I both agree with you and thank you for this post. It's interesting, as both cult and culture originally derive from a word for cultivated. That is an excellent point though, as he does try to take it a step further than just a cult. Even his own books assert morals onto people.
It's more than that.
Let's take that statement and further add to it:
"Culture (/ˈkʌltʃər/) is, in the words of E.B. Tylor, "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."[SUP][1]"[/SUP]
Hubbard claimed scientology was the study of knowledge or certainty as scientology is supposedly the subject of certainty, he poo poo'd belief, he wrote a book on Art and talked about it, (morals, law custom) are all in the Ethics book. Capabilities is one hell of a rhetoric sales propaganda job. Habits are doing the TR's, what would Ron do, the repetition of redoing courses and auditing, endless word clearing, etc
and thus once you gots a group of people all agreeing we are clearing the planet and why is that a bad thing?, why you gots a crowd, as in the immortal words of Le Bon, or a revolution ( hubbard called it evolution). (at the same time, you have a group of people who can't compare notes or even discuss if any of scientology is true)
One day after being in and truely being a group member, I all of the sudden remembered, woke up you might say, in that when I first got involved by reading Dianetics some 27 years ago, why I only wanted to go "clear". You know, I says to myself, WTF, I never intended to join some group or religion. And so I left. The major push for me was the Debbie Cook email which actually got me to question.
And then from further internet research realized no such thing as clear or OT, also based on my personal experiences of seeing so called people who achieved these so called states, LOL
