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Coherence of Scientology

Hmm... well, I'll bet you said the same sorts of thing when you were a scientologist. You were probably pretty convinced that anyone who didn't have your understanding was delusional, though you might have said it using different words, then.

Some people leave the Church, but it stays with them.

I'm not sure what comparing someone who only had access to a copy of Dianetics and a list of pipe dreams it claimed to deliver has to do with trying to make sense of the incoherent babbling of an amphetamine addicted con man after you have access to all of his material and know it never even remotely come close to producing the results it promises.

I was never interested in becoming a Scientologist, I was perfectly content with my religion and was only interested in Dianetics, Once I understood that the only goal of Hubbard's material is to make the you Scientologist, I was no longer interested in any of it. Then a few years later when I read the Time Magazine article in 1991, I couldn't believe people continued to waste their time with it and it still baffles me to this day.
 

Panda Termint

Cabal Of One
Hmm... well, I'll bet you said the same sorts of thing when you were a scientologist. You were probably pretty convinced that anyone who didn't have your understanding was delusional, though you might have said it using different words, then.

Some people leave the Church, but it stays with them.
Yes indeed. :thumbsup:

In answer to the OP, in my view, there is an underlying or core belief which gives the subject an apparency of cohesion. It's somewhat at odds with the concept of "knowing how to know", for obvious reasons, yet it seems to underpin the thinking of almost every CofS scientologist I know.

The belief is this; Hubbard knows something about the mind/spirit/life (everything) which I don't know.

If you look at what scientologists actually do in scientology (and I mean anything from the most complex auditing procedures to cleaning windows) you will probably find this belief at its core.

I know that non-CofS scientologists may have a somewhat different concept of Hubbard's "infallibility" but I'd be very interested to know what they observe upon honest inspection of this concept (obviously, many have already done such inspection).
 

uniquemand

Unbeliever
Yes indeed. :thumbsup:

In answer to the OP, in my view, there is an underlying or core belief which gives the subject an apparency of cohesion. It's somewhat at odds with the concept of "knowing how to know", for obvious reasons, yet it seems to underpin the thinking of almost every CofS scientologist I know.

The belief is this; Hubbard knows something about the mind/spirit/life (everything) which I don't know.

If you look at what scientologists actually do in scientology (and I mean anything from the most complex auditing procedures to cleaning windows) you will probably find this belief at its core.

I know that non-CofS scientologists may have a somewhat different concept of Hubbard's "infallibility" but I'd be very interested to know what they observe upon honest inspection of this concept (obviously, many have already done such inspection).

I'm quite sure he knew a lot of things I don't know: how it feels to have tens of millions of dollars at your disposal, or minions to do your bidding, etc. I doubt he actually knew anything about the mind or spirit that cannot be known by my own study. I'd say that if you modify that belief just slightly, it rings my bell. Most scientologists believe that Hubbard ALONE could know all there was to know, and that anyone else was suspect, including themselves. I've shed that belief. Thanks, Ron!
 
I'm quite sure he knew a lot of things I don't know: how it feels to have tens of millions of dollars at your disposal, or minions to do your bidding, etc. I doubt he actually knew anything about the mind or spirit that cannot be known by my own study. I'd say that if you modify that belief just slightly, it rings my bell. Most scientologists believe that Hubbard ALONE could know all there was to know, and that anyone else was suspect, including themselves. I've shed that belief. Thanks, Ron!

The one thing he didn't know is how to be a decent human being. Hubbard had the means and plenty of opportunities to do the right thing, yet it's difficult to find a single instance where Hubbard decided to do something that wasn't self-serving. I guess one has to ask themselves would they trade their life with Hubbard's and live it exactly like Hubbard did if they had the opportunity to. I know my answer ... not a chance, I wouldn't even wish it on someone I didn't care for.
 

uniquemand

Unbeliever
I'm not sure what comparing someone who only had access to a copy of Dianetics and a list of pipe dreams it claimed to deliver has to do with trying to make sense of the incoherent babbling of an amphetamine addicted con man after you have access to all of his material and know it never even remotely come close to producing the results it promises.

