Talk:Xenu/Archive 1

message: I felt there was still a lot of NPOV work to be done on this article.  I completely deleted the following paragraph:
:Critics of Scientology claim that the Xenu story is ultimate proof that Scientology is a scam and a confidence trick. They note that after spending thousands of dollars and investing years of their lives to reach the level of OT III, Scientologists learn that the true origins of human existence are based on a story that appears, to novices, to be badly written science fiction.
This paragraph was just unnecessary.  The tale of Xenu speaks for itself; a reader can figure out without being prompted that it is "badly written science fiction".  Also, "the Xenu story" sounded snide, so I replaced instances of it with "the tale of Xenu".  I moved the picture to the section discussing criticisms; the lead picture should be the official CoS representation of Xenu, not a critic's parody of it.  I removed the article from the "fictional aliens" category, as implying that Xenu is fictional is obviously POV.  I edited the account of the story to make it sound less silly (... well, as much as reasonably possible anyway).  The fiction spoiler warning seemed inappropriate for religious scripture, so I replaced it with a custom warning (which, as a bonus, can be read as dry humor in addition to a genuine warning to Scientologists :). --Redquark 03:43, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I put back that paragraph - that is the critical viewpoint, succinctly expressed, and needs mention. And quite a few people left when they found out what OT III actually was, e.g. Roland Rashleigh-Berry. (I was particularly pleased to find a referenced Church viewpoint for the following para!) I see no reason to delete the cat. I might link to Peter Forde's scientific evaluation of OT III. The new spoiler warning is very good! I moved the pic back up because it needs to be higher up for good article layout; I am unaware of any official CoS depictions of Xenu. Including the first page of OT III as fair use would probably be encyclopaedic (and they've yet to try suing Dave Touretzky), but I think it'd count as really tweaking their noses hard ... I like 'story' better than 'tale' and think either could be taken badly - David Gerard 16:49, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: 16:58, 12 Dec 2004 Fubar Obfusco (Removing category "fictional aliens" again. We wouldn't put "fictional people" on [{Satan]] or Jesus ... :)) - OK, you have a point there - David Gerard 17:05, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOVing 

message: The origin paragraph I've added mentions Hubbard's prodigious drug consumption of the time. This looks out of place, but (a) every account I've read of OT III's beginnings points this out (b) a lot of casual observers have noted that "Body Thetans" do in fact sound quite a lot like the "crawling insects on the skin" symptom of barbiturate withdrawal ... Anyone want a go at making this para seem more obviously relevant and hooked into the rest? - David Gerard 12:36, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Origins of the Xenu story

message: I didn't originally put them on (oops, it was me that put "Fictional aliens" on), but I kept :Category:Fictional aliens and :Category:Villains for Xenu's status as a fictional character in Revolt in the Stars. It is true that that's not at all what Xenu is famous for ... - David Gerard 10:44, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Categories

message: :Scientology states they [Body Thetans] are the source of most of mankind's problems and can only be freed by auditing them to remove their reactive minds.
That sentence contains a whole bunch of inaccuracies. Firstly, there is a Hubbard quote where he specifically says that standard tech (auditing) is not the only way to clear people, just the only way that can easily be taught to anyone.
Secondly, Scientology doctrine states that the source of most problems in the lives of people who have completed the bridge up to OT III - let's not forget that OT III is just one part of the bridge, which has many other strange tales to tell.
Lastly, the goal of OT III is to "detatch" BTs from the reactive mind of the preclear (subject), not to free the BTs of their own reactive minds.
Mkweise 19:06, 14 Dec 2004 
:Hmmm. I was going by Dave Touretzky's NOTs Scholars Page, which seemed to me to say that you needed to clear the BTs to get them to drop off. Of course, he did point out that this was not standard Dianetic auditing, but New Era Dianetics which is of course totally different.
:This is like arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a cowpat ... Of course, it's all verbal tech by definition.
:I'm tempted to ask on a.r.s. If I dare risk being sucked back in again. - David Gerard 22:35, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I've posted a request for help, with cites, to a.r.s - David Gerard 23:17, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: As you doubtlessly are aware, the original OT III course materials as published by Mr. Hubbard can be obtained using a simple google search. I think this article should be based as closely as possible on those, otherwise we're just putting random peoples' words into Hubbard's mouth. Mkweise 19:49, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course. But references are good thing, and the text of related Hubbard writings is also important - David Gerard 21:04, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Urine contains large amounts of [[urea]], an excellent source of [[nitrogen]] for plants. 

