1 I was bored.
1.1 I didn’t learn much I didn’t already know.
1.11 I did learn that members of the organization’s upper echelon spent years living in squalor as they endured physical and emotional abuse.
1.111 It doesn’t much change my view of Scientology to learn that.
1.12 I also didn’t know the extent to which L. Ron Hubbard was — and the current Chairman, David Miscavige, is — paranoid, violent, and megalomaniacal.
1.121 It doesn’t much change my view of Scientology to learn that.
1.2 Scientology is played out.
1.21 We continue to hear about it because it’s hugely successful.
1.211 By “successful,” I mean that the Church’s assets are worth $1.5 billion.
1.212 The active membership of the Church in the U.S. is relatively small, but Adherents.com — hardly a credible-looking website, but whatever — places Scientology at the bottom of their Major Religions of the World list, behind Rastafarianism.
1.22 We also continue to hear about Scientology because it operates in Hollywood and uses celebrity members as spokespeople.
2 The film seems not to share the aim of the book on which it’s based: to elucidate rather than expose.
2.1 Any time a documentary film comes out a year and half after the book on which it’s based, you can be sure that what’s common to both, and what’s central to the film, is information.
2.11 Information is boring.
2.2 The film claims that the Church of Scientology received tax-exempt status because of the cowardice of one man at the IRS.
2.21 Why is any religious group exempt?
2.22 If the Church uses the money to provide public services, as other churches do, then why should we be particularly horrified by, and attracted to, stories of its abuses?
2.221 The Catholic Church is a tax-exempt organization, and I need not mention the extent of corruption and exploitation in the clergy of that order.
2.23 The Church of Scientology controls ABLE, one of whose subsidiaries is Narconon, a drug rehabilitation program.
2.231 Narconon’s program isn’t informed by good science, but then neither is AA’s.
2.3 The Church is a cult.
2.31 But cultishness is in the eye of the beholder.
2.311 Apart from its size, the dominant (taxable) collection of institutions, corporations, and individuals known as “society” is also a cult.
2.32 The members of the Church suffer under its regime.
2.321 The citizens of the U.S. suffer under its regime.
2.33 The Church has stepped in to make money off vulnerable rich people, which may or may not be a public service.
2.34 The U.S. government does nothing if not serve the interests of the rich: creditors, bosses, entrepreneurs, etc.
2.35 Amazingly, after converting everything outside themselves into dollars, the rich still feel empty.
2.36 All the tax loopholes in the world can’t enable the rich to escape the pain they feel in those brief moments when the desolation of their souls comes upon them like a tidal wave.
2.37 The rich turn to the quackery of the Church, which milks them for cash the way the government refuses to do.
2.38 Amen.
3 And now I bring you the wise words of another:
“The stories of our souls in which our man-magister have variously schooled us, from backward human childhood to this precocious senescence of the present, are all adulterated with lessons in allowances and deprivations and reward and penalties and all the other equipment of rule. Every spiritual story told has been armed with an over-system making belief imperative—as if that were truth which best imposed itself. Even in our most generous stories, the cost of unbelief is destruction.” —Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling
4 I leave you with an accidental irony:
