I’ll admit I don’t know much about scientology. Actually, my entire knowledge of scientology comes from the amazing episode of South Park where they explain Scientology as such: L. Ron Hubbard (a science fiction writer and creator of Scientology) claims that 75 million years ago there was a galactic federation of aliens led by one alien king: Xenu. Xenu rounded up all the alien species, froze them, and loaded them into fighter jet type planes and sent them to Earth. Once there, the aliens were dumped into Hawaiian volcanoes where they were burned up. Their souls (known as Thetans) escaped the volcano and began ascending back to space. Xenu somehow knew this was going to happen so he sent his soul catching machines to catch all the souls before they went into space. The soul catching machines brought the captured souls to a building that Xenu had built on earth to house the lost alien souls. Once the alien souls were inside the building they were forced to watch images of false prophets and other lies. Xenu then released the lost souls back onto Earth where they continued to roam confused until the dawn of man. The souls then inhabited the first men and women as fears and lies. To this day the souls cause all of our fears and confusion and problems. No, really, that is what Scientologists believe. Don’t try to go back and reread that nonsense because it will never make sense. I don’t know why so many celebrities follow this religion, and why they give so much money to the Church of Scientology but they do, they really do. Millions and millions of dollars of funding come from celebrity members of the church. Here’s a list of some famous scientologists:
Kirstie Alley
Anna Archer
Sonny Bono
Nancy Cartwright
Erika Christensen
Jeff Conaway
Tom Cruise
Jenna Elfman
Isaac Hayes
Jason Lee
Juliette Lewis
Danny Masterson
Bijuou Phillips
Priscilla Presley
Kelly Preston
John Travolta
Giovanni Ribisi
Edgar Winter
So why do they give their money to the church and why are they so drawn to the religion of Scientology? A couple of reasons: first, anything discussed or done in the Scientology center is private and confidential, second, they can pursue Scientology at their own pace (which works well when celebrities are away shooting movies), and third, the Scientology auditing program allows celebrities to become better at public speaking and auditioning.
The auditing process is a strange and complicated system that applies Dianetics (a set of idea and practices regarding the metaphysical relationship between the mind and body which was created by L. Ron Hubbard). Another formal definition of auditing is: the action of asking a person a question, getting and answer, and letting them know you acknowledge their answer. Most auditing sessions require the person being audited (known as a preclear) to be hooked up to a Hubbard Electropsychometer which measures changes in the preclear’s body. The test works a bit like a lie detector and even those involved in scientology don’t fully understand what it does.
While Scientologists do believe in glorified lie detector tests they do not believe in medicine, or psychiatry. They also believe that Thetans can be reincarnate and have lived in other humans on distant planets that we on Earth do not know about. To receive the highest honor as a Scientologist, and exercise all your Thetans, a Scientologist must participate in high-level courses which cost several thousand dollars. Because of the high cost of becoming a top level Scientologist, it’s very hard to move up to the Bridge—the highest level of Scientology.
