Try this thread:
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=58231
or this one:
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=43817
The issue comes up about once every two or three months, usually when one of the Hollywood proponents of the sect brings it up in an interview.
By the way: you may have somewhat confused Scientology with Christian Science. The Scientologist WILL go to a hospital and will take medications for physical ailments. However they are very conservative even about doing this, since they feel that many medications interfere with ‘auditing’, a sort of system of reverie, in whihc one attempts to remember past traumatic experiences in some depth. Scientology was established by L. Ron Hubbard, a one-time science fiction writer who professed to have found a new science of mental health, which he called ‘Dianetics’. It is actually an amalgam of pre-existing theories, Eastern religious thought, and quack ideas, some of which DO involve space aliens and reincarnation. His ideas may have been originally thought by some theoretical psychologists to be somewhat interesting, but eventually rejected as unscientific by the entire psychological community. At some point in the 1950’s he incorporated a church known as the Church of Scientology, which shielded him from charges of practicing therapy without a license. Scientology has long been an outspoken critic of pyschiatry and psychology, which in turn have opposed Scientology as menace to mental well-being.
The central idea of Scientology is that human beings have something known as the ‘Reactive mind’, whose sole purpose is to record all events related to physical or emotional trauma. These records, known as ‘engrams’ were the way we originally learned to avoid danger or pain. Rather like a cat which jumps onto a hot woodstove and thereafter will never come near that woodstove, hot or cold. Unfortunately, humans often include in their engramatic memories a number of things NOT related to the actual pain.
For example, one is having breakfast as a child, and–as children often do–one is ‘rocking’ the chair on two of it’s four legs. The chair topples and one strikes one’s head, losing consciousness for a moment. At the very point at which that injury occurs, one experiences a wide variety of things:
- The smell of bacon frying;
- The morning sunlight pouring through a window;
- One’s mother screaming, “Watch out, silly, or you’ll fall!”
- The family dog, coming over to sniff one as one lies on the floor.
There might be other things but these are enough. All of these become part of the engram and–years later–one deveolps an aversion to bacon, bright sunlight, and dogs–they all give one a headache. Worse: one constantly thinks of oneself as silly or foolish, likely to ‘fall’ if one does not ‘watch out’. Oddly, one may have long since forgotten the actual fall–it perhaps did not involve serious injury, but simply stunned momentarily. Dianetic theory suggests that by going back and recollecting all of the various experiences such as these, going over-and-over them until all aspects of the memory are recollected and ‘released’, one will eventually erase the emotive force of the engram. In the case I have just described, one would no longer have a distaste for sunlight, bacon, or dogs, NOR be inclined to think of oneself as ‘silly’ or ‘liable to fall’.
In practice, Scientology is considered to simply NOT WORK. In fact numerous people who have sought help via Dianetics have seen their symptoms worsen until they actually are driven to suicide. (See the links to “Operation Clambake” in the threads I suggested above for more details). Worse: the Church of Scientology is known to keep records of the things disclosed during one’s reverie, often using them as a sort of blackmail if one leaves the Church of Scientolology and begins to oppose it. It is one organization which I would suggest one study at arm’s length for this reason. The Church of Scientology has often harrassed and even entered into lawsuits, mainly frivolous, against anyone who opposes it. People have had anonymous calls made to their workplaces, have had their spouses called by someone professing to have had an affair with them, have had numerous expensive items ordered in their name, etcetera. It’s an especially ugly organization.
