So you have questions about Scientology...

Null and void | 11/14/05 | null and void

[null and void]

As a former member of that, ummmm, organization, I have a standing open offer to answer any FReeper's qusetions about Scientology, either in open forum, or via FReepmail.

I will do my best to answer as promptly, concisely and accurately as possible, but as I left some time ago, I'm not always privy to the latest wrinkles.

Still, from what I can gather from my few remaining contacts not that much has really changed!

[null and void]

*smooch*

[freedumb2003]

How was it that a hack SF writer that couldn't even carry the used jockstrap of the real giants (Heinlein, Asimov) was able to somehow get his name mentioned from time to time in the same paragraph?

Battlefield Earth was a great example of terrible SF writing of that time.

[Central Scrutiniser]

Are you afraid of Xenu?

How come your teachings are copywrighted? Seems like a real religion wouldn't make someone pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about it.

Are you at the OT level where you can read minds?

[null and void]

est was started by an ex scientologist, or so I've been told.

No familiarity with the Forum. One cult per lifetime suffices...

[Senator Bedfellow]

Interesting...

How long were you in?

How much money would you estimate you spent on Scientology materials, fees, etc.? If you're not comfortable answering, that's okay.

What prompted you to leave?

[Army Air Corps]

How long were you a member?

I haven't met any Scientologists but I have met a few former-members in social settings.

Personally, descriptions of the organisation seems like an elaborate scheme to seperate people from their cash.

On the other hand, I did have a teacher in High School was in EST. She was a foul hag.

[null and void]

How was it that a hack SF writer that couldn't even carry the used jockstrap of the real giants (Heinlein, Asimov) was able to somehow get his name mentioned from time to time in the same paragraph?

I believe you'll find the ones doing that mentioning are scientologists.

[Central Scrutiniser]

Why did the church deny that it witheld treatment from Lisa McPherson? Why did they harass anyone that spoke out about her death that was caused by church members in your hotel in Clearwater?

Have you ever been to www.xenutv.com and watched the video of the church goons harassing the cameraman as he tried to film your street fair which was being held on a public street?

Have you watched the interviews with former high ranking members and heard the truth about David Miscaviage?

[null and void]

Are you afraid of Xenu?

Not in the slightest.

How come your teachings are copywrighted?

They aren't my teachings. [bristling a little]

Seems like a real religion wouldn't make someone pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about it.

That pretty much covers it. A Real religion wouldn't.

Are you at the OT level where you can read minds?

Sometimes. But so can you. Sometimes.

[Central Scrutiniser]

Why did the church protract the wrongful death suit of Lisa McPherson for 7 years, and then settle out of court?

Why did L. Ron say he was a nuculear physicist, or that he graduated from college, or about his war record? If he was so anti depression medication, what about the drugs found in his body when he died?

From the Scientology Lies website, some questions:
Why have so many people reportedly been held against their will by Scientology? (Just a few examples: Michael Pattinson, Janice Hayward, Roxanne Friend, Dee Rowe, Marianne Coenan, Dorothy Geary, Moira Hutchinson, Dennis Ehrlich, Stacy Young, Birgitta Dagnell, Hana Whitfield, Margery Wakefield, Annie Rosenblum, and Gerry Armstrong)

The book "Dianetics" promises that Dianetic processing can give people perfect memories and greatly improved health, based on extensive scientific research. Why does Scientology continue to promote the book when Scientology's never provided any scientific evidence; the scientific study done in the 50's disproved the existence of engrams; and no "Clear" has ever demonstrated having perfect memory or any of the other abilities promised in the book? Isn't that fraud?

[Calpernia]

:-)

[Calpernia]

>>>est was started by an ex scientologist, or so I've been told.

That makes sense!

>>>No familiarity with the Forum.

I *think* Forum is the new name for EST (Heard a talk radio show host say that)

[null and void]

I was in about 10 years.

I spent in the low $10's of thousands.

Let me dig up the answer I just gave on another thread so I don't have to retype...

