Look out! He's got a knife!

The Triune Understanding

When I was in my early teens, I read the start of the ten-volume Mission: Earth series by L. Ron Hubbard. The graphic scenes of sex and violence combined with cheesy SF and goofy comedy floored me at the time, because I'd never read anything like it before, but after a couple of volumes I got bored and gave up.

However, I was impressed with the idea that L. Ron Hubbard had invented his own religion and so ended up doing a history project on his life. I read two biographies of him; one was a whacked-out crazy thing co-written by his son, but the other - a more straightforward biography called Bare-faced Messiah - was amazing and i would highly recommend it. The Wikipedia page links to pdf & html versions of the complete text, by permission of writer Russell Miller. As the title suggests, Miller examines Hubbard's life largely by attempting to unravel the various tall tales he told about himself over the decades, but as colourful as Hubbard's lies could get the true parts are even more amazing.

I also read The Scandal of Scientology by Paulette Cooper, which was a critical exposé that the church tried to suppress, but in the long term what they tried to do to Cooper probably did more damage to them than the book ever could have.

Though I eventually gave up on it, I liked the Kurt Busiek run on The Avengers when he introduced a hero called Triathlon, who turned out to be a member of a Scientology-inspired 'religion' claiming to maximise human potential but actually tied to a alien invaders. Here's an article on Triathlon's faith.

And here's a weird little article about a very young Neil Gaiman.