The Namesake

After reading about Tom Cruise's re-enactment of his insanity on Oprah, I am now convinced that the man's sanity is questionable. Why would he want to re-live that PR nightmare - even in jest? He's clearly a little nutty, and while I don't want to be prejudiced, I have a feeling that his nuttiness may be a result of his belief in Scientology.

I've heard lots of crazy postulations about the "religion", and remember doing some reading about it when Tom initially lost his self control and self respect on national TV (Oprah, Matt Lauer, the list goes on..)

But today I felt renewed curiosity about it, and decided to really find out for myself what this is all about.

So, I went to the official source: the website of the official Church of Scientology, as well as Wikipedia (that venerable source of all that is good and true!). Here's the skinny:

• Scientology was founded by in the late 1950's by a somewhat slimy-looking, red-haired man called L. Ron Hubbard, and means "the study of truth" ("scio" = to know, "logos" = study of).

Ok - right away this is suspicious. How can you trust a red-headed guy named Ron? Has Tom learned nothing from the adventures of Harry Potter? I'm sure Mr. Hubbard means well but he's probably a right disaster when it comes to the big things. Not that it's his fault or anything - how would you feel if your mother died of starvation because there was nothing in her cupboard?

• Man is made up of Mind, Body and "Thetan" or Spirit. Thethan is really what Scientology seems to be about. To make sure your spirit is healthy, they have elaborate concepts like "Auditing" (cleansing yourself by talking to a Scientologist) and "E-Meters" (machines that measure mental activity).

Hmm. This would make sense to me if I lived on the Starship Enterprise and had a positronic brain like Data, with an ethical program that could be controlled with an energy pulse. Perhaps Scientology is just ahead of its time and should wait to be embraced until the 2500's when we've moved past money, hunger and poverty and learned to tune our spirits to the uplifting chords of the Star Trek theme song?

• There are several levels of the Thetan, numbered in Roman numerals, and at each level you learn about "hidden truths". At the final level, VIII, you achieve a type of Nirvana, that I guess must feel like teen spirit. But at level III you learn about how to reverse traumas from past lives and that lesson is taught through the story of "Xenu".

First of all, doesn't the above paragraph sound like the description of a video-game? Like how in "Prince of Persia: Sands of Time" you have to go through a prologue, and then get the dagger to unleash the hourglass and then...

And I'm sure by now you noticed what inspired the title of this blog entry.

• Xenu was a galactic tyrant who first kidnapped certain individuals who were deemed "excess population" and loaded these individuals into space planes for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). These space planes were said to have been copies of Douglas DC-8s, except with rocket engines. He then stacked hundreds of billions of these frozen victims around Earth's volcanoes 75 million years ago before blowing them up with hydrogen bombs and brainwashing them with a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for 36 days, telling them lies of what they are and what the universe should be like and telling them that they are 3 different things: 'Jesus, God, and The Devil.' The traumatized thetans subsequently clustered around human bodies because they watched the motion picture together, making them think they are all the same thing, in effect acting as invisible spiritual parasites known as "body thetans" that can only be removed using advanced Scientology techniques. Xenu is allegedly imprisoned in a mountain by a force field powered by an eternal battery. He is said to be still alive today.

WOAH! That's it - this religion *totally* gets my respect! That is the coolest possible namesake story, screw you Gogol Ganguli. Oh, how I wish I had space planes to deport all the "excess" people I know..

/me drifts off into daydream

Ahem, ahem. Anyway.

So, after all this digging, what's the consensus?

Scientology doesn't seem to be a religion at all. It's more like psychological therapy, a "How to be a well-adjusted person" routine, embellished with Latin and Greek influences for dramatic, "truthiness" effect. Most of its followers are ex druggies and Hollywood types - just the kind of people to embrace normal behavior only after it has been sugar-coated in fancy words that allow them to feel superior to other underpriveleged philistines that don't know any better. It's the work of a self-abosrbed man looking for fame by suggesting the most outrageous theory possible, a religion cobbled together by mixing the influences of mystical religions, comic books and the Sci Fi channel's original dramas. In sum, a whole lot of poppycock.

But I still wouldn't mind those space planes.