What do Scientologists do for society?
Since the founding of the Church of Scientology forty years ago, Scientologists have been actively involved in the improvement of their communities and society.
The Church of Scientology has received thousands of awards and commendations for its work in communities all over the world. Many of these awards have come from city and county authorities; others from individuals and groups who appreciated a helping hand. Awards are always valued, but they are incidental to the intention and the deed they symbolize. Scientologists help because as they grow spiritually as individuals, it is natural to expand their responsibility and turn outward to help others.
Church members are active in anti-drug educational campaigns in countries throughout the world and have given drug abuse education lectures to more than 500,000 people. They are involved in Neighborhood Watch anti-crime programs and programs to assist law enforcement officials reduce crime.
Some Scientologists work in Narconon, a drug rehabilitation program based on L.Ron Hubbard’s technology which is recognized by government studies as among the most effective ever developed. Narconon has helped restore more than 25,000 people to drug-free, productive lives. Church members also help educate community officials and groups about the dangers of drugs and offer solutions to the problems posed by drug abuse.
Other Scientologists are active in educational programs such as Applied Scholastics, where they work to resolve study problems and bring literacy to millions.
Scientologists support Criminon and work with probation officers and police officials to help rehabilitate criminals by restoring their self-respect and their ability to lead honest and useful lives.
Individual Churches of Scientology all run a variety of community outreach programs. Some of those programs are listed here.
Parishioners of the Church regularly hold blood drives for hospitals, the Red Cross and other relief organizations. Because Scientologists do not use harmful drugs, the donation of drug-free blood is particularly welcomed.
In the United States, the "Lead the Way to a Drug-Free USA" national campaign has helped millions by fighting further drug proliferation. This campaign includes the Church’s Drug-Free Marshals -- school-age children who pledge to stay off drugs and to keep their friends and family off drugs. They are "sworn in" as Drug-Free Marshals and participate in projects to promote drug-free communities, including swearing in adults as fellow Drug-Free Marshals. More than 12,000 children and adults have participated, including many federal, state and local law enforcement officials throughout the United States. In Canada and the United Kingdom, those who take part in this program are known as Drug-Free Ambassadors.
Many Scientologists assist in the community as Scientology Volunteer Ministers. The Church and its Volunteer Minister Corps conducted a massive relief program following the devastating Northridge, California, earthquake in January 1994. They donated more than 10,000 hours of volunteer work, tens of thousands of dollars and untold hours of religious counseling to more than 1,000 victims in need of assistance. As a result, individuals and families were able to recover from the trauma and restart their lives.
Volunteer Ministers are active wherever there are Scientologists. Their services include communication seminars to local police and community service organizations; workshops on education to schools; and hospital visits to assist those recovering from illness or accidents.
During the holiday season, Scientologists are particularly active. For many years, the Church in Los Angeles has sponsored Hollywood’s popular "Winter Wonderland." Situated in the heart of the city, Winter Wonderland includes Santa’s home, tons of snow and the film capital’s largest Christmas tree, more than 65 feet in height. During the annual Hollywood Christmas parade, Santa lights the tree and, throughout the holidays, plays host to thousands of children and their parents. Winter Wonderland is a tradition started by L.Ron Hubbard’s gift of a Christmas tree to the city each year, and carried on by the Church as a goodwill activity.
A similar scene has been created in Clearwater, Florida, where Winter Wonderland occupies a full city block. The festive site features a 55-foot Christmas tree with 18,000 lights, an outdoor ice skating pond and a snow-covered forest of 100 pine trees. Visited by 30,000 residents and tourists last year alone, Winter Wonderland in Clearwater, as in Hollywood, has now become an annual tradition for the city.
Community service campaigns have been conducted in Australia, Canada, South Africa, Italy, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and other countries, earning the Church thousands of recognitions for its works.
One such literacy project in Compton, California, has successfully turned drug abusers and gang members into responsible members of the community. The project has won endorsements from both community leaders and educators, and youth counselors have described it as nothing less than "heaven sent."
