[VIDEO] Deconstructing Scientology: Chapter Two

Hey everyone. This video continues my critical analysis of the book Scientology, edited by James R. Lewis with chapters contributed by various religious scholars, psychologists, sociologists and the like. Thanks for joining me on this.

If you haven’t yet watched my first couple videos in this series, I recommend you do although this video can stand alone. There is a link in the notes section below to the first part which gives the introduction and context of this series. I also want to reiterate just in case you didn’t see those earlier videos that I am not making any claims to be unbiased or objective in my views on Scientology.

Here we will be taking up Chapter Two of this book, written by William Sims Bainbridge. According to Wikipedia, he is an American sociologist in Viriginia and is the co-director of Cyber-Human Systems at the National Science Foundation, which is the official government agency that issues grants for research and education in all non-medical fields of science and engineering. So he’s kind of a big deal. He’s got a Harvard Ph.D. in sociology and has written a number of books on religion including The Sociology of Religious Movements and The Secular Abyss as well as works on specific cult groups such as Satan’s Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult in 1976 about a group called The Process and The Endtime Family: Children of God in 2002.

Bainbridge appears to be a much more thoughtful academic than Lewis or J. Gordon Melton, whose previous chapters I talked about already, in that his work attempts to analyze controversial religious groups and their characteristics from a bigger picture perspective of society at large. In other words, he does real sociology. Unfortunately, as you’ll see, with Scientology he makes the same mistake other academics make in that he takes Scientology at their word and therefore draws false conclusions about Scientology because he’s using their false statistics. For some reason which he doesn’t get into here, he also seems to be all-too-willing to disregard any source of information that is not the Church of Scientology. Let’s take a look at this chapter and what he has to say.

Bainbridge starts out stating his own bias:

“I must be clear. I am not myself a Scientologist. As an atheistic Futurist and Transhumanist, I do not share the beliefs of Scientology or any other religion, but I do agree with Scientology about the possibility of achieving transcendence through technology. Where Scientology seeks to promulgate a spiritual technology, I believe that physical technologies based in computer science and cognitive science would be required. A more sociological way of expressing this is to say that I am a member of the same post-Christian cyberculture as L. Ron Hubbard, but not a member of the Scientology subculture within it. My personal position is relevant for this scholarly essay for two reasons. First, members of the archaic Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture – including some mercenary secular journalists – are so hostile towards Scientology that a special effort must be made to see this novel religion’s real virtues. Second, it is essential for someone familiar with the wider culture to which Scientology belongs to place it in its proper cultural context.”

So we’re pretty clear right from the beginning that Bainbridge is coming at this from a biased and somewhat egotistical position. This is not unexpected from a Transhumanist, who by their nature feel that they have a higher ethical standard from which they have decided what is best for humanity. Transhumanism is a controversial subject and it’s not the point of this video to critique transhumanism, because there are pros and cons to it which would take hours to lay out and argue, especially when it comes to the ethics behind answering the question of “just because we can do something, does that mean we should do it?”

Instead, I’m simply putting some context behind where Bainbridge is coming from when he voices support for what he thinks is Scientology’s core belief – that man is actually a spiritual being who can achieve an objectively better state of existence and awareness through the application of specific techniques or methods which Hubbard refers to as Scientology technology. To some degree, Bainbridge says he finds common ground between this and his own Transhumanist ideas of improving man through the application of technology and because he’s found this common ground, I think this has blinded him to looking at Scientology with a more critical eye.

To put Scientology into a cultural context, Bainbridge begins by talking about the subculture of science fiction fans and mentions an article I’d never actually heard of until now.

“I first learned about Scientology’s precursor, Dianetics, through a 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction that belonged to my maternal grandfather, and a 1951 issue of Marvel Science Stories that I myself bought at a newstand (age ten). Mr. Hubbard published articles titled “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science” in Astounding, and “Homo Superior, Here we Come!” in Marvel.”

Having never heard of the Marvel issue, I looked up what I could about it and I think the reason the Church of Scientology did away with any references to it is because that particular issue of Marvel contained three articles about Dianetics. In addition to Hubbard’s, there was an article by Lester Del Rey entitled “Superman – C.O.D.” and another by Theodore Sturgeon called “How to Avoid a Hole in the Head”. So clearly Dianetics was not being popularly received by all of Hubbard’s science fiction writing contemporaries. I could not find any online copies of any of these articles for review and Bainbridge does not provide any real details about what Del Rey or Sturgeon had to say about Dianetics.

