Scientoliology Today

I watched this intensely mediocre horror film from the Ukraine this week called Dark Waters. It's "inspired" by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, which means it includes sea creatures and candles, I guess, but what stands out about the film are the repeated and elongated re-enactments of Satanic rituals.

This got me thinking about Satanism in the grander sense. It doesn't really make sense to me, as a religion. I mean, no religions really make sense to me, but at least I can begin to understand most of them on their own terms. If you really really believe that there's a personified God who came down and impregnated some virgin who then gave birth to a half-God/half-man hybrid who proceeded to give a series of invigorating lectures before being ruthlessly tortured and then killed by The Jew, you'd logically become a Christian.

Also, if you happen to think homos is grody. I think it's a silly, delusional position to take - akin to believing in Snow White, Boo Radley, Captain America and other popular fictional characters taken from world literature - but it's a position.

But Satanism, to my mind, has two specific problems:

(1) Satan didn't really like us.

The whole reason he started a war in Heaven back in the day (seriously...all the way back...) was that he felt the Big Man preferred humans to angels. So why would he want us to pray for him? He thinks we suck. He'd want us to hate him. I mean, that's kind of ol' Jack Scratch's raison d'être. Torturing humans and making us suffer.

Therefore, if you truly loved The Devil and wanted to please him, the only way to do so would be...to hate him. Which means that the only true Satanists are the hardcore Christians!

(2) Satanism needs Catholicism as a counterpoint.

Catholicism can exist without Satanism. It has its own rituals and rites that have nothing to do with any kind of Satanic belief. I suppose, to be a strict dogmatic Catholic, one must believe in Satan on some level, but one need not even be aware of Satanic worship on any level in order to attend a Mass or confess your sins or transsubstantiate or any of the other crap those idiots do.

But the entire notion of, say, a Black Mass is predicated upon the existance of regular Mass. Think of Bizarro Superman or Evil Spock from "Star Trek" (easily identified by his goatee). Superman isn't called Normal-o Superman, nor is Spock generally referred to as Good Spock. They exist as their own entities. The anti-heroes exist only in reference to the originals.

It's the same with Satanism. All their rituals recreate Catholic rituals, only reversed. Instead of white hats, everyone wears black hats. The crosses are upside down (and occasionally aflame). I think in the movie, they're even speaking backwards some of the time. It's clearly a bullshit subservient religion - basically accepting the validity of Catholicism by taking up the alternative view.

Say what you will about Wiccans but at least they've got their own uniquely stupid bullshit going on. Not bullshit based on doing the opposite of what Zoroastrians do or whatever.

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that I have wanted to start up an anti-Scientology religion for some time now (Scientoliology), only I can't figure out a way to avoid the pitfall of Satanism. If I go ahead and base everything on the opposite of real Scientology, it's like admitting that L. Ron Hubbard's retarded cult has some kind of actual merit.

To start an anti-religion, you implicitly concede that there's something interesting about the original religion that is worth responding to, and I don't feel that way at all about Scientology. I just think it's irritating and want it to go away.

I'm not sure why Scientology in principle bothers me more than other religions. In my humble opinion, there's no way a religion could be less true than Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or Shintoism or any of the other religions. (I've said it before on this blog but I'll repeat myself for emphasis - Buddhism gets no love around here because of the reincarnation thing. The "life is suffering" part sounds pretty accurate to me.)

Yet something about the faith of Cruise and Travolta unsettles me. When I detect Scientological (Scientologist?) beliefs in a piece of media or entertainment, it strikes me as excessively ignorant, whereas professions of more traditional religious faith don't really affect me one way or the other. (This is definitely the reason noted Scientologist Paul Haggis' Crash bothered me more than a garden-variety treacly Hollywood "message" picture.)

I suppose it's possible that it's just the stigma on Scientology or the fact that it's a newer religion than the others. (This might also explain why so many people think Mormonism is creepy. That or the fact that a lot of Mormons are creeps.) But I think it's some fundamental aspects of the religion that really get under my skin. (I'm feeling very list-y in this post for some reason!):

(1) Its emphasis on celebrity-themed marketing

I hate the fact that Scientology has become well-known because it purposefully appeals to celebrities. (Ditto Kabballah.) Now, I know that this is simply a smart marketing strategy. If you want to interest people in your product, just get Jessica Alba to talk about it once, and you're set for life. So it makes sense to court famous people and get them talking about Scientology, if you wanted Scientology to take off.

But that doesn't make it any more acceptable or classy. We're talking about a core belief system here, not a new cologne. This is important. Even if you can sway particularly impressionable idiots with the help of Beck, Giovanni Ribisi and Jenna Elfman, that doesn't mean you should. To me, it speaks volumes about the corporate attitudes of the people behind Scientology. They see it as a product to be sold to the masses. They're trying to "move units" of religious belief. That's just gross.