I was never interested in becoming a Scientologist, I was perfectly content with my religion and was only interested in Dianetics, Once I understood that the only goal of Hubbard's material is to make the you Scientologist, I was no longer interested in any of it. Then a few years later when I read the Time Magazine article in 1991, I couldn't believe people continued to waste their time with it and it still baffles me to this day.

I can grok that. I went in with the goal of becoming an expert Dianetic auditor so that I could help my friends and family be free of "engrams", "secondaries", "locks" and so on. When I heard there was more, I was willing to look. When I found out that at no point did I feel like the goods were delivered, I left.

It wasn't black and white, with me, though, obviously. I was still interested in the theory of Dianetics, because while it didn't deliver what was promised, it DID deliver valuable things to my friends and family. Of course, the Church destroyed what they could of me and my family, and stripped whatever assets they could find, but this didn't invalidate the actual benefits that were obtained, in my view. Obviously, that's a kettle of fish that there will be lots of disagreement and upset over, but I will stand by what I observed with application amongst my friends and family. No, they did not go "Clear", or achieve "OT". Nobody had eidetic memory or cured illnesses. However, they did have better understanding of themselves, and it actually revolutionized the way we related to each other in a positive way (not the Church, but the results of having had some sessions). So, while I became disgusted by the Church, the theory of Dianetics became MORE interesting to me, rather than less so. Studying it from outside the Church allowed me to find out the origins and sources used by Hubbard, and then perverted for his own financial and domination-ego games. So, yes, you were correct in saying that my understanding of Dn and Scn (and GPMs) is not what Hubbard said. It is my own understanding. And while you may consider it a waste of time, or a delusion, I obviously do not. Many others will probably find a lot of truth and value in what I have written about it. If not, well, I gave it the old college try.

The one thing he didn't know is how to be a decent human being. Hubbard had the means and plenty of opportunities to do the right thing, yet it's difficult to find a single instance where Hubbard decided to do something that wasn't self-serving. I guess one has to ask themselves would they trade their life with Hubbard's and live it exactly like Hubbard did if they had the opportunity to. I know my answer ... not a chance, I wouldn't even wish it on someone I didn't care for.

Hubbard is, to me, largely irrelevant, except that I ran into his philosophy and Church before I ran into something more intellectually sound and free of the cultic trappings he created. I wish I had studied Korzybski and Freud more thoroughly in college, instead of so much Kafka and Dostoevsky. Would have saved me the trip down Dianetics lane. I'm certainly not recommending that people sit around saluting Hubbard, or selling Dianetics books. When I explain my understanding of something Hubbard talked about, it's not because I love the man, it's because this was an idea that I found interesting and central to the subject I'd studied, and a concept that I was able to export to normal living. That's the thing I don't understand: I get being angry at the Church, and Hubbard, but I don't understand rejecting ideas that you found to be true and valuable, even if the context they were put in was dangerous and yucky. Perhaps you simply didn't find any concepts that were true and valuable. I did. C'est la vie.
 

Student of Trinity

Silver Meritorious Patron
When I say that coherent explanations should 'make sense', I do not particularly mean that the explanation has to conform to previously held ideas or intuitions. Carroll's nonsense poem 'Jabberwocky' makes sense, as far as I'm concerned, even though much of it is sheer gibberish. Well, it's not as easy to make sense of the first and last stanza, about toves and mome raths. But the rest hang together as some sort of monster-slaying story. There are obvious questions concerning the next details about jub-jub birds and vorpality, but it's already clear, within the given text, what general kinds of things these must be.

