Cult News

An ordained Scientology minister from Santa Barbara is scheduled to speak to Cal Poly (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA ) students tonight on campus. His sponsors are enrolled in the school’s religious studies program, but ironically the venue chosen for his presentation is “in the Science building” reports Mustang Daily.

Scientology, which believes as an article of faith that alien spaceships have visited earth and subscribes to an assortment of health remedies concocted by its founder L. Ron Hubbard (photo below conducting an experiment), is hardly “Science.”

Hubbard, neither a scientist nor a doctor, was a pulp-fiction writer turned purported “cult leader.”

His bizarre beliefs about the human mind and health have frequently been derided as “psuedo science.”

This is why Scientology specifically chose to become a “religion,” where in addition to tax-exempt status; it could position its claims outside the realm of serious scientific scrutiny.

For example, Hubbard’s ridiculous claim that human bodies are supposedly capable of storing toxins and/or the residue of drugs indefinitely.

Respected researchers have dismissed this belief repeatedly.

A Scientology program called “Narconon” was ultimately purged from California schools, when it was learned that Scientologists were teaching such Hubbard hokum to schoolchildren.

Another example of Hubbard’s penchant for blurring the boundaries between science and religion is the Scientology ritual known as the “Purification Rundown.”

This regimen closely connected to Hubbard’s claims about toxins includes a regimen of saunas, ingesting large doses of niacin and vegetable oil to allegedly purge poisons from the body.

Tom Cruise once tried to promote this routine in New York in the guise of “detox” clinics, even encouraging city firemen exposed to chemicals at Ground Zero through 9-11 to try it.

However, the New York Fire Department’s chief medical officer told the New York Times that there is no “objective evidence” to support Hubbard’s theory that somehow people can sweat out toxins.

Moreover, an Irish professor that heads a university pharmacology department stated that the purification rundown is “not supported by scientific facts” and “not medically safe” reported the Irish Times.

Never mind.

Scientologists believe whatever Hubbard said and/or wrote, and it is not legitimately subjected to scientific scrutiny, but rather accepted on faith.

As noted believer Isaac Hayes once said Hubbard’s pronouncements remain forever true and therefore “immutable.”

In fact, Scientologists feel so strongly about this that the words of L. Ron Hubbard have been enshrined. The church has spent millions building vaults to serve as perpetual repositories of their founder’s supposed knowledge, in New Mexico and most recently Wyoming.

Hubbard’s writings date back to the 1950s and the man himself died more than 20 years ago in 1986.

Of course since that time science has moved on, well beyond Hubbard’s quaint theories and observations.

Relatively more recent discoveries in science concerning the chemistry and synaptic connections of the brain and the role of genetics in human illness were not known and/or understood by Hubbard. Perhaps this is why so much of what passes for his “holy wisdom” now seems so hopelessly out of date and disconnected from reality.

According to Rolling Stone when Hubbard died the coroner’s report “described the father of Scientology as in a state of decrepitude: unshaven, with long, thinning whitish-red hair and unkempt fingernails and toenails. In Hubbard’s system was the anti-anxiety drug hydroxyzine (Vistaril), which several of his assistants would later attest was only one of many psychiatric and pain medications Hubbard ingested over the years.”

Perhaps Hubbard himself was disconnected from reality?

This might in part explain his claims, which appear to be more fantasy; than anything grounded on scientifically proven facts.

Cal Poly has an excellent academic reputation.

Scientology is known as a fringe “new religion,” often called a “cult.”

Perhaps the best place for a Scientology lecture isn’t in the Cal Poly Science Building, but nearer to the fiction stacks at the university library?

Postscript: Apparently at the Scientology lecture Cal Poly faculty would not allow probing questions, which raised meaningful issues about Scientology’s troubled history. They instead insisted that students submit their questions through attending professors, who then filtered and edited them as they saw fit. One person commenting about this process said, “Questions were offered to the professors who hosted the event regarding the substantive issues… For example, a direct question on the ‘Disconnection’ practice of Scientology was so watered down into a softball that asking it in the re-worded way it was phrased was the functional equivalent of filtering reality…A disservice was done…to the students of Cal Poly…at best failing to fully disclose the nature of the subject matter, and at worst exposing students to one of many deliberate recruiting methodologies of the cult.”