(2) The fact that they get such shitty celebrities

Let's face it. If you were serious about trying to get me to embrace your twisted worldview, you'd hire more convincing celebrities than John Travolta, Tom Cruise and Kirstie fucking Alley. I wouldn't listen to their recommendations on anything. If Kirstie Alley suggested that I enjoy a deliciou ssteak at Outback, I'd make a beeline for Black Angus, is what I'm saying. Have you ever seen her being interviewed? She's half-retarded!

(Need an example? Kirstie was the only "Cheers" cast member to refuse to appear on the spin-off show "Frasier." Why? She felt that it made psychiatrists and psychotherapy appear correct, honest and heroic, whereas Scientologists hate and distrust psychiatrists. Apparently, it did not occur to Kirstie that, for all those years she appeared on "Cheers," Kelsey Grammar was actually standing right next to her playing a friendly and sympathetic psychiatrist. Perhaps she only read her lines in the script and ignored everyone else around her.)

I'm just saying - Catholicism has Mel Gibson, Judiasm has Ron Silver, Witchcraft has Stevie Nicks, Latvian Orthodoxy has George Costanza and Snake Handling has Moe Szyslak. Scientology needs to class up its celeb roster if it wants to compete. Seriously.

(3) Scientologists have a weird, somewhat perverse and largely inaccurate view of the world that they try to insist upon other, more sensible people

First of all, I hate how Scientologists refer to their faith as "tech" and refer to practicing their faith as "learning" or "reading" or even "researching" Scientology. You're not doing any fucking research. You're reading a bunch of books written by a science-fiction writer. Yes, other religions do this, too. You go to a "school" to "learn" how to be a priest, even though that involves reading a whole lot of made-up stuff as well. (But at least in seminary, you get some philosophy mixed in with all the flying and magic.)

It makes it sound like they are smarter than everyone else, but in fact they just know more about one crazy guy's wacked out philosophy of life. Like when Tom Cruise was calling out Brooke Shields publicly for taking anti-depressants. He actually believes he's more knowledgable about the effects of and uses for prescription medications than a doctor. Because he's taken classes in Scientology.

That's one of the most pernicious effects of organized religion - they substitute made-up lunacy for real knowledge and then convince you that you know more than the people who have dedicated their lives to studying reality.

This is how you get Museums dedicated to Creationism where guys ride around on top of dinosaurs. (Oh, I wish this didn't exist...but it totally does...) It's not just stupid to proclaim, with no genuine scientific background, that you know more than expert scientists in their own field. It's willfully ignorant. This kind of psychosis affects a relatively small sub-set of Christians and other religious Americans, but it affects pretty much every Scientologists whom I've ever heard speak.

Here's Scientologist Jenna Elfman in an interview in the Scientology magazine.

Hey, guess what the Scientology magazine is called? Celebrity!:

“Dianetics is the modern science of mental health…psychiatry...that's incorrect technology,” says the former sitcom star.

What is Ms. Elfman planning for her future?

To be “absolutely relentless and unreasonable about grasping [Scientology technology] and owning it,” she says. “That way, I can have complete KSW (Keeping Scientology Working)…[and] forge ahead with a very high speed of particle flow.”

...

“If we want to clear this planet, we've got to know and apply this tech. It's just a rule. It just is…I can't even emphasize it enough. It's just truth. You can't go beyond truth, it just is…if you want to Keep Scientology Working, you need to do the PTS/SP Course. Either that or you could be dead. You pick.”


I like! You are good! If I join Church of Scientology, can I put camera in ladies' washroom?

(4) It's really just about money

All organized religion on some level is about money, but Scientology is really explicitly about money. You can't progress in the religion without paying. It's so expensive to progress in Scientology, in fact, that many church followers have to switch careers or start their own businesses in the hopes of earning enough just to move forward in the church.

This is part of the reason the church focuses heavily on celebrities. If you're trying to get people to shell out thousands of dollars to hang around in your compound, it helps if they think they might get a chance to hang out with Isaac Hayes. Sound like a worthwhile faith so far?

See, it all boils down to OT levels, what Jenna Elfman was bragging about in that insane article. For a complete rundown on the concept of OT, this is a great resource. I don't want to get all technical here and actually delve into the guts of Scientology, because it's stupid and pointless, but OT stands for "Operating Thetan."

As you move up OT levels, you begin to "clear" your mind of harmful thetans, which are actually trapped alien souls but which function very much like psychological neuroses in a practical sense. They are hang-ups that keep you from reaching your mind's full potential.

