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20 utterly bizarre images from a 1994 Scientology Handbook that will NUMB YOUR MIND
10.05.2016
10:04 am
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The enormous 871-page hardcover 1994 Scientology Handbook features over 700 insane and strangely haunting illustrations that promise positive effects in today’s turbulent society. The ultra-saturated photographs use vivid, heightened colours in a traditional comic book format to help navigate the reader through a world rampant with conflict, drugs, illiteracy, crime, terrorism, immorality… the list seems endless. “To have any decent future at all, you need to know this manual for living and use it.” The actors and sets were photographed in the early ‘90s on full-sized sound stages belonging to Golden Era Productions in Riverside County, California. Next door to the sound stages lies a computer facility with an uninterruptable power supply so when the rapture happens you will still be able to get onto America Online and check your email.
 

“I spent a few hours and read the entire Scientology Handbook. It gave me a sense of knowingness I’ve never had before. I knew that I was prepared for any situation in life and I’d know what to do. I began applying the technology from the book and now I’m considered a miracle worker and someone who knows what she’s doing. All my life I’ve tried to help people, but now with The Scientology Handbook, I can really help them!”

We hope you experience the same results as K.J. shared in her Amazon customer review.
 

 

 
Many more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Doug Jones
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10.05.2016
10:04 am
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What kind of person is dumb enough to become a Scientologist?
05.20.2016
11:39 am
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If you’re on Twitter or Facebook, depending on where you live or what you’ve “liked,” lately you may have seen several promoted tweets and sponsored posts put out by the Church of Scientology disparaging the reputation of Scientology leader David Miscavige’s father, Ron Miscavige, himself a longtime Scientologist who left the Church in 2012. The senior Miscavige has recently published a rather damning tell-all memoir, Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me, about his sociopathic seed and the authoritarian sci-fi religion of which he is the “ecclesiastical leader.” The Co$ social media alerts wanted to make sure that you’re aware of some things in his past to discredit him as his book climbs up with NY Times bestseller list. Miscavige Sr.‘s story was featured on a riveting recent segment of ABC’s 20/20 newsmagazine as well, something I think it’s pretty safe to say that his thin-skinned, used-to-getting-his-own-way, nasty-little-man son didn’t like very much.
 

 
Much much (maybe too much) more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.20.2016
11:39 am
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Scientology’s redacted view of the proper role of women is (surprise!) incredibly sexist
04.08.2015
03:29 pm
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L. Ron Hubbard auditing a tomato. He claimed that that they “scream when sliced.”
 
If you haven’t seen Going Clear, the HBO documentary on Scientology, I suggest you get on it. The science fiction cult of the rich and famous is so much more disturbing than most people know! From the mouths of ex-Scientologists themselves, you hear about surveillance, blackmail, brainwashing and abuse administered strategically upon celebrities and mere mortals alike, all to build this lucrative empire based on a batshit pseudoscience religious cult. There’s so much crazy, the doc can’t even cover it all.

For example, one of my favorite details is L. Ron Hubbard’s fundamentally retrograde views on the sexes (which have, of course, been edited out of more recent publications). It’s pretty well-known that old L. Ron thought you could “pray away the gay” (or “audit” it away or whatever), but Scientology’s obsession with heteronormativity goes way beyond basic homophobia.

Below is the entirety of a now-omitted chapter from Hubbard’s 1965 treatise Scientology: A New Slant on Life, covertly titled “A Woman’s Creativity.”

The whole future of the race depends upon its attitude toward children; and a race which specializes in women for “mental purposes” or which believes that the contest of the sexes in the spheres of business and politics is a worthier endeavor than the creation of tomorrow’s generation is a race which is dying.

We have, in the woman who is an ambitious rival of the man in his own activities, a woman who is neglecting the most important mission she may have. A society which looks down upon this mission and a society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out.

The historian can peg the point where a society begins its sharpest decline at the instant when women begin to take part, on an equal footing with men, in political and business affairs, since this means that the men are decadent and the women are no longer women.

