Yes, Scientology was "created". I have a friend that went into Christian studies and gave me a paper once that had "How to refute Scientology" with like 3 points on it. One was a quote from Hubbard. One was a quote from his books. And the other was a picture of a document someone had written from inside "the system" I guess. I didn't quite understand it, but my religious zealot of a friend did.
But its nothing new. Lots of these cults exist to try and better people with false promises. Take the book "Stranger in a Strange World", by Heinlein. In it, he describes a church that has different levels of "knowing" or "groking" of each other, that ends up being a nested circle structure where in the innermost circles, sexual promiscuity is rampant. So then what happens after the book?
Church of All Worlds:
http://www.caw.org/articles/basic.html
Or how about a religion that was started to get out of required college chapel services?
http://www.neopagan.net/
Solar Temple members tend to die off too fast to actually promote their religion.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/dc_solar.htm
Or one of my favorites:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/body.html
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