So maybe Lynch was not actually a Scientologist. That means he is doomed to be swept into the in-between lives and from there to either the Mars or the Venus implant station. Once entrapped there, he will be programmed to forget his most recent Earth life and will otherwise be made malleable through mental implants and so on. Then, back to Earth most likely, to be born again.

But an OT would not have suffered that fate — he/she/it could be exterior with full perceptics and could presumably communicate in any number of ways. “Hey!” the dead OT might write in clouds in the sky, “the weather is fine out here; all the invader force keys in the implant stations are actually long dead. I’ll leave you notes up here in the blue every day! ML and ARC, a Thetan.”

Further, if you were an OT VIII, you would not even need to come back. Heck, if you were quasi-god Ron, you would not even need to do fundraisers. You (Ron) — being at cause over MEST, life and thought both subjectively and objectively — could simply postulate a pot of gold into existence whenever you needed money. The hell with fundraisers. And you could blow the minds of everyone by simply postulating ideal orgs into existence. One day, vacant lot. Next day, 50,000 sq. ft. building that doesn’t even need to be hooked to the grid — it somehow generates its own energy.

Scientology has its own convenient rationalizations for why it cannot subject the world to actual proof — overwhelming, restimulative, out-gradient, out-exchange, unethical, etc. Bollocks. That same Scientology is quite happy to overwhelm people with crush reging, restimulate them through volcanoes on book cover art and any number of other practices, push people way out gradient through ridiculous stats pushes, create massive out-exchanges ($1,000 for a t-shirt — wow!, not to mention books, e-meters, etc.), and of course any true meaning of ethics is something truly incomprehensible in the Scientology world view.

So why can’t Scientology demo any Clear or OT objectively? Because they don’t exist. Why can’t dead (out-of-body, exterior) OTs communicate to us? There’s no OTs exist. Not one has been realized. None proven. Just anecdotal information that can be explained in many other ways much more plausibly.

But for Mr. Lynch, I wonder — would true believers in Scientology really be fine with their magazine editor being manhandled in an implant station? Wouldn’t they want to usher him past the in-between lives madness and get him back in a Scientology baby body? Oh, wait — Scientology does not encourage babies or growth of family, and may enforce abortion for its top ranks.

Stupid.

Stupid evolutionarily: those persons with the traits to be the truest believers and most dedicated servants, you weed out of the gene pool instead of encouraging them to have kids?

Stupid sociologically: pretty much every other religion on Earth has grown via reproduction. Not Scientology! It focuses on the growth vector some (but not all) religions promote — conversion! In its arrogance of belief that it will clear the Earth (convert 100% of the population), Scientology thus squanders its true growth potential through reproduction.

Well, as Mr. Gump once said that his momma said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

And back to Mr. Lynch. He has not moved on to an implant station. He will not be back. He is now born into that land from whence no one returns — to poorly paraphrase Shakespeare, who had a quadrillion times more wisdom than Hubbard.

Not sure you can get a protection order against a dead man.

Dave

My feeling is that if they do come back, and I am sure they do not, they probably have completely forgotten about Scientology–so unless they were recruited into it somehow the subject world be completely foreign to them. Most of the people in the world still have never heard of Scientology, and even of the ones that have, very few have bothered to find out much about it.

There bodies go unclaimed. Really, has this happened?

You raise a very interesting idea: that outrageous health claims for a “religion” gain less traction in countries with a broad safety network for health services. It certainly makes intuitive sense.

I did a quick look at the numbers (that’s what I do for a living) and the numbers for Scientology membership in Canada don’t look much different from the US (which just gives me another bit of evidence to lead me to believe that Canada really is part of the US, they’re just pretending :-). There are about 30 million Canadians, roughly 1/10 of the US population. The just-released religious numbers from the 2011 census show 1,745 Scientologists. Adjusting for population size, that would suggest there are about 17,500 Scientologists in the US (we have to estimate from multiple sources since the US census data doesn’t track small “religions”). That’s probably a little higher than the actual number of Scientologists in the US, but well within appropriate margins for error. A similar number holds true for the UK, where the NHS arguably does a better job than the provincial health systems in Canada: there are 2,500 Scientologists out of a population of 65 million or so.

Interestingly, this does not lead me to conclude you’re wrong; it simply suggests to me that people get into Scientology for reasons other than the alleged “health benefits.” They may believe in the health message once they’re in, but it is probably not what attracts them in the first place.

I would be interested if there are any studies done of highly coercive cults focused more on health benefits (“Breatharians”, etc) of membership in the US versus countries with single-payer health care, but I have neither the time nor any uniquely powerful research tools to track that down.

If auditing cured cancer, I would probably join up pre-emptively. In the last seven years, my grandfather died of it, then my grandmother had a mastectomy, then their youngest son (my uncle) got brain cancer and died.
Actually, scratch that. I live in Canada. We have health care. Consequently, GETTING cancer is cheaper than being audited to AVOID cancer (even if it did work) and I am broke.
I wonder if that’s part of the reason why Scientology never took off here with *quite* the fervor that it exhibited in its US heyday. When there’s a safety net, you don’t have the same desperation to convince yourself that there’s a “cure-all” waiting just inside the door for you personally (just swipe your card here, and sign away your life HERE…).

Thanks for the reply. That is such a major story. Hope it works out to be published, and the other to be translated.

Truly.