I asked this question on another board. Have you ever met a member of the Church of Scientology? A co-worker, friend, family member, enemy, boss, anyone who is a member of that group?
According to this site, Scientology has “millions of parishioners”. I don’t really believe that this is true. Is there a church service? Like a hall where people sing songs and hear a sermon and all that jazz? How about a black Pentecostal Scientologist meeting. “OH XENU!” “GET THEM THETANS OUT OF MY BOOOOODY! IN THE NAME OF L. RON HIMSELF!”
The creepy, evil looking man is the Top Scientologist, David Miscavige. Possibly the most powerful being in the Universe. Or an asshole.
If you are in Scientology, isn’t it more or less a full time thing? Scientology is not something you do on Sunday. Can they drink, do drugs, have sex with whores, and go insane like L. Ron did? Now that would be a fun religion.
I think they count anybody who was once a member as a member, which would inflate their numbers significantly.
I’ve never met a Scientologist AFAIK other than the young people who I used to see on the New York subway offering psychological testing and free books.
I’ve known two. One was a high school friend’s dad and the other is a good friend of mine (he’s now out, AIUI). Regarding the high school friend’s dad, I remember well the discussion the friend and I had about it. He told me out of the blue that his dad had quit Scientology, was like a Level 7 (or whatever, I don’t know what the levels are called, but he was pretty high up) and I was absolutely NOT to discuss it with anyone. He made it sound like his dad was in danger.
The good friend of mine can be rather credulous sometimes, and I was dismayed that he bought into it. I assume he’s out because his wife pulled the plug on the tens of thousands of dollars they were spending (or he wanted to spend) on auditing.
I’ve known a few, but their focus seemed to be more about the scientology business management model (manage by numbers ) than about the “religious” side of it. At least that’s what they told me. Regardless, they were card-carrying members. Curiously, they were also chiropractors.
I’ve known quite a few. All of them were arrogant in the extreme about their intelligence.
When pressed for details about how an “obviously intelligent person” can lend belief to a 65-million year old alien who blew up followers with H-bombs (or something like that – I can’t be bothered to look up their history).
Every answer: that’s just something we tell people to keep the riff-raff out. We don’t actually believe that.
Ahhh, cafeteria religion. I love it.
So, naturally since I’ve met .000001 % of the Xenu population, they ALL are like that
That doesn’t necessarily mean they are part of Scientology, though. I’ve heard of folks putting their enemies on Scientology mailing lists, because the Scientologists are vastly more relentless than any other religious door knocker.
Yeah, the problem with their dodge is that this used to be the top-level ultimate discovery that you had to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to find out, not to mention devoting years of work to the cause. (IIRC, one guy almost had a nervous breakdown at discovering that a bad SF story was something he’d devoted his life to.) I guess now that it’s being shouted from the street corners at everyone sitting down to do a “personality test” with the CoS group, they’ve probably layered on more garbage on top of that.
Either that, or the “riff-raff” scoffers you talked to are in for an unpleasant surprise in a while…
When I lived in Los Angeles in the 1990s, I would pick up a friend who worked at the Children’s Hospital, which happens to be across the street from the Scientology building. It wasn’t unusual to see the Sea Org out and about or the protesters outside the “Temple of Evil,” as they called it. I was approached a few times about whether I was interested in Scientology when I went out for walks when my friend was running a little late. I always told them "No, thank you, " as I was a reader of Xenu.net from way back.
I’ve known many. They were perfectly nice normal people in my interactions with them. Except they believe something pretty much as stupid an incomprehensible to me as what other religious people believe.
Strong issue with some of the tactics of the CoS, but the teachings don’t really seem uniquely stupid to me.
I know several ex-Scientologists who have been active in anti-Scientology circles and have protested at various “orgs” with them, including one who was privy to the “OT Levels”. A neighbor in an apartment building I used to live in was an ex-Scientologist, and he would throw their crap in the trash can in the lobby, so I dug some of it out and actually had a price list for various “religious services”, with “mandatory donations”, so we could calculate how much one would spend to go “up the Bridge” to a particular level. Heck, I spent a night in a Kansas City jail when two Scientologists who were running their “free personality test” scam on the street in front of the theater on the Country Club Plaza lied to the police I had called and claimed I had been “screaming obscenities”. I’ve been a victim of the “Fair Game policy”.
I’ve never met anyone that I knew was a scientologist. The whole subject reminds of an aphorism that I read some (and I don’t whom to credit for it) that the advantages or organized religion accrue mainly to the organizers. I don’t know that their beliefs are nuttier than those of an other religion. (What you got those golden tablets from the angel Moroni and mislaid them? God said you mustn’t cook a kid in its mother’s milk so you cannot eat dairy product until 4 hours after you have eaten meat? What about during the change between DST and standard time? Jesus rose from the dead?
