South Park and Scientology

Last week, South Park, one of my favourite TV shows, decided to poke fun at Scientology ("Trapped in the Closet"). The beliefs of this religion, as presented in the show, seemed so outlandish that I had to Google Scientology. What the heck are thetans, and are we really controlled by them? What, exactly, is an E-meter? What's this business about an intergalactic war in an overpopluated universe millions of years ago, and all the thetans being sucked up into huge vacuums, brainwashed, and stuck on earth thinking they're human? And will Tom Cruise ever come out of the closet?

The first result Google turned up was the Church of Scientology Official Site. The site is nicely laid out, with a lot of white space, and is very easy to navigate. You can learn about Scientology and what Scientologists believe, and find out that thetan is more or less another word for soul, and that it is the most important of the three parts of man - the other two being mind and body, of course. You can also learn about the late L. Ron Hubbard, the creator of Scientology. The man really must warrant the absolute devotion of his followers that Matt and Trey, creators of South Park, made fun of, since his biography just goes on and on... The man sure did write a lot of fiction in his time.

I recommend checking out the Newsroom on the site. Here you can find out about something called Silent Birth, which dictates that a women shouldn't make a peep while giving birth. "This is because any words spoken are recorded in the reactive mind and can have an aberrative effect on the mother and the child." Now, I have never given birth, but it seems to me that if some man should tell me to be quiet while I'm in the midst of labour pains, it's going to have the reverse effect. I didn't find out anything about ancient space wars or theton-sucking brainwashing facilities on the Church of Scientology's official website.

"Operation Clambake: Undressing the Church of Scientology since 1996" was the second result Google turned up. It is also reported by other anti-scientologists to be "the number one anti-Scientologist resource on the web." This is a horribly designed website. The home page doesn't tell really tell me what's going on on the website, and the nav bar only reveals a small part of the site. However, by clicking on the different links on the home page, you'll find some really interesting information about the religion. Such as the stuff about an intergalactic war that took place 75 million years ago. Courtesy of ex-scientologist Roland Rashleigh-Berry, here is the "Xenu Leaflet":

Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack.

Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were overpopulated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.

Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyse them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).

These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralysed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.

The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).

After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".

When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.

As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xenu is still alive today.

Normally, when South Park makes fun of some thing, body, or organization, they have to resort to good old fiction to get the best laughs. Not so with Scientology. All the show's producers had to do, it seems, was portray the truth.

A slightly better designed website than Operation Clambake, Scientology Lies takes a good critical look at what's wrong with the religion. A scroll through all of the reported lies is a little scary. Not as scary as the website Scientology Kills, though. This is only one of many sites dedicated to the memory of those who's deaths have been linked to involvement with the Church of Scientology. This particlular site is well designed, with a gothic elegance, and is easy to navigate.

Wikipedia is a good place to get a wholistic picture of Scientology. Not the most aesthetically pleasing website, Wikipedia can always be relied upon to provide reliable information on all sides of an issue - the good, the bad, and the controversial. And it's an easy site to navigate through.

As for Tom Cruise? He did come out of the closet at the end of the episode.

Me, I think I'm gonna start up my own philosophy: Humanimism. We are all human, and part of the world around us.

Stan, making his first public appearance as the reincarnation of L. Ron Hubbard.