Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Scientology
Please take a monet or two to read www.xenu.net and then vote at http://www.petitiononline.com/yarbaro/petition.html . I know electronic voting means little, but it will be an interesting vote none the less. I'll add my own thoughts about scientology and the other cults (Islam, Moonies, Christianity etc.) later.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I'm commenting here rather than after your long screed because my comment is strictly a story about Scientology/dianetics. It may be apocryphal, certainly I'm not old enough to vouch for it, but I had enough SF writer friends who claimed it was true and that they had 'been there.' Dianetics was first published as a series of articles in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION -- despite the title and that fact, the true birthplace of science fiction as an adult literature, under the editorship of the brilliant but 'controversial' John W. Campbell.
There was, at the time, an SF club, not a fan club but one limited to professionals in the field, called the Hydra Club. The story is that both JWC and Hubbard -- who'd sold a lot of stories to ASTOUNDING -- were there and John was 'holding court,' arguing against psychoanalysis and some of its assumptions. Hubbard got up -- they'd both been drinking -- and said, "John, give me a couple of months and I bet I could come up with something that makes as most sense."
JWC replied, "You do it and I'll print it." The article appeared in the June-August issues.
Now this might be apocryphal, and the authors who would have been there are dead now (Asimov, Sturgeon, DelRey, among others, as is Campbell). The only thing that makes me wonder is that L. Ron was not a New Yorker, but he could have been in town for any number of reasons. Certainly the people who told it to me swore it was true.
Prup (aka Jim Benton)
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/scientology/start.a.religion.html
Your right Jim. See the above link. John W. Campell went down hugely in my estimation afer i learnt he devoted a whole issue to Dianetics. Although he came to regret his publishing of hubbards works later on and even professed a strong dislike of the man later on. He was a brilliant editor of sci-fi though. A copy of Astounding is always worth a read when you come accross one.
It all started to go wrong for Dianetics when the first "Clear" was paraded in public. She was meant to have perfect recall but couldn't even remeber the colour of Hubards tie whom she was sharing the stage with. Unfortunatly for many people, Hubbard went off and came back with "the rest of the course" Scientology.
Post a Comment