New Yorker article on a Scientology defector

In My Humble Opinion
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I debated (heh) on whether to post this in GD or GQ or here, so if I made the incorrect choice, mods, please feel free to move the thread.

Has anyone read the New Yorker article in next week’s issue, available online here? I’m about halfway through it - it’s a very long, very detailed story regarding a famous Hollywood screenwriter, Paul Haggis, who resigned from the Church of Scientology over its stance on Proposition 8 and other issues that came to light when he started to do research on the church. He’d made it all the way to the top operating level, and spent a ton of time and money on his advancements, and yet claims to have never heard of much of the documented crap on the church.

I would really like to hear the reactions of people who’ve read the article. While I knew some of the information in it, some of it was new to me. Do you think Haggis will be the target of vindictive lawsuits the way other defectors have?

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I enjoyed the article, but I don’t think I learned anything new, other than some of the Haggis particulars.

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I heard the Scientologists tried to grind him up and mix him with oats.

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His mother is Anne Archer? Hot damn, she does not look old enough to have a kid his age :eek:

  1. Wow.
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No, Tommy Davis is her son. He’s the head of the Scientology Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles.

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Nah. They didn’t have the stomach to do the job.

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Well, I got one page into the article and saw that earthlink was founded by and is still chaired by a Scientologist, so I’ve spent the last few minutes sending an email to everyone in my address book (after culling quite a few addresses) telling them to send everything to my gmail account. Yikes, I’ve been supporting this guy for years without knowing it.

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Don’t feel like your money has gone to waste, well, at least not total waste. I happened to drive by this place with a friend who explained what it was. It is truly amazing.
Their compound

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It’s actually one of the main reasons I stopped using Earthlink a few years back.

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I’m plowing through a backlog of New Yorkers at the moment and am still two issues back - I read every article except the fiction. I’ll definitely be sharing this one with my wife. We were both very happy when Haggis got out of the cult. We’ve been foes of them for years and have protested at various “Orgs”. I doubt we’ll learn anything new, but it is always nice to see high profile defectors, especially if they are willing to give interviews.

Expect to see the cult spreading a lot of crap about him via a process they call “dead agenting” - they take everything a former victim had revealed during “counciling” and use it against them. Imagine if the Catholic Church recorded everything said in the Confessional and used it to keep former members quiet and current ones paying “mandatory donations” (writing about Scientology really annoys one’s spell-checker".

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Damn, I did not know that. As soon as I can arrange it I will be cancelling my earthlink account :eek:

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Just finished the article… whew… good thing I don’t have court today.

I have always had a morbid fascination with Scientology. I read an article about L. Ron, a few years back and was astounded. He was quite a character. Then I researched a bit more, and loved, loved, LOVED the whole backdrop of Xenu, the galactic federation, and thetans. Brilliantly hysterical! I love sci-fi… but I couldn’t believe people actually believed this crap.

Then my first cousin joined up. Patrick, now in his 40’s, was always different. Always a bit special. He never really fit in, and was just socially ackward. I have no personal experience with the autism spectrum, but I suspect that if he was a kid today, he would be identified in a second. As it was, growing up in the '70’s with a mother who refused to admit that her kid was special, he was just shunted along.

And then, in the early 90’s, he found Scientology. It enveloped his life. I remember he moved to D.C., to live near the center there. My family was in Northern Virginia, so we saw him from time to time. He worked for them, but he had no money. He took every class he could, and every dime he earned he turned over for more classes. He was basically homeless at one point. During this time, Patrick was always a kind and happy guy. But then, he always was. And as far as I was concerned, my weird cousin Patrick had found a group to belong to. If they embraced him half as much as he embraced them, it was a win-win. They certainly weren’t grooming him to be a terrorist, but rather to live healthy. Nothing wrong with that, right? Right?

Wrong. After my aunt and uncle stopped giving him money for classes, he disowned them. Then we didn’t hear from him for a long time. Then he showed up on my aunt and uncle’s doorstep. Completely broke. He had nothing. He won’t talk about what happened to him, or disparage Scientology in any way. He left the “church,” and he is trying to rebuild his life. It’s just sad. They basically used him up and spit him out.

I will say that I am fairly dubious of all organized religion (lapsed Catholic here). But what happened to my cousin was just weird and sad.

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Click “Bird’s eye” at the top and then zoom in. Wow!

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I don’t see “Bird’s eye” anywhere on that page.

I first became aware of Scientology after they moved into Clearwater, Florida. I lived near there back when they first bought the old Fort Harrison Hotel (sob) and noticed a sudden influx of robot-looking women in blue suits walking around town. Serious robots, all carrying books. I wasn’t happy to discover that this lovely little town I drove through on the way to the beach was being overrun by aliens. :frowning:

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What struck me most was how completely the children of members could be immersed into the cult. I had no idea that someone could be raised in a manner that they would literally not know someone who wasn’t a Scientologist. I also didn’t know that there were boarding schools run according to the belief system.

The mindset of someone being at Gold Base for YEARS without protesting their treatment or thinking anything unusual about it is pretty interesting, too, since it’s significantly more cult-like than Scientologists like to admit.

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[QUOTE=kapri]
I don’t see “Bird’s eye” anywhere on that page.
[/QUOTE]

Look where it says “Road”.

They call it a “disconnect”. A Scientologist can be ordered to disconnect from anyone no matter how close. Children from parents, husbands from wives, brother from sister.

Hubbard had a charming term for recruits to the cult - “raw meat”.

If he was working in an “org”, he probably signed the “billion year contract” that supposedly obligates him not only for this life but for a billion years of re-incarnation.

Here’s a pretty good personal history from an ex-Scientologist that may give you some idea of what he went through and is going through.

There really, truly is no religion on Earth as harmful as Scientology. As messed up as other religions can be towards ex-members, none can compare to the sheer malevolence of the CoS.