New book on Scientology: Going Clear

Puppycow

Penultimate Amazing
Puppycow
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Sounds interesting:

Eyes Wide Shut

By MICHAEL KINSLEY
Published: January 17, 2013

That crunching sound you hear is Lawrence Wright bending over backward to be fair to Scientology. Every deceptive comparison with Mormonism and other religions is given a respectful hearing. Every ludicrous bit of church dogma is served up deadpan. This makes the book’s indictment that much more powerful. Open almost any page at random. That tape of L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, that Wright quotes from? “It was a part of a lecture Hubbard gave in 1963, in which he talked about the between-lives period, when thetans are transported to Venus to have their memories erased.”

Oh, that period. Of course. How could I forget?

We are all thetans, spirits, trapped temporarily in our current particular lives. Elsewhere, though, Hubbard says that when a thetan discovers that he is dead, he should report to a “‘between-lives’ area” on Mars for a “forgetter implant.”

Oh dear, oh dear. So what are poor thetans to do, where are they to go, when they find themselves between lives? Left to Venus or right to Mars? For sure, they can’t stay here. “The planet Earth, formerly called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of planets under the leadership of a despot ruler named Xenu,” said Hubbard, who was a best-selling science fiction writer before he became the prophet of a new religion. To suppress a rebellion, Xenu tricked the confederations into coming in for fake income tax investigations. Billions of thetans were taken to Teegeeack (you remember: Earth), “where they were dropped into volcanoes and then blown up with hydrogen bombs.” Suffice it to say I’m not hanging around Earth next time I’m between lives.
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:dl:
 
Puppycow said:
Interesting. Thanks for the tip. The whole thing is free online then?
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Yep. If you don't want to read it online, there's a plain-text version you can download: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/miller/bfm.txt.gz

Looking it up on Wikipedia now, apparently publication in the US was stopped because the US courts ruled that some parts of the book (quotes from private letters) constituted copyright infringement, while courts in the UK and Canada ruled it to be fair use.

Also, I found this amusing...

Wikipedia said:
The Church of Scientology has been less complimentary; the executor of Hubbard's estate called it "a scumbag book ... full of ********" in a court deposition in the U.S.
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Going Clear hasn't got a UK or Canadian publisher yet, due to concerns about libel litigation.
 
hgc said:
Going Clear hasn't got a UK or Canadian publisher yet, due to concerns about libel litigation.
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Check your local library, though, particularly in Canada. Mine has ordered 12 copies (presumably from the States), and any decent-sized library concerned about freedom of thought and censorship (and most of them are!) should have ordered some.

Get your request in soon, though: the library here has 100 requests for this title already (I'm 71st in line!).
 
What's so deceptive about comparing Scientology to Mormonism or other religions?
 
It's a pretty great book. Should finish it today or tomorrow.

I knew a little bit about the occult aspect of Scientology but this goes very deep into the topic.

Miscavidge is a creep of the highest order. And Tom Cruise...I used to think he's an innocent victim of all this but he's a dirtbag, too.

Thankfully, my foray into Scientology ended with a communications course and some free student auditing in the early 90's (though I still get junk mail from them...sometimes 10 magazines/flyers a week). Plenty of smarter, wiser people have been destroyed by this organization.
 
They've had the author on NPR's Fresh Air twice now. Pretty good stuff.

I always recommend an old one, Cults Of Unreason...Written back when L. Ron was still alive and the early years of the Church were wild and wooly.
 
A long time ago in a branch of the multiverse which has long since decohered from the one I now occupy, I was a young, naive, and quite broke gambler, stranded in Las Vegas.

Well, not completely naive. I was savvy enough to learn a blackjack card counting system. But naive enough to try it without enough money to survive even a minor statistical downswing.

I knew nothing about scientology except that the Las Vegas org would accept volunteers they would ostensibly train to become "staff". Seriously needing a gig, I gave them a call. They quickly dispatched a complete turd to pick me up. I was singularly unimpressed with the haughty turd, but decided to continue with the now-dubious experiment.

I ended up living the life of an impoverished org rat for several days before concluding I would starve if I didn't leave. So I hitchhiked out.

Real hospitable people. :rolleyes: I asked the "treasurer" for a $20 advance to buy some food. He said "I could do that. But I don't want to." I studied him like a bug for a few seconds. Quickly deciding I didn't want to starve or ever see one of them again either, I left shortly thereafter. I was just looking for a gig. Not a concentration camp. I wasn't trying to freeload. I would have worked for the money, but they never offered me any work. They just kept giving me "courses", which they later tried to charge me for. The idiots.

A so-called "clear" had showed up at the org the previous day. When I saw him, several of them were standing around looking at him and asking questions about what it's like to be "clear". After they left the room, the "clear" continued to stand there looking uncomfortable while I stood in the doorway looking at him for a few moments. That's when I knew for sure. I can tell when a lousy actor is acting.

