In my recent YouTube video about Scientology and Christianity, I read an excerpt from one of Hubbard’s lectures from the Class VIII course.
You can hear the relevant section of this lecture, accompanied by a slide show (you can select various sources for the slide show — South Park, Going Clear, Panorama and some others).
There can be no doubt what Hubbard is saying when you listen to the entire 10 minute excerpt.
I wanted to put this up on my blog so it i
The ridiculous premise of an exact duplicate of 1950s-60s USA – except for various exotic technology for space travel, and doing strange things to large numbers of people – sounds to me like a tongue-in-cheek device in a speculative science fiction story, that the audience wouldn’t be expected to really take seriously.
Hubbard also doesn’t account for other countries on the planet that had jets other than DC-8s and somewhat different daily lives, or how that all continued to evolve in later decades; the first can be chalked up to classic American myopia, but the second seems like a real lack of the sort of imagination and foresight that even a really good science fiction writer should have.
Question: Were participants allowed to ask Hubbard questions or clarifications during his lectures?
Without a doubt simply AMAZING we have this on audio.
I was a first gen Scientologist, and I had a lapsed Christian viewpoint. Lapsed and never really a Christian, but respectful of all the Christian denominations.
Hubbard essentially was a lapsed Christian also, so it figures he for reasons that most members in the early through to the end of his life, were themselves lapsed Christians, and respectful in the same way that Jewish atheists are respectful of their lapsed faith.
So, the OT 3 outlandish Hubbard statements, Hubbard says horrible stuff about Christ.
Not mentioned in the stolen valor megalomania of Hubbard for him to also claim “Am I (the returned Buddha)? ”
Just slap in the face.
But all this said, Mike, when I was a wooden headed strict rule follower, when LRH said what he said that people can be other faiths and be Scientologists, this obviously means they can be their other major faiths, until their beliefs get stronger in Scientology, and they shed pretty much their faith in their first religions.
When I was a Course Sup ,at the HGB in LA in Hollywood, I had a DSA PR trainee from Berlin, no less. The woman was still strongly Catholic.
She CSWed to go to Mass around or after Easter time and I approved her CSW, let her go, and let no one stop her from going.
I think I let her go to Mass a couple times. She hadn’t yet given up on her prior faith, and fine, I could “think” with Hubbard’s rules, and let her go to Church on Sunday, a couple times.
I also, reported her to OSA and suggested that she probably isn’t fully yet qualified to work in the DSA office in Berlin, due to her not really being fully on board with Scientology yet.
Mike, the official movement is irreligious.
I found that one moment with the EU Ron’s Org Scientologists went to the Int Base, spent one moment with linked hands, in a circle, and they postulated good things for the Int Base and for upper Scientology.
That was really a kind of unique ‘religious’ type of moment, that main decent splinter Ron’s Org people from EU, slightly bowing their heads, many with eyes closed, and postulating for I guess a kind of positive future for Int Base and for themselves.
Some Scientologists, do transcend the crappy horrible nastiness parts of Hubbard’s.
I’m an atheist, but it has to be noted, not all Scientologists are creepy irreligious assholes like Hubbard was and which Hubbard nastily institutionalized into Scientology.
To me, the Ron’s Org Switzerland is kind of the continuing place that official Scientology ought to move themselves.
It is notable that a splinter group has to detach from official Scientology, to become more decent.
Fred G. Haseney: “L. Ron Hubbard! How do you take your frozen alcohol and glycine?”
L. Ron Hubbard: “Shaken, not stirred.”
Everything okay? Seems like that last sentence got cut off. “I wanted to put this up on my blog so it I…”
Blink twice if you need helpðŸ˜
One of the more interesting cognitive dissonances in Scientology is that this Christ, who did not exist, managed to still have a terrible temper and be a lover of young boys. Quite an achievement for a non-existent person, no? Yes, Hubbard really did say both of those things. Although at least we can give him some credit – it was not in the same lecture.
I guess the nice thing about being a cult leader is when you make proclamations like that, no one is allowed to ask ‘How the hell would you know?’
gv, I think it fits with a point of view that Jesus was a historical person, but not actually the Christ (the anointed or chosen one). There have been varying schools of thought regarding that going back to ancient times, and it was a fertile topic in the late 19th and early 20th century milieu, particularly Theosophy (which viewed Jesus as inspiring, but not divine), that influenced Hubbard – and that he borrowed from heavily, typically without attribution.
The ‘lover of young boys’ piece goes back to some early Christian heresies like the Carpocratians, and the discovery in the 1950s of a sort of gnostic gospel with such influences and implications. Hubbard would have picked up such ideas from the occult and esoteric circles he traveled in in the 1940s, and the sci-fi and subculture circles he was connected to into the 1950s – and the iconoclastic concept of casting Jesus as not just human but even profane, must have appealed to him.