God Only Knows

The blessing and burden of growing up in a secular
household is that I’ve been forced to confront the
mysteries of life without an official handbook. Instead
of simply inheriting the beliefs, values and rituals of
previous generations, I’ve had to start with a blank
slate and create a philosophy out of my own personal
experience. The advantage of this method is the
freedom to use every resource imaginable to inform
and guide me on this journey toward enlightenment.

In my life, these spiritual guideposts have included
traditional religious and mythological texts,
modern art and literature, cutting-edge physics
and cosmology, and even popular movies and
music. All have contributed to the creation of
a philosophy that I can only really describe as
Mystical Atheism.

Simply put: The universe is a mystery, God is
unknowable, and the only way to reach heaven
is to experience it here on Earth.

Or at least, that’s what I used to think until I
read this fascinating bit of theology:

The head of the Galactic Confederation (76
planets around larger stars visible from here)
founded 95,000,000 yrs ago (very space opera)
solved overpopulation (250 billion or so per
planet -- 178 billion average) by mass
implanting.

He caused people to be brought to Teegeeack
(Earth) and put an H Bomb on the principal
volcanoes (Incident 2). And then the Pacific
area ones were taken in boxes to Hawaii and
the Atlantic Area ones to Las Palmas and there
"packaged."

His name was Xenu.

He used renegades. Various misleading data
by means of circuits, etc. were placed in the
implants.

When through with his crime, Loyal Officers
(to the people) captured him after 6 years of
battle and put him in an electronic mountain
trap where he still is.

"They" are gone. The place (Confed.) has since
been a desert.

Pretty cool, huh? Can you guess the author of this highly
evocative religious text? No, it’s not George Lucas. It’s that
other science-fiction writer who famously said: If a man
really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would
be to start his own religion.

That’s right folks, it is L. Ron Hubbard, and the passage
above is from OT III, a document that (according to critic
David S. Touretzky) “Scientologists must consider to be the
most significant document in the history of the human race.”

But unlike those other significant documents like the
Torah, New Testament or Koran. You can actually view
this text in its original form, handwritten by Hubbard
himself.

[You’ll notice that I’ve adjusted some of the punctuation
to make it a bit easier to read -- forgive me, Ron.]

But seeing is believing, and until the US government can
figure out where they’ve misplaced the Ark of the Covenant,
this is how the score looks to me:

Xenu: 1
Jehovah: 0

So who’s really crazy here?
Tom Cruise?

Or the folks who stick with the more orthodox traditions?