Owlseyes ’s Reviews > The Scandal of Scientology > Status Update

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Perhaps. Sometimes when I am most skeptical about the efficacy of their methods, I think back to what one Scientologist said (using typically inflated figures) about their membership: "Fifteen million people can't be wrong." But history has often proven otherwise.
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Hubbard has also claimed that Dianetics or Scientology can alter the shape of the body and make people grow taller, make them ambidextrous, make the insane sane, cure chronic chills, impotency, manic states, laryngitis, make children more beautiful, change the personality, improve Parkinson's disease, and make large bruises disappear in forty-five minutes

Inside the tar is this little nugget of truth; but all this black tar is over the side of it so people reach for the truth and they get all hung up in the tar and the various organizations and the science itself becomes perverted.
-- L. Ron Hubbard Jr.

Chapter 21

Does Scientology Work?


... I would say there is no validity [to Scientology processing]. But within Scientology you find a great deal of very direct truths, but then it is sort of like a bre'r rabbit tar baby. (...)

Freudians could have a field day with this pseudonym, and its obvious phallic counterpart, perhaps surmising that he unconsciously chose the name to compensate for other weaknesses.

Hubbard's hostility and unconscious obsession with violence runs through all of his writings. But it was apparent even before he presented Dianetics or Scientology. One of his earlier pseudonyms was "Winchester Remington Colt" and although it's possible he consciously chose the name for its euphony it does seem strange that all three names are those of guns.

In addition to having visited Heaven, Hubbard has also rewritten Genesis. "Before the Beginning was a Cause and the entire purpose of the Cause was the creation of effect," etc. He has also rewritten the calendar to read "A.D. 1, A.D. 10," etc., (to stand for "After Dianetics 1951," "After Dianetics 1960"), as if his discoveries were as important as the birth of Christ.

Also omitted, obviously, are the speculations that have been made about his sanity. The Australian Report said that "expert psychiatric witnesses" were of the opinion that Hubbard's writings indicated "symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia of long standing with delusions of grandeur."

He says that the research began with his 1938 book, Excalibur, which appears to have been the manuscript he claims was stolen by the Russians. During these twelve years, especially in the last three or four before Dianetics came out, he wrote at least seventy-eight science fiction stories alone (under his name, or the pseudonyms of Rene Lafayette and Kurt Van Strachen) not to mention writing in other fields.