[Central Scrutiniser]

If you can learn to read minds from CO$, why not have results verified by an independent panel? Think of the press!

You might even get several new SeaOrg members to sign up for million year tours of duty!

My favorite, the "Who is Xenu" leaflet

Who is Xenu?

I'm going to tell you a story. Are you sitting comfortably? Right, then I'll begin. Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack.

Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were overpopulated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.

Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyse them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).

These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralysed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.

The story doesn't end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a "thetan" in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).

After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called "implanting".

When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.

As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xenu is still alive today.

That is the end of the story. And so today everyone is full of these clusters of souls called "body thetans". And if we are to be a free soul then we have to remove all these "body thetans" and pay lots of money to do so. And the only reason people believe in God and Christ was because it was in the film their body thetans saw 75 million years ago.

Well what did you think of that story?

What? You thought it was a stupid story?

Well so do we. However, this story is the core belief in the religion known as Scientology.* If people knew about this story then most people would never get involved in it. This story is told to you when you reach one of their secret levels called OT III. After that you are supposed to telepathically communicate with these body thetans to make them go away. You have to pay a lot of money to get to this level and do this (or you have to work very hard for the organisation on extremely low pay for many years).

We are telling you this story as a warning. If you become involved with Scientology then we would like you to do so with your eyes open and fully aware of the sort of material it contains.

Most of the Scientologists who work in their Dianetics* centres and so called "Churches" of Scientology do not know this story since they are not allowed to hear it until they reach the secret "upper" levels of Scientology. It may take them many years before they reach this level if they ever do. The ones who do know it are forced to keep it a secret and not tell it to those people who are joining Scientology.

Part of the first page of the secret OT III document in L. Ron Hubbard's own handwriting

Now you have read this you know their big secret. Don't let us put you off joining though.

[Jotmo]

Bump

[Central Scrutiniser]

I believe Warner Eherhard, the founder of EST was thrown in the slammer for ripping off his cult.

[null and void]

What prompted you to leave?

Although there were a number of things worth doing early on, as I got deeper into it it started heading in directions I found to be contrary to my personal goals, and ironically in conflict with first principles of scientology and dianetics.

One of those principles was that you had the PC (client) run only those incidents that they themselves brought up. In the upper levels the client is given very specific incidents to run, these were said to be common to every case. They aren't.

IMHO, All levels OTIII and above are actively dangerous, as they involve waking up traumatized bits of awareness (body thetans) and kicking them out of the body in an awake and psychotic state.

The organization itself became increasingly dysfunctional (or I became increasingly aware of the dysfunction).

At the time I left in the early 1980's a lager number of people had reached the same conclusions and were leaving in droves.

My personal breaking point was when a policy letter called 'Jokers and Degraders' came out. This said that people who made jokes about scientology were the enemy. If you've been following my posts for any length of time you know it was only a matter of time before I ran afoul of that!

Also, scientology started increasing its' costs of services.
Only a little.
Just 10%.
A month...

That was a glaring conflict with the goal of 'clearing the planet' and indicated that they were shifting focus from eliminating the effects of the reactive mind, and concentrating on making money.

About the time I left L. Ron Hubbard died, under circumstances that suggested to me that he might have been murdered.

[Calpernia]

>>>I believe Warner Eherhard, the founder of EST was thrown in the slammer for ripping off his cult.

How is 'his', Hubbard?

[Central Scrutiniser]

From Operation Clambake, a site you guys have tried to shut down several times, and have tried to get delisted from Google.

http://www.xenu.net/roland-intro.html

Operation Clambake presents:
What is Scientology?


In the late 1940s, pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard declared:
"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion"
Reader's Digest reprint, May 1980, p.1
Hubbard later created the Church of Scientology...

---

Based on a text by ex-Scientologist Roland Rashleigh-Berry. Roland wrote: "This is my personal opinion. I grant permission to anyone to reproduce this material. This description has been tailored to people who have never been Scientologists and seek a simple and short explanation as to what it is and why it is surrounded by controversy."

