Mick Hartley

Is the Church of Scientology headed the same way as Theosophy? Their big name stars like Tom Cruise, far from being role models, just make fools of themselves. And that threatening aura, which once prompted newspapers to think twice before publishing anything derogatory about them, seems to be evaporating. Here's an article in the NYT about a couple who tried to leave and, surely to no one's surprise but their own, found that apostasy was almost as frowned on (but not quite) as it is in Islam. But this is the good bit:

The church is vague about its membership numbers. In 11 hours with a reporter over two days, Mr. Davis, the church’s spokesman, gave the numbers of Sea Org members (8,000), of Scientologists in the Tampa-Clearwater area (12,000) and of L. Ron Hubbard’s books printed in the last two and a half years (67 million). But asked about the church’s membership, Mr. Davis said, “I couldn’t tell you an exact figure, but it’s certainly, it’s most definitely in the millions in the U.S. and millions abroad.”

He said he did not know how to account for the findings in the American Religious Identification Survey that the number of Scientologists in the United States fell from 55,000 in 2001 to 25,000 in 2008.

Is the last laugh with L Ron? It's hard not to think of Scientology as some kind of reductio ad absurdum of the whole religious impulse. A second-rate sci-fi author who proposes that founding a religion would be a good way to make money, and then goes ahead and does just that? Complete with the most ridiculous pseudo-scientific bunkum: those auditing e-meters derived from the pop psychology of the Fifties, and an esoteric set-up whereby the more involved you get, and the more money you've handed over, the more ridiculous the teaching becomes and the more elusive the goal of total recall ("yes, well, the next level is where you'll really get the benefits – that'll be another $10,000")…Xenu from the Galactic Confederacy coming to Earth 75 million years ago, setting off hydrogen bombs in volcanoes, and all the rest of it.

There must surely have been times when Ron, aboard his Sea Org yacht, will have sat down alone in his luxury cabin, run his hands through the piles of cash, and just roared with laughter. "Lord, what fools these mortals be".

[Update: more on Scientology's current woes here]