Scientology

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there Sara was able to convince Hubbard to agree to a divorce and she took full custody of the baby.

Hubbard was aware from the get go that creating a religion could generate him a lot of money. He was heard to have said many times that he knew that all he had to do was get the IRS to acknowledge the church as a real religious church and he would be in business. They, unfortunately for him, did not see it, and thought the church was run like a business. Hubbard still refused to pay his taxes, and in no time the IRS was after him for tax evasion. He knew he couldn’t afford to pay this money, so he created the Sea Org as a way to escape the IRS. The Sea Org was “the most dedicated group of Scientologists” who “signed a million year contract to serve” Hubbard on a boat that had no definite destination (Scientology Frequently Asked Questions 1 and Gibney 1). The boat set out going from port to port in order to stay in international waters where U.S laws couldn’t reach him. He told the Sea Org members that in multiple of his past lives he was a prince who had hidden treasure in multiple Mediterranean countries, and they were on a mission to find all of it. Sea Org members were the most dedicated members of Scientology, so they say Hubbard as a God-like figure and worshiped everything he said. This large group of people legitimately thought this man could remember previous lives and that this wild goose chase for riches was realistic. On the boat Hubbard would “overboard” Sea Org members as punishment. Anyone Hubbard deemed worthy of punishment would get pushed off the side of the boat into the water. Word eventually reached other countries that this man was evading the law, and coastal cities stopped allowing them to stay in their ports. With nowhere to turn to, Hubbard had to come back to America. The ship somehow managed to get Hubbard back into America undetected, and from that point on he lived in isolation and hiding.

Hubbard always swore by the magic of auditing. He said that his efforts in the navy resulted in him becoming blind (which was false) and that Scientology and auditing cured him. The more a person participates in auditing, the higher a person moves up the ladder of the levels of OT. Once a person reaches OT III, they are given access to Hubbard’s confidential files concerning the religious background of Scientology. Reading these files is the first time a Scientologist learns about the history of the religion. Most churches, you can walk in and know the story of Jesus Christ, Allah, or Buddha in about five minutes. In Scientology, you don’t know the basis of the religion until you’re five years and thousands of dollars deep. The documents lay out basically this. Billions of years ago, there was another galaxy somewhere that contained planets that housed a population of people that built a world that looked almost identical to that of Earth in the 1950s (coincidence much?). They were controlled by “Galactic Overlord Xenu” who had a “galactic confederation of 76 planets”, who was basically the dictator of the entire galaxy (Headley 1). He had an overpopulation problem on his planets, so he took a large portion of his people to his prison planet, Earth. He flash froze all of them and put them on spaceships and sent them to Earth, where he dropped them into volcanos. After they were all dropped into volcanos he dropped hydrogen bombs into the volcanos. This huge chain of explosions supposedly created these thetans that inhabit every person’s body. Most people that have made it past the 8th grade can come up with dozens of reasons why this story just could not possibly have happened, just beginning with the fact that those volcanoes physically could not have existed billions of years ago. This is the point where a lot of people start to question what they’ve gotten themselves into, and a good portion leave at this point, but most are so involved at this point that they’ll either believe anything or just try to ignore that portion altogether.

Hubbard felt he had one last innately evil engram in his body that couldn’t be expelled by regular auditing. He had a fellow Scientologist build him a machine very similar to an E-Meter, but when it was switched on, it would send an electric current through the wires and cans into Hubbard’s body that had the capability of killing him. It was basically a suicide mission to expel this engram. There was a mishap with the machine, and while he was still severely electrocuted, he did not die, but instead “died of a stroke a matter of months later” on January 24, 1986 (L. Ron Hubbard 1). Taking his place as chairman of the church was David Miscavige. In Scientology there was a concept that 98% of the people in the world were good people beneath their thetans, and only about 2% were Suppressive Persons who could not be helped. Miscavage lived in a state of paranoia that led him to believe the opposite, that nearly everyone was out to take down Scientology and he could only trust a select few. He had caught Hubbard’s eye from a young age. He had lots of ambition and drive to be involved in Scientology. Miscavige became chairman of the board at just about the time Scientology was taking on their biggest challenge yet, the IRS.

The church up to this point was not recognized by the IRS as a religion, but still refused to pay taxes. The IRS finally sued the church of Scientology for a tax bill of over one billion dollars. The church at this point was collectively only worth a few million, so they had no choice but to fight for tax exemption or be shut down. The Church had an “Attack the Attackers” policy that basically stated that anyone who was a potentially threat to the church was fair game for foul play. “Individual Scientologists sued the IRS and even sued individual IRS members” for multiple frauds, some not even concerning Scientology’s position as a church (Gibney 1). There were a total of 2,400 law suits against the IRS and their employees by the church of Scientology. The church proposed that all the lawsuits would be dropped if it was recognized as a religion and tax exempt. Shortly after on October 1, 1993, Scientology was recognized as an official religion and the church and all its sectors were tax exempt, and as promised, all the lawsuits were dropped.

The Celebrity Centre is a very important sector of the church. It was vital for the church’s image to be praised by the celebrities that practiced the religion. The most important man in Scientology in Miscavige’s eyes was Tom Cruise. He was deeply involved with the church in the years preceding his marriage to Nicole Kidman. But after he met her his involvement dropped off. Kidman was also a worry to the church because her father was a psychologist, which classified him as a Suppressive Person. This worried Miscavage to the point that he was willing