Scientology is exemplary as the type of mumbo-jumbo "spiritual"

ideology that promises its adherents the world, but delivers absolutely nothing, but mystification and the emptiest promises of salvation. It is a testimony to the glibness, cynicism, megalomania and boundless opportunism of L Ron Hubbard and the tragic gullibility of those needing some sort of relief from the vicissitudes of life, which we all must deal with in our precarious assortment of ways. Unhappily, those most hopefully attracted to its idle promises of relief from anxiety and its more fantastic offerings of immortality and unlimited power are the very ones most in dire need of counseling and facing up to certain limitations and facts of life.

L. Ron Hubbard was a narcissistic and orally obsessed charlatan and death worshipper, unable to exercise discipline over his own life -- so he opted for the next option, to manipulate and extract relentlessly from whatever minions he could coax into playing along with his extravagant fantasies. Hubbard’s own penchant for objectification and dehumanization is almost unprecedented in any belief system hiding behind the moniker of religion. This is clearly evident through his own words -- he repeatedly employs the term "raw meat" as a reference to potential initiates into the sinister scam of Scientology. More generally, Hubbard’s fondness includes vulgarizing and depleting human language by transforming living and transitive verbs into reified "things" ("is-ness," "havingness" as glaring examples). In effect, the founder of Scientology attempts the same transformation of language that he attempts upon his human victims, namely, to deaden, cheapen and subsume them. Even more revealingly he draws liberally from his outmoded science fiction lexicon by insisting that mankind lives "on a planet."

This term, "planet," is a favorite of astronomers and pedantic fiction writers. But L Ron Hubbard is mistaken -- we, as human beings, do not live "on a planet." Rather, we live in a world.

This world is essentially social and one that the founder of Scientology clearly turned his back upon very early in life.

This renunciation is also frighteningly evident in the baleful and defensive glare of its most ardent practitioners that one notices while strolling through the streets of downtown Clearwater. Here march the "elite" of Scientology, relentlessly advancing into the darkest of spiritual cul de sacs. These are the flatfooted, humorless, robotic, lost souls having lost any access to irony or metaphor, the glazed-eyed consumers of L Ron Hubbards impoverished semantic universe, torturous and self-nullifying religious technology and paranoid delusions of grandeur.

The Scientology cult reminds one of a vampire bat parasitically sucking whatever resources a person has in his or her capacity that the organization finds useful, particularly money and labor, but yields nothing in reciprocal return. I reiterate: it promises everything, it gives nothing. It’s sham public relations propaganda addressing social issues or "community outreach" such as education, drug rehabilitation, "charity,"

etc. is a flimsy canard with negligible substance. It serves only to cloak its motives and influence the most corruptible or naive politicians. Its primary aim remains to lure unsuspecting and troubled souls into the nightmare of L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction soap opera in order to exploit them and consequently grow in power and further enlarge the scope of its nefarious social influence.

Within the confines of Scientology one rapidly discovers an alarming absence of warmth or reciprocation. There is, of course, a tenuous institutionalized sense of cooperation and solidarity amongst those situated in the lower rungs of the organizational apparatus. But once this veneer is gently pierced one quickly encounters ruthless coercion, blackmail, extortion and rampant human abuse. Anyone offering positive testimonial to the virtues of its dubious counseling methods ("auditing") and administrative processes are forced to do so via peer pressure and omnipresent administrative ("ethics") threats. The spiritual advances testified to by members are flagrantly hollow to the eyes of almost any casual outsider.

They have credence only within the limited confines of the social milieu of the organization itself. Peering through the windows of any Scientology establishment one might discern the mystifications of an on-going and precarious internal confidence game.

Few within the parameters of the organization's influence have the emotional leverage to defy the cult's mandates for if they had had resonant familial, community or cultural support in the first place, they probably could not have been seduced by this insidious organization.. Nor do they typically have any idea where to turn for help once they begin to question the emotional and psychological abuse that inevitably is dealt to them within the confines of the Scientology fold. The paradox is that those attracted and drawn into the Scientology fold enter a nightmare far more lethal than any they might have encountered outside the organization. The real world with its resolute demands, what one might call "reality," is what they fear the most and are least equipped to deal with -- recapitulating why they were susceptible to the empty promises of Scientology in the first place.

Scientology is a sham, a cancerous facade and to its roots inherently evil. It appeals to the most shallow and worst aspirations of all of us. Then through ruthless extortion and abuse it leaves in its wake tragedy and pain in the form of spiritual and financial destitution. It survives in its current through-the-looking-glass guise aided and abetted by a culture increasingly prone to semantic confusion in a postmodernist world where little seems real anymore. Or, to paraphrase Dostoyevsky, "When God is dead, everything is permitted."

Scientology all too willingly has entered into this vacuum of meaning, eager to exploit personal and social anguish, and our frightening inability to distinguish between the probable, the possible and the utterly fantastical.

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