Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

practice a serious threat to the community, medically, morally and socially; and its adherents sadly
deluded and often mentally ill.'
In many cases, the report continued, mental derangement and a loss of critical faculties resulted
from Scientology processing, which tended to produce subservience amounting almost to mental
enslavement. Because of fear, delusion and debilitation, the individual often found it extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to escape. Furthermore, the potentiality for misuse of confidence was
great and the existence of files containing the most intimate secrets and confessions of thousands
of individuals was a constant threat to them and a matter of grave concern.
As for L. Ron Hubbard, the report suggested that his sanity was to be 'gravely doubted'. His writing,
abounding in self-glorification and grandiosity, replete with histrionics and hysterical, incontinent
outbursts, was the product of a person of unsound mind. His teachings about thetans and past
lives were nonsensical; he had a persecution complex; he had a great fear of matters associated
with women and a 'prurient and compulsive urge to write in the most disgusting and derogatory
way' on such subjects as abortions, intercourse, rape, sadism, perversion and abandonment. His
propensity for neologisms was commonplace in the schizophrenic and his compulsion to invent
increasingly bizarre theories and experiences was strongly indicative of paranoid schizophrenia
with delusions of grandeur. 'Symptoms', the report added, 'common to dictators.'
It continued in similar vein for 173 pages, concluding: 'If there should be detected in this report a
note of unrelieved denunciation of Scientology, it is because the evidence has shown its theories to
be fantastic and impossible, its principles perverted and ill-founded, and its techniques debased
and harmful. Scientology is a delusional belief system, based on fiction and fallacies and
propagated by falsehood and deception . . . Its founder, with the merest smattering of knowledge in
various sciences, has built upon the scintilla of his learning a crazy and dangerous edifice. The
HASI claims to be "the world's largest mental health organization". What it really is however, is the
world's largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous
techniques which masquerade as mental therapy.'[6]
It was not difficult to 'detect' a note of unrelieved denunciation in the Anderson report; indeed, in its
intemperate tone, its use of emotive rhetoric and its tendency to exaggerate and distort, it bore a
marked similarity to the writings of L. Ron Hubbard. In his determination to undermine Scientology,
Anderson completely ignored the fact that thousands of decent, honest, well-meaning people
around the world believed themselves to be benefiting from the movement. To condemn the church
as 'evil' was to brand its followers as either evil or stupid or both - an undeserved imputation.
Bloodied but unbowed, Hubbard began fighting back against the Anderson report on the day of its
publication, beginning with a rebuttal written exclusively for the East Grinstead Courier, accusing
the Australian inquiry of being an illegal 'kangaroo court' which had refused to allow him to appear
in his own defence. Its findings were 'hysterical', he said, and not based on the facts. He compared
the inquiry to the heresy trials which had led to witches being burned at the stake in the dark ages.
However, Dr Hubbard - described as 'the son of a Montana cattle baron' - still found it in his heart to
be munificent: 'Well, Australia is young. In 1942, as the senior US naval officer in Northern Australia,
by a fluke of fate, I helped save them from the Japanese. For the sake of Scientologists there, I will
go on helping them . . . Socrates said, "Philosophy is the greatest of the arts and it ought to be
practiced." I intend to keep on writing it and practicing it and helping others as I can.'
For his fellow Scientologists, Hubbard had a slightly different message. What had gone wrong in
Australia, he explained, was that he had approved co-operation with an inquiry into all mental