Becoming a religion

Rachel Aviv reviews 'The Church of Scientology', by Hugh Urban:

Urban does not argue, as other writers have, that it was all a financial ploy, though he agrees that getting rich was a powerful motivating force. He places Hubbard in a line of science-fiction novelists who thought of reality as a ‘collective fiction created by our own continual agreement that it appears to be real’. As Hubbard saw it, the ability to create one’s own reality was a divine kind of freedom; he compared this ‘creation and management of universes’ to ‘a writer sitting at his desk’. ‘He’s pounding a typewriter,’ he said in a 1952 lecture. ‘So what’s he doing? Inventing time and space and energy and matter.’