I saw mentions of Scientology from time to time in different contexts but never actually talked to anyone practicing it until recently.
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to a movie on YouTube about how evil are some pharmaceutical companies, especially ones that develop and sell psychiatric drugs. I did not watch the movie and working with several pharmaceutical companies I could say a few things about this industry but his views were a little too black and white for my taste. My immediate question was if this is Scientology related as the one thing I knew about Scientology is that they have a huge problem with psychiatric drugs. When he said yes I felt excited to know that he is involved with Scientology. I was not excited because I thought I could become an avid follower but because I felt it can be an interesting topic to explore.
I started my quest not with official Scientology materials as I felt I got a good overview from him but with what I could find that looked more like a documentary. Every movie I saw had some kind of motivation behind it and trying to collect crumbs of facts was difficult.
What I found amusing was the hypocrisy of some people. From an observation of human history it is obvious that people have a need to group. Like a giant organism where all cells start equal but then become skin cells or heart cells people bond together and then each finds its natural position.
This is so common that we see it all over. We see it in religions, organizations, corporations, sports fans, media celebrity worship etc. Each of these hierarchical clusters of people is very much like a religion.
The hypocrisy I found was that people can belong to several such groups and label them as good or as evil based entirely on subjective motives.
I know very little about Scientology and I already know that I don’t agree with some of what they say. This is fine. I don’t agree with most of what I hear regardless of who else believes in it.
I am not referring here to the actual Scientology beliefs because of two reasons. The first is that I know almost nothing about them and the second is that like any belief system it is about belief. Hypocrisy is when someone believes in one religion but ridicules another one that in many aspect is more similar to his than different.
It seems that Scientologiests freak out when they are called a cult. I can understand this. Anyone that strongly believes in something feels strongly against outside people accusing him of belonging to something that sounds negative and potentially criminal. Starting a new religion today is very hard and very expensive. It is very easy for someone from the outside to come and ruin everything you work for and believe in by spreading negative claims to fuel his own agenda.
I realize that many people need a religion or another form of a strong social bond. Religions evolve with time much like an organism does. When a religion is young it needs to grow exponentially with limited resources and get to a point that it can sustain itself and feed its growth. For doing this mission impossible you need special people. You need people that are very capable and that can lead and create on a very tight budget and I can appreciate this from my experience with technology startups. You need stars. As the religion evolves and stabilizes it uses much of its energy to conserve and maintain its current assets and growth, although important becomes a task of specialized groups that act as young sub-religions that compete in evolution against other sub-groups. The advantage of evolution is optimization by introducing randomness into a process and induce greater creativity, the danger is that some of the optimizations are not in a direction that is good for the organization in the long run and managing them is not easy without a well thought out process in place and even then.
The word cult refers to the young religion as it molds but it also includes a judgment. If you put a list of behaviors together and call it an evil cult how would you call your army unit? the corporation you work for? your church? your sports team, your extended family or your favorite American idol or even the boy scouts…? If you want to use the word cult than at-least have the decency to admit that we are all involved in several cults at the same time fighting for our attention, devotion and resources for exchange for their acceptance and social and other advantages.
To use a non-judging term I will call Scientology a young religion. Young because in its evolution it seems to be still fighting for its status and recognition. Anyone that thinks that Scientology efforts to grow as a religion are overly aggressive should consult his nearest bible or other religious scripture and see how the other religions behaved when they were young.
People point to Scientology alien related beliefs with judgment and all I say is look at your bible, read it and be amazed at what so many people on this planet believe in. Many people believe that the world is about 5,000 years old when this sounds to me much less plausible than any alien related claim anyone could ever come up with.
So is Scientology good or evil? Scientology is an evolving young belief system. I don’t know if it will survive to make a big impact or not in a historical perspective but I do know one thing. Scientology will evolve to represent the inner wants on its members. As people, whenever we bond together and set strict rules and start marching in synch we end up doing horrible things to other people.
I am not afraid of Scientology. I am afraid of people, people that use the name of a group they belong to, to escape from responsibility for things they know are bad. People that use the power of belief to do bad things.
I only ask new scientologists as they join Scientology to be the next Scientology leaders and the current Scientology leadership to remember that they hold great power in their hands and although it is probably close to impossible to shape the evolution of something like a religion to try to make sure they do more good than harm. To keep history in mind and let’s all pray that 1,000 years from now no Scientology believer will blow himself up in a bus full of children, and not deprive people of their basic rights. We had enough of that with our current religions. I understand that an astronomical amount of money is needed for your religion to survive and take its place in history and that you all believe that the good that it will bring to mankind is worth the sacrifice but please use moderation and don’t take from people more than they can give.
Scientology should do its best as any legitimate group of people united by a joint idea or a set of beliefs to reach all like minded people and represent them in a way that will improve their life but they should also invest the needed resources to set a strong moral foundation of rules and guidelines that deal with the danger of over enthusiastic people that go too far and damage the organization, the membership body and the greater community around it.
I know that I am asking for a lot. Especially when much larger and older religions failed miserably at that and keeping in mind that in the internet age evolution is fast forwarded to the speed of light. Maybe its a call for a group of people to draft a universal set of rules that can serve as a best practice guideline for any religion or organization. This non-religious human behavior ontology can be used as template and provide an easier way to deal with the problematic sides of human nature and help these organizations in their early evolution.
