The Church of Scientology has a reputation for being litigation-happy. The Church of Scientology has sent legal letters to people who criticize Scientology or, even worse, reveal the beliefs which Scientology only tells members after they have become heavily invested - emotionally, psychologically, and financially - in the organization.

Codebot.org is a “community driven website” dealing with all manner of technical and technological information, but they made the “mistake” of publishing an article critical of Scientology. Lawyers for the Church of Scientology sent a threatening letter to their hosting company and actually had the site taken down for a while; fortunately, they came back up after a week or so.

Here is the original article which the Church of Scientology thought was so awful:

As you progress up the ladder, the church begins to reveal more information about itself to you. They contend it can’t be revealed to you all up front, because the information is so powerful, that if you were to hear about it with an unprepared mind it would kill you (it’s that powerful). What they begin to reveal is that all the negative energy trapped inside you are actually thetans, and that thetans are wandering immortal souls carrying past life experiences.

Fortunately, the “awful truth” is readily available, as the article explains:

Eventually the courses teach you that once you reach the state of “clear” all thetans will have been purged from your body. After “clear” you progress to an OT (operating thetan). As an OT you will begin to develop supernatural powers (John Travolta is a high level OT).

It’s in the OT levels that the church begins to tell you the true story of the universe. They teach that 75 million years ago the thetans were actually hundreds and hundreds of billions of interplanetary space beings placed on Earth by the evil galactic space ruler Xenu. They were killed by Xenu when he placed their bodies around volcanoes (somewhere around Hawaii) and bombarded them with H-Bombs. Their souls attempted to escape after death, but Xenu anticipated this and had machines ready to capture them. The souls were taken to giant 3D cinemas and brainwashed into believing all kinds of bad things, like the story of God and the devil. Finally, Xenu released thetans into the atmosphere, where they began to clump together and make their way into our human ancestor’s brains.

This is just ridiculous, but it’s what the Church of Scientology teaches as truth and it’s what they don’t want most Scientologists to know. The above article has a very nice graphic which rotates through images to tell the story of what Scientology really teaches — it makes the story easy to understand but, in doing so, makes Scientologists harder to understand. How can anyone accept such an absurd belief system?

In their announcement about their return and the failure of the Church of Scientology to intimidate them, Codebot explains:

These lawyers had sent legal complaints to my hosting company Verio Inc. accusing me of forgery and concocting a scheme to create chaos, with the intent to provoke people into sending threatening communications to the church. All of this stemming from the publication of this article.

Ava Paquette, of Moxon & Kobrin, representing the church wrote, “I would also ask that you preserve any and all documents pertaining to this web site and this customer including but not limited to, logs, data entry sheets, applications -- electronic or otherwise, registrations forms, billings statements or invoices, computer print-outs, disks, hard drives, etc., in the event the harassment continues and I am forced to go to law enforcement for help.”

Scheme to create chaos? What nonsense — of course, given how ridiculous the doctrines of Scientology are, it’s not difficult to imagine someone saying something like this with complete sincerity. There is no basis to the allegations made by this lawyer, but there is also no basis to the claims made by Scientology about thetans and Xenu.

 

Read More:

• What is Scientology?
• Scientology News
• Scientology: Critiques
• Scientology: Spoofs & Books
• Scientology vs. the Internet
• Scientology: Court Cases
• Scientology: L. Ron Hubbard