My parents and most of my immediate family are members of the Church of Scientology. Los Angeles is full of Scientologists. When people make fun of Scientology, they spell it with a dollar sign instead of an ‘S’, like this: $cientology. They spell it that way because the church is famous for extorting unlikely amounts of money in return for counseling and courses which are supposed to lead you up the Bridge to Total Freedom. In church pamphlets, there are lots of pictures of bridges that go upwards and end in a ball of white light with rays coming out of it. Freedom!

The melanocetus johnsoni, or the deep-sea angler, is a fish that only lives in ocean water 1000 feet or deeper. You can find it in an ocean near you and sometimes on the Discovery Channel. The female has an appendage that looks like a fishing rod made from E.T.’s finger jutting out from the top of her head, which is actually a protrusion of the dorsal spine, and is tipped by a bioluminescent sphere called a photophore. When it’s hungry, it flips on some switch and lures in prey by using the hypnosis that brightness promises when brightness is in short supply, and the bulb glows. When a smaller, dumber fish has wandered into deep ocean, the angler’s photophore looks to it like a ball of white light with rays coming out of it. Who wouldn’t go see?

Every bookshelf in my parents’ house is jam-packed with volumes of books written by the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. The “L” stands for Lafayette. Ron Hubbard died in 1986 in seclusion on his ranch in Creston, California. Church management said, “He told us he is going on to Target Two”, which Scientologists take to mean that he’s left it up to them to carry forward while he gets started on sowing the seeds of Truth elsewhere in the galaxy. Some of the books on the shelf say that, and my parents just eat it up.

Here is something else the Scientologists ate up: it’s a quote from a book written by an ex-Scientologist turned critic called A Piece of Blue Sky about a speech given by a Scientology executive after Hubbard’s death:

“In 1986, Scientologists celebrated LRH’s birthday as usual. In Los Angeles, Annie Broeker made her first public appearance since the 1970’s. Fumbling with her lines, looking tired and wearing too much makeup, she told the assembled fans a story. She said that Hubbard had once told her that ‘after the first tick of time’ that one ‘Arp Cola’ had invented music. There was a strong implication that Hubbard had been Cola. He supposedly borrowed some of these early tunes and refashioned them into the modern style. The result was an album called ‘The Road to Freedom’, which was released that night.”

When “The Road to Freedom” came out, my parents played the cassette in the car until it broke. The lyrics to the chorus in the title track are:

“Get on the road to freedom.
Help us save all mankind.
Your pain and all your sorrow
Is only in your mind.”

Freedom!

In his lifetime, Arp Ron Cola, the inventor of music, and not the upper echelons of church management after his death, authored 220 tales and novellas, numerous film scripts, 20 novels, including the science fiction original Battlefield Earth and the 10-volume series Mission Earth, hundreds of massive tombs of religious texts on every conceivable subject, thousands upon thousands of shorter church doctrines or ‘policy letters’, a poem called A Hymn of Asia in which he proclaims himself Buddha reincarnated, and lecture series after taped lecture series. When he was only 13 years old, Arp became America’s youngest Eagle Scout.

The most prolific writer on Earth was the late biochemist Isaac Asimov, who thought Arp Cola was an idiot. In his lifetime, he published over 500 books. Sometimes, Asimov published ten books a year. He was also a sci-fi writer. The difference between Isaac Asimov and L. Ron Cola is that Asimov never tried to start a religion, but more people read and agree with Asimov. Asimov never founded a cult, but people worship him anyway. The FBI never raided Isaac Asimov’s house, which goes to show that even Eagle Scouts can be un-American.

The bazillions of books that were written by Arp Cola, and not by the upper echelons of church management after his death, talk about the ARC Triangle, or the three components of communication that equal Understanding. They talk about the Chart of Human Evaluation, which you can use to tell if someone is likely to cheat on their spouse by how dirty their bedroom is, or if they like children or not. They talk about the tone scale, where being uptone means being an animated, creative go-getter, and not being homosexual.

People who are uptone like children, clean their rooms, and don’t cheat on their spouse. They smile a lot, and they are the Cause rather than the Effect. When uptone people feel blue, they just decide to feel better and do.

With all that spiritual freedom floating around, you’d think that it would speak for itself. You’d think they wouldn’t need to develop a public relations policy based around excommunicating dissenters, or suing the living shit out of naysayers.

Freedom!