Apologist journal smacked down by best ever Scientology prof — and with Bunker assist

Underground Bunker

In June we pointed out that the [CESNUR] journal had created a stir by charging that critics of Scientology have often said that Hubbard lied about having a civil engineering degree (he actually flunked out of college), but that not a single document showing Hubbard himself claiming to have a degree had ever surfaced.

The journal article said that any time a reference to Hubbard claiming a degree had appeared in print — even on documents written by Hubbard! — it was actually the work of others trying to puff up Hubbard’s credentials without his knowledge or approval.

Not only was this extremely dubious, the journal went on to throw down the gauntlet and proclaimed that critics of Hubbard had never found a single scrap of evidence to the contrary and were all full of hot air, and if we were all wrong about Hubbard’s academic claims, then it called for a re-assessment of everything the critics had ever said about Scientology:

Close inspection of all currently available evidence indicated that Hubbard never lied about his grades nor about having graduated with a civil engineering degree. The fact that no scholar, critic, supporter nor the Church of Scientology itself has thoroughly examined or explained these discrepancies merits reevaluations of several other various claims and criticisms regarding Hubbard, Dianetics, and Scientology.

Oh, brother.

By that time, we had already published for the first time a 1958 letter supplied to us by Lawrence Wright’s fabulous researcher, Lauren Wolf. The 1958 letter was clearly written by Hubbard bragging about having a civil engingeering degree, but CESNUR claimed that it didn’t “sound” like Hubbard and so it didn’t count (and we’ll come back to that in a minute).

But then, being the spoilsports that we are, we decided to publish another letter, also supplied to us by Wolf. This 1960 letter was clearly written by Hubbard, and clearly personally signed by him without any reference to typists or anyone else. In it, Hubbard instructed a famous physicist, W.F.G. Swann, that he should be referred to as “L. Ron Hubbard, B.S. in C.E.”

Game over.

We soon learned that the best Scientology researcher on the planet, University of Alberta professor Stephen Kent, was going to respond to the CESNUR article, and we made sure that he had seen our article and the letter we had found.

Kent was good enough to alert us yesterday that his lengthy article painstakingly taking apart CESNUR’s worthless attack has now been published by CESNUR (to the journal’s credit)."

#scientology 

https://tonyortega.org/2020/05/01/apologist-journal-smacked-down-by-best-ever-scientology-prof-and-with-bunker-assist/