It’s not only Hollywood that profits from the many young tourists who visit L.A. with stars in their eyes, carrying the dream that some day maybe they too will make it big. So does the Church of Scientology.

The sidewalk placards outside the “Scientometric Testing Center” near Hollywood and Vine entice passersby with, “Come Inside. I.Q. Tested. Free Personality Test. Free Stress Test.”

Obviously this is premium real estate. Sunset Boulevard near Vine has its own elaborate Scientology properties. Near the city street L. Ron Hubbard Way, which intersects Sunset, is the most prominent of the Scientology high-rise structures, complete with the gargantuan neon sign “Hubbard Dianetics Foundation.”

The place actually sits among Kaiser Permanente’s medical complex! “Get ’em when they’re most vulnerable,” is the obvious thinking.

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At the literal corner of Hollywood and Vine is the “L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition,” which according to the certification sticker in the window is a “Member California Association of Museums.”

From my car stopped at the light in blinding afternoon sun, I could easily look into the plush lobby and see a bronzed bust of Hubbard framed by a floor-to-ceiling bronze-color vertical water fountain structure. It had big, big money written all over it.

I pulled over to jot down the Hubbard quote engraved on a plaque at the center of this bar-no-expense shrine, which, by the way, lined up with radio commentator Walter Winchell’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Hubbard assesses, “As I have never seen wisdom do any good kept to oneself. And as I like to see others happy. And as I find the vast majority of people can and do understand. I will keep on writing and working and teaching.”

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What made seeing all this garbola especially bizarre was I had just read in the morning paper a long cover piece about how the internet has become a major outlet for “ExScientologists” with horror stories to tell.

"People have been scared out of their minds to speak out about Scientology," one woman was quoted saying in the Los Angeles Times article. “Nobody should have to be that scared to speak out about a church."

She, along with two friends, started the website ExScientologyKids.com, which alleges physical abuse, a bad education and alienation from family members for children raised in the church by their parents.

Another woman says in the article, "The Internet is listening. If something happens to me, all of these people will know."

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Of course, Scientology has a long reputation of going after its detractors in the most severe fashion. As the Times states, “Reporters have long had to tread carefully when writing about Scientology, fearful that lawsuits and other kinds of retaliation would follow any story that Scientology did not like.”

The newspaper places the current onslaught of online anti-Scientology sentiment with the recent release of a secret Tom Cruise video “extolling the religion's tech-based approach to enlightenment (that) was leaked onto YouTube, where users holding it up to ridicule copied and recopied it; several sites posted it without hesitation. . .

”The church's whack-a-mole campaign with the Cruise video became a rallying cry for Anonymous, which saw efforts to remove the videos from YouTube as an unwanted incursion into the domain of digital culture, where information and media, copyrighted or no, are often exchanged freely.”

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In a great interview I saved from the New York Post last month when I was in Manhattan, English author Andrew Morton, who’d just released his controversial new book, Tom Cruise: An Authorized Biography, gave a very revealing explanation into the New Age appeal of Scientology for people like Cruise (who, by the way, is a big friend of Oprah’s and one she’s consistently promoted in the same fashion she’s now out selling Barack Obama).

Morton says of Cruise, “At first I thought him a ticking bomb, like the programmed Manchurian Candidate. I’ve now learned his personality chimes with their ethos. He’s basically a zealot.

“Driven, focused, authoritarian, a techno geek, slightly hierarchical, with a disconnect from society in general and a self-contained philosophy. Almost a military feel allowing no outside influences. At this point, everything in his life is shaped around his faith. He is willing to sacrifice his career for his faith.

“His first wife, Mimi Rogers, introduced him to it when Scientology was down and out, rickety, was in disarray, had IRS issues. Already up and coming, he needed nothing then, but its beliefs somehow speak to the old and faded or the young and upcoming.

“Cruise hated his childhood, and this faith teaches that if it isn’t true for you then it isn’t true, so he could rewrite his background memories. It spoke to his need to belong. His need for a wider family of smiley people.

“It’s a medieval court, and he’s king there. Once he came to its headquarters, serfs returfed the brown parched weeds and laid down a blanket of fresh green grass just so his eyes would not be disturbed by unsightly faded patches.”