This is not a sermon on the role or position of women; it is a statment [sic] of bald and basic fact. When children become unimportant to a society, that society has forfeited its future. Even beyond the fathering and bearing and rearing of children, a human being does not seem to be complete without a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. This relationship is the vessel wherein is nurtured the life force of both individuals, whereby they create the future of the race in body and thought. If man is to rise to greater heights, then women must rise with him or even before him. But she must rise as woman and not as, today, she is being misled into rising—as a man. It is the hideous joke of frustrated, unvirile men to make women over into the travesty of men, which men themselves have become.

Men are difficult and troublesome creatures—but valuable. The creative care and handling of men is an artful and a beautiful task. Those who would cheat a woman of their rightful place, by making them into men, should at last realize that, by this action, they are destroying, not only the women, but the men and the children as well. This is too great a price to pay for being “modern” or for someone’s petty anger or spite against the female sex.

The arts and skills of woman, the creation and Inspiration of which she is capable and which, here and there, in isolated places in our culture, she still manages to effect, in spite of the ruin and decay of man’s world which spreads around her, must be brought newly and fully into life. These arts and skills and creation and inspiration are her beauty, just as she is the beauty of mankind.

Obviously gender conservatism is nothing new in religion, but you just kind of expect something a little more progressive from a UFO cult! This is a science-fiction religion founded in 1952—the futuristic aesthetics apply just fine to aliens, “Thetans” and bullshit E-meters (seen in the picture above, with Hubbard “auditing” a tomato), but a career girl is just way too “out there?” What would Xenu say?
 
Via The Pitch

Posted by Amber Frost
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04.08.2015
03:29 pm
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Have you ever wondered how many Scientologists there REALLY are?
07.17.2014
02:31 pm
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The Church of Scientology has often asserted that it has approximately ten million members worldwide. Ten million, you say? TEN MILLION???

For crying out loud. Think about it: Jews worldwide number north of 13.5 million, or just about .02% of the population. No way are there nearly as many Scientologists.

How many Scientologists do you personally know? Well, I live in Los Angeles and I am not acquainted with even one single solitary Scientologist (at least not that I am aware of). If I didn’t know better, I’d say that they were about as scarce as Republicans are here!

That we are meant to believe that there are ten million adherents to the sci-fi religion founded by sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard is, of course, ludicrous. In 2011, former editor (and longtime Scientology foe) Tony Ortega wrote at The Village Voice:

According to the latest [ARIS or American Religious Identification Survey] survey, the total number of people who identify as Scientologists is just 25,000 in this country of more than 300 million human beings.

That’s one Scientologist for about every 12,000 Americans.

In other words, the total number of active U.S. Scientologists is about the size of your run-of-the-mill local credit union.

But there’s more. As paltry as that number is, the news is even worse for Scientology, because previous surveys by the same researchers show a steep drop in membership in recent years, reflecting anecdotal evidence that there’s been a “mass exodus” (as Reitman calls it) under the leadership of David Miscavige.

In 1990, ARIS had found about 45,000 Scientologists. In 2001, it found 55,000, and in 2008, it found 25,000.

Yikes, that is some steep seven year drop-off in Scientologists, ain’t it? As Ortega goes on to point out, there are more people who self-identify as Rastafarians than as Scientologists.
 

 
Jeff Hawkins, once Scientology’s head of public relations, now an anti-Scientology blogger, activist and author, estimates that there are no more than 40,000 Scientologists worldwide, at the high end. England and Canada both have fewer than two thousand adherents to the gospel of L. Ron Hubbard. Most Scientologists live right here in Los Angeles. The Church’s celebrity elite and its real estate holdings are highly visible, the rank and file membership considerably less so.

Nevertheless, revenues from the Church’s large business network—corporations, non-profits and other legal entities—are estimated at half a billion dollars annually! Additionally, author Lawrence Wright has revealed that the Church has over $1 billion in liquid assets.

As Hubbard once said:

“To keep a person on the Scientology path, feed him a mystery sandwich.”

