Is Scientology dangerous?

Tom Cruise. You just say the name and the first word that comes to mind is probably “crazy.” That’s kind of a shame, because the man has done some pretty good work on the silver screen. But it’s hard to feel sorry for him, because his notoriety for being a flake is well-earned.

At the crux of his perceived nuttiness is his fanatical devotion to his religion of choice, Scientology. But is it fair to look down on him for his religious convictions? Is it really such a bad thing to be fired up about your faith? Ordinarily not, but our acceptance of someone’s religious fervor tends to wane when their beliefs seem to take them too far off the deep end, common sense-wise. And some of Scientology’s teaching strike many people as scoring a little too high on the wackiness scale

One good example of that is Scientology’s virulent opposition to psychiatry. Old Tom earned himself some bad press on this topic when he came down hard on Brooke Shields for seeking psychiatric help when she was suffering from post partum depression. While all of that was going on, you might have wondered just why Tom and his brethren are so cheesed at the head shrinker set. It turns out there’s an interesting story behind that, but it’s not a short one.

What I’m about to tell you is highly sensitive information that is usually only revealed to Scientology members after years of training and thousands of dollars worth of contributions to the church. It also comes with a warning that people who attain this knowledge before they are ready may well die from the shock. If that doesn’t scare you, read on.

Scientologists believe that 75 million years ago a creature named Xenu ruled over a Galactic Confederacy that included 26 stars and 76 planets. One of those planets was our very own home world, which back then was known as Teegeeack. At some point Xenu decided that he needed to ease overcrowding within his empire, so he summoned billions of his subjects together under the pretext of an income tax survey and paralyzed them with a mixture of alcohol and glycol.

He then flew his incapacitated captives to Teegeeack and stacked them around some of our more prominent volcanoes. Hydrogen bombs were then lowered into the volcanoes, and detonated.

The souls (called thetans in Scientology-speak) of his now-deceased subjects were released into our atmosphere, but quickly captured by Xenu in special electronic nets. The thetans were then transported to a massive 3-D cinema and shown movies that implanted certain ideas in their subconscious. These images would later form the basis of the world’s major religions, including Christianity.

After that, the thetans were released, and they began congregating in groups of thousands. Later these thetan clusters attached themselves to human bodies on our planet. They still haunt you and me to this day, unless you have progressed to the highest levels of Scientological enlightenment and gained the power to release these “body thetans.”

Now what in the Sam Hill does all of this have to do with psychiatry, you ask? Well, it turns out that when Xenu was rounding people up for the ill-fated trip to our planet - he was aided and abetted by those pseudo scientists we know as psychiatrists. So the enmity between Scientologists and psychiatry is millions of years old. I wouldn’t expect them to bury the hatchet any time soon

Back to the original question – is Scientology dangerous? If you’re like me, after reading the story above you probably have a hard time taking Scientology seriously enough to see it as dangerous. Such a religious system may prosper in the somewhat detached and inane world of Hollywood, but I don’t see it as any sort of threat to either established belief systems or to enlightened religious skepticism.

It’s just another example of how Hollywood is nothing like the real world, and another reason to see that actors should not be role models, for anyone.