Like any other religious, non-profit group, to maintain its operations the Church must receive funds, which come in the form of donations for services and materials. The small group of apostates who have illegally posted a portion of the Church's advanced scriptures to the Internet are trying to render the value of the secret scriptures nil by making them easily and readily available in an out of context fashion in a manner intended to hold the content of these materials up to derision. Their aim is to discourage people from seeking to learn this material according to procedures mandated by Church scriptures. Further, competing churches have arisen in the past, and while each was ultimately a failure, the apostates who fail to live up to the Church's standards but still crave its teaching will attempt to compete again. It was just such an effort to create a competing church that led to the theft of these materials in 1983 and the imprisonment of one of the thieves.
Financial considerations are one of the issues.
The Church encourages the widest possible dissemination of Scientology publications containing all the Scientology scriptures other than its confidential, unpublished materials, which comprise a small fraction of the scriptures of the religion. In addition to the many public information actions described later, we have donated thousands of copies of Scientology books and materials to public libraries. This has been done to make it possible for individuals with limited financial means to learn and apply Scientology principles to their lives without having to pay anything. Our library donation program has proved extremely successful. In fact, it has been calculated that every 29.5 seconds, somewhere in the world, a person checks out a Scientology book from a library.