My mother, the Christian Scientologist?

(No, I don't mean Christian Scientist... though Christian Science is tangentially referenced below.)

My mother, as many of you know, espouses a number of beliefs that are... well, I could say "colorful" or "interesting," but what I really mean is "totally insane." Among her delusions is that she is a good Christian, despite being cold and judgmental and uncharitable and basically hating poor people, among other demographics. So I was surprised the other day when she defended SCIENTOLOGY, of all things, as a legitimate religion/belief system. Interestingly, her apologia on Scientology began not five minutes after we passed by the Church of Latter-Day Saints near Lincoln Center, which made her comment, "Mormons right in the middle of the city! How scary!"

The whole thing started when she randomly began to over-relate to some celebrity story that she probably read about in People magazine -- she actually does this pretty frequently, which illustrates how little I have to talk about with my mother. This time it was John Travolta and his autistic son. She was upset -- not because young Jett died recently (she didn't even mention his death, oddly), but because she didn't think the media should "exploit" his son for being autistic. She was all in a huff about this, she explained, because she can relate, as a parent of an autism-spectrum-affected child (my older brother has a pervasive developmental disorder). What's funny is that she took absolutely the wrong position on this -- she didn't seem to understand that the media frenzy was about the fact that the Travoltas weren't acknowledging, much less treating, Jett's autism -- because they are Scientologists. They claim their child had some neurological problems -- seizures, specifically -- as the result of having Kawasaki disease as a child. The problem? Kawasaki is a heart problem, and is not known to affect the brain.

I actually didn't know about any of this until I checked the internet afterwards, but I did point out to my mother that perhaps the problem here was that Scientology doesn't acknowledge problems like autism. She insisted that they must, "because autism is a neurological problem" -- and I pointed out that this wasn't necessarily true in the world of Scientology. I mentioned the whole body thetans thing, and pointed out that their belief system wasn't entirely sound.

So this is what she had a problem with. It is sound, she insisted, and went into a long rambling lecture that was so incoherent and nonsensical that I can't even summarize it properly. She mentioned dimensions beyond spacetime (the quantum physics concept) as well as parallel universes (the science-fiction concept) -- and somehow managed to conflate them. She mentioned the movies "A.I." and "The Matrix." She compared the belief in extraterrestrial life to having faith in God and Jesus. She believes all of this is mentioned in the Bible. She insisted that this belief system must be very intelligent, because my sister's friend's mom is a Scientologist, and she want to HARVARD, you know, so she must know what she's talking about. (Checked with sister -- said friend's mother is actually a Christian Scientist. I see a lot of problems in that belief system as well, but the point here is that my mother totally confused two *extremely* different religious beliefs.) Oh, and the kicker -- she actually said that Scientology is "just science"! South Park totally used that line as a joke, but she meant it!

Yes, that's correct -- my mother thinks Scientology is legit because of aliens, robots, fictional movies, the Bible, and Harvard. And she also apparently thinks Christian Science, science, science-fiction, and Scientology are one and the same.

I spent some time wondering how my mother could reconcile her Christian beliefs with both this cult and with the occult in general, and then I remembered a few things:

1) My mother idoloizes celebrities, especially those of the People-magazine variety. This is a woman who weeps and weeps when someone like Princess Diana dies, but who thinks her severely depressed children need to suck it up. So obviously, if celebrities love Scientology, so does she.

2) My mother believes -- I'm totally serious here -- that she was abducted by aliens as a child growing up in Thailand. She even once mentioned her abduction(s) as a potential reason for my brother's disability. So obviously the whole Xenu/body thetans thing doesn't seem so bizarre to her.

3) My mother is a hypocrite, and is willing to go to any lengths to justify her conflicting belief systems.

YOU try planning a wedding with this woman in control...