He then goes on to talk about the importance of Hubbard’s history as a writer of science fiction. Usually, this fact is used by critics to ridicule Hubbard and his overactive imagination but this is not a point I have ever tried to make because as far as I’m concerned, Hubbard’s other professions or experiences bear no real weight on the value or validity of Scientology itself. The fact that Hubbard was a writer, a sailor, a college dropout and a bigamist don’t have anything to do with whether one word of Scientology is true or not. But Bainbridge actually considers it an advantage and something that gives Hubbard credit, which I found somehwat intriguing when I was first reading through this.

He builds his case by first talking about the cultural significance of science fiction and it’s place in society starting by saying:

“Science fiction is a redoubt of deviant science. A redoubt is a cultural enclave in which cultural elements can survive, despite being rejected by the wider culture…. A great culture must be diverse, but some cultural elements contradict others. Partly, we solve this through the division of labor, for example, allowing poets to describe human beings in a different manner from psychologists or political scientists. But some contradictions are so striking or concern such important areas of life that we must exile one or more of the cultural alterantives to a redoubt. Over time, conditions change, and a previously exiled cultural element may sometimes re-emerge from the redoubt to take a respected place in conventional culture.”

Science fiction has long been looked at as a means of making statements or introducing ideas which reflect on the society in which the author lives without making a direct reference to that society, such as when movies like Terminator show our fear of advancing technology taking on a life of its own or evolving beyond our control, but that’s not the exact idea that Bainbridge is expressing here. He doesn’t actually give any concrete examples of a cultural redoubt, so it’s not clear what point he is making other than that some elements of science fiction stories could be considered unacceptable to a society at large at one point but could later be accepted because the society changes. This is such a broad idea, that it would be easy to find anecdotal examples that both prove and disprove it. I couldn’t find reference to this idea of a “cultural redoubt” in any sociology texts and sociologists I contacted about this had never heard of it, so I think this concept is one of Bainbridge’s own invention.

Moving on to the next point of the case he is building, Bainbridge then goes in to the nature of belief.

“Art, as Coleridge remarked, requires the willing suspension of disbelief. We would agree that maxim applies to science fiction except that Coleridge missed an important point. There are serious ambiguities about the meaning of the concept <i>belief<i>. This is especially true in areas of religion, in which the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition placed heavy emphasis on exclusive loyalty to one set of statements, symbols and formal organizations. That tradition assumes that the truth is known, unique, and expressable. Although all religious traditions have some room for doubt and mysticism, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic has been exclusive to the point of tyranny.”

I don’t really agree that Coleridge missed the point, as Bainbridge is mixing apples and oranges when comparing a reader or viewer’s belief about a story or a painting to something like religious belief. This is not so much a point of ambiguity about the word belief as it is two different definitions of the word, so connecting those dots is really just playing unnecessary word games. One could argue that this also reveals his anti-religion bias but I don’t think that’s what he intends. There are plenty of instances of tyrannical behavior on the part of Judeo-Christian-Islamic organized religion for this to not be an inherently biased statement.

Bainbridge then describes how he designed artificial intelligence computer models to model gradations of belief, shades of gray rather than absolute black and white thinking and he then makes the point that this is how non-fundamentalist belief works. True enough but it’s not clear why he has to mention that he had to make a computer model about it.

He says that Scientology is a mix of absolute and relative beliefs.

“Scientology, like the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, seems to stress loyalty to a particular set of beliefs, to ‘100 percent standard tech.’ However, other maxims in Scientology communicate a kind of relativism, notably, ‘Your reality is your reality.’ Indeed, Scientology defines reality in terms of social agreement…”

He’s right about the fact that Scientology is a grab bag of varying and contradictory maxims and philosophies. However, and this is important, he is mis-quoting the actual Scientology maxim he is drawing from when he states “Your reality is your reality.” That’s not something Hubbard actually said and is not what Scientologists tell one another. Bainbridge is actually mixing two Scientology maxims into one, namely “what’s true for you is true” and “reality is agreement.” While I wouldn’t normally make such a fine point about this, it’s important in that there are big differences between the ideas of “truth” and “reality” in philosophy and especially when reality is being defined as a social construct rather than an absolute or objective concept that exists outside of how people perceive the world.

