I did the Scientology test once and got the serious personality disorder, however my girlfriend who did it with me was told she was very stable and happy individual

Turns out it’s just another sign that I am no longer youthful, good-looking or well-dressed….

When I was in New York a few years back I used to pass by the ‘Scientology Celebrity Centre’ off Fifth Avenue - needless to say no one invited me to do a personality test there either.

Second Stubby’s recommendation of Hal Miller’s L Ron Hubbard biography - like the ‘religion’ itself manages the unusual combination of being both extremely funny and seriously creepy.

Are the Scientologists really worse than the Branch Davidians though?

I’d say it’s precisely their pulp science fiction (which Hubbard used to produce by the yard before he quite literally said ‘Sod this - I’m founding a religion’) weirdness that makes them if not harmless, at least not something the rest of us need to worry about over much.

Any movement that organises itself as a pyramid-selling scheme and recruits exclusively from the shallower and dimmer members of the middle class is never going to be a threat to anything much other than the bank accounts and sanity of its own members.

The Branch Davidians like the People’s Temple before them recruited from a much wider social range and devoted themselves to building totalitarian separatist communities.

Up to a certain point states can ignore this, but once the cultist communities top a thousand or more and start brandishing illegal weaponry and openly violating the civil rights of their members and neighbours, even the most corrupt and incompetent government has to step in.

Middle class weirdos like the Scientologists and the Rajneeshis have at times toyed with this kind of separatism, but in the end it takes trailer (and ghetto) trash poisoned by centuries of Protestant fundamentalism to create a Waco or a Jonestown.

Speaking as a Christian, whether your loved ones go to hell or not has nothing to do with you. And the best form of evangelizing - the only effective form, really - is living your life according to your professed beliefs, being honest about your owns sins and weaknesses, caring about (and respecting) other people regardless of their beliefs or their sins and weaknesses, not mucking about in other peoples’ business without an invitation, and generally not acting like an asshole, which I assume these people do (I’m not going to try the link - I have more than passing familiarity with crazy Christian fundies.)

Apparently the Sex Pistols were approached in 1976 or thereabouts (and actually did the test, what’s more). So if this is a genuine policy, it clearly hasn’t been around for ever!

I’m not sure this is of any relevance to anything much, really, but I like the story.

I have the misfortune of working only just round the corner from the Tottenham Court Road Scientology centre, and I’m constantly accosted by off-puttingly fresh-faced people asking if I want to take a free personality test.

I’ve never succumbed - but has anyone ever tried it and got a result other than “you have a severe personality disorder that can only be cured by granting the spirit of L.Ron Hubbard (pbuh) unlimited access to your wallet?”