Sea Org Day (Scientology)

The Sea Organization or Sea Org is the senior-most status of staff within the Church of Scientology network of corporations, but is not itself incorporated. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Sea Org was started as L. Ron Hubbard's private navy, and adopted naval uniforms and ranks. Today, all Scientology management organizations are exclusively staffed with Sea Org members. The Sea Org maintains strict codes for its members, beginning with a billion-year pledge of service to Scientology upon initiation. David Miscavige, the leader of Scientology, is the highest-ranking Sea Org officer with the rank of captain. The higher rank of commodore is permanently reserved for the reincarnation of the late L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. Some ex-members and scholars have described the Sea Org as a totalitarian organization marked by intensive surveillance and lack of freedom.

Scientology is a set of beliefs and practices invented by the American author L. Ron Hubbard, and an associated movement. It is variously defined as a scam, a business, a cult, or a religion. Hubbard initially developed a set of pseudoscientific ideas that he represented as a form of therapy, which he called Dianetics. An organization that he established in 1950 to promote it went bankrupt, and his ideas were rejected as nonsense by the scientific community. He then recast his ideas as a religion, likely for tax purposes and to avoid prosecution, and renamed them Scientology. In 1953, he founded the Church of Scientology which, by one 2014 estimate, has around 30,000 members.