It’s alterations and misunderstandings like this that can get academics into a lot of trouble because they end up analyzing something that sounds like Scientology but really isn’t.

I like the directions that Bainbridge takes his thinking when he’s talking about Scientology in a wider cultural context, but he is not the best of writers. This essay definitely wanders but basically what Bainbridge is doing is connecting dots. He goes from talking about science fiction to belief to Scientology’s beliefs to then getting into Buddhism and L. Ron Hubbard’s mega-poem called Hymn of Asia.

In case you aren’t familiar, L. Ron Hubbard wrote a book in poetic form called Hymn of Asia in 1955 where he fraudulently claimed that he was the foretold next coming of the Buddha, called Metteyya, based on what he claimed was an old prophecy from Sanskrit lore.

As Bainbridge describes it:

“Metteyya is the way the Pali language renders the Sanskrit name Maitreya, the future Buddha who will bring the world ultimate enlightenment. One way to conceptualize many Asian religions, and a way Scientology conceptualizes itself, is as technological religion (Braddeson, 1969). That is, they seek to employ spiritual techniques to accomplish definite goals, notably advancement in personal wisdom, power and invulnerability.”

I say that Hubbard fraudulently claimed to be Metteyya because Hubbard took, shall we say liberties, with the actual Buddhist legends to fashion himself as the embodiment of its fulfillment. He claimed, for example, that the Sanskrit texts stated that Metteyya would have flaming red hair and would arise first in the West. Oddly, no such Sanskrit scriptures can be found anywhere that say that. It takes but a few minutes to debunk Hubbard’s nonsense by reading actual Buddhists talking about Hubbard’s claims and how wrong the Church of Scientology gets it. There was an effort made in the early-2000s to get a foothold in the modern Buddhist world and I recall Buddhists visiting Scientology’s Clearwater facilities and there being a lot of positive noise in the Scientology world about this and then, suddenly, it got really quiet and nothing more was ever said about the whole thing.

Hymn of Asia has been out of print for years and I think is something Scientology would like to forget ever happened.

However, Bainbridge literally takes everything Hubbard and the Church of Scientology say at face value. As I’ve already shown in the last two videos, this is a very serious flaw. Bainbridge is well aware, or should be, that Hubbard’s operatic nonsense in Hymn of Asia has nothing to do with real Buddhist or Sanskrit prophecy, but he doesn’t bother to mention any of this because he’s too busy building a case for the validity of Scientology against his own transhumanist philosophy. I just want to point this lack of critical thinking on his part because it is a consistent error throughout his entire essay. By failing to apply any fact checking or debunking to Scientology’s literature and claims, Bainbridge really just becomes a Scientology mouthpiece rather than an objective academic analyst.

But let’s carry on with our reading and see where he goes with this.

So after making what I think is a fairly controversial claim that eastern religions are technology religions, Bainbridge brings it back full circle to science fiction.

“Science fiction is filled with supermen – including the comic book character explicitly named Superman and created by science fiction fans. Some, like Superman himself, are born superior. Mr. Hubbard’s Marvel essay, “Homo Superior, Here We Come!” reflects the fact that stories about human evolution to a higher plane were common. For example, Odd John by Olaf Stapledon (1935) and Slan by A.E. Van Vogt (1946) imagine that ordinary humans will defensively seek to destroy superior beings, and this is one explanation for current hostility against Scientology.”

What? This is where Bainbridge’s bias really starts boiling to the surface in ridiculous ways. To think for a second that the reason Scientology is being criticized or generating hostility from society at large is because it is capable of creating super beings who threaten the order of that society is such a ludicrous and unsupportable claim as to make it just laughable.

There is not and never has been even one piece of objective or verifiable evidence that Scientology has ever given anyone superhuman, paranormal or exceptional abilities. In fact, just the opposite is easily demonstrated since Scientologists who attain the high levels of Clear and Operating Thetan have been shown over and over again to suffer from cancer or bad eyesight, declare bankruptcy and even commit suicide. Not one critic of Scientology that I’ve met, read or heard has ever said or implied that it was Scientology’s ability to create higher states of being that infuriated or upset them. If anything, just the opposite is true and you’ll find many critics who are very much upset that they wasted years of their life and millions of dollars trying to achieve states of being which Scientology cannot produce.

