Christianity is the same as Scientology

[Alex K]

I think it requires the same amount of faith to believe in the mythology of both religions.

The higher ups in scientology seem to be much more obsessed with stealing your entire life away from you, however. They seem to be this way across the board, whereas only some extremist Christian groups operate in this manner.

So, same in theory, yea, but not the same in practice, so to speak.

There has been some discussion among ex-scientologists, especially in connection to the whole freezone and independent scientology thing, whether the sucking you dry and eating you whole part, the disconnection policy and hard sales tactics are inextricably woven into scientology such that there cannot be scientology without them, or whether there can be a reformed scientology without the most harmful elements which would then kind of carry on as a more benign practise. From what I've seen, the harmful elements are so explicit in Hubbard's instructions how scientology has to be run, that I think you'd need at least a few hundred years to allow for as lax an interpretation of them as we have it in the Abrahamic religions, where there is clearly evil stuff which is simply not taken at face value any more by all socially acceptable denominations. With scientology, for now, the whole thing is so tightly bound to the heaps of Hubbard policy letters micromanaging what everyone has to do for every conceivable detail, that scientologists have a hard time not being fundamentalists. In addition to that, I've heard it said that the whole scientology auditing and training stuff kind of loses its placebo power once you remove all the authoritarian theater around it. This is evidenced by the fact that a lot of people leaving the Scientology organization do the independent Scientology thing for a while as a kind of cultural transition process, but then lose interest.