Thursday, January 24, 2008

Why I joined the church of Scientology

I joined the Scientology movement for a day when I was 16. The clinching argument was that it payed better than picking strawberries. Unfortunately, as way to recruit people into Scientology there is some kind of personality test. I managed to fail this test. It was a very complicated test and involved running about and doing errands. It seems very unfair that Tom Cruise was allowed to join, but not me. I would have fought the decision to kick me out if I had known that William Burroughs went "clear". Over the holiday I enjoyed reading "The bare-faced messiah" by Russell Miller. This is the story of L Ron Hubbard who founded Scientology. Hubbard was a science fiction author who claimed to have found new insight into mental health (dianetics). The first part of the story was boring because it wall about him as a child who was loved by a large family. As he got older he started to start telling bolder and bolder lies. From the book it did sound that he had manic depressive qualities. He sounded immensely charismatic, and was a good confident speaker. Anyway just in case anyone from the Church of Scientology wants to sue me, you can read the book yourself and judge for yourself. There is track by Mike Skinner from the Streets who complain about camera phones making it hard to do drugs. Because if you are famous than there is always someone ready to take a video or picture to put it on youtube, or sell it to the papers. In a similar vein, it is hard to found a religion these days, because everyone's life is so well documentated. I also thought this when I read Joseph Smith founding the church of the latter day saints. It could be that the Internet and the camera phone will stop any further religions from being started, because there will always be ways to rubbish the founder. I payed 13 pounds for the book from Amazon. I knew it was secondhand, but it had a stamp in it that it was withdraw for sale from a London library. The stamp also told me the book was sold off for 1 pound. Even the anti-Scientology groups rip you off.