Why I will never see another Tom Cruise movie. Ever.

If Mr. Cruise wants to believe in Scientology, fine. After all, according to fellow movie superstar and noted theologian and Bible scholar Will Smith, "the ideas of the Bible are 98% the same ideas of Scientology, 98% the same ideas of Hinduism and Buddhism." I suppose the 2% of differentiation in content involves some of this fascinating Scientology belief:

Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack.

Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were overpopulated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.

Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyse them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).

These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralysed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.

The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).

After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".

When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.

As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xenu is still alive today.

That is the end of the story. And so today everyone is full of these clusters of souls called "body thetans". And if we are to be a free soul then we have to remove all these "body thetans" and pay lots of money to do so. And the only reason people believe in God and Christ was because it was in the film their body thetans saw 75 million years ago.

Of course, maybe all that is tucked away in the Old Testament somewhere among all the "begats", and I missed it. When it comes to those who believe weird stuff, fine - free country, freedom of religious expression, and all that.

However.....

Pardon my language, dear readers, but enough of this horseshit already.

Hard to pick the most giggle-inducing/hair-on-back-of-my-neck-standing-on-end moment from this collection of clips:

The part where Mr. Cruise states that Scientologists are the only ones on earth that can save humanity? Kind of makes Jesus' "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light" seem a little mundane, doesn't it?

The part where Scientology is extending its tentacles into federal agencies? Holy crap.

The part where Mr. Cruise states that, since Scientology is the only hope for mankind, they don't need "to ask permission" to impose it on everyone else?

The part where Mr. Miscavige (the Master of Ceremonies) vows that Scientology will remove anything in its path (presumably, any non-scientologist), no matter how big?

The part where Mr. Cruise relishes the idea of future without "S.P.'s" (Suppressive Persons)? Another instance of the "Oppose Scientology And You Will Be Eliminated" mindset, this time accentuated with maniacal, batshit crazy grin.

Tom Cruise has long been one of my favorite actors. However, his behavior over the last couple of years has done substantial damage to that, and by the end of this collection of clips, I had reached the point of no return. I have seen the abyss. Jerry, over and out.