sheldrake

It's not really all that great a story, and it's long, which is why I didn't tell it. It does serve to reveal that there is a very shallow veneer over the crazy in your average Scientologist, though.

One afternoon when I was about 14, my sister and I drove past a Scientology place with one of those "free psychological test" signs out. And our mother is an experimental psychologist. So we were gripped.

My sister was older than 18, so she could sign for me to take the test, and we did, and it was a terrible test. Like I said, we're the children of an experimental psychologist. So, in our separate rooms, we took the test, and then our assigned counselor or whatever began telling us all the things that were wrong with us that Scientology could fix.

And we responded by explaining precisely how the test was not valid, with helpful critiques, suggested statistical methods for analyzing it, and just generally we said way more than our counselors wanted to know. And we both expanded from there to a very extensive and detailed criticism of the entire system based on this test.

And remember - we were in separate rooms. We each had no idea what the other was saying. The counselors eventually divested themselves of us with some difficulty, and then, while they were not signing us up as new Scientologists, they compared notes. And when they realized we both said the same things, they decided we were EVIL PLOTTERS AGAINST SCIENTOLOGY. And they wanted to separate us and take us back into their little rooms, which my sister vetoed on the grounds that no, we weren't that stupid, and they asked us many many suspicious and hostile and generally very interesting questions about how we came to be there that day, and who told us to say those things, and who we'd been talking to, and so on.

I responded with bewilderment - "But of course we said all that. It's TRUE. What's wrong with you people, that you believe such stupid things?"

My sister responded to their hostility with her own special brand of ever increasing hostility, and if you get into a fight with my sister, she'll win, especially if she's right. And other people who were also being recruited were there, listening to my sister get louder and more detailed in her critiques.

Eventually, they took our pictures with polaroid cameras, and gave us some paper things we immediately tossed away so I have no idea what they said, and told us we were Down In Their Records (we had to supply our names and addresses and so on to take the tests), and we could not come back to any Scientology property EVER, or talk to Scientologists, because we were clearly very bad persons. My sister said that was the best news she'd heard all day, and we left.

And thus I learned at an early age that Scientologists = crazy.