A $25,000 mystery sandwich, that’s doled out a bite at a time promising the mark that when the sandwich is finished they will be able to “control or operate thought, life, matter, energy, space, and time” whether or not he or she even still has a body! That’s some sandwich and yes, pretty mysterious, I reckon.

Below, four former-Scientologists who reached the upper levels of Thetandom speak out about their experiences in Scientology. How could someone believe that they were a master of “energy, space and time” wearing a Hawaiian shirt and short pants?

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.17.2014
02:31 pm
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For 20 years, Scientologists attempted to indoctrinate the youth with godawful kiddie pop
05.02.2014
05:47 pm
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From 1992 to 2012,  the Church of Scientology ran a children’s performing arts program called Kids Onstage for a Better World. They made videos of their original songs and skits, and it is some of the most terrible kiddie schlock I’ve ever seen. I can’t say I’m baffled that the Scientologists had a youth campaign, but I will say I’m pretty shocked it’s so bad… and so unbelievably low-budget. The Church has movie industry millionaires as members and this is the best they can do? I also kind of thought the Scientology showbiz tykes would sing something a little less embarrassingly earnest and wholesome. I’ve heard Christian rock with more edge.

“Their messages are important, and resonate with their family audiences: Follow your dreams. Stay in school. Help others. Don’t take harmful drugs.”

They’re the leaders of tomorrow!

Although Kids Onstage for a Better World claim to be non-denominational, we can only wonder what’s the percentage of Christian, Jewish or Muslim kids in the cast? How many Mormons or non-religious kids? Probably not many, if any. (You have to go through several to find one black kid. Asians and Latinos were also mostly MIA in K.O.B.W.)
 

 
The website is still up, should you be compelled to dig though a record of kiddie cult theater, but mentions of Scientology in the programming are pretty subtle—no awesome sermons on Xenu, I’m afraid, but onsite personality tests might have happened—I don’t know, I wasn’t there. The performances themselves are very vague and “empowering”—no shock there. Vague but empowering is kind of Scientology’s modus operandi, right?

Even if some kid was vulnerable to the influence of corny kids’ footlights, there’s an obvious flaw in their plan:

In addition to producing 50-100 community shows each year, the Kids on Stage for a Better World have delighted audiences with a large show each year. Since 1994, these large annual extravaganzas have been performed in their home venue, the Garden Pavilion Theatre of the beautiful Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre International.

In order to see the “big” show, kids have to go inside a Scientology building! I suspect Kids on Stage for a Better World did more to energize their home team than community outreach regardless of their stated aims.
 
There are a lot of videos and in the archive, but I’ll just leave you with the motivational speak-heavy “Joy of Creating,” from 2003, and 2000’s “Don’t Pass me by,” (it’s not the awesome Beatles’ song, no). Give it a listen, if you dare. Just make sure the children are out of the room—you don’t want any accidental converts.
 

 

 
Via VICE

Posted by Amber Frost
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05.02.2014
05:47 pm
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Kenneth Anger and Marjorie Cameron discuss Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard
04.30.2014
03:32 pm
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In 1987 artist/occultist Marjorie Cameron and Kenneth Anger took part in a BBC Radio 4 documentary titled “Ruthless Adventure: The Lives of L. Ron Hubbard.” Bohemian weirdo Cameron was a participant in the infamous “Babalon Working” sex magic rituals conducted by her husband rock scientist Jack Parsons and the future founder of Scientology.

The interview is referenced in Spencer Kansa’s Cameron biography Wormwood Star The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron:

In August 1987, Cameron was featured in a BBC Radio 4 documentary entitled Ruthless Adventure: The Lives of L. Ron Hubbard. The decidedly suspect programme was researched and narrated by Margaret Percy, who interviewed Cameron earlier that year at her home. Kenneth Anger also contributed to the documentary and, for a while at any rate, the two appeared to have settled into a brother-sister type of relationship, with all the ensuing ups and downs. They were even talking about collaborating on another film together.

