Belief can make you stupid.

When you believe something strongly, when you firmly hold an opinion, you can end up spending your intelligence on justifying or explaining away facts that are contrary to your belief. Your intelligence and power of reasoning could be better spend on constructive efforts like fixing the flaws in your beliefs or creating something new.

We see this in politics every day – trying to justify one’s own position instead of keeping the eye on the ball, the result… a better society.

Marty Rathbun’s latest latest blog post is an excellent example of a guy justifying his beliefs. Mike Rinder’s comment inspired me to write this post here. Scientologists become experts in justifications as they are told to believe that the subject is The Only Way to salvation. When cracks become visible – they start justifying why the cracks are not there or why they are there for a greater reason. After years of studying the subject, they become extremely skillful in this. This may be the reason why Scientology is and should remain a religion. It is a belief system. It could move into the category of science, but not without inflicting severe pain in its justifiers.

Science is the practice of doing away with one’s beliefs and replacing them with knowledge.

Beliefs are healthy and important when they serve as motivation toward a goal. Beliefs are great for urging to action, but a substitute when used to explain what is.

I stepped back, took a couple of breaths and then a good hard look… at the thousands of discussions on Scientology I have witnessed during the last three decades. Some in person, most online. I have come to the conclusion that discussing the content of Scientology, the processes, the policies, the cosmology, Hubbard’s life and possible intentions, Xenu, the rationale behind Dianetics, the E-meter and the rest of it is pretty useless. It is only really worthwhile to look at the actual results produced. The results is the key – the only aspect really worthy of discussion.

So, it really only boils down to: “Does it work?”

Does it work for you? Does it work for Average Joe? Does it work for the society? What are the actual results produced by the church? What are the actual results produced by the individuals and groups applying it? Is it beneficial? And does it produce the advertised results? What in Scientology works? What does not?

I believe there are different answers to each of these questions. I will list some of my conclusions here:

1. Did Scientology work for me?
   Yes. Everything I did in the church gave me valuable results. The service I did outside of the church (L 11) was fantastic.
2. Did Scientology work for my friends?
   About 50%. Some of my friends had excellent gains from their auditing and training, others had little, no or even negative results. Some crashed. In this category I have little experience with friends doing Scientology in the independent field.
3. Does it work for Average Joe?
   Well… something like 95% of the people that get into Scientology bounce off like a tennis ball off a wall.
4. Does Scientology benefit society?
   Insignificant. It’s irrelevant to the world at large – from its inception to present time.
5. Does auditing work?
   To a large extent: Yes. Almost all the people I know that have gotten Scientology counseling inside or outside of the church are very happy with the gains they have gotten. They do however tend to worry more about their own issues after having started getting Scientology auditing – they tend to introspect more.
6. Does Scientology training work?
   Usually. The training is lacking the component of an instructor that help bring the material to life. Thus, the training tends to be more “dry” than other comparable training in society.
7. Does Hubbard’s administrative technology work?
   No. It’s a disaster. This is the single most dominant factor why people shun Scientology and why people leave it in droves – despite the gains that can be had through auditing and training. In this body of knowledge you find horrendous policies on how to handle enemies, policies on disconnection, volumes of details resulting in over-bureacuracy, micromanagement and stripping of employees creativity, etc. It’s perfect for creating and managing an organization of robots. I suspect that a group delivering Scientology auditing and training without the Admin Tech as a yoke would do quite well and get a large percentage of happy clients.
8. Does Scientology produce the advertised results?
   As a whole: No. There are no OTs produced as advertised by Hubbard. Neither are there any Clears by the original definition in Diantecs. But certain training courses and auditing levels does produce the advertised results most of the time.

These are my current conclusions, subject to future revisions.

Update: With more than 1500 comments on this blog post – I hope to carry the discussions over to a new blog post, titled “Scientology – does it work? (cont.)“.