If you aren’t familiar with Scientology, you should read up on what complete horseshit it is:

• Wikipedia entry
• Operation Clambake
• The Secrets of Scientology
• The Forbidden Side of Scientology
• Exposing the Con

If you can believe it, some people seriously subscribe to this, which was founded by a bad science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, a few years after telling a convention of sci-fi fans that the way to make lots of money is to start your own religion:

75 million years ago, the galactic overlord for this sector of the galaxy was called Xenu. He was in charge of 76 planets, including Earth (at that time known as Teegeeack).

All of the planets Xenu controlled were over-populated by, on average, 178 billion people. Social problems dictated that Xenu rid his sector of the galaxy of this overpopulation problem, so he developed a plan.

Xenu sent out tax audit demands to all these trillions of people. As each one entered the audit centers for the income tax inspections, the people were seized, held down and injected with a mixture of alcohol and glycol, and frozen. Then, all 13.5 trillion of these frozen people were put into spaceships that looked exactly like DC8 airplanes, except that the spaceships had rocket engines instead of propellers.

Xenu’s entire fleet of DC8-like spaceships then flew to planet Earth, where the frozen people were dumped in and around volcanoes in the Canary Islands and the Hawaiian Islands. When Xenu’s Air Force had finished dumping the bodies into the volcanoes, hydrogen bombs were dropped into the volcanoes and the frozen space aliens were vaporized.

However, Xenu’s plan involved setting up electronic traps in Teegeeack’s atmosphere which were designed to trap the souls or spirits of the dead space aliens. When the 13.5 trillion spirits were being blown around on the nuclear winds, the electronic traps worked like a charm and captured all the souls in the electronic, sticky fly-paper like traps.

The spirits of the aliens were then taken to huge multiplex cinemas that Xenu had previously instructed his forces to build on Teegeeack. In these movie theaters the spirits had to spend many days watching special 3-D movies, the purpose of which was twofold: 1) to implant into these spirits a false reality, i.e. the reality that WOGS (Hubbard’s derisory term for anyone not a Scientologists) know on Earth today; and, 2) to control these spirits for all eternity so that they could never cause trouble for Xenu in this sector of the Galaxy. During these films, many false pictures and stories were implanted into these spirits, which resulted in the spirits believing in all the things that control mankind on Earth today, including religion. The concept of religion, including God, Christ, Mohammed, Moses etc., were all an implanted false reality that to this very minute are used to control WOGS on Earth.

When the films ended and the souls left the cinema, they started to stick together in clusters of a few thousand and remained that way until mankind began to inhabit the Earth. Today on Earth all the spirits of these aliens have attached themselves to our bodies and are the root cause of the false reality that all but Scientology’s “Homo Novis” or OT 8′s on earth experience. It is the job of all Scientologists to remove this false reality from the world by auditing each and every space alien spirit and human on earth and the entire universe to CLEAR. For those who oppose Scientology and stand in their way like the Lisa McPherson Trust and all Scientology critics, Scientology promises to do away with them “quietly and without sorrow”.

When Tom Cruise (who is a proselytizing Scientologist) was on Matt Lauer’s show and the conversation turned to Scientology, Cruise said this:

Scientology is something that you don’t understand. It’s like you could be a Christian and be a Scientologist.

It is a religion. Because it’s dealing with the spirit. You as a spiritual being. It gives you tools you can use to apply to your life.

Way to piss off every Christian in existence, Tom. Because, you know, I don’t remember any references to Lord Xenu in the Old Testament, but maybe I’m wrong. I’m sure you’ve done a lot of critical analysis on all religions before choosing one that makes you pay to find out that a bunch of souls are stuck to your head like a wad of gum.

Oh, it gets better. You should understand that Scientology doesn’t like the medical profession, psychiatry in particular, most likely because it takes away their business. Imagine the egg on their face if all those souls were just a chemical imbalance, or unresolved issues with one’s father. Ha! Those silly Scientologists! Anyway, here’s a further excerpt from the article:

When Lauer mentioned Cruise’s earlier criticism of Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressants, Cruise told the “Today” show co-host he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do,” Cruise said.

The interview became more heated when Lauer, who said he knew people who had been helped by the attention-deficit disorder drug Ritalin, asked Cruise about the effects of the drug.

“Matt, Matt, you don’t even — you’re glib,” Cruise responded. “You don’t even know what Ritalin is. If you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, OK. That’s what I’ve done.”

As we all know, we need to trust cult-member movie stars instead of our doctors. I’m sure that when Tom says he’s “read the research papers” and knows the “history of psychiatry,” what he means is “My Scientology teacher gave me selective, incomplete, or simply falsified data that I took unquestioningly as absolute fact because I’m a mindless, spoiled automaton, and I really needed to advance in my classes. I think I got more souls stuck to me, because I’m a little stuffed up today.”

As a liberal, I’m pretty tolerant of other people’s religions, but Scientology? That’s just plain dumb.