Bainbridge rambles on in this vein, discussing other science fiction stories which align to this thesis and talking about Hubbard’s career as a science fiction writer. He then goes into a really bizarre tract where he combines two survey sets showing the relative popularity of various science fiction writers over the course of time. Both survey results show L. Ron Hubbard to be considered below average. Here is how Bainbridge puts it:

“Thus the graph allows us to see how the subculture of science fiction “fandom” has changed its views of some of the older writers. Mr. Hubbard, notably, dropped from the middle of the pack to the bottom, possibly because fans had become hostile to Scientology as it developed during the intervening years. In my study of the social movement that produced space technology (Bainbridge, 1976), I described fandom as a somewhat retreatist redoubt, capable of preserving and even creating new ideas, but incapable of organizing to bring them to reality. Thus, fans may paradoxically resent Scientology’s attempt to bring their dreams to reality.”

Now these are some very creative conclusions which as far as I can tell, Bainbridge is just pulling out of his ass and are wholly unsupported by any of the data he is citing. At the same time, he manages to also insult all of science fiction fandom by not only saying they aren’t able to create much but they subconsciously resent Scientology and therefore L. Ron Hubbard’s writing.

Apparently Bainbridge can’t conceive of the idea that perhaps science fiction fans don’t like L. Ron Hubbard’s writing because it’s shallow, filled with two-dimensional caricatures and stereotypes and the dialogue so bad as to be vomit-inducing. Bainbridge’s pro-Hubbard bias is pretty out in the open here.

Unfortunately, Bainbridge carries on with this line of thinking in the next section, entitled “Science Adventurism.”

“Critics of Scientology sometimes disparage L. Ron Hubbard’s love of adventure, implying that it was an unrealistic residue of his experience writing action-adventure fiction.”

For the record, I’ve never seen or read one critic who disparaged Hubbard’s love of adventure, so I have no idea who Bainbridge is referring to here.

“I would suggest something quite different. The image of adventurer-scientists undertaking dangerous expeditions is quite realistic, and illuminates much about Scientology, although this image has gone somewhat out of style. Few people will today recall that Alexander von Humbolt heroically combined scientific research with bold exploration of uncharted territories two centures ago, but perhaps they know that Charles Darwin had to go literally to the ends of the Earth to do the research reported in Origin of Species. L. Ron Hubbard may or may not have risked his life, but scientists and scholars in my own family did so, in one case connecting to Mr. Hubbard’s personal story.”

Bainbridge then reveals that his great uncle Con (short for Consuelo Seoane) was best friends with Snake Thompson, a man Hubbard claimed to have met on a sailing voyage when he was 11 years old. Russell Miller, in his biography of Hubbard called Bare-Faced Messiah, apparently implied that Snake Thompson was a figment of Hubbard’s imagination and this was a research error on his part because Thompson was confirmed to be quite real by more than one source including William Sims Bainbridge in this very essay.

It makes for interesting reading to be sure, but it does nothing to confirm or deny the validity of Dianetics or Scientology to show that Thompson was a real person, much less a master spy of some renown. Nevertheless, that is what Bainbridge spends the next three pages of his essay doing. Why does he do this? He explains it as follows:

“I have told this true story at some length, both because Thompson was so influential in Mr. Hubbard’s intellectual development, and because it illustrates a little-appreciated fact. A very few adventuresome soules really do have the fantastic experiences described in science fiction or action-adventure stories.”

I don’t think that anyone really was contesting any of this, which really just serves to make this section of this essay on Scientology seem non-sequitur and even self-congratulatory when Bainbridge lays out four different people in his own family who had their own adventures in the course of their professional life. But Bainbridge’s egotism comes to the fore when he then reveals this:

“In particular, I spent six months in 1970 doing covert participant observation inside Scientology for my senior honors thesis, even trying Con’s method of using shoe scratches to record data, and two years intermittently from 1971 to 1975 inside a nominally Satanic offshoot of it called The Process (Bainbridge, 1978). Subsequently, I felt it was my duty to provide court affidavits for the Church of Scientology – at no cost, of course – affirming that many members really did consider it to be their religion. Scientology was wise enough to notice that the fact I had done covert research without their permission or guidance added credibility to my affirmations and our relationship has been on cordial but unbiasing terms ever since.”

Unbiasing terms? I would beg to differ. He infiltrated Scientology for six months and he has not one critical or negative thing to say about that entire experience? He then spent years involved in a dangerous Scientology offshoot group called The Process which has been linked to animal sacrifices and ritual murders and he still has nothing negative to say about Scientology’s influence on its members? Bainbridge’s bias comes through so loud and clear in this essay that it’s frankly amazing to me he’s not a Scientologist.

