Tom... it was a bet, for crying out loud!

Some years ago, science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard bet fellow sci-fi writer Poul Anderson that he could invent a religion and actually get people to believe in it.

He called his joke-religion "Scientology." He won the bet. Countless people have been its victims. Tom Cruise, for one, is not only a very vocal Scientologist, but he seems to have swallowed the garbage peddled by the cult which started out as a bet pretty much whole- including the notion that electrical gizmos which actually do absolutely nothing are more beneficial to psychologiclly troubled people than is medical science.

No wonder a nice (nominally) Catholic girl like Nicole Kidman had problems with this person. Nothing nominal about Tom. What you see is what you get- engrams and all.

These folks had a table set up in Springfield Mall down in Virginia. It was sad seeing the naive and desperate people being hooked up to those non-functional gizmos an the pretext of being given a "stress test--" and doubtless subsequently turned against the sources where actual spiritual and psychological help might have been found.