Crocoshark, have you read 'Going Clear"?
Yes. I even wrote a review documenting my thoughts at the time. Because I felt my parents were the ones most likely to see it and because this was a year ago I included my most pro-Scientology thoughts at the time.
Review of Going Clear
I read (over half of) my first Scientology critical book in the past week. The problem with that is that if I said I wanted to leave the church of Scientology or said I didn’t believe in it anymore after this date, my parents could blame it on that book. “You can’t read that stuff and NOT have it change your beliefs.” So for clarity’s sake, I’m writing this to comment on what impact the book had on my beliefs. But first, background.
A couple weeks ago I was reflecting on the drastically different views from in and out of Scientology. It’s as if you were born in a country that taught you nothing of its history, and you grew up only with a glowing view of the government, leaders and founder, and when you get out? People talk only of the long list of scandals and abuses of your country you have never heard of, of your founder or leaders being pathological liars, nothing but negativity, and while they seem to know nothing about the government education system and services, (which you think is good or at least worth bringing up), they seem to know more about YOUR country’s history than YOU do. It’s as if Americans never learned about slavery, racial segregation, carpet bombing and other military slaughter, abuses in the prison or justice system, extraordinary rendition, and so on. You were raised knowing nothing of anything wrong with your country and outsiders seem to be experts on all your country’s abuses you’d never heard of.
What country does that sound like?
North Korea.
A police state.
No country should be like that.
And no religion should be like that either.
The book Going Clear only reinforced my observations with examples of the church’s PR machine.
Any wrongdoing it is accused of; Mere denial. A simple “Nuh uh!”. Rarely (but not never) any explanation of how these rumors would come about, what these rumors are based on. Never an admission of wrongdoing. What’s worse was the “unperson” style lying about people’s whereabouts. “Word in Scientology was that he had died of cancer.” Says Paul Haggis, after learning someone he knew had actually been out of Scientology for years. “Quentin Hubbard was taken to become a pilot! Oh . . . he was found dead in a car with a hose going from the car’s tail pipe to the window? Encephalitis.” There were other examples; it seemed like the church would send out a PR story whenever it was convenient.
Quentin Hubbard brings me to my next point. I’d learned Hubbard actually had a family when I was 11 and I was genuinely surprised. Before than and for the most part since then I’d heard absolutely nothing about them. Hubbard had been married three times, and with Mary Sue Hubbard had FOUR kids, but it’s almost like they’ve been written out of Scientology history. Why? Quentin Hubbard was found dead; Arthur and Suzette Hubbard both blew, the latter after Hubbard tried to stop every romantic relationship she got into, Mary Sue Hubbard took all the blame for Operation Snow White and went to prison, and the wife and son he had when he came up with Dianetics thought he was a quack and fraud. Not much “making it go right” for the very man who invented the tech; if there was one person able to use the tech to ensure success in family (and physical health and superior handling when dealing with governments) it was Hubbard. If there was one group of people set to be utterly convinced by Hubbard that Scientology works, it was his wives and kids. But no.
Though a lot of the sources in the back were interviews, so there COULD have been a lot of unreliable people reporting slanderous things about Hubbard. (If that is true than, given the number of interviews, that sort of made Hubbard a magnet for people with suppressive tendencies or missed with-holds which he couldn’t spot or handle; and as for governments, I do not buy that “the man” or “psychiatrists” conspired to bring him down because they “knew” Scientology worked. Because it’d be too easy for any psychiatrist to dismiss it for its claims and lack of scientific verification, I don’t think any psychiatrist would resort to such conspiracy.)
In Scientology’s defense you could argue that Hubbard or not, that’s still a small sample size; one man and one family. But still, it’s interesting to note that looking at families dodges the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, named for a hypothetical sharp shooter that fires a bunch of shots and circles targets around the resulting bullet holes. When you focus on Scientologist success stories you’re taking a collection of experiences first (having gains enough to become a Scientologist) and then counting the people that had them, but with a family, you take a set collection of people of differing personalities and seeing who has experiences and how much. And Hubbard’s family combines toward the sample size of my own family and extended family in trying to count Scientology’s hit rate. So far, it’s hit and miss, to be polite.
Another thing I thought about was responsibility. The church says you are total responsibility and cause to the point that LRH says nothing bad happens to you unless you agreed to it in some way, that if someone is smearing others and talking smack they committed crimes against that person. So . . . What are your crimes Scientology? By it’s own logic it committed some TON of overts against psychiatrists, ex-Scientologists and people it smears as suppressive.
Speaking of smears, how immature is that? It gave one example, though from the 80s, where they dealt with a critic by sending letters to the guy’s office saying he was a homosexual. Actual blackmail would've been more honorable, but in their justification that’s the way you discredit someone. It only shows how THEY are immature enough to dismiss someone because they have embarrassing secrets and expect others to be the same way. What sort of mentality is that? That’s a kindergarten mind set. “Jimmy says I punched him in the face, but before you believe him, you should know Jimmy wets the bed and plays with dolls.”