Our friend’s brother is relatively high in the ranks. He was ordered by those even higher up to break all contact between their kids and the kids’ non-Scientologist grandparents.
I had a girlfriend whose brother joined, and paid a lot of money. Her parents got it back because he was under 18 - I got the impression the scum weren’t at all happy about having to pay it back.
I’ve known quite a few. All very nice people. There aren’t mandatory services(although you obviously must participate in the auditing and stuff in order to move up to the next levels) so a lot of Scientologists are simply Scientologists by virtue of having taken a few classes or having read a few books.
It appears that for the vast majority of a Scientologists study they don’t learn about anything having to do with Xenu or galactic wars. I’m pretty sure that a Scientologist could dedicate years and years to the religion before finding anything more kooky than your basic thetan and auditing hooey. It’s probably just more or less a sort of therapy/hypnosis hybrid with a lot of self-help homework thrown in for the first few years.
Anytime I gently questioned some aspect of Scientology they would ask me if I got my info from an anti-Scientology website and I had to reluctantly admit that I had. From there it’s a simple matter for them to dismiss any of my questions as being anti-Scientology propaganda.
Overall I would consider those that I know to be about as nice as Mormon missionaries and their religion to be about as crazy as Mormonism. There is no danger of these people taking over the world.
I used to live with one that ended up selling everything and moving down to Florida and joining Sea Org, last I heard he was still there and active, and it has been about 20 years so I would guess that he has progressed up the ladder.
And I have been a victim of fair practice. He had essentially gotten me a job with another scientologist who owned a small company, and I had been working there for about 5 months and doing just fine. When I had finally gotten shed of him and moved out I mysteriously ‘wasn’t working out’ and was canned. It was fine with me, I got another job pretty much instantly.
I basically had gotten tired of him pushing me to do the scientology thing. I had humored him, and gone to FCDC [First Church DC in Washington DC] and done the intro testing crap, mainly just to be polite and shut him up - as I told him I didn’t do drugs or drink, so I didn’t need a purification rundown. I liked myself, and had no addictions to anything and felt no need to be cleared of anything. He actually paid for that day in DC, something on the order of $120US for the days shenanegans so I wasn’t out any money.
I think I knew one. I’m not sure because he never brought it up and I never asked him, but a mutual friend told me he and his wife were Scientologists. The weird thing was, this guy was one of the nicest, most competent, smart, easygoing guys I know. Not a hint of the crazy, and I’m usually pretty tuned in to that. His wife was a little odder but still very nice.
My spouse knew one who was more the classic nutjob (though I think it was more mental illness than Scientology–no idea, though, since I barely knew the guy).
Long-time, medium-close friends of ours, husband and wife, became Scientologists and went a long way with it. We would see them once or twice a year, and they usually mentioned “the church.” They once told us how they had spent more than $10,000 in “training”, and how happy they were to pay through the nose for the ultimate meaning of life, because they would never have expected to get something for nothing. Their smug arrogance was hard to put up with. They were very satisfied with themselves and their own wisdom. What wisdom they imparted to us was always pop psychology, new-age mumbo jumbo, the silliest sci-fi nonsense imaginable, and bits and pieces of pop eastern mysticism.* We were appalled at their stupidity.
As time passed we saw even less of them, until one day they told us that after twenty years they finally realized that the COS was ridiculous bullshit. They never mentioned it again, except to say that they had severed all ties with COS.
They moved away, and we had no contact with them for a few years. When we eventually reconnected, we soon learned that they were now hardcore New Age woowoos. Magic crystals, pyramid power, healing touch. Twice a year, they would travel 800 miles for a session with their Channeler, who had an inside line to a 19th Century mystic-physician. “Dr. Peebles”, or something like that. We found out about this when they handed us a cassette recording of their latest session with “the doctor”, because they “thought [we] might find it interesting.” I won’t bother with details- it was fortune-telling at its finest, and their gullibility was astonishing. They had abandoned Scientology only to drop to a LOWER level of stupidity.
We’d finally had enough, told them exactly what we thought of Scientology and Dr. Peebles and the “pyramid chair” in their living room (don’t ask) and all the rest; the excrement impacted the propeller, and we never heard from them again. That was 15 years ago. Why did we put up with them for so long? She and my wife had a very long history; it was hard for my wife to let go of the friendship that used to be.
Sorry I rambled but it felt good to vent.
It was only many years later that I discovered how much Hubbard “borrowed” from Mormonism.
And by the way, they never asked us about our “beliefs.” Not once.
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