Although Hubbard had not yet established Scientology, which was overtly presented as a religious practice, and continued to maintain that Dianetics was a scientific subject with techniques aimed towards therapeutic results, the information on "theta" in the book clearly begins to move the subject into a religious direction.
This concept of a spiritual life energy entering and purifying the physical universe recalls the ideas of Gnostic religions.
In January 1951 Hubbard published a booklet by these same alleged doctors: Dianetic Processing – A Brief Survey of Research Projects and Preliminary Results by Dalmyra Ibanez, Ph.D., Ed.D., Gordon Southon, Peggy Southon and Peggy Benton In it, the authors state: If dianetic research is to be defined as "the study of human behaviour for the purpose of discovering and removing the sources of aberration", or, in other words, as the study of mental health, a need arises for tools with which to pursue that study.
Actually, such tools as do exist may or may not apply to the dynamics of Dianetics, since its methodology has no exact parallel in the history of psychology... For our present studies, therefore, use has been made of those testing instruments judged by a group of psychologists as most appropriate for dianetic purposes.The names of the persons in this "group of psychologists" are not mentioned.
The booklet presents case histories and X-rays and says that it proves that Dianetics can cure "aberrations" including manic depression, asthma, arthritis, colitis and "overt homosexuality."
People who are temporarily suppressed below 2.0 commonly have bad breath.One passage in particular in Chapter 27 of Science of Survival has been singled out for criticism by opponents of Scientology.
[5] In it, Hubbard states that The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the tone scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered.
It is not necessary to produce a world of clears in order to have a reasonable and worthwhile social order; it is only necessary to delete those individuals who range from 2.0 down, either by processing them enough to get their tone level above the 2.0 line — a task which, indeed, is not very great, since the amount of processing in many cases might be under fifty hours, although it might also in others be in excess of two hundred — or simply quarantining them from the society.
By the simple expedient of collecting and destroying all the beggars in Venezuela an end was put to leprosy in that country.Critics, such as the French Government's Anti-cult interministerial mission, believe that forcibly quarantining all human beings that are classified low on Scientology's tone scale would be a violation of human rights.
[7][5] Hubbard has also been criticized for the strong opposition to abortion, which he displays in the book, in which he says that "America spends [billions] yearly on institutions for the insane and jails for criminals ... primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked mother to whom children are a curse, not a blessing of God.