message: "Four quadrillion years ago" divided by the estimated age of the universe (13 billion) equals roughly 307,692.  Did this guy really say "quadrillion" or was there a miscommunication somewhere??? - 12.11.183.254
:He really said "four quadrillion". Search on Google, there are lots of copies of the text of OT III (in the Fishman Affidavit) available - David Gerard 20:04, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Maybe quadrillion should be wikilinked? ie quadrillion - I don't think most people would know this number. 81.5.150.113 01:31, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: "Four quadrillion"

message: This article has been listed on WP:FAC for over a week now and has received no (actionable) objections. Can it now be promoted to featured article status? -- ChrisO 13:04, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Probably, but we should wait for someone else to do it for us - David Gerard 13:32, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Featured article candidacy

message: Chris - in Bodies In Pawn, you mention that "it appears that the injuries sustained by Hubbard were actually caused by his falling off his motorbike on a mountain road. He suffered a broken arm and broken ribs, but refused to let a doctor treat him." If you have the reference for this, it'd be worth mentioning in the "origins" section - David Gerard 17:25, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: That's a very old essay. :-)  I'd got the dates wrong - the motorcycle accident was actually on Tenerife in 1973, so it has no connection with OT III.  There's no evidence that I'm aware of that he suffered the injuries he claimed in 1967. -- ChrisO 22:09, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Hubbard's motorbike accident?

message: I've restored this point because it raises a significant issue - I think that, at least in the early days, Hubbard was tongue-in-cheek about a lot of things. But later on, he very evidently came to believe completely in everything that he spouted, no matter how improbable, and insisted that it was all true even when it plainly wasn't or couldn't be. (This is why his official biography is such a mess.) It would have been very like Hubbard to make up a name like "Arslycus" (bear in mind that he was an Anglophile so he would have certainly known the expression "arse-lickers") as a joke name for an extraterrestrial civilisation. -- ChrisO 22:44, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmmmmmmmmm okay. Was he living in the UK by the time he invented Arslycus? - David Gerard 23:08, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: He was in and out of the country at that time (there was tight visa restrictions on Americans in those days and the Home Office had already decided that he was an "undesirable" and didn't want to make life easy for him). He lived in St John's Wood, of all places (the house where he lived was 30 Marlborough Place, near the Abbey Road Studios - it's still there). He first mentioned Arslycus in Philadelphia on 1 December 1952 (in the first of the Philadelphia Doctorate Course Lectures) after leaving the UK a short time earlier following the expiration of his 3-month visa. The timing suggests that he came up with Arslycus while he was in St John's Wood. -- ChrisO 23:26, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Arslycus/arse-lickers

message: I took the religious disclaimer out and put it as a senetence in the introduction. I did this because I think to do otherwise would set a very bad precedent. →Raul654 20:48, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)
:You got a point there. Quoting the pneumonia warning in Ron's words works for me - David Gerard 21:13, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Religious disclaimer

message: Has OT III been superseded by NOTS or not?  Back during the heyday of the a.r.s. wars, I thought it had been stated by David Mayo that NOTS had actually replaced the original OT levels.  The original 0Ts had since been moved to a "higher" level, so that OT III is now something like OT VIII. --Modemac 00:58, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I should ask again on a.r.s. What's the Touretzky page say? I understood that OT IV-VII had been replaced with NOTs, but that OT III was still in place to explain where all the body thetans had come from. Operating thetan would be a good place to detail this. - David Gerard 11:38, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Is OT III obsolete?

message: Take a look at http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6908975/ :
:"I intend to make Scientology as accessible to as many people as I can. And that is my goal," Elfman said. To do this, she says, it is my "duty to clear the planet." By "clearing" she means to rid the world of "body thetans" — aliens who Scientologists believe inhabit the earth from a nuclear explosion 75 million years ago.
Hmm! -- ChrisO 22:44, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Obviously they need a pointer here! - David Gerard 11:12, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Xenu/OT III on MSNBC

message: Thousands of hydrogen bombs with a cumulative explosive force equivalent to gigatonnes of TNT would have had to have been used. This would certainly have left physical traces...
Is this strictly true?  The article calculates the size of the pile of bodies to be a mile deep and six miles on a side.  I'm pretty sure some hydrogen bombs have fireballs with radii in the mile range.  Twenty or thirty bombs total might do the trick.  Of course, I find the story every bit as implausible as most of you, but I think this rebuttal might be overstating things a bit.  Perhaps someone could do some math better than my back of the envelop calculations and update the section if necessary?
-Matt (user:130.39.141.185)
:This bit does verge somewhat on original research. I wonder if the Peter Forde paper says anything about it - David Gerard 17:16, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've added more detail from Forde. The calculations do appear to be original to Wikipedia, but I'd be surprised if no-one had run through them before; there's likely to be a source somewhere - David Gerard 17:38, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Explosive force calculations

message: I think one  could delete:
The space planes were exact copies of Douglas DC-8s, "except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't." (DC-8s have jet engines, not propellers, although Hubbard may have meant the turbine fans.) -- unsigned comment by Taghawi-Nejad
:Why would we delete that?  That is how Hubbard described the space planes, right down to being wrong about the planes he was comparing them to. -- Antaeus Feldspar 18:35, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Useless clutter 

message: That has to be a mistake when refering to the fact that the DC-8's use jet engines in outer space. That is very, very impossible. User:65.50.31.31
:But, but they were like space and stuff! - David Gerard 00:11, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, if you read it, Hubbard doesn't say the space planes had jet engines -- he doesn't say what kind of engines the space planes had at all.  What he wrote is "DC-8 airplane is the exact copy of the space plane of that day. No difference, except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it, and the space plane didn't."  Hubbard is mistaken about what kind of engine the DC-8 had but he doesn't claim what kind the space plane did have. -- Antaeus Feldspar 02:09, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jet engines