Beyond Belief My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape

I have not read the book but wanted to comment on the synopsis referencing Scientology as a religion.

Religion: the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.

I am glad she got out. I would not classify Scientology as a legitimate religion in the sense that its adherents are terribly exploited, oppressed and intimidated. While that can happen in organized religion, most faiths are not predicated on it, it is rather the failure of some adherents by their misapplication of their faith. In scientology, the “faith” itself, is fatally flawed.

L. Ron Hubbard was not superhuman, but apparently a sick, influental individual, and David Miscavige seems the same.

I suppose the most important thing is that Ms. Hill got out so that she can discover her identity on her own terms, and find out who God is to her. I'm not saying God is of our choosing, but that God wants us to be free in concluding what He means to them and how we relate to Him.

An eye opening first hand account, and heart wrenching in its childlike simplicity of speech.

While the facts and the life story are pretty incredible, I could not help but get bored out of my mind by the simplistic story telling. The sunk cost fallacy is the only reason why I finished reading it.

I LOVE reading about the bananas details of Scientology, and this is a great first-hand account. It's, um, workmanlike prose. But when you're telling a story as intriguing as this, there's no need to get all high-falutin' about it, right?

One of the problems in writing about Scientology is that its credos are both highly complex and utterly meaningless. The religion was created by a not-so-bright guy who thought he was a genius (recipe for disaster), and not-so-bright people who think they're geniuses tend to believe that the more complicated and dense something is, the more brilliant. As a result, in learning about this religion, the reader has innumerable stupid jargon words to contend with (“out-ethics”, “enturbulated”), and has to learn about so many pointlessly complicated “training exercises” that make no sense but that last literally weeks. (Example: L Ron Hubbard, pedagogical revolutionary, believes that people learn best by stating every definition of every word they read as they go, and starting all over again from the beginning every time they make a mistake. Imagine reading this review, starting with the word “one”, providing every definition of that word, then moving on to do the same for “of” and “the” and so on. What a rich understanding of the text you'd have!)

The problem is that this author's writing and level of . . . I don't know, analysis? Reflection? are at about an 8th grade level, though it gets better as the book goes on. It frequently makes the tedium of Scientology tedious to read about. Under more capable hands, that tedium could be elevated to absurdity, irony, pathos, I don't know – anything else. I wish a better writer had taken this fascinating story on. Still worth a read.

Very interesting subject matter, but unfortunately it's poorly written.