Re: Question - CORRECTION!!

I probably was impolite when suddenly appearing on this newsgroup a few days ago without at least one word about myself. Well, here I am. I followed ars now since quite some time and found it funny, heart-breaking, hope giving and hope taking. The variety of people sharing their views with milne acting in the best of GO/OSA tradition and only a few scientologists actually trying to learn the basics of serious debate, all this is quite inspiring to one who once used to be a scieno. Of course there is a reason why I post through penet. This might change one day, we'll see. So I shall give my input from time to time, hoping to contribute some matters worthy of consideration.

HOW SCIENTOLOGY CAME ABOUT

Hubbard probably invented the word Scientology with rather little knowledge of the Nordenholz book. His explanations vary markedly in the early 50s. On Feb. 25, 1952 in his lecture "Review of progress of dianetics and dianetics business" he states:

"Now, one of the things that is going to happen in the next few months: you will probably see, increasingly, the word Scientology occurring. And that is in order to give doctors of medicine and psychiatrists and psychologists an out. It is pretty hard, after a man has made pronunciamento about which he knows nothing, to convince him he ought to say something else about it now that he knows something about it, because he will lose face with the people he has said this to. So if we just give him another word for a similar package and we say "Now it's Scientology, and Scientology embraces the Axioms," why, then two things will happen: he can say, "Well, Dianetics was no good and Hubbard was really crazy when he threw that one. But Scientology - now, that's different: scientifically done. It has a great many things to recommend it. Well organized, and it works! (Dianetics didn't!)"

What does this tell us? - It would seem quite obvious that Hubbard was on the run - mentally I mean. Here comes Dianetics in 1950, the man has a bestseller but the established medical community does not agree and warns that his theories are still only theory and anyone practicing it should be aware of that until the whole thing has been properly validated by scientific methods. This seems to have been difficult - in other words the dianetics theories to a large degree seem to not have been fool-proof when attempts were made to verify them. Not that everything must have been false. But Hubbard's claims of what dianetics could achieve were, IMHO, markedly exaggerated. Being who he was he of course would not step back and agree he might have been too fancyful. Instead he went ahead and claimed all kind of illnesses could be cured. The blind would see again and the lame again walk, as we read in History of Man. BTW did you note that while the scienos made a footnote to the Piltdown Man chapter in HOM, acknowledging the thing to be a fake, they failed to actually throw out the chapter. Would have been nice if they had said: Well Hubbard erred in this one. But of course this would contradict the claim that History of Man was all "scientifically proven and tested".

So scientology is a term coming off the brain's imagination compartment. And in the tradition of Asimov's Foundation trilogy, where Harry Seldon's psychohistory is transformed into a religion, or Heinlein's 1949 story "The day after tomorrow" which tells us about a military operation being disguised as a religious movement so that the invaders of the U.S. could be fooled long enough until that pseudo-religion has gained sufficient strength to throw the invaders out of the country, Hubbard went ahead to religionize his unscientific science. The man obviously read a lot of science fiction. - And who doesn't like Star Wars?

Must go now ... Marcabs have been sighted close to the Himalayas and all hands are needed to prepare their welcome dinner... - Hey, who stole my spaceship???

Andrew

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