scientology myths 2.0

About 99% of Scientology scripture is available to anyone. Most of these materials were adapted or first released in books. Scientology books are available at major book stores worldwide as well as from Churches of Scientology. The remaining materials consist of recorded lectures of L. Ron Hubbard that has been fully made available over the last decade (see below).

And those 1%? This material is open only to the experienced Scientologist but not he general public. Says religious scholar Jean E. Rosenfeld:

"All religions have origin myths, and all religions keep secrets from the uninitiated. ... Myths are symbolic expressions of existential truths; they are not literal accounts of historical events. Their truth — religious truth — is not subject to experimental verification. Religious truth sustains and organizes human societies and gives identity — and thus, sanity — to human beings. Expressing oneself religiously and symbolically is an essential ingredient of being human. Myth will always be with us, whether created by cosmologists, as the Big Bang theory, or by poets and prophets as alternative accounts of world creation."

(Los Angeles Times, 22 February 2008[1], Jean E. Rosenfeld is a historian of religions at the UCLA Center for the Study of Religions).

In December 2009 the Church of Scientology released 970 CDs with restored lectures of L. Ron Hubbard that contain a "day-by-day record of research and development" of Scientology technology. The restoration of these lectures finished a 25-year project of tracking down and recovering tapes, wax disks and other recordings of L. Ron Hubbard's dictations and lectures. More on the restoration and recovery of these materials has been described in the New York Times of 8 January 2010[2]:

The new materials were announced in a New Year's celebration at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles that was broadcast to churches around the world last week and include 1,020 lectures and hundreds of corresponding booklets from courses and other sessions with Scientology ministers from 1953 to 1961. They include discussions of how Hubbard arrived at the principles of Dianetics and his research on everything from decision-making to personal responsibility.

They were recovered through a painstaking hunt that led members to find tapes and papers in a basement in Wichita, Kan., a storage trailer in Phoenix, and a garage in Oakland, Calif., among other places. Some of the materials were believed to have been lost.

''We've been able to restore lectures we literally never thought would be heard again,'' Davis said.

The release marks the third and final batch of Hubbard works to be distributed as part of the decades-long project initiated by Hubbard himself but carried out after his 1986 death by the church's current leader, David Miscavige. Releases in 2005 and 2007 included updated versions of 18 basic Scientology books to correct transcriptional errors, as well as hundreds of other lectures given by Hubbard.

''It's so huge for our religion having these materials. It's really a renaissance,'' said Davis. ''It's as if it's a rediscovery of our own scriptures and what they hold and what they mean.''

As of January 2010 all of this material is publicly available (on http://www.lrh-books.com/acc/ and on http://www.bridgepub.com) .