That may have been the same day an "auditor" employed their little lie-detector contraption on me while he asked me a few questions. I tried to lie in a manner he would find pleasing, but amazingly the jerry-rigged gizmo picked up my lie, revealing that I didn't really believe the "courses" had done me any good. The courses were rudimentary. Skills like reading comprehension and how to stare at people, abilities I already possessed. So of course they hadn't done me any good. If they had bothered to learn anything at all about me, they might have understood that the rudimentary courses were unnecessary, and we could have gone straight to the clearing part. Hell, I can stand around acting "clear". Nothing to it.

The scientologists and I could have saved each other some time if they had simply told me the whole crazy story about the "thetans" at the outset and we could have parted ways without wasting any more of each others' time or creeping each other out.
 
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Jon. said:
Check your local library, though, particularly in Canada. Mine has ordered 12 copies (presumably from the States), and any decent-sized library concerned about freedom of thought and censorship (and most of them are!) should have ordered some.

Get your request in soon, though: the library here has 100 requests for this title already (I'm 71st in line!).
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Oh, 71st for only a dozen copies? Are there loyal officers resident in your sector of the Canada? They may launch raid-and-snatch missions. Good luck.

Btw, Tim Horton's maple frosted rocks. You got nothing to worry about.
 
Where goes fredcarr? We need someone like him around to 'splain things proper.
 
Foster Zygote said:
What's so deceptive about comparing Scientology to Mormonism or other religions?
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Well, if you go on to read the rest of the review it describes some things about Scientology that, if true, would set it apart from modern mainstream Mormonism (certain cultish Mormon offshoots are another story though; and perhaps Mormonism did start off as a cult like Scientology that eventually grew to be more "respectable" and "moderate" as an organization).

But Wright’s book, “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief,” makes clear that Scientology is like no church on Earth (or, in all probability, Venus or Mars either). The closest institutional parallel would be the Communist Party in its heyday: the ruthless struggles for power, the show trials and forced confessions (often false); the paranoia (often justified); the determination to control its members’ lives completely (the key difference, you will recall, between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, according to the onetime American ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick); the maintenance of something close to prison camps where dissenters, would-be defectors and power-struggle rivals were incarcerated in deplorable conditions for years and punished if they tried to escape; what the book describes as mysterious deaths and disappearances; and so on. Except that while the American Communist Party, including a few naïve Hollywood types, merely turned a blind eye to events happening in faraway Russia, Scientology — if Wright is to be believed, and I think he is — ran, and maybe still runs, a shadow totalitarian empire here in the United States, financed in part by huge contributions by Tom Cruise and others of the Hollywood aristocracy.
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What else is different? How about "billion-year contracts" and the huge fees they charge to take "high-level courses":
Most of the Scientologists who were incarcerated and humiliated by the group’s leaders were not literally in chains all day. They could have walked out or refused to return when caught. Why didn’t they?

The answer is partly familiar psychological explanations, variations on the Stockholm syndrome. But there were other, practical barriers. Some had joined as children and signed “billion-year contracts” that they didn’t realize were preposterous. (Some adults also contracted away the next billion years of their lives.) Some had no friends outside Scientology, no relatives they hadn’t been forced to disown, no mailing address or credit card. As a practical matter, they had no place else to go. And if they asked to leave, they were told they needed to pay back some ridiculous sum like $100,000 for classes they supposedly had signed up for (not easy on a weekly salary — often not paid — of $50).
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Or the litigiousness?
Wright is well advised to be calm and seem neutral in his presentation of the Scientology story, since the group has been known to make life miserable for its critics, its favorite weapon being the lawsuit, often brought in order to bury the defendant in legal costs and hassles. The purpose of a lawsuit is “to harass and discourage rather than to win,” Hubbard said. Perhaps, though, this knowledge that any mistake will be abnormally costly does lend added credibility to Wright’s vast research and reporting.
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This all seems to be describing the Sea Org. My ex-scientologist acquantances suggest that most scientologists are just ordinary people with ordinary lives, that go in for the occasional course or auditing session.
 
Hmmm, I may want to print up some bumper stickers: "Thetans go home, Teegeeack for Teegeeackians" or "Teegeeack independence now!."
 
arthwollipot said:
This all seems to be describing the Sea Org. My ex-scientologist acquantances suggest that most scientologists are just ordinary people with ordinary lives, that go in for the occasional course or auditing session.
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But, surely, if you're supporting the Church financially, then you are at least partially culpable for the activities of the Sea Org? They may not tell you what goes on there voluntarily, but it's not like the information is hard to come by.

Which is not to say that I'm unsympathetic to those taken in by the more public face of Scientology - I consider them victims, too. I also appreciate that Scientology teaches you not to read or view anything which could be critical of Scientology. Yet, still, they are financially supporting an organisation which acts in this manner, and I think that they must shoulder some small part of the responsibility.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
But, surely, if you're supporting the Church financially, then you are at least partially culpable for the activities of the Sea Org? They may not tell you what goes on there voluntarily, but it's not like the information is hard to come by.

Which is not to say that I'm unsympathetic to those taken in by the more public face of Scientology - I consider them victims, too. I also appreciate that Scientology teaches you not to read or view anything which could be critical of Scientology. Yet, still, they are financially supporting an organisation which acts in this manner, and I think that they must shoulder some small part of the responsibility.
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I can't disagree with that.
 
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