What Would Hubbard Do?
I was amused to read that the founder of the pyramid scam known as Scientology, the ever-amusing L Ron Hubbard, visited “Heaven” several trillion years ago and definitively described what he saw:
Heaven was not a floating island in the sky as everyone imagined, but simply a high place in the mountains of an unnamed planet. Visitors first arrived in a ‘town’ comprising a trolley bus, some building fronts, sidewalks, train tracks, a boarding house, a bistro in a basement and a bank building. Although there seemed to be people around – in the boarding house, for example, there was a guest and a landlady in a kimono, reading a newspaper – Hubbard quickly discovered they were only effigies and probably radioactive, since ‘contact with them hurts’. However, he was able to report he saw ‘no devils or satans’.
The bank was the key point of interest in the town. It was an old-fashioned corner building of granite-like material with a revolving door. Inside, to the left of the door, was a counter and directly opposite was a flight of marble stairs leading to the Pearly Gates! ‘The gates . . . are well done, well built,’ Hubbard wrote. ‘An avenue of statues of saints leads up to them. The gate pillars are surmounted by marble angels. The entering grounds are very well kept, laid out like Bush Gardens in Pasadena, so often seen in the movies.’
On his second visit to heaven, a trillion years later, Hubbard noticed marked changes: ‘The place is shabby. The vegetation is gone. The pillars are scruffy. The saints have vanished. So have the angels. A sign on one side (the left as you “enter”) says “this is Heaven”. The right has a sign “Hell” with an arrow and inside the grounds one can see the excavations like archeological diggings with raw terraces, that lead to “Hell”. Plain wire fencing encloses the place. There is a sentry box beside and outside the right pillar…’