Scientology Fascinates Me
Apart from serving as an extremely efficient Idiot Badge, and providing endless hilarity in the form of Tom Cruise’s infantile Messiah Complex, I think the bit I find most fascinating about Scientology is just how easy it shows it to be to get people to believe patently ridiculous things.
I assume many of them are quite sincere in their beliefs that we are inhabited by exiled alien souls and all that stuff, and although there’s no qualitative difference between that any any other religious mythology, the big difference for me is the lack of mystery. Believing in the myths of Scientology is on the face of it no different from believing crazy stories about evil being caused by a magical being who took the form of a snake and persuaded some lass with her knockers out to eat bad fruit – they’re both just slightly bizarre fairytales and would be treated as equally daft, had they not the stamp of religious belief on one and cultish lunacy on the other.
With most religions, however, they at least have the Argument from Antiquity on their side, and the advantages of massive numbers, popular acceptance and the opportunity to brainwash from an early age, no matter how silly the magic that they are preaching. The Abrahamic religions have been telling their weird and wonderful tales for a couple of thousand years now, which gives them a slightly false sheen of respectability, and given how many people believe in them it seems less silly to do so, no matter how nonsensical a great many of the teachings would seem if evaluated on their own merits. And when you’re rasied with something from childhood it can be near-impossible to shake it off. How many sports fans just can’t allow themselves to say that they think that their team will win, even if they do? It’s just bad luck, and even sensible folk often will not do it, even if they tell themselves that they know better.
With Scientology, grown adults are persuaded to accept as true a series of stories that are not only obvious nonsense but are well know to have been invented by a second-rate science fiction writer about fifty or sixty years ago. How can we, as a species, be so desperate to believe in woo that we are capable of convincing our supposedly rational brains that this kind of slightly childish fantasy is even close to reality? What do you have to do to your brain to persaude it that the concept of Xenu is anything other than a little bit silly?
I suppose general angst, insecurity, tribalism, herding instincts and fear of the unknown all play a part, and maybe an actual psychologist would just laugh off the question as trivial, but I find it quite fascinating. Volcanoes and aliens? Really, seriously? I suppose it ties into the secular West’s increasing fanaticism about idiotic forms of alternative medicine and anti-vaccination lunacy and things like that – we just seem to have an inner need to believe in some sort of magical agency and are collectively prepared to project it onto almost any variety of foolishness you can imagine.
Robbie Robertson – Somewhere Down the Crazy River
