Suspicion or Acceptance?

All in all, the group takes it pretty well. Only one serious flinch, so right away I feel good about the decision to have come and brought the Church’s resources and commitment to the game. After more than 15 years of being a Scientologist, and almost always the first one at a table like this (knowingly, anyway), I’ve learned I can know a lot about a group by observing their reaction to my arrival. The well-intentioned show surprise and hopeful curiosity, sometimes launching into an interrogation of our beliefs, rumors, celebrities, etc. The ill-intentioned, who often end up having some other agenda entirely, flinch and seem to squirm without actually moving any skin. They either assume that I, too, must be up to no good, or, if given time, I will see their true motivations. So a quick assessment of “the surprise to flinch ratio” gives me the first indication of whether I’m dealing with a group with people of good will.

And that’s important to me because it is part of the moral code of a Scientologist to support people of good will. That’s who keeps the world going. Our survival depends upon them. We all benefit if we take measures to find, help, support and defend people of good will.

Which is how I think I got started in the game of peacemaking and demand for universal human rights. I took a course in Scientology where I learned ¾ and then observed for myself ¾ that more than 97% of the inhabitants of this planet are basically good, spiritual beings, 20% or so of whom are simply stuck in some spiritual or emotional angst that makes them act badly. That only 2.5% are truly evil, so blinded by the knowledge of their own history of bad acts they feel they can’t afford to let anyone thrive and flourish for fear of being found out and crushed.

Even they, underneath, are basically good, but are stuck in history, looking at a long timeline of transgressions that must be kept hidden through the oppression and suppression of others. Somewhere along the timeline they’ve lost sight of the concept of forgiveness, replaced it with a desperate need to make sure nobody is ever strong enough to find them out. When such persons rise to positions of social or political power, you have a social environment where there are no human rights. You have easy search and seizure laws, no recourse to the courts, no way to face your accuser or defend yourself against false accusation. There is an escalation of the use of psychopolitics, where people who protest get their mental status called into question, and can be drugged into more compliant behavior.

Scientology v Evil

Which, I suppose, reveals the underlying religious principle of Scientology that drives all of our human rights and social betterment work: that each of us is a basically good, immortal spiritual being with abilities well beyond those we are normally aware of. That when you give a person the means and space to confront and handle those things within him that hide those abilities, you free a truly remarkable person with an infinite capacity for kindness, intelligence and responsibility.

It’s really quite true. If you want to upset a Scientologist, just start trying to convince her that people can’t become well and happy. Because the religion of Scientology is a body of knowledge that possesses those means, and the Churches of Scientology provide that space. And once you’ve had the opportunity to really know who you are, there’s just no turning back. It can’t be undone, even if you never walk into another Church of Scientology again.

You cannot oppress this person; which is why Scientology is fought so viciously by some governments and most pharmaceutical companies. We have gone from zero to more than 8 million participants and 3,700 churches in 50 years (the first Church was founded in 1954 in Los Angeles). That’s an astounding rate of expansion -- and an awful lot of people regaining their spiritual feet. A regime that survives only through the oppression of its people cannot afford a movement that has as its very core the restoration of people who cannot be oppressed. When the people wake up to who they are, they will not tolerate the majority good being oppressed by the minority who are acting evilly.

Enlightened Self-Interest

The Aims of Scientology, first articulated in 1954 by the Scientology religion’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, are: “A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights...”

So the Church becomes an unrelenting champion for human rights and peace from many different aspects.

Some of it is simple self-preservation. No religious or spiritual movement can successfully exist in a society run by, or bombed by, madmen.

Some of it is group-preservation. Through our European religious freedom campaigns, fights against easy seizure laws, our 40-year expos? of IRS abuses, exposure of government-sponsored chemical weapons testing, revelation in our magazine of the 1960s CIA-sponsored mind control experiments, etc., we’ve set ourselves up as a target. Some of our members in other countries have gone to jail for speaking out. We need to continue to fight for full implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in order to maintain our own ability to exist.

But largely it’s based on humankind-preservation. We, the peacemakers, the people of good will, the 80%, are in a race against the 2.5% who are trapped by their savage instincts. The task becomes increasing our ranks, and recapturing the top of the social and political ladders, restoring those positions of trust to those who can actually be trusted. [