by Steven Novella - September 22, 2005
(...)Scientology's real dogma is that we are all suffering from the traumatic memories of aliens, called thetans, who were murdered on Earth millions of years ago by the evil overlord Xenu, who trapped them in a volcano and then blew them up with nuclear weapons (hence the volcano reference on the cover of Dianetics ). So what we all need to be cleared of are parasitic alien ghosts haunting us with bad memories.
This quasi-religious, sci-fi belief system has been widely mocked for being silly (which of course it is); but it also puts Scientologists directly at odds with the mental health profession, in the exact same way that religious creationists are at odds with natural historians and evolutionary biologists. Scientologists are the creationists of mental health. This casts them in the role of deniersdenying a vast and growing body of scientific evidence in the field of behavioral neuroscience.(...)
http://newhavenadvocate.com/gbase/Lifestyle/content?oid=oid:126922