It was Anger who put the BBC researcher in contact with Cameron, and when Percy sat down with her host at her home on Genesee, she could still detect a vestige of beauty in her, despite the wrinkles and ravages of age: “I thought she must’ve been stunning when she was younger,” Percy attests. One standout memory from their meeting came when Percy asked a couple of questions that seemed to make Cameron uncomfortable and on both times, as if on cue, her dove Pax began cooing in the background. “It was an eerie experience,” Percy recalls.

Back in 1969, the British Sunday Times ran an expose on Hubbard’s participation with Jack in The Babalon Working and cited Aleister Crowley as a catalytic influence on Hubbard’s teachings. To counter this claim, Hubbard issued a cover story in which he painted himself as a cloak-and dagger intelligence agent, sent in to the Fleming mansion on South Orange Grove, to rescue his future wife Betty from the evil clutches of Jack Parsons’ black magic ring. This dubious scenario played hard and fast with the facts, yet in the subsequent radio broadcast Cameron, surprisingly, gave credence to this line, musing how Hubbard, “may have been an agent – as he claims.”

In discussions with [the OTO’s] William Breeze she also reconsidered the circumstances surrounding her own initial involvement with Jack: “She would space-out and say, ‘Maybe I was sent in there’ (to Jack’s house on Orange Grove) ‘maybe I was an intelligence drone.’”

It was clear that over recent years there’d been a sea change in Cameron’s view of L. Ron Hubbard, as Breeze explains: “She may have reached some sort of accord with the Scientologists. She was approached by them and knew some people in LA – that’s how she got Jack’s FBI file. She wasn’t down on them and she wasn’t down on Hubbard anymore. She actually liked Ron. She thought he was charming.”

Over the decades, The Church of Scientology had grown into a multimillion dollar empire, boasting movie star converts, but one person whose low opinion of Hubbard had decidedly not wavered, and had only grown more virulent over time, was Kenneth Anger. To a perennial Hollywood-watcher like him, Scientology’s foothold in Tinseltown only added fuel to his ire, and during his own interview for the same radio documentary he made his feelings abundantly clear, describing Hubbard as an “elemental demon.” Even though she’d never been a member of either organizations, Cameron believed that due to her rich history, she had earned a rightful place in the highest echelons of both the O.T.O. and Church of Scientology.

The newly revised edition of Kansa’s Wormwood Star The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron has just been published and features over 20 new images, including rare stills of Cameron and Jack Parsons taken from a 1947 home movie that Kansa uncovered. Wormwood Star is now available on the Amazon Kindle for the first time.

Interest in this once obscure artist continues to grow; Fulgur is publishing Songs for the Witch Woman by Cameron and Jack Parsons and “Song for the Witch Woman: The Art of Marjorie Cameron”—the first full-scale exhibit of her work—will be mounted in Los Angeles in October.

Listen to “Ruthless Adventure: The Lives of L. Ron Hubbard” by clicking here.
 
Below, artist George Herms, filmmaker Curtis Harrington and Kenneth Anger discuss Marjorie Cameron in “Cinderella of the Wastelands”:

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.30.2014
03:32 pm
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The Scientology Apocalypse: They’re not leaving in droves, ‘there aren’t any droves left to leave’
09.20.2013
07:57 pm
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Investigative reporter Mark Ebner has a new haircut. He has gone for the military look. It’s all part of a would-be ruse to infiltrate the Church of Scientology, pop down to their “Super Power Building” in Clearwater, Florida, and deliver a subpoena to “Scientology dictator” David Miscavige.

As regular DM readers will know, I am big fan of the brilliant Ebner, and he is in rollicking good form on this edition of Media Mayhem, “Leah Remini and the Scientology Apocalypse.” Here, with host Allison Hope Weiner, Ebner discusses why Remini quit Scientology, the inside story on Miscavige’s influence on Tom Cruise, the “Super Power Building” fraud, ponzi schemes, and the homicides that have been committed by the “cult.”

