The trouble with having a religion founded by a crazy writer is that crazy writers tend to write crazy shit. Traditionally, the Church of Scientology has handled this by making access to the craziest of L. Ron Hubbard's jabberings a reward you might earn in exchange for having blown thousands of hours and dollars. (Scientology is to religion what Farmville is to games.)
But what do you do when your founder drops this in a cheap-o paperback?
"A society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out."
That's from "A Woman's Creativity," a chapter omitted from reprints of Hubbard's 1965 book Scientology: A New Slant on Life. In "A Woman's Creativity," Hubbard also observes,
"The historian can peg the point where a society begins its sharpest decline at the instant when women begin to take part, on an equal footing with men, in political and business affairs, since this means that the men are decadent and the women are no longer women. This is not a sermon on the role or position of women; it is a statement of bald and basic fact."
And:
"If man is to rise to greater heights, then women must rise with him or even before him. But she must rise as woman and not as, today, she is being misled into rising - as a man. It is the hideous joke of frustrated, unvirile men to make women over into the travesty of men, which men themselves have become."
Scientologists reprinted A New Slant on Life in 1988, two years after Hubbard's death. "A Woman's Creativity" and seven other chapters went missing in the new edition. This demonstrates rare sensitivity on the part of a church that once published photos of a guy dressed as the prophet Mohammad standing in a subservient position to a Scientology auditor.
The 2007 edition, which retails for $30, leaves out 17 of Hubbard's original chapters, including paranoid gems "Records of the Mind are Permanent," "Confronting," and "Freedom vs. Entrapment." These have been replaced by more conventional self-help claptrap ("How to Handle the Confusions of the Workaday World") allegedly found in Hubbard's papers. Not all Scientologists believe this.
Still, the reprint is good enough that it has received 34 5-star Amazon reviews, including five anonymous (and amusingly similar) raves on a single day in 1997.
