Reviews for Scientology, a History of Man: A List and Description of the Principal Incidents to Be Found...

The average rating for Scientology, a History of Man: A List and Description of the Principal Incidents to Be Found... based on 2 reviews is 1 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-12-29 00:00:00 Janine Huxford The first line of the introduction says it all: "This is a cold-blooded and factual account of your last 76 trillion years." It captures L. Ron Hubbard's pathological compulsion to lie, his inane science fiction writing, and the bravado with which he presents it all. It is a bit surprising that this book is freely offered to anyone (well, it's $30 on Scientology's website, but you can find it cheaper elsewhere), as it contains the deep-time nonsense that we normally think of as being revealed in the upper OT levels. There's no mention of Xemu/Xenu, but you learn of other events, technologies and places in the long-distant past lives of our eternal thetans. For example, we learn that Arsclycus was "an old society built in space, with no planet, in which there were many roads, turrets, castles, and so forth. People were brought in and put to work there. Every time they died, they found themselves standing back in the same line again and were slipped back into a body for about ten thousand consecutive lifetimes until Arsclycus blew up." A good chunk of LRH's explanatory efforts go toward describing the history of the Genetic Entity (GE), a component of our physical (MEST) bodies that carries memories of our evolutionary history. It's separate from the thetan that comprises your true identity, but it can affect your body and show up in auditing nonetheless. The GE is passed from body to body, life after life. After dismissing Darwin (who is lumped in with Lysenko) and evolutionary theory in general as "a sprawling and contradictory mass of poorly compiled data", Hubbard has the audacity to present his own invented, cockamamie history of man's evolution. Basically, we all started as clams. "Can you imagine a clam sitting on the beach, opening and closing its shell very rapidly?" LRH is quite confident that you, the uninitiated, will have a clenched and sore jaw just from reading that last sentence. I'm equally confident that your jaw is just fine, thank you. After that unsubstantiated clam, he mentions that barnacles in the clam's shell eventually became our teeth, and that teeth problems can be resolved by auditing back to this time. Then he mentions birds, which were not part of our evolutionary path, but often dropped us clams, instilling a fear of falling. Dinosaurs are skipped completely, but next thing you know we are sloths. Then we're apes. Then we're something like "The Piltdown Man", which is hilarious because Hubbard chose to name a specimen that was exposed as a hoax the year after this book was published in 1952. It has not been corrected as of this 2007 edition. Following that we are cavemen, and auditing back to that time can help with relationship problems. The rest of the book details the various things that happened to our thetans (souls) over the past 76 trillion year "whole track" - these incidents being the most important to address, since they involve our true selves. Here Hubbard invents an absurd array of machines and behaviors used on ancient planets to trap, torture, confuse and burden our thetans with false memories and insecurities. Apparently our immaterial thetans can be affected with electronic devices that haven't yet been invented on Earth, but were used extensively in the past. LRH frequently makes reference to supernatural effects a thetan is capable of, such as "knock[ing] off hats at fifty yards and read[ing] books a couple of countries away..." Elsewhere he says the energy from a thetan can explode eyeballs or cut a body in half. Any one of these abilities demonstrated could make Scientology appear credible, but Hubbard warns followers that such displays would only make it harder for others to get up the bridge, so don't try to perform miracles to impress the "sleeping sapiens". CONVENIENT. Here's an example paragraph, chosen at random, showing the dense patois of Scientology terms: "There is no subject more interesting than that of THETA TRAPS. It is of vast interest to any invader. It is of vaster interest to your preclear. How can you trap a thetan? By curiosity, by giving him awards and prizes (of an implant), by retractor screens, by mock-ups, by ornate buildings which he will enter unsuspectingly only to be 'electroniced down,' by many such means the thetan is reduced from KNOWING to a colonist, a slave, a MEST body." (p. 113) As with any Scientology work, there's a sizeable glossary in the back to explain terms as Hubbard used them. This glossary is 59 pages for a 147-page book. There's a combination of mid-century phrases L. Ron Hubbard favored (I'm sure glad they defined "hot papa suits"), common words anyone should understand (thanks for clearing up "coupled", "fraction" and "thin air"!), as well as the elaborate network of Scientology speak. Here's a particularly daft one: "DED: DED stands for DEserveD action, an incident the preclear does to another dynamic and for which he has no motivator - i.e., he punishes or hurts or wrecks something the like of which has never hurt him. Now he must justify the incident. He will use the things which didn't happen to him. He claims that the object of his injury really deserved it, hence the word, which is a sarcasm." DED stands out for its bizarre abbreviation and sarcastic meaning-the-opposite-of-what-it-intends-to-mean, but also encodes a sinister policy of blaming the victims within Scientology. If you complain of any wrongs done to you, that just means you're covering up something equally bad or worse you did to someone else first. I could go on for a long time, but I'll just say there's some pretty entertaining claptrap here if you're a glutton for this brand of punishment. I'm just constantly floored at how boldly and self-assuredly L. Ron Hubbard lied, making reference to research that obviously never took place, factual claims that are clearly false, and sci-fi scenarios as unbelievable as they are poorly written.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-10-22 00:00:00 Carolyn Shaw The best one yet. This book covers the fact that you are actually a thetan who is trillions of years old and immortal, and that you are trapped in a body. Oh, and that you can move things with your mind and generate electrical charges. Pure entertainment.