Reddit reviews Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

I fucking hate Scientology, but please don't spread false information. It only makes it more difficult for people to tell that Scientology is full of shit.

Ron Hubbard died in his motorhome on his ranch in Creston, CA. An autopsy was performed and then the body was cremated. The circumstances were suspicious and his followers were told that he had left his body for a higher plane.

Source: Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion (Scientology expose), also see wikipedia

Read "Inside Scientology" - it is a fascinating read.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00A7K68UY/ref=redir_mdp_mobile

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.

I'd just like to take the chance to mention this here

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Scientology-Americas-Secretive-Religion/dp/B00A7K68UY

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.

Lawrence Wright's "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief" is the most-recent must read book on this pernicious organization.

It's a good complement to Janet Reitman's "Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion" which was published just a couple of years ago.

Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman. Extremely well written and researched... and 100% creepy.

What you have heard is a likely combination of misinformation, misunderstandings, and out of context information with a dash of truth thrown in for believability (plus some stuff that so weird you can't make it up). I suggest you start with one of these books (in order of objectivity):

• The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion by Dr. Hugh Urban. This one is by a religious studies professor and is by far the most objective. He covers the history of the church, its basic beliefs and practices, and controversies and does an amazing job of putting things into context.
  
  
• Going Clear by Lawrence Wright. This guy is a journalist and did a pretty good job of staying objective. He chose some of the more sensationalist topics I think but still covered them more-or-less fairly. I was actually surprised that this book was more objective than I was expecting.
  
  
• Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman. Another journalist's take on Scientology. Reitman was a bit heavier on the sensationalist stuff and didn't quite "get" the context for some aspects of Scientology but she still did a pretty good job.
  
  > allows it's members to attack critics
  
  The video you probably saw recently isn't attacking a "critic". While I don't believe he should be harassed at all, this is a guy who was a top executive that left, wrote some books that makes the rest of top management looks like total assholes, and basically wants to reform the whole movement from the outside. Normal critics, members, and ex-members don't get treated like this. No one is going to knock on your door for posting critical stuff on reddit, for example.
  
  > No one person's religion is "the right way"
  
  This is one of Scientology's core moral values - "Respect the Religious Beliefs of Others"
  
  > the rich are going to get more rich in this religion
  
  not really, not many people are making a lot of money from it even toward the top. It's mostly going into bank accounts, real estate, buildings, improvements of services, and other churchy things. The one guy at the very top lives a pretty CEO-like lifestyle but I doubt many others are getting rich other than the organization itself - and I'd argue that even it isn't super rich. Things like the setup ot Bridge Publications, the church's publishing arm, cost a huge amount of money.
  
  > put those funds back into the fucking community, instead of wasting it on new churches, make new homes and schools for the poor
  
  Then donate to organizations that build homes and schools instead of a church. The aims of a church are to further the spread the religion. Churches that build schools and houses are usually doing so with spreading their religion as their real agenda. There are plenty of secular non-profit organizations that build homes and schools for the poor as their primary concern that tend to be much better at it.
  
  Its also worth pointing out that donations to the Church of Scientology are typically not outright donations. They are almost always for some service or material good, such as a book or lecture series on CD. There isn't really a concept of 'tithing' in Scientology and indeed the idea of getting something directly back when you give someone money is kind of part of the culture of the church.