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The Church of Scientology was founded in 1954 by L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer. It is perhaps best known for its celebrity members, among them Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

Whether Scientology is a “religion” is a matter of debate, but for our purposes at govern point it is. Scientology presents itself as a “technology” that leads people to “true spiritual release and freedom.” It does not emphasize particular beliefs about God or other traditional religious topics.

Scientology focuses on psychological technologies that people can use to make their lives better.

As such, it has very little to say about God, the afterlife or other speculative religious ideas. Just as Scientology is focused on humanity, so are its beliefs.

Nevertheless, the Church of Scientology considers itself a religion because of its focus on the soul and spiritual awareness and does include some beliefs on other traditionally religious subjects.
God

Scientology includes belief in God, but offers no details or doctrine about God. In his explorations, Hubbard noted the prevalence and importance of belief in a Supreme Being to all peoples. God is therefore the Eighth Dynamic, which is also known as Infinity. Scientologists who progress to the Eighth Dynamic come to their own conclusions regarding the Supreme Being.
Scientology on Human Nature

Based on his personal research, L. Ron Hubbard concluded that a human is made up of three parts: the body, the mind and the thetan.

The body includes the brain, which is not to be confused with the mind. The purpose of the brain is to carry messages; it is likened to a switchboard.

The mind “consists essentially of pictures.” It is the accumulation of life experiences, memories, perceptions, decisions and conclusions.

The thetan is the soul, which is the true essence of a human being. Hubbard felt that “soul” had come to have too many meanings, so coined the term thetan based on the Greek letter theta.

A thetan is the person himself, not his body or his name or the physical universe, his mind or anything else. It is that which is aware of being aware; the identity which IS the individual. One does not have a thetan, something one keeps somewhere apart from oneself; he is a thetan.

The thetan can exist entirely independent of the body and the mind. Scientology teaches that, through a process called exteriorization, a thetan can leave the body but still control the body. This experience results in a person’s certainty that he is not identified with his body. A person who is able to practice exteriorization is called an Operating Thetan or OT.

The official Scientology website states:

Man is a spiritual being endowed with abilities well beyond those which he normally envisages. He is not only able to solve his own problems, accomplish his goals and gain lasting happiness, but also to achieve new states of awareness he may never have dreamed possible.

Afterlife

Scientology does not include an official belief about the afterlife. However, it reports that during auditing, a person often recalls memories of past lives and that Scientology ascribes to the idea of being born again into another body.

Xenu

In Scientology doctrine, Xenu is a galactic ruler who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living. These events are known as “Incident II” or “The Wall of Fire,” and the traumatic memories associated with them are known as the “R6 implant.” The Xenu story prompted the use of the volcano as a Scientology symbol.

Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard detailed the story in Operating Thetan Level III in 1967, famously warning that R6 was “calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) anyone who attempts to solve it.”

Much controversy between the Church of Scientology and its critics has focused on Xenu. The Church avoids making mention of Xenu in public statements and has gone to considerable effort to maintain the story’s confidentiality, including legal action on both copyright and trade secrecy grounds.

Critics claim that revealing the story is in the public interest, given the high prices charged for attaining the level of OT III.

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What is a Charter School?

Charter schools aren’t new and have proven to be effective over time, they are just hard to get into. These schools are commonly held as innovative public schools that are accountable for results. They are designed to deliver programs tailored to the needs of the communities they serve. Charter schools are nonsectarian public schools of choice that operate with freedom from many of the regulations that apply to traditional public schools. The “charter” establishing each such school is a performance contract detailing the school’s mission, program, goals, students served, methods of assessment, and ways to measure success.

Charter schools are one of the fastest and most successful growing educational reforms in the country. The first charter school opened its doors in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1992.

How Do Charter Schools Differ From Traditional District Public Schools?

Two key things jump out –

Choice: Charter schools give families an opportunity to pick the school most suitable for their child’s educational well-being. Teachers choose to create and work at schools where they directly shape the best working and learning environment for their students and themselves. Likewise, charter sponsors choose to authorize schools that are likely to best serve the needs of the students in a particular community.

Accountability: Charter schools are judged on how well they meet the student achievement goals established by their charter contract. Charter schools must also show that they can perform according to rigorous fiscal and managerial standards. If a charter school cannot perform up to the established standards, the charter will not be renewed.

Some charter school programs focus on the basics — reading, writing and the traditional school subjects that some children struggle with. Some schools focus on the arts or music programs. Some are science and math focused – essentially what was ever approved on the charter. You can even have a language school such as the Hebrew Language charter school proposed in New York.

What is the Quality of Education?

The primary reason for charter schools is to get a quality education. Charter schools typically set higher standards in their defined charter. This is not the case in public schools which are just there and open regardless of performance.

What is The Rapture?

The Second Coming of Christ will occur in stages. First, He will remove all Christians from the Earth, to protect them. This is called “The Rapture.” The term comes from the Latin verb raptare, and the Greek word harpizo, both meaning “to be caught up” or “to be snatched up.” Jesus will “snatch us” out of harm’s way.

Most Christians believe in the Rapture and the Tribulation, which will be followed by a 1000 years of Christ reigning together with the resurrected saints.

Christians who do not believe in the Rapture and the Millennial Kingdom are referred to as “amillennialists”. They believe that mankind will simply become better and better through the efforts of the Church, and when mankind becomes holy enough Christ will return.

After The Rapture, God will begin executing judgments against unbelievers, during a period called the Tribulation. At the end of the Tribulation all nations will attack Israel, and Jesus Christ will physically return, leading the armies of heaven. At the Battle of Armageddon they will destroy everyone who is not a believer. Then Satan will be bound, and Jesus will set up the Millennial Kingdom, headquartered in Jerusalem. Jesus and the saints will rule over the nations of the Earth for a 1000 years. During this period there will be people born who are not loyal to Christ.

The prophesy continues that a large group will take up arms against the Lord and be defeated. Then, Christ will judge all who have ever lived, giving rewards to some and punishment to others. Those who were “destroyed” will be cast into the Lake of Fire, i.e., Hell. After that, God will destroy heaven and Earth because they have been polluted by sin. He will create a new heaven and a new Earth, put those who were saved on the new Earth, and rule it forever.

The big bang is a theory on how this whole world and the universe started. The big bang theory is the theory that the universe started from a single point, and has been expanding ever since the initial explosion.

This has been well-established by observations, such as the apparent movement of galaxies away from earth, and the background radiation believed to be the leftover light from the big bang.

The evidence for a big bang having taken place about 15 to 20 billion years ago is fairly overwhelming, so it is reasonable to believe that it is the case.

Some astronomers, who are religious, argue that the big bang theory confirms the existence of God and the basic elements of the creation story as told in the Bible.

Scientists, like people in most any profession, have a vast diversity of religious beliefs. Some of us attend houses of worship, others do not. Some of us consider ourselves very religious, others consider ourselves staunch atheists. So simply while a scientific theory, it could validate God or stories from the Bible