(Part 2) Top products from r/scientology

We're talking about two different things, here -- or at least two aspects of it. One is the acceptability of an employer pushing its belief system on its employees (particularly when those belief systems are "faith based"); the other is whether/when that applies to the CofS or the members who are themselves employers.

Let's start with the first piece, which is the "rights" of an employee. I'm thinking of the many times I have worked for a large company that got into a Management Thing Of The Month Club, whether it was "Quality Circles" or Agile development or "business process re-engineering." If the boss says you're going to take the course, and that this is the way we do things around here... that's how it works. If you disagree with its premise or practice, you could bitch about it, or be insubordinate, but eventually (a) you do it anyway (b) you go to work somewhere where you don't have to endure such silliness (c) you give it a try and decide it's useful after all or (d) you hold your breath until the Management moves on to another fad. (If indeed it actually is; I'm a serious proponent of Agile, for instance.)

Note that some of these management objectives do have faith at their core, at least in practices such as "we're closed on Sunday so you can pray" or choosing franchisees who participate in group prayers. While I've been lucky enough to avoid such companies (they also tend to have crappy pay), I have known people to work in "Christian companies," and even if such businesses cannot legally discriminate in hiring... well, you're probably not going to last long unless you put up with the "Thanks to Jesus" commentary. If you took a job at such a firm and their employment contract says, "We apply biblical management principles," then you know it ahead of time, and you have the freedom to not accept the job.

> You could claim that parts of Leviticus are not part of the religious teachings of Christianity, being that it is a "book of law" and not a book regarding the sacrifice of Jesus, but its part of the "holy scripture" and thus it is inseparable from the religious teachings of Christianity.

A better analogy is the Talmud. The bible is "the word of god," but the Talmud is interpretations by men. It's possible to consider yourself Jewish without following the Talmud -- and that's pretty much what Reform Jews do. (It was the Talmud, for instance, that interpreted, "Do not eat the calf in its mothers milk" as the complex laws of Kashrut.)
Now, is WISE part of Scientology? I don't think so. It's based on the Green Volumes, sure. But it isn't the Green Volumes, any more than Og Mandino's The Greatest Salesman in the World isn't part of the bible... though he sure refers to it a lot. (I haven't read the book in 30 or 40 years, and I recall it as being good sales advice... and also very Christian.) "Inspired by," sure. "Aligned with." Absolutely. Does that make the advice less valuable, if it's true...? And if it's not, I don't care where it came from.

If someone accepts a job that uses WISE management techniques, and is open about doing so -- which seems to be the case here -- then I can't see how they are being forced to adopt a religion.

A book I often recommend to Christians (or those with a strong Christian background) you may find worth checking out is A Course in Miracles its kind of like if the Scientology upper OT levels were written in a Christian context.

The backstory is kind of sketchy I think, but if you can ignore that and just take the text for what it is then its well worth the read. It can be rather dense and can take a long time to get through, especially if you do all the exercises, but it's worth the time and effort in my opinion. I'd generally skip the organizations and such that promote it and go with just the text itself and your own interpretation of it.

Another book worth checking out is Zen Flesh, Zen Bones which was almost like a Bible for me for many years.

It's also worth reading The Principia Discordia for a bit more humorous take on religion - but a religion that many people actually take seriously. Hard-core Discordians throw the best parties, btw.

Religion doesn't have to be the solemn or overly serious thing that its often made out to be. The idea of 'truth' is often thrown around as being objective but there are very few objective truths in my honest opinion and experience. Find out what's true for you and if nothing is true for you then, well, make up something new that is.

Also, power and attention. Those seem to me to be the reasons Hubbard did most of what he did. He wanted to lecture others, be revered, hold power over adoring sycophants (mostly women and rich people), be seen as an expert, hobnob with world leaders and intellectuals, that sort of thing. He wanted to seem like a rebel, anti-establishment, a challenger to the prevailing power structure (in psychology, the government, society).

I do think that Hubbard had as a sub-goal making money. Or at least stealing it. His many run-ins with the law show that he was a fairly regular theif and embezzler - running up bills and not paying them was his norm, as was taking people's money and just doing his own thing and going away. Not just Parsons, the department and grocery stores, and the issues with Don Purcell where he lost the rights to Dianetics stuff, but those in particular stick out as a way to show how much he really thought he could just take money wherever he wanted.

And some of the most revealing parts of A Queer and Pleasant Danger were the parts where Kate remembered being ordered to go to Switzerland and open/manage bank accounts under an assumed name, or deliver suitcases of cash to banks in other countries. It's been a while since I read it, but that was the part that stuck out to me the most - and wondering what ever came of all the money she hid for Hubbard.

You need to sit your mother down and read.

http://exscientologykids.com/storiesindex.html

http://www.forum.exscn.net/forumdisplay.php?f=2

Also, start calling her Lisa McPherson Jr.

http://www.lisamcpherson.org/

Free comprehensive book on PDF form (A Piece of Blue Sky):

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/atack/

Books:

http://www.amazon.com/Scientology-Abuse-Top-Amy-Scobee/dp/0692008012/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293718546&sr=1-3

http://www.amazon.com/Blown-Good-Behind-Curtain-Scientology/dp/0982502222/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293718546&sr=1-4

http://www.amazon.com/My-Billion-Year-Contract-Scientologist/dp/0578039222/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293718546&sr=1-5

Read Inside Scientology and Jenna Miscavige's (The niece of the current leader David Miscavige) Beyond Belief. I was curious and recently read these and they blew my mind. How this is still happening in the U.S. is insane. I would recommend Inside Scientology first to get a background on all of their beliefs and terminology. They have their own jargon that is incomprehensible to anyone not in the group. Jenna's story tells about her life growing up inside the Sea Org and how she had to escape. Before reading this I had no idea that they were holding people captive and using child labor. It is a very interesting subject to learn about, especially since no one ever talks about it.