---

In a Nutshell

The Church of Scientology is a vicious and dangerous cult that masquerades as a religion. Its purpose is to make money. It practices a variety of mind-control techniques on people lured into its midst to gain control over their money and their lives. Its aim is to take from them every penny that they have and can ever borrow and to also enslave them to further its wicked ends.
It was started in the 1950s by a science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard in fulfilment to his declared aim to start a religion to make money. It is an offshoot to a method of psychotherapy he concocted from various sources which he named "Dianetics". Dianetics is a form of regression therapy. It was then further expanded to appear more like a religion in order to enjoy tax benefits. He called it "Scientology".

Scientology is a confused concoction of crackpot, dangerously applied psychotherapy, oversimplified, idiotic and inapplicable rules and ideas and science-fiction drivel that is presented to its members (at the "advanced" levels) as profound spiritual truth.


The Harm it Does to a Person
The results of applying their crackpot psychotherapy (called "auditing") is to weaken the mind. The mind goes from a rational state to an irrational one as the delusional contents of the subconscious mind are brought to the surface and are assumed to be valid. It also makes a person more susceptible to suggestion since it submerges the critical thinking faculties of the mind into a partial subconscious state. It results in a permanent light hypnotic trance and so from thenceforth that person can be more easily controlled. The person will, to a much greater extent, believe and do whatever they are told. And of course this is used to the full in persuading them to hand over further money and dedicating themselves further to the cult.
The results of applying their oversimplified and inapplicable rules in life is to lose the ability to think rationally and logically. A person loses the ability to think for themselves and so they lose the ability to challenge incorrect ideas. This makes them easier to control. It also isolates and alienates the person from society so that they withdraw from normal society and into their "Scientology" society. This further increases their susceptibility to the influence of their group. They end up being afraid of society, believing all society to be controlled by a group of drug companies, psychiatrists and financiers all of whom report to more remote masters. In other words they are in a state of mass paranoia. They therefore avoid reading newspapers and the like since they fear it will disturb their safe Scientology world. It is a downward spiral into madness.

The science fiction content of Scientology is revealed to them after they have reached the state they call "Clear", meaning freed from the aberrations of the mind. However, perhaps "brainwashed" would be a more applicable word to describe the mental state of someone who has survived the near entire delusional contents of their subconscious mind brought to the surface and presented to them as "truth". On the "advanced" levels (called OT levels) above the state of "Clear" they encounter the story of Xenu. Xenu was supposed to have gathered up all the overpopulation in this sector of the galaxy, brought them to Earth and then exterminated them using hydrogen bombs. The souls of these murdered people are then supposed to infest the body of everyone. They are called "body thetans". On the advanced levels of Scientology a person "audits out" these body thetans telepathically by getting them to re-experience their being exterminated by hydrogen bombs. So people on these levels assume all their bad thoughts and faulty memories are due to these body thetans infesting every part of their body and influencing them mentally. Many Scientologists go raving mad at this point if they have not done so already.

The "Ethics" Trap
On the surface the Church of Scientology seems reasonable. The insane content of it is only revealed to a person when the early stuff has done its work and made them more susceptible. After a short while a person "believes" that Scientology is doing them good. They are then persuaded to help their new-found group further by donating money and/or working for the organisation for almost no money. Many people do exactly that.
"Ethics" is used to good effect to trap a person. A person’s natural tendency to do good is worked upon. Yes - they want to be more ethical, but what is ethical? This is where a clever trick is pulled! "Ethics" is redefined by Scientology in such a way that to be ethical is to be a better Scientologist and obey the "church". Young people, not yet made cynical through the machinations of life and politics, are very keen to contribute to the world and to be ethical. So the "ethics" trick works easily into persuading them to join the "church". Many of them join an elite group called the "Sea Org" where they become brainwashed slaves. There they work a hundred hour week for almost no pay. There they are subject to every cruel whim of their masters. It is a living hell that they endure because of the conditioning they have received and this now perverted sense of ethics that they have accepted. The "Sea Org" is the ultimate in brainwashed slavery. They are expected to work harder and harder to achieve ever higher targets of production. If they fail to meet their targets there are various penalties. One of them is to be put onto a diet of beans and rice and to miss sleep. Another is to be sentenced to a period on the RPF (Rehabilitation Project Force). This is the equivalent to "hard labour". Such is the extent of their brainwashing that they actually write "success stories" when they complete their sentences.