L. Ron Hubbard’s Study Technology is used in many countries to help students and teachers alike. In South Africa, these programs helped well over two million underprivileged black Africans improve their ability to study, well before the walls of apartheid came down or the world had even noticed. In the People’s Republic of China, more than 5,000 teachers and industrial managers have been trained in Study Technology.
Dianetics and Scientology organizations exist also in the African states of Ghana, Zaire, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone, and apply Scientology routinely to help their communities.
The Church has been involved for many years in actions to protect religious liberty and is active in the American Conference on Religious Movements (ACRM). This multi-denominational association of religious organizations is dedicated to the advancement of religious liberty and dialogue.
Scientologists worked together with leaders of other religions to petition the U.S. Congress to enact a Religious Freedom Week. The result was just such a designation in 1988. It has now become an annual national tradition.
The Church mustered interfaith support for a bill prohibiting claims for punitive damages against religions, with strictly defined exceptions. Many religious groups joined the Church of Scientology in support of the bill, including the National Council of Churches. The bill (California Senate Bill No. 1) was signed into law by the governor in September 1988.
The bill had arisen following a frivolous lawsuit filed against a Christian church over the suicide of one of its parishioners. The Church of Scientology worked with more than 1,500 religious organizations to oppose the suit and make its ramifications known to other religions and the public. In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed a California Supreme Court decision which held that the state’s laws forbid the filing of such cases against churches.
In 1991, Scientologists supported passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law on November 16, 1993. The Church of Scientology International was an active member of the Coalition for the Free Exercise of Religion, a broad-based religious and civil liberties group that strenuously worked for passage of the act.
For more than a decade, the Church has exposed and defused assaults on religious freedom from organizations which support "deprogramming," the violent practice of paying kidnappers to try and break an individual’s faith through such tactics as forcible restraint, food or sleep deprivation, beating, drugs and even rape.
Over the years, deprogrammers have attacked members of many different religions, including Baptists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Mormons and Moslems. As a result of coordinated interfaith actions, deprogrammers have been arrested, convicted and jailed for their role in such illegal activities.
Scientologists abhor "treatments" which harm people and particularly dislike it when those responsible refuse to take responsibility for their acts or to institute reforms in their own field. Scientologists are instinctively opposed to those who abuse their power or who harm the innocent and weak. Scientologists particularly object to the materialistic view advanced by psychiatry that man is a soulless animal.
The words psychiatry and psychology both come from the Greek word "psyche," meaning "the soul." The word psychology originally meant "study of the soul." In 1879, however, German professor Wilhelm Wundt of Leipzig University advanced the idea that investigating the soul or spirit was fruitless, that man was simply another animal, and that he could be studied in the same manner as an animal.
Scientologists, on the other hand, hold that man is a spiritual being. Furthermore, by the Creed of the Church, the healing of mentally caused ills should not be condoned in non-religious fields.
Scientologists aim to create a world without war, without insanity and without criminality. Psychiatric practices, on the other hand, destroy minds and reduce man to a robotized and drugged state where he can be controlled. Despite psychiatry’s vast absorption of government funds, crime, illiteracy and drug addiction -- social problems that would decline if psychiatry were doing its self-imposed job of handling the problems of the mind -- continue to proliferate.
Even when psychiatric treatments do not tear apart living tissue, psychiatrists routinely tell their patients what they think is "wrong" with them, thus interjecting the psychiatrists’ own prejudices, preferences and falsehoods into the therapy and so denying the patient a chance of recovery.
A true therapy would enable a person to find out for himself the source of his troubles and give him the ability to improve conditions in his own life, relationships and environment.
Violent psychiatric therapies create not only physical but spiritual traumas. At best, psychiatry suppresses life’s problems; at worst it causes severe damage and irreversible setbacks in a person’s life and even death.
CCHR is not anti-psychiatry. Rather, it opposes brutal practices, and its aim is to end the use of psychosurgery, electroshock treatment and the administration of dangerous psychiatric drugs that have destroyed the minds and lives of millions of individuals.
And Scientologists believe that the treatment of mentally caused ills should not be divorced from the field of religion. Psychiatry has attempted to preempt this religious role.