But 'Jabberwocky' is a pretty carefully crafted story, for all its gibberish. I can easily imagine a screwed-up retelling of the story that would be totally incoherent. And in general it's possible to have an incoherent explanation of a coherent body of ideas. You just have to screw it up. So in math and physics, for instance, there are certainly a lot of student understandings that aren't very coherent. But in my experience, if you really understand these subjects they are coherent, in the sense I've described.

Already in this thread I've seen some pretty diverse descriptions of what the coherent core of Scientology really is. It could be that not everyone has understood the subject. But the other possibility is that Scientology really is not coherent. Instead, it's a set of loosely related notions, several subsets of which could be separated from the others without much loss. So different people pick and choose differently from among the options, and there's no clear way to tell whose chosen pieces are the fundamental ones. An outsider like me is simply left asking, Will the real Scientology please stand up?

Judging from what I've seen, both here and elsewhere, I think this is probably the case, and Scientology is incoherent. But maybe it really only falls apart into a few major chunks. Maybe 'mass' is incoherent, but the engram theory is coherent; or maybe GPM and ARC are two coherent chunks, that do not particularly connect to each other. Or maybe even the more coherent chunks fall apart further, when looked at more closely. Or maybe it all connects, and we just haven't seen it put properly yet.
 
Yes indeed. :thumbsup:

In answer to the OP, in my view, there is an underlying or core belief which gives the subject an apparency of cohesion. It's somewhat at odds with the concept of "knowing how to know", for obvious reasons, yet it seems to underpin the thinking of almost every CofS scientologist I know.

The belief is this; Hubbard knows something about the mind/spirit/life (everything) which I don't know.

If you look at what scientologists actually do in scientology (and I mean anything from the most complex auditing procedures to cleaning windows) you will probably find this belief at its core.

I know that non-CofS scientologists may have a somewhat different concept of Hubbard's "infallibility" but I'd be very interested to know what they observe upon honest inspection of this concept (obviously, many have already done such inspection).

Well, Panda, I've known an awful lot of scientologist who held to some such belief about Hubbard. But I've also known a few who didn't. The church is certainly 'Hubbard-centric' in its manifestation as a cult. Accordingly many scientologists come to believe that is what defines the subject. But that reflects ignorance, not insight, and although it is in conformance with church practices it it violates the fundamental principles of the subject.


Mark A. Baker

---------- Post added at 11:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:17 PM ----------

... Judging from what I've seen, both here and elsewhere, I think this is probably the case, and Scientology is incoherent. But maybe it really only falls apart into a few major chunks. Maybe 'mass' is incoherent, but the engram theory is coherent; or maybe GPM and ARC are two coherent chunks, that do not particularly connect to each other. Or maybe even the more coherent chunks fall apart further, when looked at more closely. Or maybe it all connects, and we just haven't seen it put properly yet.

As in physics, some 'chunks' are more fundamental than others. :coolwink:

GPMs & arc are such. GPMs are more complex structures. ARC is a more 'fundamental' mechanism. GPMs are envisioned as occurring when different goals, or considerations, are seen to conflict. Nonetheless, each goal, or consideration, itself exemplifies aspects of ARC. More complex mental/spiritual structures are the result of relationships arising from combinations of simpler ones.

Hence the importance of being able to recognize priorities and hierarchies in form as they relate to abstractions about thought. Same as in physics or any other discipline. :yes:

Hence also the difficulty in having an intelligent discussion about the matter with someone without at least some interest and a form of similar grounding in a mental/spiritual discipline as happens too often on esmb. :eyeroll:


Mark A. Baker
 
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Panda Termint

Cabal Of One
Well, Panda, I've known an awful lot of scientologist who held to some such belief about Hubbard. But I've also known a few who didn't. The church is certainly 'Hubbard-centric' in its manifestation as a cult. Accordingly many scientologists come to believe that is what defines the subject. But that reflects ignorance, not insight, and although it is in conformance with church practices it it violates the fundamental principles of the subject. <nip...>
Mark A. Baker
Undoubtedly, Mark. My experience is limited to CofS-scientologists in the main. In fact, I'd never met a non-CofS scientologist (who I thought of as a scientologist) until I arrived at ESMB in 2008.
 
