History & overview · every faith gets one
You are a thetan, and the recordings are not you.
Built by L. Ron Hubbard out of his 1950 self-help system Dianetics: the person is a thetan, an immortal being who has lived countless lifetimes and is held back by engrams — recordings of past pain that fire without being noticed. Auditing on the E-meter is the practice that finds and discharges them, along a graded route called the Bridge to Total Freedom. Recognised as a religion in law by the High Court of Australia in 1983, granted tax exemption by the United States Internal Revenue Service in 1993, and convicted of organised fraud in France in 2009.
The Victorian Board of Inquiry under Kevin Anderson QC reported against Scientology in 1965 and Victoria banned its practice under the Psychological Practices Act that year. The ban lapsed after the High Court of Australia held in Church of the New Faith v Commissioner of Pay-roll Tax (Vic) [1983] HCA 40, decided 27 October 1983, that Scientology is a religion in law. In 1979 Hubbard's wife Mary Sue Hubbard and ten others were convicted in Washington DC of conspiracy over the infiltration of federal agencies, an operation the church's own documents called Snow White. On 27 October 2009 a Paris court convicted the Celebrity Centre and the Scientology bookshop of organised fraud and fined them 600,000 euros; the conviction was upheld on appeal in February 2012 and by the Cour de cassation on 16 October 2013. The church rejects the French finding as a breach of religious freedom.
Why it is filed this way
Whether Scientology is a religion has been litigated in several countries and answered both ways. The High Court of Australia held in 1983 that it is one in law, and that ruling became the standard test for religion across the Commonwealth. The United States Internal Revenue Service granted its entities exemption in 1993. A Paris court convicted its French bodies of organised fraud in 2009 without ruling on the religious question. It is carried here as a movement, which is a statement about its age and shape and not about its truth.
The founding
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health sold in the hundreds of thousands in 1950 and its foundations went bankrupt within two years. Hubbard rebuilt the system as Scientology, and the first Church of Scientology was incorporated in Los Angeles in February 1954.
Its founding is bound to L. Ron Hubbard — 1954 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A universe of matter, energy, space and time, made and inhabited by spiritual beings who forgot they made it.
The divine. Scientology names a Supreme Being as the Eighth Dynamic and then declines to describe it, holding that each person arrives at it themselves. Nothing is worshipped in the practice. The practice is auditing..
Death and after. The thetan does not die — it takes another body, and the recordings follow it.