posted July 11, 2005 06:18 PM         

I ask here, because I'm pretty certain they also believe in past lives, and reincarnation. I used to work at a place where all of the key players in the company were Scientologists. They wouldn't go too far into it with me.

I'm more interested in the philosophies or teachings than the history. I'm aware that their history is pretty shady.

posted July 11, 2005 06:30 PM         

quote:

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What Scientologists Believe:

• Belief in Deity
Scientology considers the belief in a God or gods as something personal and therefore offers no specific dogma. The nature of the Supreme Being is revealed personally through each individual as s/he becomes more conscious and spiritually aware. There exists a life energy or force (Theta) beyond and within all.

• Incarnations
There are no particular human incarnations of God, as the universal life force (Theta) is inherent in all. All humans are immortal spiritual beings (thetans) capable of realizing a nearly godlike state through Scientology practices.

• Origin of Universe and Life
All is manifestation of the universal spirit, which is all that actually exists.

• After Death
Rebirths continue until one consciously confronts all pre-birth, current-life, and previous-life traumas and realizes one's true nature as a "thetan," immortal spirit--transcending matter, energy, space, and time. Achieving this state enables the spirit to escape the cycle of birth and death--to operate independently of the physical universe and become one with God.

• Why Evil?
Painful experiences and harmful acts in one's prebirth, current, and past lives become imprinted in the reactive mind and lead to irrational behavior. Departures from rational thought and untrue ideas ("aberrations") can result in wrongdoing.

• Salvation
Salvation is achieved through the practices and techniques of Scientology, the ultimate goal of which is to realize one's true nature as an immortal spirit, a thetan. The path to salvation, or enlightenment, includes achieving states of increasingly greater mental awareness--Pre-Clear, Clear, and ultimately Operating Thetan. An Operating Thetan is a spirit who can control matter, energy, space, time, thought, and life. Practitioners ("Auditors") are regarded as ministers and counselors who assist others to achieve self-enlightenment. Auditors help others to identify their prebirth, current, and past-life disturbances, which are obstacles to happiness and spiritual enlightenment.

• Undeserved Suffering
Suffering occurs as part of the spirit's entrapment here in the physical universe. Only when the individual is aware of his spiritual nature can he identify his barriers within the universe and overcome them, rising out of a lower state and into a higher state of happiness and freedom.

• Contemporary Issues
Based on the belief that you cannot free yourself spiritually without working to free others, Scientology has founded and supports many organizations for social betterment, particularly in the areas of drug abuse, crime, psychiatric abuse, government abuse of law, human rights, religious freedom, education, and morality. Scientology strongly favors the use of their methodology for spiritual/mental healing over the use of conventional treatment.

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Are you familiar with L.Ron Hubbard? I think he was the founder, I used to read his books (Mission Earth) way before I knew that!
I've read all 10 in the series, even though it was science fiction, he always was writing with some sort of philosophy in mind.

Here I found something about what he thinks:

quote:

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And Hubbard's basic idea is that human beings have two kinds of mind: what he calls the analytic mind, which he describes as a flawless computer, and the reactive mind, which is sort of like Freud’s model of the unconscious, even though Hubbard didn’t like Freud much.

The reactive mind is the repository for what Hubbard calls "engrams," which are memory traces, specifically moments of pain that get sort of burned in the reactive mind and then cause us problems in the future, both physical problems and psychological problems. And the idea is that through a process called "auditing," you can go back and pinpoint where those engrams are and relive them and thereby clear them from your reactive mind.

The ultimate goal is to clear all of those problematic engrams. And that’s the state called "clear," when you’re completely free from all those negative memory experiences.

Dianetics really focused on dealing with the engrams of this particular life--going all the way back to childhood, even in the prenatal state. But in Scientology, Hubbard introduced the idea of reincarnation, so that you have engrams not just from this lifetime but previous lifetimes. And so Scientologists describe experiences like being killed in the Civil War or even more incredible sorts of things like being on other planets and experiences in previous lifetimes.

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BTW, I'm not into scientology at all, for various and other reasons that I wont discuss.

posted July 11, 2005 07:45 PM         

ive also read his book dianetics which has some reasonable psychological theories as well as some more speculative stuff....

all of that stuff is good....but there are rumors that the leadership of scientology have some kind of theory based on some kind of alien possesion/abduction?? or some such extraordinary theory that they dont reveal publicly.......i dont know how it goes......

years ago i used to live just down the street from their headquarters in clearwater fla....
they're actually some of the nicest folks you'd ever meet just walking down the street.........(although it was kinda spooky how they all wore the same clothes...plain dark pants and shoes, white shirt,black tie i think...like they stepped out of a fifties black and white tv show.... )

posted July 12, 2005 02:23 PM         

I have no clue if excorcism is how they propose to liberate onesself from an essence of an alien... But Im fammiliar with a few beliefs and likelyhoods that a certain breed of aliens blood could certainly be part of the main map to our own DNA . To liberate our selves from that sounds like trying to break donw our genetic coding towards the more primative apes .

posted July 12, 2005 05:20 PM         

Anyhow, on a tangent. Mission Earth did get weird hey? I still remember a lot like when the main dude roundhouse kicked someone in Central Park while wearing golf shoes? Not pretty. Or the bad dude with the two girls that tied him up? And the floor on the Empire State building and the taxi driving around like a mad man. Very fun to read though. My mum hated me reading them.

