Sunday, July 01, 2012

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day

Rupert Murdoch apparently tweeted that Scientology is a "creepy weird cult."
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3 comments:

The Archer of the Forest said...

Scientology was a religion that was created on a bar bet. I read about that when I was in law school. L. Ron Hubbard was a master of playing the court system and avoiding subpoenas so we read all about the Federal civil trial proceedings when they finally got him after like 20 years to testify under oath about the beginning of the Scientology religion. The Federal Government didn't want to treat it like an organized religion. He basically finally admitted under oath that his friends bet him he couldn't go out and create a religion based on his science fiction writings, and sure enough he did.

7/02/2012 8:33 AM
Jason said...

Know who his betting "friends" were? Could have possibly been Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley.

7/02/2012 9:23 AM
Anthony said...

I wonder why I still care enough about this subject to be the debunker here, but Archer doesn't have it quite right. There's some truth mixed with bizarre fantasy.

First, see this link: www.faqs.org/faqs/scientology/skeptic/start-a-religion-faq

Despite what the above says, it seems likely to me that he said it just once, but it was such a memorable remark that, once he started Scientology, lots of people "remembered" him saying it to them as well (cryptomnesia). It does seem he did say it, but he certainly did not make a bet of it.

Anyway, the real falsehood in Archer's remark is the claim that Hubbard admitted this under oath. Hubbard managed to avoid the law for the last 35 years of his life, so it's absurd to say he did any such thing.

Re Jason's remark, I'm pretty sure Hubbard did not ever actually meet Crowley, though the latter famously wrote of Hubbard and Parsons: "I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts."

7/03/2012 2:00 AM

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