This might have been posted before. I was skimming through "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief " and came across a few interesting mormon related items.
Mormons interested in buying a movie script called "Revolt in the stars" and Mit[t Rom[]ney's favorite book was a L. Ron Hubbard novel. There is also a very short section comparing about LDS beginings and other Hubbard non-sense.
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Excerpt:
L. Ron Hubbard never lost his interest in being a movie director. He wrote innumerable scripts for Scientology training films, but he still thought he could take over Hollywood. He had particularly high hopes for one script, “Revolt in the Stars,” that was based on one of his novels . Inspired by the thunderous success of Star Wars, Hubbard worked on the script in 1979 with the legendary acting teacher Milton Katselas with the aim of having it made into a feature film.
When Katselas and Hubbard finished the script of “Revolt in the Stars,” Hubbard dispatched one of his top Messengers, Catherine Harrington, to Hollywood to make a deal... She shopped the script around and found a buyer willing to offer $ 10 million— which, at the time, would have been the highest price ever paid for a script, she was told.
The Guardian’s Office became suspicious and investigated the buyers, who they learned were Mormons. Hubbard figured that the only reason Mormons would buy it was to put it on the shelf . Harrington was demoted and sent to be alone in the furnace room runder the parking garage of the Clearwater base. The script never did get made into a film.
Wright, Lawrence (2013-01-17). Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (p. 201-202). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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L. Ron HUBBARD FINISHED WRITING his thousand-page opus, Battlefield Earth, in 1980. (Mit[t Rom[]ney would name it as his favorite novel.)
Wright, Lawrence (2013-01-17). Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (p. 209). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
{You would think after 27 years MR might have read a novel that was more striking and worth name dropping other than BattleField Earth.}
2nd Source:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/rom*****ney-favors-hubbard-novel/?_r=0....When asked his favorite novel in an interview shown yesterday on the Fox News Channel, MR pointed to “Battlefield Earth,” a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. That book was turned into a film by John Travolta, a Scientologist.
A spokesman said later it was one of MR’s favorite novels.
“I’m not in favor of his religion by any means,” MR, a Mormon, said. “But he wrote a book called ‘Battlefield Earth’ that was a very fun science-fiction book.” Asked about his favorite book, MR cited the Bible.
{Note: The influential life changing BOM was not mentioned even though both speak of Christ.}
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Excerpt: Scientology and LDS beginings spoken of in the book.
Hubbard once wrote that “the old religion”— by which he meant Christianity— was based on “a very painful lie,” which was the idea of Heaven. “Yes, I’ve been to Heaven. And so have you,” he writes. “It was complete with gates, angels and plaster saints— and electronic implantation equipment.” Heaven, he says, was built as an implant station 43 trillion years ago. “So there was a Heaven after all— which is why you are on this planet and were condemned never to be free again— until Scientology.” He went on: “What does this do to any religious nature of Scientology? It strengthens it. New religions always overthrow the false gods of the old, they do something to better man. We can improve man. We can show the old gods false. And we can open up the universe as a happier place in which a spirit may dwell.”
One might compare Scientology with the Church of Latter-day Saints, a new religion of the previous century. The founder of the movement, Joseph Smith, claimed to have received a pair of golden plates from the angel Moroni[Nefi] in upstate New York in 1827 , along with a pair of magical “seeing stones,” which allowed him to read the contents. Three years later, he published The Book of Mormon, founding a movement that would provoke the worst outbreak of religious persecution in American history. Mormons were chased all across the country because of their practice of polygamy and their presumed heresy [and voting Mormon Block, theivery, Danites, takeing from the Gentiles]. Smith himself was murdered by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. His beleaguered followers sought to escape the United States and establish a religious theocracy in the territory of Utah, which they called Zion. Mormons were so despised that there was a bill in Congress to exterminate them. And yet Mormonism would evolve and go on to become one of the fastest -growing denominations in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first, centuries. Members of the faith now openly run for president of the United States. In much of the world, this religion, which was once tormented because of its perceived anti-American values, is now thought of as being the most American of religions [Joseph..The All-American Profit...]; indeed, that’s how many Mormons think of it as well. It is a measure not only of the religion’s success but also of the ability of a faith to adapt and change.
And yet Joseph Smith was plainly a liar. In answer to the charge of polygamy, he claimed he had only one wife, when he had already accumulated a harem. A strange but revealing episode occurred in 1835, when Smith purchased several Egyptian mummies from an itinerant merchant selling such curiosities. Inside the mummy cases were scrolls of papyrus, reduced to fragments, which Smith declared were the actual writings of the Old Testament patriarchs Abraham and Joseph. Smith produced what he called a translation of the papyri, titled The Book of Abraham. It still forms a portion of Mormon doctrine. In America at the time, Egyptian was still thought to be indecipherable, but the Rosetta Stone had already been discovered, and Jean-François Champollion had successfully rendered the hieroglyphic language into French. In 1966, the Joseph Smith papyri were discovered in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was soon shown that the passages that Smith “translated” were common funerary documents with no reference to Abraham or Joseph whatsoever. This fraud has been known for decades, but it has made little difference in the growth of the religion or the devotion of its adherents. Belief in the irrational is one definition of faith, but it is also true that clinging to absurd or disputed doctrines binds a community of faith together and defines a barrier to the outside world.
....Many religions —including Christian Science, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even Christianity— have known scorn and persecution. Some, like the Shakers and the Millerites, died out, but others, including Mormons and Pentecostals, have elbowed their way into the crowded religious landscape of American society.
Wright, Lawrence (2013-01-17). Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (pp. 439-442). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.