The following message was first sent to the list ivy-subscribers, a private Internet list available to all who subscribe to the (on paper) clearing tech magazine, International Viewpoints. (see http://home8.inet.tele.dk/ivy/ or write the editor: ivy@post8.tele.dk) From: PJSpickler@aol.com Received: from PJSpickler@aol.com for Sun, 12 Jan 2003 01:04:01 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 01:04:01 EST Subject: IVySubs: Church or business? a study in split personalities To: ivy-subscribers@lightlink.com ** ivy-subscribers relaying ** Good evening! If I were to write a history of Dianetics and Scientology, I should probably be well advised in advance of doing so by friends and relatives to get my head examined before undertaking such an activity. I shall be more content to remain an imperfect walking history book of the aforementioned subjects, and occasionally, when the mood overtakes me, to emit some historical information and someone's thoughts and feelings about said emission. Dianetics, as all will remember or eventually find out, did not come to us as a religion. It came to us as the "modern science of mental health." That's right! it was considered to be a science. This notion of it being a science has been argued and disputed over the years by real or imagined scientists who were much more apt to believe that structure monitors function than that function monitors structure. Sometimes folks just know something and claim it to be a scientific fact, meaning the end product of all the rigorous things that science demands before something can legitimately be called a scientific fact, but here they are, claiming something to be a scientific fact without the science to back it up. The scientific community (a generality) has been and is pretty hard on any individual or group that lays claim to a scientific fact without the science to back it up being present. Some centuries ago, a chap called Kepler, an astronomer and mathematician, announced a lot of information about the planetary bodies without the science to back up his premises, and it wasn't until some time later that his conclusions were found to be extraordinarily accurate. He had the fortune or misfortune to simply know something, and I like to think that scientific criteria to the contrary, it always has been and will continue to be possible to just plain KNOW something. Knowing something can make a person either vary popular or very unpopular. In L. Ron Hubbard's case, he claimed to know a great deal about the human mind and its workings, and placed his knowingness of these matters far beyond the accepted authorities of the day, such as psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, quite a bit of philosophy, and most certainly let's not leave out the religions. Well, this knowingness certainly got Ron into lots of trouble, especially since he made no bones about challenging the 1950 existing establishment that was holding the mental and spiritual monopoly of that time. In 1950 and '51, Ron and any number of Dianetic practitioners could and did get into trouble with laws in various states that forbade the practice of psychological or psychotherapeutic disciplines that were not accredited and/or licensed by these states, especially if there was something called "money" involved in such practice. I think it is fair to say that it was the difficulty in authenticating practitioners of Dianetics that finally led Mr. Hubbard and his followers, at least some of them, to the establishment of a religion and a church. This establishment surprised many of us early Dianeticists, and seemed a repugnant and repellant idea that invalidated a Dianetic view of religions and their churches as being one of the mentally and emotionally unhealthy things that humankind might be exposed to. If you doubt this, all you need to do is Dianetically help another to find out what effect religion may have had on messing up the human mind. So now a science it is no more -- it's a religion, with a church; and its practitioners are ministers; and it's incorporated as a tax-exempt not-for-profit religious and educational etc. etc. etc. And so now, for better or for worse, we're looking at a group that can operate in the field of the spirit and the mind, and even the body, and do so without getting charged with practicing psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, or medicine, without a license; 'cause we know that if you do practice those things without a license, you get into a lot of trouble, largely due to the fact that you are interfering with the income, with the finances, of said bodies. And there is no greater sin than having to do with the vast sums of money that are possible to those disciplines, and what you're required to do before you're allowed to feed at the financial trough. Well, having a church now gave Mr. Hubbard a platform in which he could continue to challenge and decry the abuses and the ignorance of the mental health establishment, and under the banner of spiritual healing even take some good healthy shots, uppercuts and right hooks if you will, at American medicine as exemplified by one of his oldest opponents, the American Medical Association It is of some interest, at least to me, that the United States is one of the only civilized (or perhaps I should say uncivilized) and overdeveloped countries in the world today that does not have a universal health plan for its citizens, and that every attempt over the decades to get one has been successfully destroyed in large part by the political clout of the medical establishment in this country, even though the medical bill in the United States at this moment has recently been tabulated at a number that works out to over $5,000 per year for every man, woman, and child in this country, even though there are millions of Americans with no health insurance and without adequate access to medical assistance. Well, just one more fact, and then I'll get off Mr. Hubbard's and perhaps my favorite hobby horse. In the last few years, a very reputable body here in the United States called the National Academy of Science etc. etc., after a very thorough investigation of death caused by medical malfeasance, found that in a given year, approximately 100,000 citizens -- yes, that's 100,000 citizens -- die through avoidable medical error. Can you think of any other group, business or otherwise, that could kill 100,000 of their customers without losing credibility and without very heavy consequences for such statistics? That gives you some idea of how powerful the medical lobby and structure is in this part of the world. Anyhow, coming back to Mr. Hubbard and his church: although Ron was capable of assuming any number of beingnesses, they were usually to be found in the area of heroic warrior, starship commander, intergalactic tough guy, warship commodore, etc. etc., just to give you an idea of one of his favorite flavors. (I'm sorry I left out explorer and writer.) But anyhow, now he's got a church, and is expected to obey all the things that make a thing look like a church and sound like a church, as well as maintaining the strict requirements for maintaining a tax-exempt organization, which are usually closely looked into by states and the federal government until such a church has been around for 50 or 100 years to prove that it's doing with money what it says it's doing Well, it wasn't too long after incorporating as a church that Mr. Hubbard, by getting just past the midpoint of the 1950's, stopped following the letter of the laws that govern tax-exempt organizations and remained in flagrant violation of such laws nationally and internationally, until finally, sometime I believe in the 1990's, his latter-day minions were able to cut a deal with the Internal Revenue Service so that the churches of Scientology could regain their tax-exempt status (real or imagined). This occurred after making more unnecessary trouble for himself and his organizations and us practitioners in the field than I care to remember; and although it was one hell of a game, it was an unnecessary game, an aberrating game, and I saw very few if any people, including Mr. Hubbard himself, that ever thought it was fun. The schizophrenia of maintaining that one is a church with tax-exempt privileges while operating as a business with money as a motivation drove Mr. Hubbard and many of his followers, including yours truly, right over the edge and into the abyss. I think on that note I shall end this historical vignette for the moment, and promise in the next installment of the Perils of Pauline (just kidding) to take up, with the help of certain philosophers and my own experience, the idea or ideals of how it might be possible to practice one or more of the healing arts without losing your soul to the lure and attractions of money, even though your services may be sought after by many and the tendency of some of your customers to idolize you. I hope to explore such possibilities. Thank you ,............. ** Home Page: http://home8.inet.tele.dk/ivy/ - with extensive links to FZ! ** **************************************************** There were comments to the list on the above. While we have blanket OK from Phil to place his ivy-subscribers contributions in Homer's Archives, I have to ask individually for others. One person, who refused permission, referred to a book on Kepler, and quoted the following from it: "When all these data were collected [by Tyco Brahe] they came into the hands of Kepler, who then tried to analyse what kind of motion the planets made around the sun. And he did this by a method of trial and error. At one stage he thought he had it; he figured out that they want round the sun in circles with the sun off centre. Then Kepler noticed that one planet, I think it was Mars, was eight minutes of arc off, and he decided this was too big for Tycho Brahe to have made an error, and that this was not the right answer. So because of the precision of the experiments he was able to proceed to another trial and ultimately found out three things. * * * Some several years later Keplar found a third rule . . ." Feynman, THE CHARACTER OF PHYSICAL LAW , pp. 5-6.