The following is an excerpt from an article by Steve Pavlino:

“Have you ever wondered why religious teachings are invariably mysterious, confusing, and internally incongruous? This is no accident by the way — it’s quite intentional.

By putting forth confusing and internally conflicting information, your logical mind is overwhelmed. You try in vain to integrate such contradictory beliefs, but it can’t be done. The net effect is that your logical mind disengages because it can’t find a pattern of core truth beneath all the nonsense, so without the help of your logical mind, you devolve to a more primitive mode of thinking. Getting you to distrust your own cerebral cortex actually makes you dumber and easier to manipulate and control. Those who try to mentally process such glaring contradictions as coherent truth invariably suffer for it.”

Some of the mysterious, confusing and internally incongruous ideas I have come across in Scientology are:

•In KSW1, where Hubbard says something like “we won’t speculate on how I came to rise above the bank,”

•When Hubbard said that he used contact assist tech to find out the OT III data, and then doesn’t tell you what he means by this,

•Hubbard claims that short-sightedness is a “case” phenomenon, and that he has cured this in many people by using auditing, even “filling a barrel with discarded glasses.” So how is it that OT VIII’s, who “have no case”, still wear glasses?

•What could the OT III incident possibly be, if it was so powerful as to virtually wipe out an entire population, as well as that of 75 other planets?

•If OT III is such a major incident, why does it not come up on NED?

•In the book Understanding the e-meter, Hubbard says that when standing on a scale whilst running an incident, the scale reading goes up, but he never gives one evidence of this or makes one do the practical drill so you can observe it for yourself,

•What’s with all this GPM, 3G Crisscross, Reliable Item stuff?

•The auditing process “From where could you communicate to a (beingness)?” WTF is that supposed to mean?

•How is it that a spiritual being, who according to Hubbard has no “mass, energy, space, time or wavelength,” whose power can be defined as ” light-year-kilo-tons per micro-second” (whatever, lol!) can yet be trapped in a tiny little ice-cube, as he describes in “A History of Man”?

•How is starting, stopping and changing objects during Objectives meant to make one feel better, and have sudden realizations about the nature of the universe?

•How is observing a book and then a bottle meant to make one feel better, and have sudden realizations about the nature of life?

•How were the conditions formulas derived from watching plants grow?

•How the hell could mathematics possibly be based on the concept of ARC?

•What is Clear? I mean it gets rather confusing, what with their being MEST Clears, Dianetics Clears (which alludes to the fact that their may be Scientology Clears), Clears who are not actually Clear etc.

•If this is a spiritual practice, how come are so many of the Sea Org executives so entheta and rude? Why don’t they greet people? And why does a “religion” have a military unit anyway?

•“OTs” supposedly having all the power in the world, but in reality seeming to be just the same or worse off than the rest of us,

•Having “the only workable admin tech in the world,” yet at the same time every Scientology organization is broke: Class V orgs, Narcanons, Crimanons etc., and they are all running on admin tech,

•What about policies where Hubbard says that Scientology will have conquered the Earth in the next few years, when such were written decades ago and Scientology is still struggling to survive,

•If my org has “highest ever” stats, and is experiencing “unprecedented expansion,” how come I still see the same old people at reg events, and the number of people on services is still at the same level as usual?

•The book to give new Scientologists is DMSMH. Or is it Problems of Work? Or is it really “Public Book number 1”? And what the hell is “Public Book number 1” anyway?

•The best service for new Scientologists is the HAS co-audit. Or is it the STCC? Or is it really 5 hours of Book 1 auditing?

•How is Super Power actually going to make clearing of the planet a reality? Nobody ever explained this to me.

•Where did this figure of 10 000 OTs being able to reverse the dwindling spiral come from? Shouldn’t this change as the earth’s population increases?

•What the hell is “Target 2”?

•How can one appoint kids who have never been involved in business, never been exposed to the real world, or never even had sex, as “ethics officers” to tell one what is right or wrong about the ways of the world?

•How can a Sea Org member who has never done drugs evaluate for one that what he took was not, in fact, LSD?

•If the Purif, Objectives, DRD and OT IV handle drugs, why can’t people who took LSD after doing these things join the Sea Org?

•The EP of the Happiness Rundown is something like knowing that things will never get worse, so why do they still sometimes get worse thereafter?

•Space is defined by Hubbard as “a viewpoint of dimension.” What the hell is that supposed to mean?

•Is the senior of the Bookstore officer the Dissem Sec, or the Commanding officer of the Continental Publications Liaison Office? Because they both seem to have references that prove that each one of them is the legitimate senior.

•Why did Hubbard make the Esto in charge of financial planning? This makes no sense at all.

•Why is the Book buyer letter reg in Division 2, and not in Division 6? Contacting new public should be the role of Div 6, NOT Division 2. And as one posts from the top down, the book buyer letter reg is seldom posted in an org (the main Div 2 Reg being more valued in orgs, so that the rent can be paid), and so book buyers are never turned into Scientologists. If Hubbard was so smart, why did he create this flaw, and make it an unchangeable rule?

•Why would Hubbard make the Staff Section Officer responsible for clearing words on public? (He really did, check your OEC vol 5 policies on this).

•So one comes across a word one doesn’t understand, so how the hell does this then prompt one to do harmful acts? There is lots of stuff I don’t understand about quantum physics, yet I don’t have an uncontrollable urge to harm all quantum physicists.

•If you must post from the top down, the Public Executive Secretary will constantly be overwhelmed, because he will be constantly running around trying to get all his Gross Divisional Statistics up, and will never actually just get to focus on the public he has and cultivate them so that they become active Scientologists.

•If, as Hubbard says, the evolution of truth is toward a simplicity, why did he make the Org Board so complex?

•If “Proportionate Marketing” states to focus on new people first, why does management insist on sending us a stream of promotional item for Div 2 public?

•Why, if Hubbard wanted us all to achieve “increased self-determinism,” did he set up a dictatorial management system which could not be questioned?

•How is it that L. Ron Hubbard, “the world’s greatest humanitarian,” can recommend such barbaric treatment as isolating all those he thinks are 1.1 from the rest of humanity, can separate people from their spouses and family, can label ex-Sea Org members as “degraded beings,” and can institute “freeloader” bills on staff members who give selflessly of themselves, working extreme hours, for pay far, far lower than minimum wage?

A Scientologist, when confronted by such contradictions, may think to himself: “One day, when I have done absolutely everything to be done in Scientology, will I finally understand what Hubbard was saying?!”

However, the usual response a Scientologist has, in order to lessen the “cognitive dissonance” these incongruous ideas produce, is to simply shut down their analytical reasoning. And so they become purely emotional about the subject.

That is why, even when presented with evidence to prove that Hubbard was not the great Messiah we thought he was, Scientologists still go on believing. So to some degree Scientology has become a religion of sorts, a set of beliefs not based on actual facts, but purported to be based on facts.

Hubbard positioned Scientology as the Smart Man’s Philosophy, the tool to “Make the Able more Able.”  What it did instead, was take thinking men and turn them into robotic zealots.