Undoubtedly, Mark. My experience is limited to CofS-scientologists in the main. In fact, I'd never met a non-CofS scientologist (who I thought of as a scientologist) until I arrived at ESMB in 2008.

Yes, but my point is that not even all of the 'Co$ scientologists' buy into the church's Hubbard-centrism. Admittedly the non-conforming tend to be a distinctly small (verging on the miniscule) minority and these usually, although not always, migrate to the exits within a relatively short period of involvement. The latter being especially the likely as they may have encountered ethics trouble along the way.

But some do remain who, although functioning members of the church, never have agreed with substituting for their own judgement the determinations of higher authorities within the church. :yes:

It's a difficult road, and has become increasingly difficult over the years, but it is not an absolutely impossible one.


Mark A. Baker
 

Panda Termint

Cabal Of One
Mark A. Baker said:
Yes, but my point is that not even all of the 'Co$ scientologists' buy into the church's Hubbard-centrism.
LOL, it's obviously been some time since you were in a CofS. There may well be such scientologists somewhere but I've certainly never met one. Perhaps you're reading too much into my original comment.
 

Veda

Sponsor
LOL, it's obviously been some time since you were in a CofS. There may well be such scientologists somewhere but I've certainly never met one. Perhaps you're reading too much into my original comment.

The giant photos of Hubbard went up around 1968, 'LRH bronze busts' - with accompanying instructions for care and maintenance - appeared around 1963, "Have you ever had unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard?' appeared around 1960, with Hubbard's soon to follow explanation that ensuring that others did not have unkind thoughts about him was doing them a favor, as it would block their progress in Scientology.

Let's see... around 1960. Mmmm.... Hey, that's fifty years ago.

Amd even before that....

Oh never mind.:eyeroll:
 

Panda Termint

Cabal Of One
The giant photos of Hubbard went up around 1968, 'LRH bronze busts' - with accompanying instructions for care and maintenance - appeared around 1963, "Have you ever had unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard?' appeared around 1960, with Hubbard's soon to follow explanation that ensuring that others did not have unkind thoughts about him was doing them a favor, as it would block their progress in Scientology.

Let's see... around 1960. Mmmm.... Hey, that's fifty years ago.

Amd even before that....

Oh never mind.:eyeroll:
I think you may have misunderstood my contention, Veda. I'm not arguing as to an absence of belief in Hubbard as being the center of the scientology universe. I'm suggesting quite the opposite, in fact.
 
Yes, I have had unkind thoughts about Ron!

The giant photos of Hubbard went up around 1968, 'LRH bronze busts' - with accompanying instructions for care and maintenance - appeared around 1963, "Have you ever had unkind thoughts about L. Ron Hubbard?' appeared around 1960, with Hubbard's soon to follow explanation that ensuring that others did not have unkind thoughts about him was doing them a favor, as it would block their progress in Scientology.

Let's see... around 1960. Mmmm.... Hey, that's fifty years ago.

Amd even before that....

Oh never mind.:eyeroll:

All part of Ron's documented goal of "smashing his name into history". A lot of COS members have never read or even heard of his personal list of affirmations, visualizations and goals for his life. Possibly many who have think it's a "lie", which is their way of damping down the cognitive dissonance alarm bells of many such outpoints. :yes:

Panda, my perception is that Veda was just giving some practical examples of evidence which confirmed and supported what you were saying in response to Mark, and was not meaning to contradict you at all. But I won't speak for him! (Not being worthy to polish his shoes! :clever:)
 
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Veda

Sponsor
I think you may have misunderstood my contention, Veda. I'm not arguing as to an absence of belief in Hubbard as being the center of the scientology universe. I'm suggesting quite the opposite, in fact.

