Word: hubbards
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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According to multitudes of websites on Scientology, the Church was little better than a cult, the religion little more than a tax dodge, its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, little more than an egotistic pathological liar. But Allen and I committed to go see for ourselves...
Also baptized Catholic, Jimmy was born into a family of Scientologists. His parents, disaffected with traditional religion, had joined the Church in the 1970s, part of an early wave of American converts. L. Ron Hubbard started the religion in the late 1950s, and it was soon adopted by urban intellectuals and curious others in Washington D.C., New York, and Los Angeles. Today, there are around 77,000 practitioners in the United States, according to the City University of New York’s 2004 American Religious Identification Survey. (By way of comparison, the same survey reports that there are around...
...hand and asks about my experiences with Scientology in a lilting voice. He has large, lidded eyes that stare for uncomfortably long. Allen expresses a degree of incredulousness about the religion right off the bat; he asks about a story gleefully popular on anti-Scientology sites on internet, that Hubbard believed that an intergalactic ruler named Xenu banished human spirits to earth 75 million years ago. Jeff dismisses the story outright and addresses the question by introducing a central tenet of the religion: it’s not true unless it’s true for you. (The story...
...skepticism about Hubbard and the more outlandish facets of Scientology aside, from the beginning I felt like I kind of got auditing. Other things in Dianetics seemed weird. This I could relate to. At the heart of the religion, auditing touches on a common experience. When I have issues, I talk them out with my friends. When some of my peers have serious issues, they seek counseling. When Scientologists have issues, they work them out with their auditors...
During that July visit to the Church of Scientology, Jeff offered to show Allen and me how auditing works. We entered a small, windowless room. There were L. Ron Hubbard quotes in garish script tacked up on the walls, and a cherry wooden desk with chairs on either side of it. I could have been at a professor’s office hours...