ANTI-RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA | APRIL 22, 2017

X-Ray Vision

I recently had the pleasure of introducing a United Nations diplomat—a friend of a friend—to the subject of Scientology and the life of its Founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Here was her response.

She told me she grew up in a Soviet country where propaganda was like rain in Ireland—you learned to expect it. She told me she developed, as a young girl of only 12 or so, X-ray vision through that drizzly fog of untruth. In other words she could tell the fact from the fiction.

So she had long perceived the campaign against Scientology; it was pretty see-through, she told me. The media pounded it home: “Think it’s bad. Think it’s bad,” she said. She knew it was propaganda, but she just didn’t know why.

I explained, of course.

No, the “Scientology phenomenon” isn’t new. Every new thinker, any new pattern of thought, is ostracized, beaten up, and left, badly bruised, to “the elements” of a culture, to see if it will make it. Some endure, some erode until they turn to dust.

And then I showed her through a museum on L. Ron Hubbard’s life and she toured a Church of Scientology. She learned about our beliefs and principles, our life improvement tools, our system of counseling, our humanitarian programs. She said she sees this bizarre depiction in the news and then she enters our beautiful buildings, meets our lovely staff, is inspired by our goals and solutions, and feels it is all very important—and very misunderstood.

No, the “Scientology phenomenon” isn’t new. Every new thinker, any new pattern of thought, is ostracized, beaten up, and left, badly bruised, to “the elements” of a culture, to see if it will make it. Some endure, some erode until they turn to dust.

Mr. Hubbard himself put it beautifully in an essay entitled “Tomorrow’s Miracles.” Speaking of the intrepid explorer, he says:

“His is the task of stabbing deeper into the Unknown and the dangers he runs are those of ridicule. He knows, in his heart of hearts, what his fate will most likely be. He may come back with some great idea only to find that men laugh. He may point a road which will be a thoroughfare within a century, but men, having but little vision, see only a tangle of undergrowth and blackness beyond and push but timidly where the first to go pushed forward with such courage.

“In all the ages of history, thinking men have been crucified either by institutions or the masses. But those very ideas which at first seemed so mad and impossible are those which science now uses to polish up its reputation.”

So if you were alive a few thousand years ago, and someone told you the world was round, or that man would one day fly, or that buildings would be built 160 stories tall, I hope you would think before you laugh.

As for today: refine your X-ray vision. It’s a survival skill.