Because of various problems with Blogger, I've copied everything as of November 26, 2012 over to WordPress. The new location is Ask the Scientologist. I am not deleting this blog and will still accept comments and answer questions here too, but any new articles will appear at the WordPress location. I apologize if this causes any problems.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Is It Over Yet?

Sometimes, when I am reading a novel or watching a movie, I realize that I simply don't care about any of the characters.  Are they going to succeed?  Are they going to fail?  Who cares?

If I find I don't care, I'll put that book down or walk out of that movie.  Why waste my time?  There are too many excellent books and excellent movies for me to waste my time trudging through a boring one.

And so we get to the Glorious Battle between the mighty Church of Scientology and the bold rebels of the Independent Movement -- with the fate of "every man, woman and child for the next endless trillions of years" at stake.

Boring.

Really boring.

Really, really boring.

It appears that all the characters in this badly written drama are very excited, worried, angry and whatnot but I don't care -- and I don't see how anyone not directly involved cares one tiniest bit.

Certainly I care about all the victims of the Church of Scientology, but that isn't what they are fighting about.  They are fighting over control of Scientology.

Is it important to "every man, woman and child" on this planet?  No, of course not.

Is the fate of the Church of Scientology hanging in the balance?  Nope.  The church has been destroyed and all you see is the after-image after the implosion.  The old image of the powerful and dangerous Church of Scientology has been shattered by David Miscavige's recent stupid, immature and idiotic orders to his mindless followers.  It's a bad joke.

Is the fate of Scientology itself, hanging in the balance?  Again, nope.  All the facts and all the failures of Hubbard and Scientology are well known.   Scientology doesn't produce "homo novis", it doesn't solve any of the world's problems and it isn't a miraculous solution to anything.  People may still use Scientology but, since Scientology doesn't produce anything significant, its continued existence is of no importance.

So we have people of no particular importance battling over an insignificant "church" and an ineffective "tech" with nothing of any significance hanging in the balance.

I've walked out of better movies than this.
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Monday, July 25, 2011

Scientology Has Failed

One of the things a Scientologist must confront and must acknowledge is that Scientology has failed.

That is simply a fact.  Until a Scientologist confronts and acknowledges this, they will not be able to move on.  Even if they believe that "Scientology works", they cannot deny that Scientology has failed.

It could be said with considerable truth that failure actually defines the history and evolution of Scientology.

Scientology came into being when Dianetics failed.  Certainly, Dianetics appeared to have promise and some interesting results were reported, but Hubbard promised miracles and, beyond rare, anecdotal stories, none of his promised miracles ever appeared.  Worse, from Hubbard's point of view, his promised, miraculous state of Clear never appeared.  Dianetics was a failure.

Scientology arose from the ashes of Dianetics and promised even more miracles.  Not only was Scientology going to produce "Releases" with abilities far beyond the human state, not only was Scientology going to finally produce "real Clears", but Scientology was ultimately going to produce a god-like state Hubbard called "Operating Thetan".

And Scientology failed.

Along came "the Grade Chart” to fix those failures.  The problem was, Hubbard explained, “out gradients” and “missing actions”.  The Grade Chart was going to fix all that ... and failed.  Still none of the promised results appeared.

The lack of results, Hubbard justified, was still due to “out gradients”, and so tons of new processes were added to the “lower Bridge”.  And sold.  And still the promised results failed to appear.

The next excuse for failure was “illiteracy” which led to Hubbard’s “Study Technology”.

Another excuse for failure was “drugs” which ended up with the “Purification Rundown” and Narconon.

One continuing excuse for failure was “out ethics” which engendered a whole raft of new products and controls:  Ethics, Security Checks, FPRD, Criminon and so much more.

And still Scientology failed and failed and failed.  Even those “solutions” were failing.  In real-world, independent tests, Hubbard’s “Study Technology” was a failure. Doctors confirmed that the Purification Rundown failed to “detoxify” anyone.  Criminon and Narconon were exposed as ineffective frauds.

And still there are no Releases, no Clears and no OTs.  To this day, Scientology continues to fail to provide any of the results promised.

Each of Scientology’s failures engendered more excuses, more "reasons why", more justifications -- and more “services” to sell to “solve” those failures.  And so Scientology became the “Science of justifications for failure”.

What does a Scientologist do with all these failures when they cannot confront them?
  • Ignore it.  This is a Scientology Standard Tech method of dealing with it.  Pretend you don’t notice the complete lack of results.  Pretend that somewhere, someone is “winning”.  Pretend that the temporary euphoria after a session means “real case gain”.
  • “Fix” it.  That’s what the history of Scientology is all about:  One “solution” to failure after another -- with each “solution”, in turn, failing.
  • Sell it.  This is another Scientology “solution”.  Ignore the failures and keep selling the promised results.  In the real world, we call that “fraud”.
  • Try harder.  Believe it would work if only you could “do it right” and so, Scientologists keep trying the same “solutions” over and over in hopes that some day the promised results will magically appear.
  • Give up.  Accept the ultimate Scientology reason for all its failures: That all Scientology’s failures are your fault.  You are too awful a being for Scientology to ever work on you.
These are all the standard Scientology solutions, they are built into Scientology itself.  Scientologists are very familiar with all these, but may I suggest one additional choice that a Scientologist could make:
  • Reality.  Recognize that Scientology has failed and cannot and will not ever deliver what Hubbard promised.  Recognize that each “solution” just results in more failure.  Take whatever bits you might have found useful and leave the rest.  Step off the Bridge to Total Failure.  Stop wasting your time, your money and your life on such consistent and continual failure.  Start winning by deliberately not using Scientology.
Just because Scientology has failed doesn’t mean you have to.
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