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Op-Ed Contributor
My Views on Scientology and Christianity
By Nelly Henderson
I can perhaps contribute a valid comment to the points raised by Sean Stubblefield and other more recent correspondents about the connection, if any, between Christianity and Scientology since I am just about as antagonistic towards Christianity as I am towards Scientology. I hope this gives no offence to American readers. My point of view is very much European. I hope it causes no offence to say that I believe America is evolving in the same direction but is some 50 years behind.
I was brought up a Christian but began to object from a very young age to the blackmail and unfounded assumptions that were handed out week after week. It was unconvincing and very boring. I have always believed that my grasp of logic was developed by trying to understand sermons that were singularly lacking in it. When I was nine I resigned from all my church-based groups, an indication of future developments. I count it as a great blessing that I have been able to continue this line of evolution to the present day.
From this perspective it is evident that Christianity in many ways is an old, decayed form of Scientology that (D.V.) will never be. Centuries ago when Christianity was in power in the Western world it controlled and blackmailed every soul in it in much the same was as the CoS would do if it could. A man (or woman) could not be born, get married, have children, move from one parish to another, or die without the validation of the Church, and every sacrament cost money. Worse by far was the Christian concept of original sin, which is roughly equivalent to the body thetans of Scientology. Sin began before birth and continued after death unless you observed many rituals and, of course, paid. Perhaps the worst feature of Christianity is that the reckoning does not end with death. After death comes judgment, leading to eternal salvation or damnation. The believer cannot even look forward to a peaceful well-earned oblivion, let alone a billion years of L.Ron Hubbard.
Today over most of Europe the influence of Christianity has seriously declined but its enemies need not imagine that a lack of belief in higher powers means that Christianity is no longer important. It has left a reactive generation like myself who will fight tooth and nail for the right to believe in human responsibility for human behaviour and the natural development of human qualities. We can see that a belief in supernatural powers opens the way to degradation, despair and exploitation. Secularity is young compared with the old supernatural creeds but it has the advantage in being rational, moral and so effective.
judythpiazza@newsblaze.com
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