Investigate the Vatican

I just finished Lawrence Wright's long and ambitious piece in this week's New Yorker on Scientology, and on writer/director Paul Haggis's recent break with the religion. As a magazine editor, I applaud Wright's impulse to do the story, and I'm kicking myself for not calling Haggis myself the day I heard of his defection from Scientology, back in the fall of 2009. Unlike me, Wright did call Haggis, and he's written an important piece. I will say that the resulting piece is by turns fascinating and boring, as the story of Haggis's experience of finding himself increasingly under the sway of what he would later come to describe as a cult is interspersed with a long recitation of what might be described as the liturgy of Scientology, which entails accounting for the history of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. This description of the founding myth of a religion that now claims eight million adherents worldwide is familiar to anyone who's been paying attention to the occasional long and ambitious pieces on Scientology that one enterprising journalist or other produces every few years or so. Quoting from Wright's piece:

"A major cause of mankind's problems began 75 million years ago," the Times wrote, when the planet Earth, then called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of ninety planets under the leadership of a despotic ruler named Xenu. "Then, as now, the materials state, the chief problem was overpopulation." Xenu decided "to take radical measures." The documents explained that surplus beings were transported to volcanoes on Earth. "The documents state that H-bombs far more powerful than any in existence today were dropped on these volcanoes, destroying the people but freeing their spirits — called thetans — which attached themselves to one another in clusters." Those spirits were "trapped in a compound of frozen alcohol and glycol," then "implanted" with "the seed of aberrant behavior." The Times account concluded, "When people die, these clusters attach to other humans and keep perpetuating themselves."

The Times Wright mentions is the Los Angeles Times, which had gotten hold of a secret doctrinal scribbling left by Hubbard. Between the thetans and the volcanoes and the implantation of aberrant behavior and the dreaded Xenu, this is either a treatment for the worst movie ever made, or... it's your basic bewildering founding myth of any religion found anywhere on earth.

I mean, I grew up believing that every breath I drew sent a god-made-man named Jesus Christ writhing on the cross to which he had been nailed — an execution for which he had been sent to earth by his heavenly father thousands of years ago, so that he might die for my sins so that I might live. And yet I was born not innocent but complicit in this lynching, incomprehensibly having to apologize and atone for this barbarism for all my days and feel terrible about myself and all mankind. And not only that...

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/scientology-vs-catholicism-5204435?src=rss

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