Scientology

Scientology is a system of beliefs, teachings and rituals, originally established as an alternative psychotherapy in 1951 by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, then recharacterized by him in 1953 as an "applied religious philosophy."

Origins of Scientology

Immediately prior to his first Dianetics publications, Hubbard was involved with the occultist Jack Parsons in performing rites developed by Aleister Crowley. Some investigators have noted similarities in Hubbard's writings to the doctrines of Crowley http://www.xenu.net/archive/lrhbare/lrhbare08.html, though the Church of Scientology denies any such connection. An influence that Hubbard did acknowledge is the system of General Semantics developed by Alfred Korzybski in the 1930s. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/j/origins6.html Scientology also reflects the influence of the Hindu concept of karma, as well as the less metaphysical theories of Sigmund Freud and William Sargant.

Related Topics:
Jack Parsons - Aleister Crowley - General Semantics - Alfred Korzybski - Karma - Sigmund Freud - William Sargant

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Hubbard was repeatedly accused of adopting a religious facade for Scientology in order for the organization to maintain tax-exempt status and avoid prosecution for false medical claims. These accusations have dogged the Church of Scientology to the present day, bolstered by numerous accounts from Hubbard's fellow science-fiction authors that on various occasions he stated that the way to get rich was to start a religion http://www.bible.ca/scientology-1million-start-a-religion.htm.

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The word scientology has a history of its own. Although nowadays associated almost exclusively with Hubbard's work, it was coined by the philologist Alan Upward in 1907 as a synonym for "pseudoscience". http://www.instinct.org/texts/bluesky/bs3-4.htm In 1934, the Argentine-German writer Anastasius Nordenholz published a book using the word positively: Scientologie, Wissenschaft von der Beschaffenheit und der Tauglichkeit des Wissens, or Scientology, Science of the Constitution and Usefulness of Knowledge. http://www.scientologie.de/scientologie/index.htm Nordenholz's book is a study of consciousness, and its usage of the word is not greatly different from Hubbard's definition, "knowing how to know". However, it is not clear to what extent Hubbard was aware of these earlier usages. The word itself is a pairing of the Latin word scientia ("knowledge of"), which comes from "scio" ("to know or understand"), and the Greek λογος lógos ("reason" or "inward thought"). Hubbard said, in a lecture given on 19 July 1962 entitled "The E-meter":

Related Topics:
Philologist - 1907 - Pseudoscience - 1934 - Latin - Greek - 19 July - 1962

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:"So Suzie and I went down to the library, and we started hauling books out and looking for words. And we finally found 'scio' and we find 'ology'. And there was the founding of that word. Now, that word had been used to some degree before. There had been some thought of this. Actually the earliest studies on these didn't have any name to them until a little bit along the line and then I called it anything you could think of. But we found that this word Scientology, you see—and it could have been any other word that had also been used—was the best-fitted word for exactly what we wanted."

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There are also claims that Scientology was started as a result of a wager between science fiction authors. In some versions, the other participant was Kurt Vonnegut, while other versions name R.A. Heinlein.

Related Topics:
Kurt Vonnegut - R.A. Heinlein

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