Tom Cruise is in the news again. When referring to the pregnancy of his fiancé Katie Holmes in a GQ interview, he said, “I am gonna eat the cord and the placenta.” Whether or not Cruise was serious is still up for debate.

Now in some cultures, it is common to eat the placenta because they believe consuming it can cut down on postpartum depression.

I don’t see what the father eating the placenta really accomplishes, however. It would be like someone wearing a nicotine patch for their friend who smokes.

And the amazing thing is that this is only the second craziest thing that Cruise has ever done. As you probably know, he’s a scientologist.

Have you ever read anything about scientology? It’s a “religion” that was created by a science fiction writer. Yeah, that’s legitimate; I’m going to join that church of Shakespeare.

They literally believe that 75 million years ago, in a Star Trek-esque space confederation, many of the planets became overpopulated.

The ruler Xenu was about to be taken out of power, so he rounded up billions of people, loaded them into space crafts (which coincidentally look exactly the same as Douglas DC-8s) and brought them across the galaxy to Earth.

Now here is where the story starts to get a little far-fetched.

The people were taken out of the planes (and it must have taken a number of trips to transport several billion people in a plane that seats less than 200) after being brought to Earth, taken around volcanoes, and then the evil Xenu blew up hydrogen bombs, killing all the people.

The souls, called Thetans, were then captured by vacuums and brainwashed by Xenu. They believe in Scientology that these souls are still alive and that they attach themselves to people today and negatively impact our thoughts.

My biggest fear with all of this is that I may have accidentally converted someone to the religion. I can just see someone sitting in the Macateria right now reading this and thinking, “Wow, this makes a lot of sense. I have seen the light.”

And certainly, I don’t have all of the answers about Scientology, but in a nutshell, that gives you a glimpse at the history of the religion.

However, there are a few questions I have about the validity of it. And save your letters to the editor. I’m making comments that 99.9 percent of the people agree with. It’s crazy.

They may say things like how Scientology is compatible with other religions, but again, I disagree. You can’t be a Christian Scientologist. The Bible doesn’t say anything about being beamed up to the mother ship.

Scientologists believe in reincarnation. The one thing I’ve never understood about reincarnation is that if it’s real ” then why are there more people alive today than there were thousands of years ago?

Secondly, if there was ever actually an intergalactic federation where they could travel from planet to planet ” why doesn’t it still exist today?

Think about it. I’ve never heard of anything that made any less sense than Scientology. Aside from why anyone would choose to go to Toledo.

Josh ([email protected]) is preparing to start his own religion based on Star Wars.