But the only way to move up OT levels, to advance in Scientology and begin the process of clearing out all the thetans that are holding you back and making you sad, is to pay them lots of money. Then you do course work with an E-meter, which involves loopy science-fiction babble like this:

"Be three feet in back of your head. Whatever you are looking at, copy it a dozen times, put it into you. Find the two back comers of the room and hold onto them without thinking for two minutes."
"Find two corners of the planet Earth, hold onto them for two minutes."
"Find a place where you are not."
"Spot three spots in your body."
"Spot three spots in the room."
"Be in the following places: The room, the sky, the moon, the sun."
"Locate an animal. Postulate him moving from one spot to another. Observe him doing this."
"Find a man walking. Postulate his walking faster. Do this with 20 people."

They think that, if you move up OT levels, you actually gain powers. The highest OT level is OT VIII, which makes an individual for all intents and purposes a God. Tom Cruise is OT VII, indicating that he believes he can move things with his mind. He should really start postulating a man going to the theater to see Mission Impossible 3, because things aren't really going that well for Tom on the box office front.

Like any scam, it's about fooling the mark by showing him confidence. In House of Games, Joe Mantegna has a brilliant speech (written by David Mamet) explaining how confidence games work. It's not called a confidence game because people place their confidence in you, but the other way around. A con man (or woman) puts his or her trust in a stranger, who according to the social code feels that he or she must then reciprocate and be trusting in return. And that's how a con artist gets away with your money.

So Scientologists tell you that they're going to let you in on this huge and important secret, and that this secret is going to give you all kinds of crazy weird superhuman powers. And all you have to do for them in return is give them all your credit card numbers.

That's why Scientoliology will be 100% free. Here's some of the tenets I'm considering for my new faith:

- No one is to read any book written by L. Ron Hubbard. Instead, we gain knowledge (known as "nano-tech") by reading actual books written by worthwhile writers with an actual background in the subjects about which they write. For example, Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" would be an entirely appopriate choice for a Scientoliologist. Stephen King's "On Writing" represents the height of blasphemy.)

- Every time you come up with another reason Scientology is stupid, you earn an additional TO point. These TO points can eventually be redeemed for prescription pain medication.

- No celebrities will be admitted to the Church of Scientoliology. Exceptions will be made only if that celebrity is a former Scientologist, because they probably have a whole lot of funny stories I'd personally like to hear. Except Paul Haggis, that guy can go suck a fat one, he's not allowed in my church.

- Because I've never been a fan of psychotherapy or mood-altering drugs myself, psychiatrists are still considered evil. But not as evil as those Ear Nose and Throat specialists. No good bastards.

- Instead of an evil alien overlord named Xenu ruining all of our lives via interstellar genocide, we believe that the shallow emptiness of our everyday life coupled with frequently crippling loneliness and tendencies towards vapid consumerism and nervous anxiety are what makes Americans miserable. Americans, in turn, make everyone else in the world miserable. So that's why everyone's miserable. Call this the Lons Doctrine. It's the first of the 10 Essential Teachings of Scientoliology, or as I'm going to call them:

The TEN RIGHTEOUS UNIVERSALLY TRUE HOMILIES (or the TRUTH for short):

(1) Americans are miserable because they are shallow consumerist sheep. They, in turn, make everyone else in the world miserable.

(2) All religions say that sex is bad, even though people really like to have sex. So they religion that would be easiest to market would be actively pro-sex. Therefore, I'm going to go ahead and be the first World Religious Leader to declare the Cincinnati Bowtie a holy sacrament.

(3) Jam bands sound really cool when you're high, but not so much when you aren't. When you aren't high and you listen to a jam band for a little while, you begin to wonder how you pay attention to this music when you're high.

(4) I like how Judiasm and Christianity have all their rituals intertwined with alcohol. The light buzz I'd get off that cough syrup the Jews pass off as wine was the only way I survived those annual torments known as the "Passover Seder." So I'd like to open up the sacred Scientoliological beverage to the highest bidder. If your alcoholic beverage has its own personified mascot - a Captain Morgan, say, or Jim Beam, or even a St. Pauli Girl - that person immediately becomes a saint. Done.

(5) From this moment forth, Scientoliology is officially at War with Christmas. Fuck Christmas. Santa's going down harder than Rush Limbaugh and Dennis Hastert in a broken elevator. Do your worst, Culture Warrior O'Reilly! This shit is on!

(6) No work or school on Hunter Thompson's birthday, July 18th.

(7) There is no God. Try to learn to deal.

(8) There is no Heaven or Hell, but there is a Limbo. Weird, huh?

(9) The Legend of Zelda for Nintendo is the greatest video game of all time.

(10) Only I know the secrets of the only ritual in Scientoliology, and I'm never going to tell anyone or actually enact it myself. Unless you give me $2 million.

I just realized that last part kind of resembles my rival religion, Scientology, so I might have to amend it later. That can be the Scientoliological version of the Reformation. (So long as one of you leaves 95 theses in the comments about why TRUTH #10 is wrong.)