I recently got another dunner (request for a donation of $5,000 towards an ideal org). I counted the number of people listed who donated and compared that to the population of the city that org is in. I've been getting promotional material on this for several months now and the number of people on that list hasn't changed (increased). So I'm assuming that's the number of staff and public involved in $cientology in that area. The ratio from doing the math is 1 in 30,000 of the population are involved in $cientology. I did a similar calculation with my estimate of the number of people active in $cientology in the community where the small org is. I get about the same ratio.

So taking the population of the United States at 311,591,917 (that's from a search on Google) and using that ratio (1 in 30,000) I get 10,387. That's probably a high estimate. The ratio is probably much lower in other parts of the world, too.

^^ Good work, Wieber! I think that your estimate works for the USA and other western countries because of cultural similarities.

...but if you read or watch interviews with officials of the Church of Scientology, they are still claiming to have over 8 million members. Anyone not under the control of the "church" knows this is a complete fabrication, and that they have never had anything remotely near that figure, but they continue the claim year after year.

Hi,

All the way back in 1999 they claimed it was 8 million members.

From their propaganda/information video:

More than 10.000 churches, missions and groups across 167 nations.
Welcoming OVER 4,4 million new people each year
New churches and missions opening on 6 continents.

This just dont add up to be right.

and this statement:

Drawing on 50.000,- years of wisdom, mathematics and nuclear physics???

How old was Hubbard?


I drove by the "church" in oslo today. an ugly small building with a small sign over the door, and on the building. The lights where on, one car parked outside, and most of the blinds on the windows where shut. Maybe I`ll shoot some video and show you. Their homepage claims its sunday mass or something on sundays, maybe I`ll take a look at how many people there are.

CoS members and especially staff are pressured to recruit new members and sell courses and books, so it must be so depressing to fail. The answer? Quit!

Hubbard was born in 1911 and died in 1986.

Maybe Hubbard was claiming wisdom from past lives and the nuclear physics course which he flunked

No it doesn't.
That would be welcoming OVER 440 new people to each of the 10,000 churches/missions/groups each year.
If they count getting someone to do a stress test or personality test as "welcoming new people" then that would be possible.
Let's say a church "welcomes" 440 new people a year. That works out to between 8-9 people a week. So if they can get 8 or 9 people a week to take a stress test or attend a public event, etc, and all 10,000 churches/missions/ groups do this, then they could claim to "welcome" 4.4 Million a year. How many of these people actually buy a book or course or donate any money to the church?
Probably next to none of them.
And the number of new CO$ members is offset by the number leaving.
And there are probably more church or mission closings than openings, but they don't want to mention that.
The CO$ is as good at telling half-truths as it is at lying outright.

The Alt.Religion.Scientology Central Committee Demographics Department (me) approves this statement:

"Using data from the most recent American Religious Identification Survey in 2008 there were, at the normal 95% accuracy spread, less than 50,000 self-identified Scientologists in the USA.
"Since about half of CoS branches are in the USA, it would be reasonable to suppose that there were less than 100,000 worldwide.
"This data broadly matches up with all the indirect, anecdotal and Church data available. The only indication that the Church has 'millions of members' comes from unsupported claims by Church spokespersons."

Sources:
http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/ ... 0s0075.xls
http://www.locator.scientology.org/scn/

The ARSCC depreciates using ARIS's '25,000' figure as it is statistically highly inaccurate.

ARSCC (wdne) was its old funny name. wdne means "which does not exist." "Central Committee" was the top of the old USSR dictatorship, and paraonoid CoS thought the usenet group ARS was run by evil puppeteers, so it was hilarious that the free spirits at ARS would be puppets of a bunch of scary old commies.

If only there were a way to know for certain how many CO$ members there are exactly. That number would have to be adjusted daily for the net loss, more leaving than joining. I estimated (generously) that the CO$ has about 25,000 members worldwide. I based that on the 12,000 Debbie Cook e-mail recipients, and the estimate that there are probably about as many $cientologists in the US as there are in the entire rest of the world, so I just doubled that +1000. As Don mentioned, Debbie's e-mail list was old and stale, so adjusting for deflation, I would say about 20,000 worldwide. If Wieber were to adjust his pie chart for that figure, there would not be a visible difference unless you enlarge the pie chart to 10ft X 10ft. It all boils down to a very small and shrinking CO$ following, no matter what the exact figures.