Losing Her Religion

Scientology Day, baby!

I guess we can all be grateful to Tom Cruise for bringing this fine "religion" into its most recent moment of glory.

Katie Holmes is from Toledo, so the Toledo paper took a look last week:

The open-ended view of God means that Scientology does not contradict any other religious tradition and that people of all faiths can practice Scientology, Ms. Stanard said.

"As Scientology deals with a person as a spiritual being, a person can be a member of another church as well as a Scientologist," she said.

Mike Delaware, an executive secretary of the church in Battle Creek, Mich., described Scientology as "all-denominational."

Many people who become Scientologists stay active in other faith communities, he said, adding that if Katie Holmes joins the Church of Scientology, there is no reason she could not continue to be a practicing Roman Catholic.

According to Mr. Bromley, however, it's doubtful that anyone who makes a genuine commitment to Scientology will continue practicing another faith.

Salon is in the midst of a 4-part series on Scientology (I haven't been reading Salon for ages...mostly because of the ad thing, which annoyed me, but also was hard to deal with on the Old Computer. But New Computer....aha!), and here's Laura Miller's fantastic piece on Dianetics

"Dianetics" belongs to a category of books that will be instantly familiar to anyone who's done time reading the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts for a book publisher. This kind of book is typically an explanation of life, the universe and everything written by a choleric gentleman (often a retired military officer) who has holed up in a converted basement or former kid's bedroom to hammer out his ideas about how the world works -- ideas that have for too long been disregarded by the incompetents and assholes around him. (If you are not familiar with this sort of book, know that you have the slush pile readers of America to thank for that.)

(Heh. Michael can sympathize. And even in Catholic publishing - oh so true. If you throw in apparitions to the mix, of course)

Yesterday's story, in which another writer speculates on Cruise's status within Scientology

According to experts and the church's own literature, OT-VII ("OT" stands for Operating Thetan, "thetan" being the Scientology term for soul) is the penultimate tier in the church's spiritual hierarchy -- the exact details of which are fiercely guarded and forbidden to be discussed even among top members. It is where a Scientologist learns how to become free of the mortal confines of the body and is let into the last of the mysteries of the cosmology developed by the church's longtime leader, science fiction novelist and "Dianetics" author L. Ron Hubbard. This cosmology also famously holds that humans bear the noxious traces of an annihilated alien civilization that was brought to Earth by an intergalactic warlord millions of years ago.

....But one Scientologist who left the church in 2003 after 30 years -- and who had reached the OT-VII level and become a member of the church's governing Sea Org -- said it was his understanding that Cruise was very near completing, if he had not already completed, the OT-VII level. The former Scientologist would speak to Salon only on the condition of anonymity.

A current Scientologist who has reached the level OT-V, and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that considering the amount of time Cruise has been in the church, an OT-VII status seems probable. And Stephen Kent, a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta who has published articles on Scientology and Hollywood, also said that Cruise's behavior strongly suggests OT-VII.

One anti-Scientology site

The Lisa McPherson site (Lisa McPherson was a young woman who died in an untimely, mysterious fashion. Her family and friends blame Scientology)