(July 22, 2020 at 3:57 pm)Porcupine Wrote:(July 22, 2020 at 2:45 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: It's a hard thing to argue. Maybe Hubbard was insane just like Jesus or genuinely believed what he preached.
Nah he was a clear scammer. In fact, he was so cocky that he could get away with his scam that he even admitted it. He knew that some people were so gullible his scam would still succeed anyway.
“You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.”
― L. Ron Hubbard
Pure barefaced cockiness. He knew exactly what he was doing.
The same way one can use to interpret that Christianity was a scam from the beginning.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