Brainwashing Bites Back
There is no doubt at all that L. Ron Hubbard incorporated brainwashing techniques into Scientology to put people under his control. He even wrote a "brainwashing manual" which is still in existence today. However there was a cruel twist in his scheme. He fell victim of it himself. In creating his devoted slaves, the Sea Org, he created an audience that believed every word he said. Now L. Ron Hubbard had an over-active imagination plus delusions of grandeur. The negative feedback he would obtain by being part of normal society was replaced by the positive feedback from his devoted followers. Through this his imagination got the better of him and combined with his delusions of grandeur, his thinking became increasingly bizarre which, on acceptance, led on to more bizarre thinking and the idea that he and Scientology had the job of saving the entire universe He wanted to take over the world in order to further Scientology’s aims to save the universe and so branches of Scientology were set up to try to influence governments and gain positions where they could influence to world to a high degree. So what started out as a mass confidence trick backed up with brainwashing became a monstrous and insane organisation with fantastic, fanatical ideals. Because of this change, the Church of Scientology survived the death of their founder. It is like a runaway monster machine that tramples on society and peoples lives that is very difficult to stop.
Stop the Monster
The whole machinery called the "Church of Scientology" needs to be jammed somehow so that more people do not get sucked in and the people already in it have a chance to get out. We must not forget the people already in this "church". Although they are the ones perpetrating this crime they are also the victims. They need our help as well.
And here we come to the "War on the Internet".

The War on the Internet
The "War on the Internet" is the war between the Church of Scientology and Internet users who copy their documents and post them on the Internet.
The people who are copying their material and webbing it are using the huge accessibility of the world-wide web to get information out to people to warn them of the insanity and danger of this cult. They are doing it for the public good. The hope is that if they can get this information out to the public and make it broadly known then people will be forewarned and will not join the cult. If they can starve the cult of new members in this way then the whole organisation may collapse and then the existing members can be helped to return to society. But of course the people within the cult believe only their own founders interpretation of things so they use every means they can to stop this. Usually the method they use is harassment through lengthy and expensive legal processes. Sometimes it is physical harassment. Sometimes worse!

The people who post and host the copyrighted and confidential works of Scientology are risking themselves to help warn the public about the dangers of Scientology. They have a strong sense of public duty and care for their fellow men. They are breaking copyright laws it is true but they are acting out of conscience and out of high human ideals. As they get broken down by legal or physical harassment more rise to take their place.

I hope this short piece of mine is a befitting and deserving introduction to these people, the "Warriors of the Internet".

In an article to alt.religion.scientology 6. September 1998, parkerbp@webtv.net wrote:
Here's a short summary of my experience with $cientology.
Staff was very friendly with me as a student and pc, as long as I kept forking over the dough for services and "fund raisers."
I joined staff at an org and the attitude of other staff toward me got a little less than friendly.
I joined the Sea Org and put up with alot of crap from staff and LRH's policy because I thought I was helping myself and my fellow man.
I found out I was helping no one and hurting myself. I got out I began surfing the net and found many of my doubts and suspicions about the CO$ were very well founded.
I had been lied to and deceived by the CO$ in order to gain my trust, my money, my loyalty, and dedication to a lost and evil cause.
Now I am dedicated to voice my experiences and opinions of the cult of $cientology.
Bobby

[Central Scrutiniser]

No, Eherhard made his own cult and got jailed for some fraud.

I gotta go look it up, its been a long time since I've heard about the fraud that was EST.