The Church of the Great Gazoo

I spent a good portion of this morning, reading the Wikipedia entry on Scientology. After I got done, I thought my brain would explode from all the Operating Thetans, Xenu, and all the other crazy stuff they have going on in their religion. It seems to be a hodge-podge of science fiction and tenets borrowed from other religions such as buddhism. What really got me was that L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the religion also borrowed from Freud and Carl Jung as well, which is ironic considering the church's stance against psychology and psychiatry. I've never read all of Dianetics but my dad did and he tried to get me to read it, but I couldn't get past the first page.

I'm not going to go into all the particulars of the religion. If you are interested, you can read the Wikipedia entry here. But it got me thinking. If L. Ron Hubbard, a middling science fiction writer, can base a religion around the theory that aliens from another planet once lived on earth, then why not base a religion based on an actual alien?

Well, not a real alien, but the Great Gazoo, the little green man from The Flinstones. Seriously, is Xenu anymore real? At least there's written evidence that Jesus existed. According to L.Ron Hubbard, Xenu was the dictator of the 'Galactic Confederacy' who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of his people to earth in DC-8 like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanos and killed them using hydrogen bombs. Oh, and psychiatrists helped him do this. The rest is craziness you can read here.

On The Flinstones, the Great Gazoo, came from Zatox, and was exiled from earth for having invented a doomsday machine, a weapon of immense destructive power. His invention was a button which if pressed would destroy the world. He came to earth in a flying saucer and was discovered by Fred and Barney. Critics thought the idea of having an alien come to earth during the Stone Age was jumping the shark. But was it really?

Only Fred, Barney, Pebbles and Bam Bam can see The Great Gazoo because they believe in him. The Great Gazoo was always trying to help the humans, he called dum-dums, although he always seemed to cause more problems for them. But his heart was always in the right place.

So I propose to start the Church of the Great Gazoo. As soon as tax-exempt status is achieved, the church will work on building a space ship to help send Gazoo back to his home planet. We will also put out a book entitled The Wisdom of the Great Gazoo.

Seriously, worshipping the Great Gazoo can't be more bizarre than being a Scientologist.