After months of struggle and pain, the people of Haiti can finally breathe a sigh of relief now that the Church of Scientology has arrived on its shores. Since late in January those hilariously idiotic children of science fiction failure L. Ron Hubbard have been delivering their particular brand of useless, potentially lethal medical care to the sick and injured of Port au Prince. For some reason, probably the utter chaos of the city post-earthquake, these fools haven't been summarily ejected from the country yet. No, while actual doctors cobble together the best reality-based medical care they can manage for the countless needy in Haiti there are tents full of Scientologists in yellow t-shirts playing make-believe with the lives of homeless men, women and children. Ain't the world a grand and wonderful place?

So, what are the Scientologists actually doing in Haiti? Well, they're pitching a tent in the courtyard of the Port au Prince General Hospital and fondling crippled people who need actual medical assistance. According to their Los Angeles based volunteer ministry people, the Haiti contingent has been using a process called "assisting", which is just their own silly version of faith healing. See, when an individual has enough will and dedication and has paid the requisite number of installments to achieve Level 5 enlightenment in the Church of Scientology, that individual acquires the ability to guide trapped personal energy and blah blah blah-biddy blah.

The problem here is that all of the real doctors in Haiti are too busy taking care of the innumerable injured to give more than half a shit about a bunch of rich idiots from southern California who think they're magic. Maybe they ought to pay more attention because there are reports of the Scientologists handing out antibiotics. Yeah, the people from a religion that famously doesn't condone the use of medicine and other chemicals has been curing gangrene wounds and staph infections with MYSTICAL TREATMENTS PERFECTED BY LEVEL 5 THETAN BELIEVERS and scientifically proven medicine.

I'm not so much concerned about the hypocrisy of this cheap maneuver. Leaning on facts when they're convenient and only when they're convenient has been a hallmark of organized religion ever since the first caveman got his friends kneeling to the carcass of a deer. What's disturbing is the idea of a bunch of gullible idiots who not only have no medical training but who also supposedly don't believe in medicine administering actual chemical treatments. Antibiotics can do some nasty things to a body if they're used improperly and they can be entirely ineffective if not used for the proper duration. Given the track record of the CoS when giving out medical advice (re: Isaac Hayes), there's a good chance that these clods in yellow t-shirts are going to kill some Haitians.

It's well known by this point that all these volunteer Scientologists showed up in Port au Prince with no supplies but tons of money. They intended on buying supplies at the airport, an idea that has so many things wrong with it I don't know where to start. It's perfectly descriptive of why Scientologists are dangerous. Most of them aren't malevolent or hopelessly cynical, they just have no concept of how the real world works. The kind of alternative thinking that imagines a destroyed, third-world airport is going to be replete with groceries is the same kind of thinking that believes antibiotics can be popped like chewable vitamins with no ill effect. For all the reasons to pity the people of Haiti, criminally irresponsible crazies masquerading as aid workers shouldn't be one.