Scientology: Beliefs, Practices & Predicted Everyday Occurrences - Essay Sample

Introduction

Scientology is an organization of various religious beliefs and practices that was started in May the year 1952 y an American by the name of Hubbard. The Scientology movement comprises a vast membership that believes that human beings are immortal spirits that live in the physical body of a human being. Based on several pieces of research, there is a prediction that Scientologists who are subject to auditing will eventually come across and remember a series of everyday occurrences. The celebrity members of this movement and its unusual theology make the movement extremely interesting to the outsiders. The group has been subject to several magazines, books, and blogs within the many years since its start. It seems almost impossible for one not to be intrigued by this homegrown religion of America. The group has a network of roots in the United States of America where it started initially.

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Nevertheless, there are groups of people who differ from the Scientology movement. The groups that seem to resist the religion comprises of the academia. Approximately ten years ago, in the city of Waco in the state of Texas in the United States of America at a conference that was convened to deliberate on new religions, Douglas Cowan presented a paper discrediting the movement. The article that was given by Douglas Cowan, who is a professor of religious studies at the University of Waterloo, was showing inadequate academic research into Scientology. The professor maintains that Scientology is not well investigated and supported by theoretical analyses. The professor says that all the people who get an opportunity to hear about Scientology hears about it in the news and pop-culture media platforms. Nobody who has been able to publish a book or any academic evidence that backs up this movement.

Nonetheless, a professor of religious studies at the University of Ohio has attempted and has come closest to providing academic evidence support on the Scientology Movement. Scientology is a religion formation that split from the Dianetics movement. Professor urban has had a chance of conducting and publishing a study on Scientology and other upcoming religions since the 1990s. In his book, The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion, which was published by Princeton University Press in the year 2011. The book by Urban attempts to find out the history of the Scientology Movement and interrogates how academia should perceive controversial religious organizations.

Professor Hugh Urban continues to say that there are two strong rationales for the deficiency of the interest of academia in Scientology. The first reason is that it has been an unusual movement with high levels of secrets and involved in regulated activities ranging from its inception with the highest standards of information. The information about it is kept secret and only accessible to those who have registered outstanding progress through and those who have also paid for appropriate training. The second reason, according to Urban, is that this movement might have been the most argumentative religious organization in the history of the United States of America.

Scientology Movement is famous in America not only for its litigiousness but also for alleged harassment of who the movement believes is their enemies. Roy Wallis, who is a renowned sociologist and who was working on a research project for a book about the church in the 1970s, the Scientology church had a representative at the University of Stirling where Wallis taught. The student was taken there by the church to gather any gossip about it throughout when Wallis was doing his research. The student was later accused by the church through forged letters that he was engaging in homosexuality, among other issues contrary to the teachings of the church.

In the subsequent decades, the church was often linked with similar actions. An investigative journalist who was investigating the matter wrote a critical report after conducting an undercover story about the church. He published the report in Time magazine in the year 1991. The journalist was known as Richard Behar. In his investigative research about the Scientology church, he includes, among other issues, some of the allegations of the church forging letters to accuse who was its representative of being a gay. The journalist in his report, for instance, reported that a psychologist from the University of California, Mrs. Berkeley had to traverse under a fake name to avert harassment from the church. He feared for harassment because of the criticism she had made against the church. Following the expose by Behar, the church filed a case in court against him and the Times magazine that published his investigative report about the church. The incident took many years for completion.

After a long history of litigiousness, the church no longer shows interest in legal suits. When Princeton University Press approached professor Urban about his research on the movement, he became a little bit hesitant at the first instant. He mentions that the university press eventually secured a lawyer to go over the manuscript. He further suggests that he has never had such an experience. It almost made him quit since the Scientology movement were tight on him on several issues. Finally, he finds it wise to have taken the precautionary measures that he took before giving in. The religion did not make its usual step towards filling a case against the university press together with professor urban. The movement was so fond of filing legal lawsuits upon the slightest provocation by whom it considered as its enemies.

