church" has thousands of fanatically dedicated members who are willing to devote their lives to promoting their cult and attacking anyone who opposes it, and that they'll win almost every time, simply by tireless effort. They even beat the IRS, eventually.
Yeah, they lost this one case, but the $2.5m judgment was pennies to them, as effective as their shakedown operations are at bringing in new financing. It swelled to $8.7m with interest, since they spent $50m fighting the case for 10 years, but hell, Tom Cruise probably pays them that much every year to tell him he's special and that his magical powers are ever-increasing. Besides, the guy they paid it to had his life ruined and he hardly got a penny from it after all the legal fees and other miscellaneous shakedowns. Plus, Scientology only paid it at the last minute since another trial was about to get underway at which some more of their crazy internal documents were going to be put into the public record, and keeping that out of sight was (obviously) worth more than $9m to them.
Rather than getting too incensed by the crazy evil of their cult, I read the article the way I do all my reading about religion; by trying to see how it works for the people who are able to believe in it. What needs of human psychology does it meet? How does it help people cope with every day life, and how do this particular religion's manifestly false beliefs hold up in competition with objective reality? Not very well, I wouldn't think, but I found this bit fascinating. It's quoting the man who won the judgment against Scientology:
“OT III totally shatters the core sense of identity. The central concept of mind control is attacking the core personality, the threat that you are not who you think you are. At OT III, you find out that you’re really thousands of individual beings struggling for control of your body. Aliens left over from space wars that are giving you cancer or making you crazy or making you impotent. The reason for every bad thing in your life is these alien beings,” Wollersheim says. “I went psychotic on OT III. I lost a sense of who I was.”
Years can be spent removing these aliens—called “body thetans” or “BT’s”—by talking to and about these supposed hitchhiking entities while holding onto a device called an “e-meter.” “You’re talking to thousands of beings. They have histories. And anger. They’re complex personalities. I started drinking heavily to drown out the voices. I was non-functional, irrational, filthy. I wandered the streets of L.A. for three days. Finally I came enough to my senses to get in touch with Scientologists I knew.” He was cleaned up and calmed down, but Wollersheim was told that the solution to his troubles was just more auditing.
The power of belief and the way cults can get humans to believe almost anything, through successive brainwashing sessions, is well-demonstrated by this bit. The basic premise is farcical. I won't even dignify it by calling it unbelievable. Every human being is made up of thousands of invisible, unmeasurable alien souls, fighting within you and causing you to misbehave, is so stupid it's not even laughable. Talking snakes, and forbidden fruit trees of knowledge, and virgin births are laughable ideas, but they've got a certain mythic, archetypal power. The mythology of Scientology never even begins to rise to that level. Galactic Lord Xenu and all the rest sounds like something dreamed up by a bad science fiction writer... oh wait.
And yet, tens of thousands of people have been convinced to give up their free will and devote their lives to this uninspired madness. There's really no way humans will ever be free of religion, you know? Most people don't want to be, and for all that we can praise about the human brain and our capacity for logic and reason, we're too good at compartmentalizing. Devoutly religious people don't (often) drink poison and think it'll cure their cancer, or throw their money out the window believing it'll turn into solid gold birds. They're able to function in society since they apply normal rules of logic and reason and analysis to most areas of modern life. They're just able to switch that off when it comes to some set of foundational myths and beliefs, and through a weird inversion of logic and reason that I don't quite understand, they actually feel better, the weirder the magical beliefs they're able to take seriously.
Thus you get an intelligent, productive adult American who nearly kills himself because he loses his sense of self when presented with the foundational truth of the universe; that we're all puppets at the control of thousands of struggling, 70,000,000 year old alien souls. I just marvel at the groundwork required to support such an elaborate fantasy.
Labels: religion, scientology
