The Secrets of Scientology -- Boston Phoenix

10 Dec 2001

Boston Phoenix
april 19, 1996

The secrets of Scientology
by Dan Kennedy

To Scientologists, Steven Fishman is an apostate who's spread vicious lies about the church to which he used to belong. To church critics, he's a hero who's exposed the truth about Scientology.

Evaluating Fishman's credibility is difficult, to say the least. He's an ex-convict who served a prison term for financial crimes that he claims he was ordered to commit. Church officials deny there was any such order, and they deny just about everything else Fishman has said about his old organization -- including his allegation that they ordered Fishman to murder his psychiatrist and commit suicide.

In 1991, the church sued Fishman for defamation in connection with comments he made to Time magazine for a cover story on Scientology. (The church also sued Time, and the case has yet to be resolved.) In response, Fishman introduced into the court records a number of secret, copyrighted church documents pertaining to top-level, "Operating Thetan" ( or OT) teachings. It was these documents that Arnaldo Lerma excerpted and uploaded to alt.religion.scientology in 1995.

Church critics say Fishman's "declaration" -- portions of which appear below -- is an excellent summary of those documents. The full text of the declaration can be found on "The Real Steve Fishman Home Page" ( http://www.xs4all.nl/~fishman).

Who is Steven Fishman?
Was he really the biological father of Jesus Christ?

The Church of Scientology said he was. His auditors, Nancy Witkowski, Catherine Fox, Leah Abady, Ann Glushakow, Margaret Supak, Richard Reese, John Eastment, Hans Stahli, and Ray Mithoff all checked Steven Fishman on the e- meter over a period of years and told him over and over again that he was the biological father of Jesus Christ, and that it was Steve Fishman's responsibility to de-Christianize the planet by exposing the lie and the myth of the immaculate conception, and thereafter bring all of Christianity into Scientology as the largest FSM (Field Staff member), or conversion movement, of planet earth.

You see, the Church of Scientology is an anti-Christian religion. On Saint Hill Special Briefing Course Tape #112, L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Dianetics and Scientology who died a fugitive from justice in 1986, said, "Christ died for his own sins." In a confidential student briefing in 1980, Hubbard described Christ as a "pedophile" and as "lover of young boys." [Note: church officials have denied that Hubbard ever called Jesus a pedophile.]

I was told by Fred Hare, the Organizational Executive Secretary (OES) of the Mission of Fort Lauderdale, in 1987, that Christ was a later life cycle of the evil Emperor "Xenu," who, according to Hubbard, freeze-dried clusters of thetans or souls and transported them from an alien planet, Helatrobus, to Earth, which Hubbard called "Teegeeack." The word "Teegeeack," according to Russell Means, the leader of the American Indian Movement, is the name of a tribe of American Indians who settled and lived in Oregon in the early nineteenth century.

The word "Teegeeack" means "tribe." Yet, Hubbard tried to pass off false definitions and concepts in his poorly written, illogically contrived "Advanced Technology," known also as the "Upper Level Materials," to unsuspecting Scientologists. In the "Advanced Technology," Hubbard talked about Xenu exploding clusters or freeze-dried packages of thetans inside volcanoes located in Las Palmas and Hawaii. Scientific evidence refutes completely that there was any explosion seventy-five million years ago in Las Palmas, because there was no volcanic activity present there at that point in time.

Scientology is a Satanic cult which has its origins in the work of Aleister Crowley, a well-known Satanist. Hubbard was a disciple and student of Crowley between 1947 and 1949.

The "Advanced Technology" refers to "Body Thetans," or "BTs." After the purported volcanic explosions, and all of the thetans were released into the atmosphere, some attached themselves to and occupied the bodies of "genetic entities," and these were the bodies of animals, plants, and fish. Hubbard's cosmology does not quarrel with evolution, but rather supports it. According to the "Advanced Technology," each living thing, or "genetic entity," is occupied and controlled by a thetan, and since there are far more thetans in the atmosphere than live organisms on earth, there are many unattached thetans, and some of these, in their attempt to occupy a body, attach themselves instead to a body part, such as a nose hair or a toe nail, and these are called "Body Thetans" by the Church.

The scam of the "Advanced Technology" involves the removal of the Body Thetans one by one, at great expense, because the exorcism of each body thetan requires certain precise actions on the e-meter, which in turn has to be checked by a course supervisor.

The process of "intending away body thetans" is identical to the Satanic ritual of demonic exorcism. There is no difference, other than the Church's use of an e-meter, a rudimentary galvanic skin-response device which is a crude imitation of a lie detector....

[E]ven if a Scientologist doing the OT levels is told by his Case Supervisor that he has to get rid of a trillion body thetans, and he has managed to beg, borrow, or steal the "donations" needed to audit out the body thetans and to have his auditing supervised (at that point the Scientologist is "self-auditing" on the e-meter or auditing himself by holding the two soup cans together in one hand and writing down the readings of the e-meter needle with the other), he has the logistical question to deal with: "What if the body thetans I have sent away ever come back?"

After all, what guarantee is there that after you "intend away" a body thetan (still assuming for the ease of understanding that the body thetans are like "germs"), it will not come back to re-attach itself to you?

What this causes is the most destructive kind of paranoia imaginable. A fear so devastating to the human mind that it has resulted in countless people going insane; or in Scientology's own words, "spinning in." Scientology even has named a condition for it: PTS Type III, where a person goes totally out of control in an induced paranoid psychosis.

It is for that reason why it is so vital and important for the upper levels be free and available on the Internet. Everyone, Scientologists and non-Scientologists alike, should have the right to "informed consent in spiritual matters," which is a religious freedom and basic religious right which is just as important as free speech on the Internet.