I know. My apologies if there was any confusion. I was indirectly responding to the world's smartest Scientologist, Mark A. Baker, to whom you were responding.
 

Veda

Sponsor
Re: Yes, I have had unkind thoughts about Ron!

All part of Ron's documented goal of "smashing his name into history". A lot of COS members have never read or even heard of his personal list of affirmations, visualizations and goals for his life. Possibly many who have think it's a "lie", which is their way of damping down the cognitive dissonance alarm bells of many such outpoints. :yes:

Panda, my perception is that Veda was just giving some practical examples of evidence which confirmed and supported what you were saying

-snip-

Thanks. :)

And Hubbard's "smash" his "name into history" "real goal" is the core of "Onion," an "Onion" from which dangle the twinkling ornaments of occasional truth that mesmerize Scientologists and make them Scientologists forever, and ever, and ever, Amen.
 
I can grok that. I went in with the goal of becoming an expert Dianetic auditor so that I could help my friends and family be free of "engrams", "secondaries", "locks" and so on. When I heard there was more, I was willing to look. When I found out that at no point did I feel like the goods were delivered, I left.

It wasn't black and white, with me, though, obviously. I was still interested in the theory of Dianetics, because while it didn't deliver what was promised, it DID deliver valuable things to my friends and family. Of course, the Church destroyed what they could of me and my family, and stripped whatever assets they could find, but this didn't invalidate the actual benefits that were obtained, in my view. Obviously, that's a kettle of fish that there will be lots of disagreement and upset over, but I will stand by what I observed with application amongst my friends and family. No, they did not go "Clear", or achieve "OT". Nobody had eidetic memory or cured illnesses. However, they did have better understanding of themselves, and it actually revolutionized the way we related to each other in a positive way (not the Church, but the results of having had some sessions). So, while I became disgusted by the Church, the theory of Dianetics became MORE interesting to me, rather than less so. Studying it from outside the Church allowed me to find out the origins and sources used by Hubbard, and then perverted for his own financial and domination-ego games. So, yes, you were correct in saying that my understanding of Dn and Scn (and GPMs) is not what Hubbard said. It is my own understanding. And while you may consider it a waste of time, or a delusion, I obviously do not. Many others will probably find a lot of truth and value in what I have written about it. If not, well, I gave it the old college try.



Hubbard is, to me, largely irrelevant, except that I ran into his philosophy and Church before I ran into something more intellectually sound and free of the cultic trappings he created. I wish I had studied Korzybski and Freud more thoroughly in college, instead of so much Kafka and Dostoevsky. Would have saved me the trip down Dianetics lane. I'm certainly not recommending that people sit around saluting Hubbard, or selling Dianetics books. When I explain my understanding of something Hubbard talked about, it's not because I love the man, it's because this was an idea that I found interesting and central to the subject I'd studied, and a concept that I was able to export to normal living. That's the thing I don't understand: I get being angry at the Church, and Hubbard, but I don't understand rejecting ideas that you found to be true and valuable, even if the context they were put in was dangerous and yucky. Perhaps you simply didn't find any concepts that were true and valuable. I did. C'est la vie.

Perhaps but I don't have any desire picking through a mountain of Hubbard's excrement looking for a few raisins which he happened to forget to poison, especially when those raisins are obsolete.

I suppose people might possibly get some value by dedicate their time to learning how to programming punch cards in FORTRAN using cryptic terms from a book by a man who claims to have invented FORTRAN and got it wrong from it, but in my opinion it would make much more sense to learn how to program in an object oriented language with material that was not designed to create a group of people to worship the author of the book while hiding the prior existence of FORTRAN. I'm not sure pushing the value of FORTRAN in cryptic terms would get too many people to take them seriously today, even if FORTRAN was widely used 50 years ago to build scientific computing applications

