Scientology, is false, based upon a false foundation. He was a science fiction writer and a con man. At the end of his life he was under scrutiny by the FBI. His contemporaries such as Isaac Asimov, all laughed over Hubbard and his sci fi religion, back in the day before Scientology began and after. Does it really matter if Scientology has actually helped people? Yes, it does. Scientology can help people, on a superficial level, as can anything actually. But if you get too deep into it, it will fall down, the church as abused civil rights and there are allegations that they have actually surreptitiously caused the demise of more than one person who has gone up against them or tried to speak out against them.
Why are some ex Scientologists so fearful to speak out against this pseudo religion and science?
From NPR:
"New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright explains how he found a number of inconsistencies between documents the Church of Scientology says are official records of founder L. Ron Hubbard's war service and the actual official military records that Wright obtained."
Screenwriter Paul Haggis left the "church" of Scientology. Haggis wrote and directed "Crash" and won an Oscar for it. Wright asked if he could interview Haggis and they refused. But this lead Wright to be more curious and seek deeper information on the Scientologists.
"Wright says that one of the most interesting parts of the meeting came when he asked Davis about L. Ron Hubbard's medical records. Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had maintained that he was blind and a 'hopeless cripple' at the end of World War II — and that he had healed himself through measures that later became the basis of Dianetics, the 1950 book that became the basis for Scientology.
"I had found evidence that Hubbard was never actually injured during the war. ... And so we pressed [Tommy Davis] for evidence that there had been such injuries and [Hubbard] had been the war hero that he described," says Wright. "Eventually, Davis sent us what is called a notice of separation — essentially discharge papers from World War II — along with some photographs of all of these medals that [Hubbard] had won. ... At the same time, we finally gained access to Hubbard's entire World War II records [through a request to the military archives] and there was no evidence that he had ever been wounded in battle or distinguished himself in any way during the war. We also found another notice of separation which was strikingly different than the one that the church had provided."
On the meeting Wright held with Tommy Davis and scientology lawyers "In September, Tommy Davis and four Scientology lawyers arrive in New York with 47 volumes of supporting material, these binders that stretched seven linear feet. And we met in a conference room in 10 in the morning with me and two of the checkers and the head of our checking department and our lawyer and my editor and David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, who had just come in to welcome everyone, but took a seat and didn't get up until six that evening."
"In one very interesting moment, Davis said, 'Of course, if it's true that Mr. Hubbard was never injured during the war, then he never did heal himself using Dianetics principles, then Dianetics is based on a lie, and then Scientology is based on a lie. The truth is that Mr. Hubbard was a war hero.' And the way he phrased that, that everything depended on whether Hubbard had sustained these injuries and healed himself was like a wager on the table."
On what the Church of Scientology said about Hubbard's war records
"I asked Tommy Davis to square the records that we had with the church's own records of Mr. Hubbard's war records. And he said, 'Well, we the church were also puzzled about it until we found an expert who clarified all this.' And he said the man who did that was Mr. X in Oliver Stone's movie JFK who in real life was a man named Fletcher Prouty, who had been involved in inner circles of the American Defense Department. And Prouty, who also had worked for the church, had told them that Hubbard had actually been an intelligence agent, and the records were, as he said, sheep-dipped. That's apparently a term of art in intelligence that maintains that there were two sets of records. And we obtained all of Mr. Hubbard's military records, and there was no second set of records. There was no evidence that he had ever acted as an intelligence agent during the war in any serious capacity, and that he had never been wounded."
On Hubbard's notice of separation
"The notice of separation they gave us was signed by an individual named Howard Thompson, a lieutenant commander who apparently never existed. They gave us a photograph of the medals that Mr. Hubbard supposedly had won. Two of them weren't even commissioned until after he left active service. On there, it says that he graduated after four years of college and got a civil engineering degree, which is not accurate. ... In the 900-some-odd pages of Hubbard's war records, there were numerous letters from other researchers from over the years. And one of them had inquired about Howard D. Thompson, this lieutenant commander that supposedly signed this notice of separation. And the archivist at the time said they had thoroughly researched the roles of Navy officers at the time, and there was no such person."
Full NPR article
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