Here come the Scientologists to prove that crazy is alive and well.
My parents' middle daughter (that's my sister, to say) married a Scientologist. She met Blondie at the flea market, where he was handing out fliers for the Church as part of his compulsory, unpaid service hours.
The Addict & The Alien...I sense a romantic comedy with a Courtney Love cameo in it coming on...
The lack of hoopla over their quickie marriage at City Hall got me curious--after all, I have a brother in law now, this is serious stuff! My parents didn't seem concerned that she had married yet another weirdo, and I figured it was because they sized this character up and reasoned that the marriage wouldn't last anyway...
My sister would either tire of him...
or he'd whip up some Kool Aid at the reception, and we wouldn't have to worry about either of them ever again anyhow. ::shrug::
Thus began my quest to find information on Scientology.
What I read was probably some of the most genuinely inventive fiction I have ever read.
This excerpt from http://www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenuleaf.htm captures the essence of Scientology wonderfully (My comments in red. Their synapsis is too on-point to bother re-writing it.)
Once upon a time, 75 million years ago to be more precise, there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack (alien for "TEANECK"?).
Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyze them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).
These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralyzed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them all around, H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.
The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).
This part had me laughing the hardest. The average person can't begin to fathom what the world view of people stupid enough to believe this might resemble. I imagine the subconscious dreaming mind of one of these people looking something like this:
Typical Scientologist nightmare--little Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah's couch, and some bored looking audience member wearing a large, Elizabethan looking collar made of tin foil pulls out something that looks like an iphone. The device emits a charge similar to a laser beam that shoots out over the stunned audience members and traps Tom Cruise in the device. He bangs on the opposite side of the glass of the screen in protest, and the techs show it on the large screen behind Oprah...everyone laughs.
After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes (and here is my lazy sister, the poor gal can't even fold fitted sheets. Xenu is folding up SOULS, for crying out loud! Get it together!) and taken to a few huge cinemas. (Movies must have been much cheaper back then and theaters must've been about the size of football stadiums. With the world being so incredibly overpopulated, where did they get the real estate for such things?)
There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".
When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.
As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xenu is still alive today.
So today everyone is full of these clusters of souls called "body thetans". And if we are to be a free soul then we have to remove all these "body thetans" and pay lots of money to do so. And the only reason people believe in God and Christ was because it was in the film their body thetans saw 75 million years ago.
That's worse than telling people you decided to be a Wiccan because your parents forced your misbehaving ass to go to Catholic school in 6th grade. "I celebrate the Earth Goddess"...but you hate bugs and your idea of being out in nature is a picnic in Central Park. Right...>..>..>..>
 | . |
| Part of the first page of the secret OT III document in L. Ron Hubbard's own handwriting |
Proof positive yet again of the economic power the IDEA of organized religion and "truth" has over people. Otherwise "reasonable" members of the public will pay to have the souls of dead aliens exorcised from them so that they can lead more fulfilling lives full of steady relationships, wealth, and actualized goals and dreams because they think that buying it makes it more tangible, and truly theirs.
Pathetic, sad, and potentially another indication that there is something terribly wrong with the current public school system OR the water supply. How else do you explain a lack of reasoning ability on such a grand scale!?
The root of it all, I suppose, is that everyone is looking for answers. And what I want to know is are those body thetans what's keeping my sister's husband from seeking gainful employment? I mean, last I checked, he is American, able bodied, skilled, and literate. Those darn thetans are doing a helluva job retarding the dreams and goals of humanity... what with my brother in law sitting on the couch at home and my father having to pay their rent and all!
Verdict? Crazy never goes out of style. And apparently, neither does lazy.
