I knew, in a casual, working colleague kind of way, a recent $cientology suicide. The rumor is that he reached OT7 and, what a surprise, didn't find happiness and the cure to his personal demons and disappointments and everything else. A crisis of faith ensued and ended, not uncommonly, in death.

It seems to me that this is far more of a risk in this kind of cult than in mainstream religion. Christianity promises you salvation but (most of the time) makes no bones about the fact that it's a hard narrow path.

(That seems to be changing, given the popularity of such squishy, easy, success-oriented forms of Christianity as represented by The Book of Jabez and those 10,000-members churches with their parking lots full of SUVs.

Interesting to see where that will go when praying for affluence leads to affluence but not contentment.)

$cientology, by comparison, promises a scientific process, an assembly line to happiness. So when it fails-- and obviously it does most of the time, since it's drawing you away from meaningful help and adding the despair of knowing that you wasted thousands of dollars on sci-fi flummery-- you must think that it was your fault, you didn't do the process right, you didn't put tab 7a in slot 7b. That can only make it that much worse when the disillusionment comes-- which it must by OT7 if not before.

Michael Gebert, Writer | www.michaelgebert.com "Look where you will, in every high place there sits an Ass, settled beyond the reach of all the greatest intellects in this world to pull him down. Over our whole social system, complacent Imbecility rules supreme -- snuffs out the searching light of Intelligence with total impunity -- and hoots, owl-like, in answer to every form of protest, See how well we all do in the dark! One of these days that audacious assertion will be practically contradicted, and the whole rotten system of modern society will come down with a crash."

--Wilkie Collins, on the Bush energy policy, in No Name (pub. 1862)

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