Tom Cruise Wants to Know Which of Us "Practice Sex in Some Unnatural Fashion"

What would you do if one night you woke up to find yourself in the middle of a room, sitting on a chair, hooked to a strange, rudimentary-looking machine, not really sure if you are dreaming, re-living an "alien abduction" fantasy or simply being awake and not remembering how you got there? Well, and then what if someone came to you and started asking things like "Have you ever consistently practiced sex in some unnatural fashion?", "Have you ever made a planet, or nation, radioactive?" or "Have you ever made love to a dead body?" No, I'm not kidding - at all in fact. These three samples are not something someone wrote while high, drunk or simply in a brooding, pessimistic - or even misanthropic mood, there are samples taken directly from a questionnaire that new recruits of a certain religious cult have to deal with once they decide that they want to spend a lot of time and money looking up to Tom Cruise. Yes, you guessed it - I'm talking about the so-called "Church" of Scientology and its rather bizarre recruiting tactics.

The fact is, when I took my first look at these questions (which add up to an internal church document developed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard himself, or so it is said) I thought it was some sort of joke and that someone was trying really hard to make the followers of this cult look... well, not very sane. Then I realized it's very easy to judge something you don't know, and started an intensive "know your friendly Scientology neighborhood" campaign and tried to keep an open mind about it. However, it soon became apparent that there are no "20 questions", nor is it something remotely similar to Catholic confession, for example, in which a person willingly admits or repents for their sins. I could not, in fact, find anything similar to this recruiting questionnaire, and I ended up with more questions than answers to my initial "why would anyone ask another human being if they ever screwed with a corpse - and mean it" question.

So, here are a few more questions from the same questionnaire and yes, I sort of feel scared. I would definitely start hearing alarm bells going the moment anyone - even a priest or a spiritual leader, guru or anything like that - started asking me "Have you ever killed the wrong person?", from which I humbly deduced that killing the right person would have been OK. "Did you come to Earth for evil purposes?" would be the next slightly creepy question - to which I would probably be tempted to answer with a "I am captain Jean-Luc Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise" joke, which no one would probably find funny anyway. What I wanted to say was that I would really like to understand all this better and not take the whole matter lightly - but for now, I have few resources to go on. Anyone interested in lending me a hand?