Writing accurately about Scientology is nearly impossible. Research it on Google, and you'll find its results seeded with the busy midnight oil of a cadre of dedicated Scientology haters.

That group has published personal details about Scientologists' marital upsets, financial records, and attempted to influence judges and juries by publishing who in certain lawsuits is a Scientologist and for how long. They incite hate to stop permits for Hubbard-based drug abuse centers. When one vocal Scientologist parishioner Googled his name, he found anti-Scientologists had published his address and a map to his house. Another antagonist posted several hundred Scientologists' names, addresses, emails and telephones, unheeding of dangers to families. Its new manifestation, called "Anonymous," hacked into Scientology Web pages, jammed church phones and faxes--sometimes with death threats--and planted a fake bomb behind one church. That's extreme.

Ask a Scientologist about Scientology and you may not get a clear philosophical explanation, just personal statements of how it's helped him or her. Apparently, some Scientologists are better educated in its theory and philosophy than others--like most religions I know. Some don't want to talk about it.

Ask someone in the psychiatric or psychology fields and you'll usually get a hot-tempered tirade. Scientologists claim that psychiatry doesn't like the heat. It takes 8-12 years to train a psychiatrist and, today, most dole out pills whose side effects are suspiciously connected to school shootings and other mass murders. That's a scary correlation.

Scientologists on the other hand swear they can train an average or brighter person to be an accomplished Dianetic counselor in 4-8 (ahem) *months* and that such a counselor can do a troubled person more good in a week than a psychiatrist can do in years of therapy. (Woody Allen comically grouses about his dubious successes under decades of psychiatrists' therapy.)

You wonder if that disparity is why psychiatry instantly attacked Dianetics and Hubbard in 1950 when he published its first book. Not to be intimidated, according to a 1951 clipping in an Elizabeth, NJ, paper, Hubbard challenged psychiatry to a therapy duel of sorts, in which psychiatry was to treat patients for a week, then Hubbard would treat the same patients with Dianetics for a week. Standard psychometric tests were to sort out the winner. Psychiatry went quiet.

So I went to the well. I visited www.scientology.org. It's a (largely) video channel that answers a beginner's questions. About Hubbard, about their ethical beliefs, about afterlives, etc.

I keep mentally coming back to the seemingly obsessed detractors who put up thousands of pages attacking Scientologists, their families and businesses. I'm reminded of the quote by Andre Gide:
"It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace."

But then I'm not one to side with bullies.