Student of Trinity
Silver Meritorious Patron
A problem for any religion, or for any system of ideas for that matter, is just to hold together. If we think of the system as a nation state, the challenge is to prevent individual sections from seceding, or even to avoid splintering into many separate countries.
Some systems of thought are really tightly federalized, so to speak. Everything in them flows rigorously from a few basic axioms, making it essentially impossible to accept some parts of the system, without accepting the whole thing in a block. This is 'coherence'. The system holds together.
Other systems are not so coherent. A lot of them have loose bits around the edges, that people can take or leave, even if there is a central core that holds together very well. The major world religions seem like this to me, for instance. They all come in lots of flavors by now, but the differences among flavors of one religion are relatively minor, and the cores are robustly recognizable.
So how does Scientology stand, regarding coherence? Is it really a unit, whose parts all lock together tightly and inherently? Are there parts of Scientology that are kind of just tacked on to the rest? Or is most of Scientology really just a heap of unrelated components, packaged together by Hubbard and sold under one label?
I have to say that Hubbard's ridiculously long list of so-called 'Axioms' does not suggest to me a tightly coherent body of doctrine. But I'm open to argument.
Aside from the question of whether Scientology actually is coherent, I'm also interested in what Scientology says about its own coherence. Does Scientology do a lot of teaching about how it all holds together, or does it just throw out a bunch of separate Hubbard treatises, on everything from exteriorization to washing windows, and let Scientologists decide how to use it?
The reason I ask is that I've been puzzled for a long time by something in the way Scientologists speak about Scientology. I've finally put my finger on what this puzzling thing is. It's that they speak almost entirely in generalities. They hardly ever say, "Making clay models of abstract concepts helps people understand them", or "Shouting 'Be three feet back of your head!' induces an out-of-body experience." They tend to say, "the tech works" or "Scientology works." The claimed successful effect is usually expressed as a vague generality, "working" or "handling". And the claimed successful cause is expressed at the same level, "Scientology" or "the tech".
Is this vagueness perhaps deliberately inculcated in Scientologists? Are Scientologists actually trained, perhaps surreptitiously, to flee from concrete details into hazy abstractions? If so, does this training perhaps serve the purpose of preventing Scientologists from realizing that what works is not 'the tech', as such and in general, but only a handful of unrelated techniques that Commodore Hubbard assembled in convoy under his flag?
In other words, does Scientology really only trick people into believing that Scientology even exists as a coherent system of ideas?
Some systems of thought are really tightly federalized, so to speak. Everything in them flows rigorously from a few basic axioms, making it essentially impossible to accept some parts of the system, without accepting the whole thing in a block. This is 'coherence'. The system holds together.
Other systems are not so coherent. A lot of them have loose bits around the edges, that people can take or leave, even if there is a central core that holds together very well. The major world religions seem like this to me, for instance. They all come in lots of flavors by now, but the differences among flavors of one religion are relatively minor, and the cores are robustly recognizable.
So how does Scientology stand, regarding coherence? Is it really a unit, whose parts all lock together tightly and inherently? Are there parts of Scientology that are kind of just tacked on to the rest? Or is most of Scientology really just a heap of unrelated components, packaged together by Hubbard and sold under one label?
I have to say that Hubbard's ridiculously long list of so-called 'Axioms' does not suggest to me a tightly coherent body of doctrine. But I'm open to argument.
Aside from the question of whether Scientology actually is coherent, I'm also interested in what Scientology says about its own coherence. Does Scientology do a lot of teaching about how it all holds together, or does it just throw out a bunch of separate Hubbard treatises, on everything from exteriorization to washing windows, and let Scientologists decide how to use it?
The reason I ask is that I've been puzzled for a long time by something in the way Scientologists speak about Scientology. I've finally put my finger on what this puzzling thing is. It's that they speak almost entirely in generalities. They hardly ever say, "Making clay models of abstract concepts helps people understand them", or "Shouting 'Be three feet back of your head!' induces an out-of-body experience." They tend to say, "the tech works" or "Scientology works." The claimed successful effect is usually expressed as a vague generality, "working" or "handling". And the claimed successful cause is expressed at the same level, "Scientology" or "the tech".
Is this vagueness perhaps deliberately inculcated in Scientologists? Are Scientologists actually trained, perhaps surreptitiously, to flee from concrete details into hazy abstractions? If so, does this training perhaps serve the purpose of preventing Scientologists from realizing that what works is not 'the tech', as such and in general, but only a handful of unrelated techniques that Commodore Hubbard assembled in convoy under his flag?
In other words, does Scientology really only trick people into believing that Scientology even exists as a coherent system of ideas?