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I've probably mentioned this before, but I spent two years (8th and 9th grade) at a private school based around the "study technology" of L. Ron Hubbard. It was by no means a "religious" school in the sense that a Catholic school is; Scientology rarely came up. But the methods and structure of the curriculum and the way learning and studying was done was straight out of the basic study manual (in fact, that's what it's called, the Basic Study Manual) of the Co$...it's the way "they" teach their young. In a sense I was a Scientologist in training. I like to tell people I was a Scientologist to see how they react. As an educational tool, the methods were definitely superior to public school, though on the whole I consider it a negative experience simply because there were a total of twenty kids K-12 and I missed a great deal of social interaction at an age when that kind of thing is imperative. I had friends as well as my first girlfriend there but I would have preferred to be a high school freshman.

Meanwhile, my mom had been suckered into the early levels of the Co$ and spent time at the "Org" (located on Nicollet Mall in the center of downtown Mpls. where it gets in the way of any beneficial building ideas). To my knowledge she didn't get very far; my brother and I had to leave the school after two years because basically we ran out of money. My best friend was the son of the school's owner and he was seriously into it. He took me down to the Org one night to hear some speaker, no idea who it was, and while we were there he did the e-meter thing, which was the first real indication to me that this was all kind of silly. We started looking through books detailing people's stories about trillions of years' worth of reincarnation, until we were accosted by a goon who rushed us out of the area telling us we shouldn't be looking at those books because we weren't ready. I can recall thinking that it was pretty weird keeping core tenets of the practice secret when other religions laid everything out in the open, often for free. I didn't learn about Xenu or thetans until years later.

So anyway, we ran out of money, and we went back to public school and my mom stopped going downtown. They kept calling. They kept sending mail. We moved, and somehow they obtained our new address and continued to send us mail, and about once a month we still get some flyer or pamphlet talking about "Sea Org" cruises that cost tens of thousands of dollars. She's sent stuff back with return-to-sender but it does nothing. During the brief period I lived alone on the other side of the country I half expected to start getting stuff addressed to me; I'm no doubt on file somewhere and it'll probably come out if I ever ran for public office.

It is not a religion. My best friend there, part of a hardcore Co$ family, attended regular church on Sunday. I once went with him and that happened to be my only experience of Christian church services other than weddings and funerals. I don't feel it is a cult either; it's sort of mean to cults to call this a cult, and besides "cult" implies that someday the Clearwater janitor is gonna show up one day to find all their bodies stacked up neatly in the auditorium. I consider it a business, and a reasonably successful one, though that success comes at the blatant exploitation of helpless people. If you argue in favor of its existence, you should be doing so by quoting the ideals that champion free enterprise, not those that champion freedom of expression and worship. Personally, I favor its existence as much as I favor the existence of tobacco companies. I do not favor tobacco companies.