Scientology's Persistent Myths 1 - Hubbard's Beliefs

In coverage of Scientology by media and online conversations on the subject many ideas have been brought forth and shared. Many ideas in Scientology doctrine have been thoroughly exposed as improbable and highly unlikely, if not impossible.

I have been very happy to see that and tried to make an admittedly small contribution to this effort. A lot of others have done much, much more work and reached millions of more people than I ever will.

But despite a tremendous amount of good and even great work in my opinion some points get lost or outright denied.

I understand people will have different opinions on some matters, but for some ideas a lot of evidence exists while for others far less than adequate evidence exists. Some of the ideas with a good amount of evidence aren't getting represented enough in my opinion while some others that lack strong or even moderate evidence are being taken as proven facts.

A simple example to start with is Hubbard's beliefs. On many matters it is easy to establish what he wrote in doctrine or said in taped lectures. But to say he believed it is another thing entirely.

Far too often his words are described as his beliefs. That's assuming he believed everything he said or whatever is being reported.

That's an indefensible leap. From his affirmations to a wide variety of his quotes on lying there is strong evidence he embraced lying and if you examine the contradictions in his doctrine and add them up it's clear he contradicted himself hundreds, probably thousands, of times that are easy to see. Together these two bodies of evidence with the accounts of Hubbard taking enormous efforts to hide his lack of results, to hide his plagiarism, to hide his abuses of Scientology cult members and many lies he told in his personal life clearly demonstrate that at any time Hubbard spoke or wrote it was entirely possible he was lying.

So, for any journalist or even mere blogger or Scientology critic in possession of this information to describe Hubbard's quotes as his beliefs is problematic. Perhaps this can be used to describe his affirmations and some personal letters or journals, if one sincerely believes Hubbard was entirely honest in those private personal communications, but that requires extraordinary confidence in that judgment.

To use that description for Hubbard's ideas in Dianetics and Scientology that are for public consumption or even for staff or just the Sea Org or even a portion of the Sea Org then honesty is extremely unlikely to be found, certainly beyond all reasonable doubt. So, I would never casually describe Hubbard's quotes in general as his beliefs.