I had a good friend with whom I worked at CKDU in Halifax. He was an awfully nice guy, and I remember Mark and I driving up to Port Hawkesbury for his wedding. I was over at his place once and on his coffee table was a book with an erupting volcano on the cover called Dianetics. I asked him about it and he smiled and said it was really valuable to finally have an idea of how the human mind really worked.

Today, I walked home past the Church of Scientology of Ottawa at 150 Rideau Street. I walk past it just about every day. I think the church here is fairly new, though I can't say for sure. I've certainly been noticing it lately; there have been ads on TV for Dianetics, and last week a small pamphlet appeared in our mail box advertising a lecture about it.

Until a couple of years ago, I had only the vaguest notion of Scientology, classifying it with some of the goofier popular cults I remembered from the 1980s. But in the mid-1990s I began to read that Scientology had started to vigorously attack critics who had posted what the church considered to be "trade secrets" detailing their technology of salvation. A particular battleground was and is the Usenet discussion group alt.religion.scientology. I've been poking around this group on and off for months, and I always find it filled with posts that in any other context would be taken to be nonsensical, surreal poetry.

These posts, I discovered, are called sporgeries, and they are computer-generated messages that seem to be from real people but are filled with nonsense. Many critics of the church claim that Scientology is responsible for the sporgies, though others (perhaps Scientology shills) aren't so sure. Most of the people posting in alt.religion.scientology are critics of Scientology, and believe the church is trying to sabotage free speech. There's an article about the sporgies at ZDnet called Attack of the Robotic Poets.

There is also a great deal of Scientology-related discourse to be found on the Web. Many sites tell how critics of Scientology have been harassed by the church. I have tried to keep an open mind as I have read these accounts -- there are at least two stories to every side, after all -- but the evidence of harassment is pretty convincing, and the personal accounts compelling. Some of the stories were almost funny, like Jeff Jacobsen's account of being picketed outside a hotel where he worked, but most stories are frightening and disturbing, particularly the story of the death of Lisa McPherson after the failure of Scientology "medical" treatments.

Some of Scientology's critics obviously have an axe to grind, and I don't agree with the views of many of them, but their opinions can't simply be dismissed as religious bigotry. Putting aside the question of whether Scientology is a religion, a cult, or something else, freedom of religion is a basic human right and includes the right to question and criticize religious beliefs. There is no justification for a religious organization threatening, harassing, and ultimately silencing its critics, as has Scientology.

Much of the recent conflict between Scientology and its critics has centred on the posting to Usenet and Web sites of texts that reveal some of the most secret and well-guarded beliefs of the Church. Unlike many other religions, Scientologists aren't allowed to hear about some of their most important myths until they have reached a level of "enlightenment" that costs tens of thousands of dollars to attain.

Despite Scientology's efforts, these secret myths are not too hard to find. The surprising thing is that they read like bad 1950s science fiction.

Perhaps the core myth of Scientology is the story of an evil alien ruler named Xenu, which can be learned by a Scientologist when he reaches a level called OT III. According to the myth, Xenu was in charge of Earth and 75 other planets in our area of the galaxy about 75 million years ago. Xenu's scheme for solving the problem of overpopulation on his planets was to paralyse his citizens, fly them to Earth (then known as "Teegeeack") in "space planes" (which looked exactly like Douglas DC-8 aircraft) and, after arranging them around volcanoes, murdered them with hydrogen bombs. (This is why Dianetics has a volcano on the cover.) Xenu then gathered up the souls of these murdered billions and showed them horror films in what Hubbard described as "3-D cinemas" for several days. The end result of this was that these souls, called "thetans," clustered together and now inhabit people in their thousands, causing many of the ills of the world. And of course, they can be removed at huge expense.

I'll let you come to your own conclusions about Scientology. There is a great deal of additional information on the Web. Some of the better resources are detailed below.