Professor Thomas Szasz, author of The Manufacture of Madness, said of CCHR at its 25th anniversary celebration in February 1994:
"We should all honor CCHR because it is really the organization that for the first time in human history has organized a politically, socially, internationally significant voice to combat psychiatry. This has never been done in human history before."
Through the work of CCHR, public awareness of the destructive results of psychiatric methods has been raised and major steps have been taken to outlaw such practices.
In 1986, CCHR was credited in a United Nations report with responsibility for the introduction and passage of at least 30 pieces of legislation to improve the rights of individuals faced with the possibility of psychiatric treatment. Today that figure stands at 80.
CCHR is also responsible for the UN’s first Bill of Rights for Mental Patients.
As a result of CCHR’s actions, 212 psychiatrists have been criminally charged in recent years and 139 were jailed for their crimes.
Sixty-four psychiatric hospitals have been closed and a total of $380 million in fines has been imposed on psychiatrists and psychiatric institutions. Dozens of hospitals and psychiatrists are still under investigation for crimes such as fraud, infliction of bodily harm, sexual abuse and other felonies.
An estimated 400,000 individuals have been saved from having to undergo electric shock treatment and 20,000 from being subjected to lobotomies due to CCHR’s work.
Scientologists, through the efforts of Citizens Commission on Human Rights, became aware of numerous instances of reported suicides, murders and other extreme acts of violence linked to Prozac. Naturally, Scientologists felt that the public should be made aware of the potential harmful effects of the drug.
CCHR found that more than 14,000 adverse reaction reports regarding the drug had been filed with the Food and Drug Administration in the wake of Prozac’s release. As a result of taking Prozac, some had become violent to the point of murder, killing friends and even members of their own families in outbursts of Prozac-induced homicidal rage.
As CCHR’s investigation uncovered and exposed further incidents, the number of adverse reaction reports filed with the FDA continued to rise beyond 28,000. These included more than 1,400 suicide attempts.
Though this was the highest number of adverse reaction reports filed on any drug in the history of the FDA’s adverse reaction reporting system, the agency and Eli Lilly, the drug’s manufacturer, refused to act. CCHR investigated and discovered that the FDA advisory committee which had given Prozac a clean bill of health contained at least five members with financial dependency on drug manufacturers. One of the committee members had received in excess of $1.3 million in research grants from Eli Lilly.
The efforts to expose the facts about Prozac were made to protect unwitting people from suffering devastating side effects from this mind-altering drug.
Ritalin is a psychiatric drug given to school-aged children who have been diagnosed as "hyperactive" -- a psychiatric label which according to their own published criteria, applies to almost any normally active child.
CCHR’s investigation found that Ritalin has a variety of dangerous side-effects. It causes children to become depressed, suicidal, violent and is highly addictive. Street junkies sometimes combine Ritalin with barbiturates and use the mixture as a cheap substitute for heroin.
So-called "hyperactive" children do not need to be drugged in order to handle the symptoms they manifest. Some experts have found that symptoms of "hyperactivity" are caused by food allergies and the problem can be solved by changing a child’s diet. In other cases this "disease" is imposed upon children who are simply energetic and bored.
Dangerous and addictive psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin destroy minds and are not the solution to creating successful and happy children.
In addition to developing the technology of Dianetics and Scientology, Mr. Hubbard also addressed and developed methods to resolve some of society’s most devastating problems. These methods are broadly applied in the secular realm at a grass roots level. ABLE was established in Los Angeles in 1988 to provide direction and programs for these activities, while lending support through fundraising activities. The technologies utilized by ABLE have developed into four general social betterment programs, each addressing a specific area of current social concern: Applied Scholastics, an educational program; Narconon, a drug rehabilitation program; Criminon, a criminal rehabilitation program; and a program for improving public morality based on a nonreligious moral code called "The Way to Happiness."
The Church and its parishioners financially support ABLE and its social betterment groups. And while ABLE additionally raises funds through donations and grants from non-Scientology related entities, ABLE and its related organizations do not in turn contribute to the financial support of any Church of Scientology.
Narconon conducts broad public education campaigns to alert the general public, especially school children, to the dangers of drug use and abuse.