As to the philisophies, I think he wrote hundreds of books and travelled extensively and hence formed his religion to be a conglomeration of everything. We have a scientology building in our small city which give free IQ and Aptitude tests. Well, I was always interested in this so I went along by myself and scored 122. They then said people may gain intelligence if they buy their books and attend courses. I blow it off. Then went back later with a girlfriend. I cheated and answered the markings on the test and scored 144 while my gf scored 97. She was p'd. They jumped on her like nothing else and said do this, do that, while the girl that gave me my score said, wow, that's cool, you don't need us! That's pathetic. Obviously they are trying to target people with low IQs. Not that IQs mean anything, they're just fun if you like exams and maths and english. I never liked english though. It was interesting to see L Rons achievements. Wonder if they were real...

posted July 13, 2005 01:54 AM         

I can't believe I read it all, it was so raw and filthy!

posted July 13, 2005 09:54 AM         

From http://clambake.org/roland-intro.html

quote:

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The Harm it Does to a Person

The results of applying their crackpot psychotherapy (called "auditing") is to weaken the mind. The mind goes from a rational state to an irrational one as the delusional contents of the subconscious mind are brought to the surface and are assumed to be valid. It also makes a person more susceptible to suggestion since it submerges the critical thinking faculties of the mind into a partial subconscious state. It results in a permanent light hypnotic trance and so from thenceforth that person can be more easily controlled. The person will, to a much greater extent, believe and do whatever they are told. And of course this is used to the full in persuading them to hand over further money and dedicating themselves further to the cult.

The results of applying their oversimplified and inapplicable rules in life is to lose the ability to think rationally and logically. A person loses the ability to think for themselves and so they lose the ability to challenge incorrect ideas. This makes them easier to control. It also isolates and alienates the person from society so that they withdraw from normal society and into their "Scientology" society. This further increases their susceptibility to the influence of their group. They end up being afraid of society, believing all society to be controlled by a group of drug companies, psychiatrists and financiers all of whom report to more remote masters. In other words they are in a state of mass paranoia. They therefore avoid reading newspapers and the like since they fear it will disturb their safe Scientology world. It is a downward spiral into madness.

The science fiction content of Scientology is revealed to them after they have reached the state they call "Clear", meaning freed from the aberrations of the mind. However, perhaps "brainwashed" would be a more applicable word to describe the mental state of someone who has survived the near entire delusional contents of their subconscious mind brought to the surface and presented to them as "truth". On the "advanced" levels (called OT levels) above the state of "Clear" they encounter the story of Xenu. Xenu was supposed to have gathered up all the overpopulation in this sector of the galaxy, brought them to Earth and then exterminated them using hydrogen bombs. The souls of these murdered people are then supposed to infest the body of everyone. They are called "body thetans". On the advanced levels of Scientology a person "audits out" these body thetans telepathically by getting them to re-experience their being exterminated by hydrogen bombs. So people on these levels assume all their bad thoughts and faulty memories are due to these body thetans infesting every part of their body and influencing them mentally. Many Scientologists go raving mad at this point if they have not done so already.

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and here: http://clambake.org/archive/OTIII-scholar/

quote:

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This page is dedicated to the analysis and criticism of what Scientologists must consider to be the most significant document in the history of the human race: L. Ron Hubbard's "OT III". (See legal notes below.) The first page of this historic work, jotted down in Hubbard's own hand, is presented herewith: (see link for that)

Transcript:

Data (1) (1)
The head of the Galactic
Confederation (76 planets around
larger stars visible from here)
(founded 95,000,000 yrs ago, very space opera)
solved overpopulation (250 billion
or so per planet) -- 178 billion
average) by mass implanting.
He caused people to be brought to
Teegeeack (Earth) and put an H Bomb
on the principal volcanoes (Incident 2)
and then the Pacific area ones
were taken in boxes to Hawaii
and the Atlantic Area ones to
Las Palmas and there "packaged."
His name was Xenu. He used
renegades. Various misleading
data by means of circuits etc.
were placed in the implants.
When through with his crime Loyal Officers
(to the people) captured him
after 6 years of battle
and put him in an electronic
mountain trap where he still
is. "They" are gone. The place (Confed.)
has since been a desert.

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posted July 13, 2005 03:01 PM         

The Scientologist I knew didn't act mad/crazy. They were actually pretty together people individually. That's not to say that there is no truth to these articles.

----------------
Maklhouf,

posted July 18, 2005 06:01 PM         

If Truth is universal, why do you have to pay for it? Also, anyone who speaks against the church is an open policy for the leaders to "trash" the dissenter. I recall long ago one of the leaders on TV stating that if someone attacks the church, their belief is to attack back. They destroyed this person financially, personally, professionally. It seems like forgiveness is on the back burner in these incidents.
Religions with jargon that renames a universal principal higher consciousness to Thetan, etc. seems odd to me, It's as if spirituality is being marketed. I'm not saying that the principals that Scientology teaches are incorrect, it seems packaged. I'll have to consider looking into Scientology further, but something seems "off."