Liddle Britain

Sweeney’s rant at the Scientologists

Rod Liddle

16 May 2007

See, it’s easy to do. Scientology is the one that insists some bloke called Xenu and the Galactic Confederation brought billions of people to earth some 75 million years ago and then tied them to volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. The souls of these unfortunate aliens are still milling around today, doing God knows what — watching Panorama, among other things, one supposes. That’s Scientology. I have my doubts about it, to tell you the truth, although at least in the midst of this madness they imply that the earth must be at least 75 million years old, unlike some whacko born-again Christians I interviewed recently who are currently running state secondary schools in the northeast of England. They thought the earth was about 4,500 years old and that the dinosaurs were peacefully cohabiting on this planet with mankind. And that God created the world and all that is in it in six days flat — no time off, no lunch breaks, no primordial soup. Ah, God bless ’em. Hinduism, meanwhile, is the one that insists that cattle are sacred, out of respect to the divine bull Nandi, which, as you are aware, was the only creature capable of eating the sticky karma of mankind when it got spilled everywhere millions of years ago. It’s vitally important to get these details right, so as to avoid giving offence to the devout. Wouldn’t want to do that.

The real purpose of John Sweeney’s perfectly fine film was to inform us all just how horrible are the Scientologists. In that, you have to say, he definitely succeeded. As our own High Court Justice Latey once asserted, Scientology is ‘immoral and socially obnoxious’ and also ‘sinister, corrupt and dangerous’. Whether it is any more sinister and dangerous than one or two other religions I have named above is, I suppose, a moot point — and not one that I suspect Panorama will be investigating in the near or even distant future.