If I saw any evidence of people getting their shit together using Hubbard's material I might find it interesting, but I have found just the opposite. What I saw and continue to see if a trail of broken lives as a result of studying his concepts. I can't say I've ran across a single person who puts value in Hubbard's Tech that I would consider having his or her shit together, what I see is people still trying to convince themselves that they are better off after Hubbard's brainwashing than people who never ran across anything Hubbard ever wrote, and those are the lucky ones who haven't become batshit crazy as a result of it. I could see your point if Scientology resulted in mental stability instead of insanity, but there is no evidence of it.
 

uniquemand

Unbeliever
Perhaps but I don't have any desire picking through a mountain of Hubbard's excrement looking for a few raisins which he happened to forget to poison, especially when those raisins are obsolete.

I suppose people might possibly get some value by dedicate their time to learning how to programming punch cards in FORTRAN using cryptic terms from a book by a man who claims to have invented FORTRAN and got it wrong from it, but in my opinion it would make much more sense to learn how to program in an object oriented language with material that was not designed to create a group of people to worship the author of the book while hiding the prior existence of FORTRAN. I'm not sure pushing the value of FORTRAN in cryptic terms would get too many people to take them seriously today, even if FORTRAN was widely used 50 years ago to build scientific computing applications

If I saw any evidence of people getting their shit together using Hubbard's material I might find it interesting, but I have found just the opposite. What I saw and continue to see if a trail of broken lives as a result of studying his concepts. I can't say I've ran across a single person who puts value in Hubbard's Tech that I would consider having his or her shit together, what I see is people still trying to convince themselves that they are better off after Hubbard's brainwashing than people who never ran across anything Hubbard ever wrote, and those are the lucky ones who haven't become batshit crazy as a result of it. I could see your point if Scientology resulted in mental stability instead of insanity, but there is no evidence of it.

Ah, I see your misunderstanding. You think that I am advocating that people use Hubbard's system.

Allow me to clarify that for you, since you seem to have missed it in every single other post I have made.

I do NOT advocate that people use Hubbard's system.

Now that that is out of the way (again), let's take a look at your contention that the raisin in question is obsolete.

Reviewing incidents that have continued to bother a person, or finding incidents that "contain" a symptom that someone wants help with and then reviewing from that point backwards, is NOT obsolete. In fact, it is so thoroughly proven that it is accepted as DOGMA in certain branches of psychology (Pavlovian Flooding, Wolpe's Systematic Desensitization), where the legendary dogs have chains of association, and this theory has proven to extend to humans. Exact therapeutical methods are not agreed upon, but the fact that people have traumatic incidents, and the fact that they are chained together through associative cues that can cause re-enactment and distress based on environmental stimuli really are not questioned. That being said, I will repeat that I had success with my friends and family "auditing" them using the Book One Dianetics procedure, as well as applying very similar technique to "overts and withholds" ("earlier similar", or retrospective analysis, applied to a specific thing they considered a "sin", or to guilt of one kind or another). After leaving the Church, and discovering that Gerbode's metapsychology existed, I abandoned Hubbard's "reactive mind" theory in favor of Gerbode's "traumatic incident network" which is both more sophisticated and more elegant.

So, to repeat (because apparently this keeps being missed), I do NOT advocate using Dianetics, or becoming involved with Scientology. I DID find things of value, but as you say, I had to sort through piles of crap, and got quite confused and covered in crap in the process. What I took away from it was NOT scientology understanding, and I was told this repeatedly by scientologists, though my understanding was something they recognized and often agreed with as a better, more flexible approach with superior theoretical basis and without the cult baggage. During this time, I referred to my efforts to gain this understanding as a quest to create "cosmology neutral tech". Then I discovered it had already been done by people with far better qualifications than myself, and that they had gone further than I had with theory development, application development, scientific study, etc.

So, now, if you'd like, you can repeat how Dianetics and Scientology are obsolete, pretend that's what I'm advocating, and mistake explanations about particular scientology concepts for advocating their use IN SCIENTOLOGY (which I am not doing, but you can continue to misunderstand that and misrepresent it).

