Hubbard: Scientology is a power-and-money-and-intelligence-gathering game. To use common, everyday English, Scientology says that you and I and everybody else willed ourselves into being hundreds of trillions of years ago –just by deciding to be. We willed ourselves into being ourselves. Through wild space games, interaction, fights, and wars in the grand science-fiction tradition, we created this universe –all the matter, energy, space, and time of this universe. And so through these trillions of years, we have become the effect of our own cause and we now find ourselves trapped in bodies. So the idea of Scientology “auditing” or “counseling” or “processing” is to free yourself from your body and to return you to the original godlike state or, in Scientology jargon, an operating Thetan –O.T. We are all fallen gods, according to Scientology, and the goal is to be returned to that state.
Penthouse: And what is the Church of Scientology?
Hubbard: It’s one of my father’s many organizations. It was formed in 1953, basically to avoid the harassment of my father by the medical profession and the IRS. The idea of Scientology didn’t really exist before that point as a religion, but my father hit upon turning it into a church after he started feeling pressured.
Penthouse: Didn’t your father have any interest in helping people?
Hubbard: No.
Penthouse: Never?
Hubbard: My father started out as a broke science-fiction writer. He was always broke in the late 1940s. He told me and a lot of other people that the way to make a million was to start a religion. Then he wrote the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health while he was in Bayhead, New Jersey. When we later visited Bayhead, in about 1953, we were walking around and reminiscing –he told me that he had written the book in one month.
Taken from the June 1983 Penthouse interview with L. Ron Hubbard Jr