Human beings tend to analyze the benefits and demerits that they may get before carrying out an activity. So if you decide to carry out a study about something and realize that you are likely to suffer severe consequences, many are the time that you would not take the risk. Cowan maintains that in an event where research may case the researcher a problem, the researcher will consider doing different exciting things. Cowan provides that he could get late-night calls from officials of the Scientology movement when they learned that he was doing a paper about the church. Additionally, other scholars have had similar experiences with Scientology movement when they attempted to study the religion. Steve Kent is a sociologist who teaches at Alberta University. The scholar has done several articles about Scientology. He recalls a day when he gave a talk about the church and when the time came to go back to his car to leave, he was served with a letter by some members of the Scientology movement. The message was a cease and desist order, which had accusations on him that he was helping a former Scientologist to break a court agreement.

It took him some time to reflect and realize that that had not taken place. The members who served him with the order had just made it up. He also got suspicious that the organization was playing a game. For them, they knew that if that had happened, they would scare him away, and it had not happened, they would have lost insignificantly. It was, therefore, an attempt to silence Mr. Kent. The field of study involving new religious formations entails a variety of active groups, including Scientology. These groups are controversial that, in some instances, only little is understood.

A majority of these young religious formations have been exciting areas of media narratives over the last year. Some of these formations are considered as dangerous cults by some groups of people. Most scholars only shy away from branding these religious formations as cults. The reason is that whenever the word cult is mentioned, it instills fear among people as they are attributed to harmful and dangerous acts. Melton is among the scholars who have accusations of swallowing Scientology's claims in a natural way. The scholar delivered depositions on behalf of the movement. His 2000 report about the church made him receive an abusive letter from the church, discrediting his book. He, however, maintains that Scientology was indeed a religion to the contrary of what many believe was a business venture or a cult.

Among the most important questions that scholars ask is how much to rely on the people who have quit and disowned the group. Bryan Wilson, who is a renowned British sociologist, argued that the testimonies obtained from people who left the group are suspicious and that they are incredible and unreliable hence not worth to be used. There has been a change since the early 1990s. Professor Urban says that several scholars would provide accounts that are biased in some means. He further maintains that few would dismiss a person who makes claims of being abused by a priest. A challenge that most people encounter when dealing with research on small religion formations is that many of the people who renounce the movement are the only ones available to give the information. People who are within the church are not easily accessible hence may make the research hard due to lack of data for the study.

The current scholars of comparative religion have been intrigued by the role of secrecy that religious formations practice. Steven Wasserstrom observed the history of religious groups such as Scientology. He mentioned that the Scientology movement was highly secretive. It had its issues classified and did not allow any information about it to be known by people who were not its members. Much of the secretive life of religions remains a disappointment and a disconnection from social and political arenas. Kees Bolle defines secrecy as a mystery at the heart of all faiths. He says that a majority of the religions in the world work almost under the same principle of confidentiality. It implies that religions hold too much information for them and do not easily get accessed by other people.

The instance of Scientology during the time of the Cold War in America, I believe it offers a more integral means of thinking about the challenge of secretive religions. It also provides methods on ethical approaches, the responsibilities of a scholar in connection to classes that need to maintain a secret. High levels of secrets in religion formations control the information as an integral type of power and knowhow. The concern with the secretive nature of religions and regulation of data became immense and obsessive during the era of the Cold War.

Bibliography

Graham, Ruth. "Are Academics Afraid to Study Scientology?" JSTOR Daily. Last modified November 5, 2014. https://daily.jstor.org/scholars-on-scientology/.

Hubbard, Lafayette R. Handbook for Preclears. Bridge Publications, 1951. http://scientolipedia.org/w/images/e/e4/Handbook_for_Preclears.pdf.

Hubbard, Lafayette R. Introduction to Scientology Ethics. Edinburgh: The Publications Organization World Wide, 1968. https://stss.nl/stss-materials/English/Books%20Original%20PDF%20Scan%20OCR/Introduction%20to%20Scientology%20Ethics%2C%20ITSE%201968.pdf.

Urban, Hugh B. The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rx0v.

Wallis, Roy. "Scientology: Therapeutic Cult to Religious Sect." Sociology 9, no. 1 (January 1975), 89-100. doi:10.1177/003803857500900105..