From: jondr@sco.COM (Dances With Voles)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Re: What IS scientology??!?!?
Keywords: ignorant, confused, curious, nosey
Message-ID: <19333@scorn.sco.COM>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 91 18:31:06 GMT
References: <1991Aug23.142441.260@csug.rdg.ac.uk>
Sender: news@sco.COM
Reply-To: jondr@fscott.UUCP (Dances With Voles)
Organization: Mangled Bloody Carcass Of Sound Productions
Lines: 51

No one yet knows why ssurawls@rosemary.cs.reading.ac.uk (Ian Rawlings) said:
>Not being a relegious person at all, I am just being
>curious. If anyone out there would like to put my mind at rest and also
>supply an introductory letter to others (I found nothing about what it is in
>the letters I read) then I am sure that would be of benefit to us all.

Basically, Scientology purports to be a mental-health organization, but they
go under many guises - personal therapy, anti-drug abuse, business
management...  They are all things to all people, depending on who they want
to milk.  Have you got asthma?  We can cure it.  Nearsighted?  You can see
without glasses, just come on in.

On the streets of the US, you will often find people coming up and asking if
you want to take a free personality test.  These tests will invariably
reveal that there is some area of your personality that could benefit by
dianetic therapy.  Therapy, called auditing, usually involves confronting
incidents in your life while watching the swings on the needle on the
e-meter.  The idea is that there are incidents in your past that are
imprinted in your "reactive mind" that cause you to behave illogically and
irrationally at times when these incidents ("engrams") are triggered.  Say
you get run over by a car and a dog is barking.  Whenever you hear a dog
barking, your reactive mind associates it with the sensations you felt while
lying under the car.  Your body reacts with fear responses.  You are now
impaired in some way.  These are ideas borrowed from abreactive therapy,
incidentally.  So, in order to become a better person, you need to erase all
these engrams.  Then you are known as "clear."  The claims put forth in
Dianetics as to the powers a "clear" possesses are truly amazing, by the
way, and none of them have ever been demonstrated.

So, there are LOTS of courses involved in Scientology.  Once you've been
"cleared" you can do the Operating Thetan (OT) levels and have total control
of your life and the things around you.  I read a letter in a Scientology
magazine from a guy who says he reached out with his mind and prevented a
car crash by swerving one of the vehicles involved!

Of course, none of this wonderful knowledge is cheap.  The e-meter is $4000,
to start, and it can be built from Radio Shack parts for probably $10.  Nice
markup.  The OT courses start at $8000 and progress from there.  Devoted
scientologists are convinced that it's worth the money, though.

That's just to start.  I'm sure the scientologists will take issue with all
the points in this article while not offering any counter-evidence.

If you're interested, try reading Hubbard's _Dianetics_ and Jon Atack's _A
Piece Of Blue Sky_.  Just so you can see both sides of the issue, of course.

-- 
Jon Drukman (love pantry)                       uunet!sco!jondr   jondr@sco.com
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