After nearly three decades of being refused due to what can only be described as religious prejudice, the Church of Scientology has last week obtained tax-exempt status from South Africa, a fitting recognition for a religion that has done much to promote peace, education and morality in South Africa.

Here’s an article about Scientology in South Africa.

Well, things are getting crazy in Germany again - instead of banning Judaism as they did last century, they are trying to ban the Church of Scientology (which they’ve never recognized as a church despite its religious bonafides) out of pure old-fashioned NAZI-style bigotry.

For the truth about what Scientology is and does, go to www.scientology.org or to some of its many activities for social betterment, such as CCHR or Narconon, or its literacy crusade, or read any of the basic books on Scientology for yourself.

I’ve been involved for 36 years, and been an ordained minister of the Church of Scientology for …

I get asked this question quite a bit: “What is Scientology?” For many years I would reply with the response I learned in the Scientology catechism over 30 years ago, when I became a minister of the Church of Scientology of California. (And yes, we do have a catechism). I would say, “Scientology is an applied religious philosophy.” Unfortunately, most people don’t seem to understand that reply, probably because they don’t know what an applied philosophy would be…. They get the same confused look they get when you reel off a bunch of buzzwords. So I don’t use that particular response from …

No, it’s not some kooky mind-control cult. Any one of the tens of thousands of practicing Scientologists in the United States will give you his or her own viewpoint about it. If they were all mind controlled, wouldn’t they give you the same story? It’s always different, from one person to another, how they got into it and why they stayed and what they are getting out of it. They may all want to obliterate psychiatry (what sane person doesn’t!) but other than that they are all pretty different. They may send their children to schools that use the study technology developed …

The house where L. Ron Hubbard lived in Phoenix, Arizona in 1952 has been restored to the way it looked then, including many of the original decorations, furniture, carpets, drapes and so on. It is (from what I’ve heard from people who visited it) like stepping into a time machine to the early 1950s. 1952 was the year L. Ron Hubbard’s research led him inexorably to the conclusion that the human mind (the subject of which was covered in his book “Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health” was only one part of the oganism that is a human. There was, of …

L. Ron Hubbard wrote a lot of books. I have several bookshelves groaning under the weight of his books, and I re-read them at least once a decade, as I do C.J. Cherryh, Iain M. Banks, Robert Silverberg, and Vernor Vinge.

From time to time I’ve seen blog postings from people who should know better, dismissing Hubbard as a “hack” or a “bad SF writer”. As this post will demonstrate, they couldn’t be more mistaken.

When I was a teenager (back before dirt), I first read his “Ole Doc Methuselah” tales and asked the Jospehine County librarians to keep an eye …

I get a weekly email from “Cecile”, called the Optimism Newsletter. It is unfailingly optimistic and I find myself looking forward to it every Friday after the weekly barrage of bad news from regular news sources. That and Randy Casingham’s “This is True” newsletter (in which Randy re-phrases news stories, adding his own hysterically funny punchlines), make up most of the “Good News” emails I get in a week.

Today Cecile quoted Will Durant:

Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom. …

For the last week or so, the Church of Scientology of Portland has been sponsoring a Volunteer Ministers‘ Cavalcade in Pioneer Square in Portland. They put up a huge yellow tent and spoke with anyone who wanted to talk. In one week they had about 4500 people go through the tent, looking at the exhibits, reading about solutions to drugs, illiteracy and personal problems, basically finding out about Scientology for themselves. The tent just shows the Scientology tools with which Scientologists are very familiar. (Drug Rehabilitation, Study Technology, and the Emotional Tone Scale, for example.)

Scientology sometimes gets hammered in …

May 9th of this year marks the 57th anniversary of the publication of the book Dianetics. The History Channel noted it with this silly clip: Dianetics Anniversary. They camp it up a bit, but it IS true that Dianetics was published 57 years ago. Old as I am, that’s before I was born.

They make the e-meter look pretty spooky — but it’s actually very easy to use and for the most part the meter is unobtrusive in the Dianetic counseling. The important thing is the mental image pictures at which the person is looking. Those pictures — especially those …

John Sweeny, a BBC reporter doing an “exposé” on the Church of Scientology, has found that the church is not a normal victim of sensationalist journalism, willing to take whatever they dish out.

Before the BBC could get their smear job on the air, the Church completed its own exposé of the slipshod journalism of this particular BBC reporter and released it here:

BBC Exposé Exposed.

Having personally witnessed an earlier smear job by the notoriously unrepentent Dan Rather, where he interviewed a minister of Scientology and then took those answers out of context and reversed the answers when they …