The Church.

I had received a special request [not from Tom Cruise] to scope out the London Church of Scientology, and I managed to rope Rita into going with me. Unfortunately, we only had a little bit of time, but we were able to take at least a quick look.

The building was, of course, very nice, what with all the celebrity money they have at their disposal. The people at the front desk were young and clean-cut. We said we wanted a tour, and they asked us to have a seat. After a bit [a little too long, if you ask me, if they really wanted us to buy what they were selling], an older woman came to get us and led us up to the visitors' centre [see how I spelled that funny because we were in England?] on the next floor.

The visitors' centre consisted mostly of various stations around the room with videos playing in front of informational panels. The woman told us there was a special event that night, so the usual informational panels had been switched out and temporarily replaced with panels detailing the horror and wrongs of psychiatry. We didn't have time to really read them, but they certainly made psychiatry look frightening [of course, it's true that a lot of past methods have been terrible, but - most things in the past have been terrible...things progress, usually for the better, in most fields, as far as I can tell]. Apparently the tour consisted of the tour guide telling us to watch whichever videos we wanted, offering us some water, and then disappearing, only coming back as we were leaving to try to sell us books - again, way to convince us!

We ended up watching a few "chapters" each of the videos on dianetics [L. Ron Hubbard's alternative to psychiatry, pretty much], Scientology itself, and the church's work in human rights. None of them contained much actual information. For part of the dianetics video, you could choose different people from various countries who were talking about their experiences with dianetics. But everyone just said a variant of "I was so sad and depressed and unhappy with my life...but then I started dianetics, and now I can really live my life again!" Never any concrete information on, say, how exactly it helped them, what exactly they got out of it, etc. Just - "try it, you'll like it!"

The videos on Scientology didn't tell us much more. They had more people telling us, "It changed my life - but I'm not going to tell you how!" They told us about the churches themselves - that video mostly consisted of shots of visitors' centers that looked exactly the same as the one we were sitting in right then...so...thanks for the information? And the whole time I was waiting to hear about space aliens - but no, no mention. I guess they usually try to wait until you're actually in the thing balls-deep before they mention, "Oh yeah, also, we also worship space aliens," or whatever it is they actually believe. [Not that that's any weirder than any other religion, but at least other religions are confident enough in their crazy, out-there ideas that they don't mind telling you about them at the outset.]

The human rights display was the weirdest. Again, no concrete information, mostly just statements like "seriously, we really care about human rights" - Rita [a human rights lawyer, I might add] kept asking in desperation, "But what do they doooooo?!?" We chose a video about a Scientologist who had won some human rights award [well...from the Church of Scientology]. It was strange for a couple reasons:
1) It profiled a guy who went to Africa [don't remember exactly which country, sorry] to teach former child soldiers and others about human rights [using a curriculum designed by the Church and featuring Scientology human rights tenets], and the story basically went something like this: he went over there, was told not to even look the young men in the eyes because they were so dangerous, and started teaching those same young men about human rights - and then they broke down and wept with him and ran out, Scientology human rights pamphlets in heads, to tell their friends the Good Word. It's a beautiful story, sure, but...was it really that easy? Somehow I doubt it.
2) The whole thing was narrated by a guy who sounded like he should be doing movie trailers. He said things like "And then they compiled data from 619 interviews about the high rate of rape and abuse against women!" in the same voice that says things like "Arnold Schwarzenegger blows up buildings and takes down punks in the past and the future at the same time - coming to a theater near you on Christmas Day!" It was incredibly off-putting.

My overall impression was that besides being vague and self-serving, it was all very artificial and marketed. The videos and panels were filled with graphics that just screamed, "Some guy was sitting at his computer thinking, 'Hey, if I add a few more flames here, this'll look really cool!'"

Of course, a lot of people would argue that this is pretty much how all religions started [vague statements promising that it'll improve your life ("Oh, yeah, leprosy? We've totally got a guy who can take care of that for you."), etc.], minus the snazzy DVDs and computer graphics - and in fact, maybe in a few millennia, the Scientology graphics will seem ancient and filled with symbolism, for better or worse [I'm going to go with worse, since that's the route most religions tend to go] - but right now it really seems like a new company masquerading as a belief system to get more investors.

And in case you're worried, despite drinking their water [well, I did - Rita was afraid to], we made it out alive without promising the Church our life savings and starting on the track to become High Holy Priestesses [okay, okay, I don't think they actually have those - not that I would know from the "informational" videos, since those don't actually tell you anything].