The Eternal L. Ron Hubbard

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion. - L. Ron Hubbard

And I believe that's exactly what he did.

Just one of the many odd things about Scientologists I've noticed is that they seems always to speak about Hubbard as if he's still alive. He died in 1986. Punkt. Das Ende. But try finding any mention of that in this bio or in any other Scientologist literature for that matter. Check out this time line of his life; you have to click through 18 pages individually before you find out that "on 24 January 1986, having accomplished all he set out to do, Ron departs his body." OK, that sounds like an admission to me.

Also, I believe additional books supposedly written by him have also been released since his death. I'm not sure I've ever heard this dancing around his demise discussed in the media; it's just something I've noticed.

Why on earth would the "church" want to bury this particular fact from us? Part of their plan to fabricate a mythos perhaps?

So, to Kevin Drum's list of questions, I would add, "When did L. Ron Hubbard die?" It'd be interesting to hear a Scientologist's response to that.

The Sins of the Father

Scientology is a power-and-money-and-intelligence-gathering game.

I began to see that my father was a sick, sadistic, vicious man. I saw more and more parallels between his behavior and what I read about the way Hitler thought and acted. I was realizing that my father really wanted to destroy his enemies and take over the world. Whoever was perceived as his enemy had to be destroyed, including me.

Well, he didn't really want people killed, because how could you really destroy them if you just killed them? What he wanted to do was to destroy their lives, their families, their reputations, their jobs, their money, everything. - L. Ron Hubbard Jr. in a 1983 Penthouse interview, referencing Scientology and his father, who founded it.