mediawatchwatch.org.uk

The sinister and cultish Church of Scientology has reacted angrily to news of a spoof musical which will debut at the Edinburgh Fringe this year.

Xenu is loose! (subtitle: “Cower puny Humans as the Dark Prince of the Galactic Federation rains Atomic Death once more upon your Pitiful Planet — The Musical!”) is a spoof of L Ron Hubbard’s piss-poor Battlefield Earth. It was created by an Oxford-based drama group who spent a year collecting material about the crackpot pay-as-you-go religion.

Stuart Pringle is the director:

The more we looked into it, the more we saw potential for an exposé show. Instead of putting together a straight satire we decided to create a kitsch rock’n’roll musical based on the science-fiction mythology on which Scientology is based.

We hope to open people’s eyes about Scientology and the sophisticated and complex psychological techniques it uses to recruit people and keep them within the organisation. In our opinion it is a cult.

Scientology spokeswoman Janet Kenyon advised people to stay away from the show, and said that the church was considering “action”.

L Ron Hubbard was also a science fiction writer.

It is a cheap parlour trick to try to liken the philosophy of Scientology to that work. There is nothing in the theology or philosophy of Scientology about belief in aliens.

According to Scientological mythology, Xenu was an alien overlord who brought billions of aliens to Earth in jet planes, stacked them around volcanoes, and blew them up with H-bombs. Their souls then clustered together and attached themselves to the bodies of living humans, thus causing them to have skeptical attitudes towards loopy, money-grabbing science-fiction-based cults.

(Hat tip Disinterested Party)