Think I’m overstating it? Here is the last part of this section and you can decide if this reads like an objective academic’s writing or a Scientology promotional piece:

“One way to look at membership in the Church of Scientology is as a great adventure. Very few people infiltrate it as I had done, given that espionage runs in my family. However, a large number undoubtedly gain from their spiritual processing sessions many of the benefits of adventure: anticipation, excitement, a sense of stretching one’s capabilities, intense emotions, a series of unusual perspectives on life, and a treasure trove of vivid memories to look back upon. Adventure builds competence and a sense of efficacy. Mr. Hubbard’s personal interest in the sea, in wild adventures in exotic lands, and in combining science with spiritual questing may in some significant measure have been inspired by Snake Thompson. Contrary to rumor, Thompson was entirely real and he lived the kind of life that bland folk imagine only fictional characters experience. Scientology cannot be fully understood, unless we realize that it is an adventure comparable to science fiction, but real.”

The next section is called “A Ludic System of Honor.” Ludic means “of or relating to play.”

“Today, Scientology says it seeks to increase a person’s ability rather than status. ‘The goal of auditing is to restore beingness and ability. This is accomplished by (1) helping the individual rid himself of any spiritual disabilities and (2) increasing individual abilities. Obviously, both are necessary for an individual to achieve his full spiritual potential.’ (www.scientology.org) Beingness is the ability to say confidently, ‘I am.’ Ability is the ability to say confidently, ‘I am able.’ Yet spiritual abilities cannot be measured outside the framework of assumptions of the particular spiritual movement, so spiritual ability is a status, relative to a socially constructed framework of meanings.”

Here Bainbridge makes the first truly accurate sociological observation about Scientology and it’s obsession with status. Scientologists have formed a kind of caste system with wogs or non-Scientologists at the bottom, not dissimilar to the Hindu’s Untouchables while those who have completed the highest OT levels are considered gods among men.

He fails to mention that over the past twenty years, the status of OT has been slowly but purposefully eroded in favor of those who have given more and more money to the cause regardless of the level of spiritual enlightenment they’ve achieved. So in today’s Scientology, a status of Patron Invictus of the International Association of Scientologists, who has given tens of millions of dollars to the cause to receive that title, is lauded and appreciated far more than the common OT VIII.

Bainbridge goes on to describe how status is conferred in various groups across society, usually such status being marked by money and power. He then makes this startlingly accurate observation about the very heart of how Scientology operates:

“The many release states below [Scientology] Clear commit a person to the system. A person who fails to acheive Clear is at risk of losing the release grades, as well, which certainly happens if the person leaves Scientology. The release grades are also a training ground in the norms and values, and a series of tests of the individual’s willingness to play the game.

“If self-esteem and the respect of other people are the real goals of playing a status game, then the individual must somehow be convinced to stop whining, complaining, and being dependent. All of the steps up to Clear require the preclear to depend upon other people, but at the last moment, the Clear must learn to depend upon himself.

“After going Clear, a Scientologist may still wish to gain added abilities and status, so a ladder of further degrees is provided. Lingering doubts may be handled by hopes that the additional benefits will finally provide complete satisfaction. However, humans did not evolve to be perfectly happy, but to continue to struggle for advantage, as in games. Additional degreees above Clear allowed Scientologists to continue attaining successes and the increasing subjective status associated with them.”

So it’s not that Bainbridge is incapable of objective or clear thinking about what Scientology actually consists of or how it operates. He simply won’t take the next logical and honest step of calling a spade a spade by acknowledging that these levels of status offered by Scientology are nothing more than wholly subjective states or noting the sacrifices that Scientology demands of its members to be allowed to attain these statuses. Those sacrifices are not merely financial but also involve contributing time and psychological commitment to the cause in such a way as to make anything else in a Scientologist’s life pale in comparison. In other words, in order to make it to OT, a Scientologist has to be willing to sacrifice anything and everything else on the altar of the “greatest good for the greatest number.” That can and has had severe financial, emotional and psychological repercussions on many Scientologists past and present, yet Bainbridge can only applaud Scientology as an adventure comparable to that of a science fiction story. You can see why by this point, I’ve started to regard Bainbridge with well deserved contempt. He’s overtly shilling for Scientology in this essay.

