What is Scientology – Briefly?
ANSWER:
Let us first ask, what is religion, as that answers what is Scientology. Really.
The answer is easy. Religion can best be described as that which answers the aged old question of what am I, where am I going, and is there more to me than my physical body? These questions are ancient. Scientology is an answer to those ancient questions.
Historically there have been two major divisions of how these question have been answered. The first is that you are a spirit — something possibly still to be defined, and the other is that you are just nothing more than the clay you were said to arise from.
Getting back to the spiritual world, we find that there are two further subcategories, in religion. The first is that man is a spirit, and that he is answerable to those who speak from or for God. These are revealed religions. The other subcategory is the natural religion. This is whereby a man or men have tried to fathom and get answers to what is the universal laws that governs man as a spirit — that is, what is man, what is this spirit, what is this life force that we all answer to as “I”, and how do we relate to the allness-of-all, or creator of creations.
L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, wrote that Scientology would be a close cousin to orthodox Buddhism.
But over the centuries, the Western definition of religion has broadened to include all Christian groups, then Judaism, Islam and finally it has generally been accepted that the eastern religions are indeed great religions of this world too.
The Scientology belief is that you are indeed spiritual. You are life and that life is something separately sourced outside of the physical universe. Furthermore, there is such a thing as a creator, an infinite beingness behind all creation. Scientology is an attempt to understand what we are and how we came to be here. However it is a natural religion, not a revealed religion. That is the difference Scientology and other Western religions.
In the East people there understand Scientology better than they understand Christianity for example. But that is only because Scientology more closely parallels their own religious beliefs. That unfortunately is not so in the West.
But to understand Scientology better, one should read a Scientology book, and I recommend Scientology: The Fundamentals Of Thought. It can be found in most libraries today, or gotten from one of our churches. It is an excellent beginning book on the subject of Scientology. It not only has the theory but it has some practical counseling to help you further get interested.
Good luck!
Locate the Church of Scientology of Canberra here.
For more similar answers on life, Scientology, and more, you will find then here in the Category Q &A.
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