Ask the publishers of previous such novels:

• The Scientology Murders: A Dead Detective Novel by William Heffernan, Akashic Books, April 4, 2017
  
  
• Blown by Lauren Halsted Burroughs, lhbbooks, May 18, 2016

It's actually more complicated than that, but your instinct is correct!

At one point after the war, he was trying to get help for certain "ailments" (not the ones he claimed he suffered during the war - just ulcers, and generally feeling bad etc.) and was denied disability several times by the Veteran's Administration. Then at one point pre-Dianetics, he requested psychotherapy (which was a new field then), and wrote a detailed letter requesting it and telling his symptoms. It was also denied. My understanding is that he was trying to get more money out of the disability department, it seems.

Then, when he wrote Dianetics, and some fans set up Dianetics groups and he went out doing demonstrations and lectures, he tried to get the American Psychiatric Association to pay attention and give him credibility. He wrote them letters, talked about his groundbreaking "research", and had hoped to become the new Freud or Jung or the rockstar of psychiatry. They investigated and denied him and most of them sort of called what he did pseudoscience and quackery.

THEN, he started coming out with ever-increasing tirades in writing and lectures that basically said that the "psyches" (psychologists and psychiatrists) were evil and out to get them, etc. He went on to say that Dianetics cured so many illnesses that it was taking business and credibility away from them, so they were out to destroy him. His writing and lectures got increasingly anti-psyche over time, leading to the current incarnation.

However, pretty much everyone was out to destroy him, if you ask him.

Those days (around when Scientology was formed, post-Dianetics), he was also on about the communists. He ghost-wrote what he claimed was a communist brainwashing manual and held it up as proof that they were awful - as well as wrote a plethora of letters to the FBI accusing his enemies of being communists (remember McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 50s/60s?). Many of those people had just wronged him in some way - it's obvious that he was trying to use the FBI and red scare to destroy people he didn't like.

Then the FBI didn't respond as he wanted (they called him something like "unstable" or "unhinged" in internal documents), so they became the enemy.

Of course, by that time, he'd had more accusations about money issues against him. He stole and ran away with and misappropriated money from people like Jack Parsons, some early donors/supporters, and the people running his Dianetics Foundation, among others. Some of those money issues became criminal-ish.

And he'd run afoul of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) by making claims about what Dianetics and the e-meter could do health-wise (curing cancer, making the blind see, none of it true, of course). So when the FBI didn't listen to him and he was under scrutiny for a bunch of other stuff, the FBI and the government became the enemy. That was part of the advent of the religious cloaking (going from a pop-psychology thing and making it a religion), to decrease government scrutiny in many ways (and avoid taxes).

Basically, this was a man who didn't suffer narcissistic wounds lightly. When someone dismissed him, didn't listen to or believe him, or made him feel "less than", he used his followers as pawns to insult and hurt them (always making himself the persecuted savior).

The "psyches" were only one of his many "I want to be acknowledged by you and be seen as important by you" targets who didn't give him what he craved - admiration and attention.

Go googling around for some of his letters to the FBI and Veteran's Administration and stuff like that, there's lots of very interesting reading.

His hubris also really comes across when the government of Rhodesia was trying to form a new government post-colonialism, and he went and wrote one (some would say badly) and approached some officials (mind you, as an unknown entity, swaggering about with his secretive group and being cagy about who he was) and was like "here, I wrote the constitution for you, you can thank me later". He was incredibly depressed when they were like "who is this guy?" and dismissed him.

There's a great story about him getting two bottles of pink champagne and walking up unannounced to the door of one of the government officials there and rang the doorbell, expecting to sit and have champagne with this official's wife and thereby get his "in" into the government... of course he was turned away there too.

I mean, he approached everyone in that manner - like he expected to have his ring kissed and be granted medals and seen as important. And then when he wasn't, well, that person or entity became his next target.

It's interesting stuff. If you're interested, some of the stories are researched, documented, and told in books like A Piece of Blue Sky, Bare-Faced Messiah - which was recently re-released and is incredibly documented and researched, Going Clear, Inside Scientology. And others, but I think those are the works that are informative, with incredibly researched documentation of claims.

EDIT: Oh, I also forgot that he wrote to the US Government offering his incredible knowledge and research and said that it could solve all their problems, etc. Then, when he didn't get any response after trying mightily hard, he wrote again and threatened to defect to the Soviet Union. He said they'd offered him a sweet sweet deal, with some kind of research position and budget and teaching positions or something, and if the US Government didn't take him up on it he was going to go to the communists with it instead. Of course, that was an empty threat...

He also claimed later, in lectures and stuff, to have worked on the Manhattan Project with the leading scientists, to develop the Atom Bomb. Which was, of course, not true. And he claimed at various times to have worked undercover for the CIA.