Dear Oracle:

Why is everyone always picking on Tom Cruise and his faith?  Why can't they admit that the airtight arguments and proven techniques of Scientology have helped Tom achieve a level of consciousness so superior to their own that he would have to get down on his hands and knees, like someone looking for ants in the weeds, to even notice them?

- Devendra Steele, Queens, New York

Dear Devendra:

(For those not familiar with Scientology: it is based on the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, who warned us of the need to exterminate alien beings called "thetans," who flew their microscopic spaceships up our nostrils eons ago and have infested us ever since. (If my theology is a little off, it's because I couldn't afford the church's seminars and had to get it from the internet.))

You know that itch deep inside your forehead, Devendra?  It's just the computer chip the Scientologists implanted to monitor thetan activity and summon you to the Celebrity Centre whenever Tom needs his shoes shined. 

I'm jealous; the Scientology missionaries selling books in the subway said I was so infested that an implant would be wasted on me.  I was depressed until I heard about Tom's bizarre outbursts, which made me wonder if – in severe cases – removing thetans can cause more damage than leaving them alone, like fumigating a house held together by termites can cause it to collapse?

The jackals of the media pick on Tom because they're jealous of his inevitable transformation into the Jesus Christ of Scientology.  And some of them are still bitter about all the sleepless nights they spent, clutching a baseball bat under the covers, afraid the Scientology bogeymen of their paranoid fantasies would show up and murder them in their sleep.  If they would just read L. Ron's Dianetics, and let Scientology's trained technicians attach electrodes to their genitals and start smoking the thetans from their diseased flesh, they might be able to stop chasing phantoms and make something of themselves!

The other reason reporters pick on Scientology is because they are timid.  But then – given the choice between Scientologists (too busy to defend themselves as they work hand-in-hand with the IRS to become a "real" religion) and Muslim fundamentalists, with their knee-jerk death threats and beheadings, or equally thin-skinned Mormon fundamentalists, with the whole state-terror apparatus of Utah behind them – which faith would you choose to take on?

But thetans and paranoid fantasies aside, another thing that L. Ron advocates is the need for competence – his belief that the modern world, with all its complicated technology, is no place for bumblers and nitwits.  And of course competence is what makes Tom Cruise the #1 action star in the world, able to jump motorcycles over burning buses better than Jesus ever could.

Competence might be a costly ideal, however – just imagine what could have happened if U.S. evangelicals had forced George W. Bush to take some silly "competency test."  I shudder to think what the world would be like if he had failed, and wound up just a mild mannered drunk, sleeping on a cot in the tool shed on his parents' estate, getting a beer allowance to stay out of the neighbors' garbage!

- A. O.