COB vs. Free Speech


In surveying other pro-LRH, anti-COB websites, Friends of LRH discovered that they, like us, have been targets for elimination by the Church. The tactics have been the same: intimidation and legal threats, often carried out under the banner of “copyright infringement."

Yet in reviewing these sites, few feature LRH photographs, quotes, copies of pages from org magazines, or anything else which could even remotely be construed as a trademark or copyright violation. These sites have done nothing more than express opinions which happen to diverge from official Church dogma.

Church claims of copyright infringement, therefore, appear to be more a pretext for attack than the actual reason.

And while these attacks are executed in the name of Scientology, Scientology’s Founder couldn’t have been a stronger advocate for the right of all people to express themselves — so much so that he wrote these principles into our creed right at the Church’s inception in 1954:

"We of the Church believe:

… that all men have inalienable rights to think freely, to talk freely, to write freely their own opinions and to counter or utter or write upon the opinion of others …"

The Creed of the Church of Scientology, 1954
(OEC Vol. 6, p. 515)

Later that year, LRH again asked Scientologists to uphold these tenets in the Church’s other major code:

“As a Scientologist, I pledge myself to the Code of a Scientologist for the good of all…

  1. To support true humanitarian endeavors in the field of human rights.
     

  2. To embrace the policy of equal justice for all.
     

  3. To work for freedom of speech in the world.
     

  4. To actively decry the suppression of knowledge, wisdom, philosophy or data which would help mankind.”

Code of a Scientologist
The Creation of Human Ability 1954


For three decades after, LRH continued to write extensively on the need for free thought, free speech, and the free flow of information.

Here are just a few examples:
 

“[People] learn to keep their mouths shut, and it’s the wrong lesson. When in doubt, talk. When in doubt, communicate… you’ll be very successful all the way along the line if you just remember that.”

The Phoenix Lectures 1954


“What would happen if all men were free enough to speak? Then and only then would you have freedom.”

HCO P/L 8 February 1960
Honest People Have Rights, Too
(OEC Vol. 0, p. 461)


“A man is as dead as he can’t communicate. He is as alive as he can communicate.”

Dianetics ‘55 1955


“Perhaps the most fundamental right of any being is the right to communicate. Without this freedom, other rights deteriorate."

HCOB 10 September 1983
PTSness and Disconnection
(Tech Vol. XII, p. 446)

 


"Censor not free speech
And censor not free thought.”

Hymn of Asia
1974

 

 


As LRH foresaw, violation of these principles is disastrous not only for Scientology, but for our entire country:
 

“In the US currently only 4 percent recognized the First Amendment to the Constitution which guarantees freedom of speech, the press and religion. Ignorance of the law, compounded by a willful neglect of the Constitution by government officials, is the basic reason for the riots, civil commotion and the disintegration of the US.”

HCO P/L 4 October 1969
Organizational Enturbulence
(OEC Vol. 0, p. 68)

 

What LRH understood, even if COB doesn’t, is that people always have the right to disagree, even with him:
 

 

“And if anything I tell you, or have ever told you, is discovered to differ from the individual observation, then it isn’t true! It doesn’t matter whether I said it was true or not."

Tape: Scientology and Effective Knowledge
15 July 1957

 


 

“WHAT IS TRUE FOR YOU is what you have observed yourself
And when you lose that you have lost everything.

What is personal integrity?
Personal integrity is knowing what you know —
 …And to have the courage to know and say what you have observed.

… And sufficient personal belief and confidence in self
And courage that we can observe what we observe
And say what we have observed.

Nothing in Dianetics and Scientology is true for you
Unless you have observed it
And it is true according to your observation.
That is all."

Ability, Issue 125
February 1961
(Tech Vol. VI, p. 23)

 

“I consider all auditors my friends. I consider them that even when they squirrel. I believe they have a right to express themselves and their own opinions. I would not for a moment hamper their right to think. I think of auditors and Scientologists as the free people.”

PAB 79
10 April 1956
(Tech Vol. III, p. 343)

 

By clarifying LRH’s ideas on this matter, we sincerely hope that Mrs. Paquette, Moxon and Kobrin, and at least some of the senior executives within the Church rethink their actions and defend every person’s right to think and communicate freely, both on the Internet and elsewhere.

If not, the consequences to Scientology and the world will be catastrophic:

 

 


"It [Scientology] is not in itself an arbitrary, fascistic police force to make sure that we all think right thoughts. It's a servant of the mind, a servo-mechanism of the mind. It is not a master of the mind.

Scientology will decline and become useless to man on the day when it becomes the master of thinking.

Don’t think it won't do that. It has every capability in it of doing that. Contained in the knowable, workable portions before your eyes, there are methods of controlling human beings and thetans which have never before been dreamed of in this universe.

Control mechanisms of such awesome and solid proportions, that if the remedies were not so much easier to apply, one would be appalled at the dangerousness to beingness that exists in Scientology.”

Philadelphia Doctorate Course Tape 20
Formative State of Scientology: Definition of Logic
6 December 1952