You know what I don't understand?

People's fascination with Scientology.

For one, if you're interested in fucked up abusive cults, there's far more fucked up abusive cults to learn about.

For another, L. Ron Hubbard was a very purposeful manipulator, it seems, and so was his successor, apparently, so in some ways they're just less interesting groups to study, than where the groups have leaders who are self-deceiving and destructive but not deliberately making shit up, at least not a lot.

I'd much rather read about the Peoples Temple or the Children of God anyday, they teach you so much more about religion and the world than Scientology.

Perhaps the interest in Scientology is a reflex of popular atheism, where people are set up to understand religion as fraudulent, and so they look at the group that seems to best exemplify that?

In any case, I recently had our library on campus order 6+ Scientologist memoirs, and have begun to read them.