Can Fiction Novels Cure Learning Disorders?

MADRID, Spain – Actor Tom Cruise said Scientology teachings helped him overcome childhood dyslexia, a Spanish magazine reported.
Cruise was quoted by Spanish magazine XL Semanal as saying he was diagnosed with the learning disability when he was 7 years old.
Cruise said he was often anxious, frustrated and bored as a youth and couldn't concentrate in class, the magazine reported on its Web site Sunday.
The magazine quoted Cruise as saying he was functionally illiterate when he graduated from school in 1980, but learned to read perfectly as an adult through Scientology technology.

So it looks like Tom Cruise is giving credit to Scientology for his ability to overcome dyslexia. From a guy who not long ago told Matt Lauer on the today show that psychiatric drugs are have no merit because Cruise knows the history of psychiatry, this latest comment is a little contradictory. I guess in whatever fantasy land Maverick lives in medical doctors are less reliable on pharmacology than actors with a high school diploma.

Makes sense. If I want worthwhile psychological help, I don't go to a therapist, but trust my local bartender for advice. But the suggestion that Scientology can cure dyslexia makes less sense than Scientolgy itself. If you want to know how credible Scientology is as a religion, just go watch John Travolta's Scientology-inspired movie "Battlefield Earth." One note of caution before you watch: You should pray to whatever religion you believe in before you start the show, as you may want to kill yourself after watching 10 minutes of that disaster.

The foundations of Scientology come from a guy named L. Ron Hubbard, who wrote a book called Dianetics that somehow grew into a religion based on the thesis that some galatic space ruler called Xenu brought humans to earth 75 million years ago on jets that looked like a DC-8. Sounds reasonable, right?

Clearly a work of fiction, somehow Scientology still has the power to cure Tom Cruise's dyslexia. In related news, a 12 year-old leukemia patient in California just read "The DaVinci Code" and is now completely healthy. We should all be thankful for Tom Cruise. Not very often do we feel sorry for a guy worth $250 million.