Courts refer individuals guilty of drug-related offenses to Narconon instead of jailing them.
Dr. Forrest Tennant, who has served as consultant on drug abuse to many sports organizations, including the National Football League, and now administers a system of 30 neighborhood medical and substance abuse clinics, wrote of Narconon, "Perhaps only a physician like myself can truly appreciate Narconon’s willingness to treat the hardcore addict. Narconon takes people no one else will. If you come to my clinics and I couldn’t help you I don’t have anywhere else to send you except Narconon."
- Narconon has 40 centers in 14 countries, including the United States, Canada, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Denmark and England. A Narconon center is also forming in Russia.
- According to private and governmental studies, 65 to 85 percent of the program’s graduates remain off drugs two years after the program and have no involvement in drug-related crimes or drug dealing. Most other programs have a 15 percent success rate.
- In the last five years, more than 6,000 addicts have successfully come off drugs through Narconon.
Headquartered in Los Angeles, Criminon grew out of the Narconon prison programs. By the 1980s, with increased drug usage in all sectors of society, the Narconon program shifted its emphasis to community-based activities. At that point, Criminon expanded into correctional facilities.
Criminon provides inmates with the knowledge and skills to change their lives and become productive members of society.
- Criminon currently operates in more than 200 prisons and penal institutions, primarily in the United States.
- In 1990, a Criminon juvenile court pilot program in Butler County, Alabama found that among offenders who were exposed to the program, recidivism dropped to 2 percent, compared with 80% recidivism for those who were not involved in the program.
The ability to understand and retain data, to actually learn, is vital in today’s society. New technology has provided an avalanche of information sources to cope with, while the overall literacy level of society has been steadily downtrending since the mid-1960s.
Applied Scholastics was founded in 1972 to advance the application of L. Ron Hubbard’s Study Technology outside the Churches of Scientology and thus broadly remedy learning difficulties for people of all ages and in all walks of life.
Study Technology is based on laws that underlie all learning. It delineates the barriers which block a person’s ability to grasp information and provides precise methodologies to overcome those barriers. (See "What is Study Technology?")
Founded by a team of educators and teachers from various American schools and universities, Applied Scholastics today coordinates the many programs throughout the world which use Study Technology. Applied Scholastics programs have been used to teach gang members in Los Angeles’ inner city, students in New Zealand and teachers in South Africa.
- More than 3 million people in 31 countries and on 6 continents have participated in Applied Scholastics programs.
- Applied Scholastics programs operate in 66 schools as well as 25 community centers. There are a total of 190* Applied Scholastics groups.
A major concern today is the continuing decline of moral standards, a problem which underlies a wide variety of other ills that plague our society.
Keenly aware of this situation, in 1980 Mr. Hubbard wrote a new moral code which could be used by anyone to improve their lives. The 21 precepts of The Way to Happiness are presented in a booklet and include sensible rules for living.
Scientologists and others distribute this booklet broadly. The Way to Happiness Foundation in Los Angeles was organized to meet the heavy demand for this booklet and to coordinate groups who use it to improve their families, schools and communities.
The Way To Happiness Extension course, based on the booklet, is a key element of the Criminon program. As the first step toward rehabilitation, this correspondence course is designed to give students knowledge of right and wrong conduct. A non-religious moral code, The Way To Happiness is practical and incisive and provides fundamental guides to behavior -- a vital step often overlooked in the family life and education of the criminal. In fact, The Way To Happiness has broad applicability to our society and has also been distributed throughout thousands of schools, colleges and business organizations.
- More than 7,000 schools across the United States have participated in the Set a Good Example Contest, which is based on the precepts in the booklet. The contest promotes drug-free lifestyles, honesty, trust, literacy and competence.
- A survey of 250 teachers and 1,300 students found that 88% of the students reported that they learned something from taking part in the contest. 63% of teachers reported a positive change in their students’ understanding of moral values and 61% noted a positive change in students’ attitudes.
- Fifty million copies of the booklet have been distributed internationally in more than 20 languages.
- In one year alone, 324 major recognitions, including 131 from government officials, acknowledged The Way To Happiness for its role in fostering greater social responsibility and tolerance.
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