Bainbridge’s next and final point of analysis is called “Cyberspace Culture” and is mainly Bainbridge’s treatise on the idea of personality capture, which he says is “the first step on the way toward emulating human personalities inside computers, information systems and robots.” This of course is a very important aspect of Transhumanism which contains as part of it the concept of replicating or transmitting a person’s entire neural pattern into a computer so as to continue living after the physical body ages and dies.

Bainbridge tries to connect the use of the E-meter, Scientology’s pseudoscientific galvanic skin response reader, and their proclivity for writing down the E-meter’s responses to questions in auditing, to personality capture. Being trained on Scientology’s use of the E-meter and having used it for thousands of hours in auditing, I can dismiss everything Bainbridge says about this as pure nonsense. There is nothing of value in the direction of personality capture in any of Scientology’s auditing procedures and besides, all of the information that Scientology keeps of this nature is supposed to be held inviolate and utterly confidential. How Bainbridge imagines Scientology would ever share this knowledge in such a way as to contribute to Transhumanism I’ll leave to his imagination.

He then goes on a very non-sequitur rant about how Scientology preserving its works on titanium media in secretive vaults around the US sounds like a another perfectly valid form of personality capture to him and that Scientology has been unfairly criticized for doing this. I certainly have nothing against the concept of preserving fundamental and original materials on any worthwhile subject, but one would have to admit that Scientologists have taken this to a level that makes “obsessive” seem mild in comparison with tens of millions of dollars spent on super secret vaults in secluded regions of California, New Mexico and Wyoming that all but a small handful of Scientologists are kept in the dark about.

Somehow he then connects this to the fradulent census figures Scientology provided to him in order to map out how many Clears and Scientologist websites there are across the US. This is an exercise in futility, since Bainbridge did not challenge the figures. For him, he is able to use this to conclude the following:

“These connections are only suggestive, of course, but to me they imply a positive correlation between technologically innovative regions and interest in Scientology, in addition to the well-known negative correlation with traditional religion.”

He’s referring to the high incidence of Scientologists in the arbitrarily assigned Pacific region versus other areas of the U.S., although I guess for his purposes that he had to ignore the fact that the second highest concentration of Scientologists in the world are in Clearwater, Florida and its immediate neighborhoods. Hardly a booming hub of technological development.

So we finally reach the end of this essay and Bainbridge writes this in his summary:

“This chapter has outlined some of the complex sociocultural history of Scientology in terms of four formative phenomena: (1) science fiction; (2) science adventurism; (3) ludic systems of honor, and (4) the emerging cyberculture. Scientology is not an isolated phenomenon, but can best be understood in terms of these cultural origins and affinities. People who are not attuned to these influences may misunderstand what they are getting into when they encoutner Scientology, occassionally leading to unpleasant results.”

As a former Scientologist of 27 years, after reading this treatise, all I concluded is that Bainbridge sees the world through a sort of cybercultural transhumanist lens through which everything must pass and this is why he choose to analyze Scientology on these terms. He’s forced a round peg through a square hole and the reader is none the wiser or better for his having done so.

There is so much that could honestly and objectively be said from a sociological perspective about Scientology and its role as a western religion with eastern overtones: how its policies are reflective of so much of the Cold War mentality in which it evolved; how Hubbard imbued so much of his own personality into his teachings and how that personality overshadows and soon takes over the personalities of his followers; how the caste system of Scientology operates to create a series of sub-cultures of power and domination; and so much more. Very little of that reflected in anything Bainbridge has to say. He comes close once and then skips right off of the point which makes me question either his intentions or what instructions he was given when he wrote this in the first place. Maybe editor James Lewis would only accept a puff piece so that’s what Bainbridge provided.

Another entirely wasted effort when I was hoping for so much more. Now that I’m two chapters into this work, I’m starting to despair of getting any honest or objective analysis but let’s see what happens.

So that concludes our look at Chapter 2. I hope you found this interesting and of some use. I’d love to hear your feedback and comments, good or bad, and whether you think I missed on anything here. As I said before, I am not pretending to be objective in my analysis of this book, but I do want to be fair.

In our next part, we’ll look at Chapter 3 by Douglas Cowan, entitled “Researching Scientology: Perceptions, Premises, Promises and Problematics”. Hmmm. Sounds good.

Thank you for watching.