Have a nice day!
 
Re: Coherence of Scientology Nuances of hubbard worship.

Yes indeed. :thumbsup:

In answer to the OP, in my view, there is an underlying or core belief which gives the subject an apparency of cohesion. It's somewhat at odds with the concept of "knowing how to know", for obvious reasons, yet it seems to underpin the thinking of almost every CofS scientologist I know.

The belief is this; Hubbard knows something about the mind/spirit/life (everything) which I don't know.

If you look at what scientologists actually do in scientology (and I mean anything from the most complex auditing procedures to cleaning windows) you will probably find this belief at its core.

I know that non-CofS scientologists may have a somewhat different concept of Hubbard's "infallibility" but I'd be very interested to know what they observe upon honest inspection of this concept (obviously, many have already done such inspection).


I don't disagree with this but I do think there are variations in the way a scientologist arrives at the belief in Hubbard. I think some people seem to grab onto the idea of hubbard as a person being infallible or so authorative because of perceived "genius" that he must be right quite early. Some others may find the "tech" seems to work and cannot see anything comparable anywhere else so may think that the tech is unquestionable because they have proven for themselves that it "works" but may not go so far in thinking that hubbard was a "genius". I don't think I went in for the hubbard = genius as much as one or two people I can remember, although I did think the "tech" was fairly unquestionably always right. Of course I may be deluding myself here a bit with some revisionist rewriting of my own history, I accept that, but I don't think I fell in love with hubbard the infallible as much as some others even though I thought the tech was just plain and simply right.
Another aspect of this for me, is that I think that if I had finished a dianetics course and done grades training and audited others I would have become more and more focused on hubbard as infallible.
Another way of putting this is to say I may have thought that hubbard was infallible
(can't remember) or a genius, but it did not bite deeply. The genius part was probably "real" to me, but the infallible part may have been relatively less real - and would have become more real the longer I stayed. Nuances.

Edit: Actually I scan-read Pandas post too fast the first time and now the penny has dropped that he said this:
"...The belief is this; Hubbard knows something about the mind/spirit/life (everything) which I don't know..."
Which covers different depths and nuances of belief in the infallibility of hubbard.
 

SchwimmelPuckel

Genuine Meatball
I wasn't even planning to add anything in this thread, interesting as it is..

Scientology certainly IS incoherent and lacking in internal consistency. My ass hurts from the many falls due to failure of suspension of disbelief..

But I was wondering just why scientologists can reconcile the inconsistencies in their minds?

Thought stopping beliefs, or programming, or you could even call it 'implants' explains it I think. Some of this is very up front in Scientology doctrine.. Like the idea that 'A=A=A' is 'banky' and bad. In fact it's dangerous for your mental health, this banky thinking..

So how is that 'thought stopping'?

Associative thinking and healthy 'pattern recognition' will be 'recognised' as 'A=A=A'.. If you see something that is similar or like something else, you will have small alarmbells going off in your Hubbardian Mind... So when you feel uneasy by the RPF and thinks it's similar to the Soviet Gulags.. Why that's 'A=A=A' and you reassure yourself that these things have no relation to each other and are quite different. And you congratulate yourself on your 'sanity', because Hubbard said that the 'ability to differentiate' is sanity.

Another thought stopping 'mechanism' is the rather curious idea that Supressive Persons speak in generalities.. Scientologists have caught onto to that with a vengeance. It's possibly the most 'popular' Hubbard implant around.. So scientologists watch themselves a lot so as not falling into the trap of speaking in generalities. And they are always alert and ready to slam someone else for using a generality... This hampers thinking and speaking in many ways.

And the whole indoctrination about 'doubt'.. And the indoctrination about Misunderstoods.. Ethichs al'a honourable warlord Bolivar and changed surreptitiously into being about 'loyalty' to 'a leader'.. A step down from 'morality' even.

:duh:
 
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