But, on the Scientology favorable side, the book repeatedly points out that it’s unlikely LRH was a con artist; why would a fraud put so much effort into it? It doesn’t explain that or how many people follow and get gains from it. At one point it describes how even when LRH got rich he’d spend weeks alone writing tech. The book basically follows the stories of several Scientologists, so you read about success stories and gains as well as anecdotes of OT phenomena alongside all the failure and abuse. It may not be spotlighted, but it’s there, It also includes a part with a scholar describing how many of the “terrible” things in Scientology are no worse or not even as bad as what’s found in Christian or Jewish religion. The book also gives at least a nod to giving two sides of an issue, including the church’s position on different issues as a footnote on the bottom of the page that discusses it. I enjoyed the interview with Tommy Davis in the last chapter where you actually got to read a little debate between the writer and Davis, as opposed to the church’s usual “Nuh uh, you’re a criminal.”. All the bad RPF and tales of separation stories seem to be from the 70s and 80s, and when you read something you’re skeptical of you can go to the references in the back and see where it came from; usually an interview with someone who’s name you learned reading the book, sometimes a court document, sometimes Bare-Faced Messiah or even a blog. I enjoyed reading interviews describing the origins of the Purification course and Introspection run down, to my knowledge those stories are not in Scientology courses.
This book is critical of Scientology, but at the same time acknowledges nuance and doesn’t paint in black and white. I’d recommend it to Scientologists for this reason.
As for the impact this had on my beliefs; I can better see why people call the church of Scientology a cult. I don’t think LRH was phenomenally OT (beyond existing OT levels today, which don’t seem to grant people much more than the occasional “miracle” or parlor trick). Even if you believe in all the OT stuff is ingenious discovery I don’t see reason to believe he obtained higher levels of the bridge than today’s OTs, even if he “discovered” them. Hell, for all I know, the OT levels just induce false mental experiences and suggestibility. Not saying they do or don’t, but it’s an idea I’ve already presented and commented on earlier in this document (on exteriorization). Or there could be no more reason to resort to the spirit to explain OT powers than there is to explain amazing stories about prayers or psychics; If you have a lot of people willing good things to happen for long enough you’ll inevitably get unlikely things happening shortly after someone willed it to, compounded by personal interpretation of events and misremembering “hits” as closer hits than they actually were. It’s a possibility.
Really? With you being a former Scientologist, I'm surprised. It was a pretty well-known film a couple of years ago, nominated for a few Oscars and many other awards. But maybe you aren't a film fan.
True, I'm not. I may have heard of it but that stuff does not interest me. For the most part, my moving away from Scientology has happened no thanks to critics. I've deconverted *despite* the off-putting nature of Scientology criticism, rather than because of it.
I think you can't really separate L. Ron Hubbard from Scientology itself, despite it sounding like an ad-hominem attack in a way.
Sounds like? In a way?
In one sense you're right in that Scientology is Hubbard's beliefs and hang-ups turned into a set of doctrines, put on a pedestal based on who wrote it.
In another sense . . . Yes. Yes you can separate the two. It doesn't matter how crazy the inventor is if you think you've seen and experienced the work-ability of the invention.
My dad read Going Clear to, and he talked about how hard to figure out it was for him; on the one hand you have stories of Hubbard holed up in an apartment evading police and on the other hand he was in his eyes genius enough to uncover the techniques to clear people of their reactive mind, uncover memories of the past lives and remove the traumatic memories and upsets from other life times, grant OT abilities and make people go exterior to their bodies, create assists and drills that do various things, courses that improve communication, etc. etc. etc. I wouldn't be able to list all the stuff a practicing Scientologist could list that makes them feel certain of Scientology. But statements like this;
He may have stumbled on to a few common-sense ideas and suggestions,
Are VASTLY minimizing what makes Scientologists so convinced of Scientology. We're dealing with the experiences and claims of a religion, alternative medicine, pseudoscience, paranormal phenomena, etc. all rolled up and combined into one with all the spiritual experiences, placebo effect, paranormal experiences, theraputic value, feelings of revelation and guidance or that the text is really profound, time and financial investment, rationalizations, etc. that go into any one of those subjects. It's just not as simple as thinking Scientologists believe Hubbard on pure faith and if you only discredit him everything evaporates. It's like other religions; you can point out that the bible was created by a mess of politics but that doesn't change the fact that Christians believe there's something to their religion for other reasons.
There's also things within the experience of being a Scientologist to counter all these things. Not every Scientologist experiences the bad or interprets it the same way.
Is your family still involved with the church crockoshark?
Eeyup. At least my parents are, my brothers are not so into it.