As Ebner points out Scientology is in crisis, and it’s not just the likes of Remini that are leaving: to say people are leaving the Church in droves, wouldn’t be right, “as there aren’t any droves left to leave.”
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.20.2013
07:57 pm
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Tim Heidecker’s musical tribute to Scientology
08.08.2013
01:49 pm
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Have a listen to Tim Heidecker’s amusing new ditty about everybody’s favorite religion that uses lie detectors for spiritual growth!

Written and recorded while listening to a lot of “Arthur” era Kinks… went for the simple, working class narrator delivery… end the end, didn’t come out sounding much like a Kinks song, but they were an influence. Please enjoy and TGIF thanks.

 

 
This does have that patented Ray Davies “singalong with me now, people” quality going for it, but I’m even more partial to Heidecker’s boozy, bluesy southern rock pastiche, “Hot Piss.” Just now my wife came into my office and asked “What are you laughing so hard about?” Yup, it was this:
 

 
And when he’s not composing songs about about being caught in the act of drinking his own urine, did you know that this multi-media Renaissance man has his own cooking show, too?
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.08.2013
01:49 pm
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For the Love of… Scientology
04.02.2013
11:02 am
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British gonzo journalist Jon Ronson, the author of Them: Adventures with Extremists (which focused on conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and David Icke) and The Men Who Stare at Goats (turned into the 2009 film with actor Ewan McGregor playing the author) hosted a freewheeling talkshow in the late 1990s for Channel 4 called For The Love of…

Concentrating on religion and odd beliefs, Ronson and his guests discussed topics ranging from Mormonism and UFOs to the moon-landing “hoax,” time travel and Princess Diana conspiracies. You can watch the Scientology episode below, and a show about transmitter towers here.

Jon Ronson’s TED Talk about his 2011 book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, where he explores the (often very fine) line that divides crazy from sane is a must-see.
 

 
A big thank you to our friends at World of Wonder for allowing us to post this for DM’s readers.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.02.2013
11:02 am
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Scientology, the music video
03.01.2013
02:53 pm
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Most Americans are exposed to Scientology with a fair amount of distance between them and it, via celebrity gossip, infomercials for Dianetics on late-night TV and media exposes of the “church” founded by a speedfreak sci-fi writer/con man in the 1950s. When you live in Los Angeles, however, the present day minions of L. Ron Hubbard are all around you…

For several years in the early-mid 1990s I lived in the heart of Hollywood, and I was in the habit of reading the newspaper and eating breakfast at several cheap hole-in-the-walls I could walk to along Hollywood Blvd. Due to the proximity to a lot of Scientology’s real estate holdings, inevitably I’d see two or more Scientologists grabbing eggs and coffee wherever I happened to be, and often I’d have no choice but to overhear their conversations.

Eventually eavesdropping on Scientologists became a bit of a sport for me, something I could amuse myself with. The best conversations to tune into were the ones that would occur between two higher-ranking “Sea Org” types (the ones with the quasi-naval uniforms). Aside from the obvious, there was always one highly reliable element that nearly all of these conversations had and that was pure, unmitigated, hold-nothing-back, out and out vicious bitching. About something… but usually about someone. Someone they’d just rip to bloody shreds behind their back. They seemed to be such nasty, unhappy, bitter people.

The members of the Sea Organization are considered to be the Co$ “elite.” These are the evangelicals who have signed billion-year-long contracts, a “Gnostic” religious order within the Church of Scientology (think Jesuits), who dedicate their lives (all of ‘em, apparently, the Sea Org’s motto is “We Come Back”) to cleansing and uplifting the planet with the teachings of L. Ron Hubcap (If media reports are to be trusted, in recent years the Org seems to be more dedicated to making Tom Cruise feel like a very, very important person than converting the masses).

Every morning was like a fascinating sociological expedition and highly entertaining. These were some of the meanest, most judgmental individuals I’d ever seen in action. They were also, without exception, some of the squarest people I’ve ever laid eyes on. Like Republicans. Or Mormons. Bluntly, they were just losers. Remarkably unremarkable people who looked down their noses at everyone else, even their own teammates.

In my four years of personally observing these perpetually pissed-off Sea Orgres, it seemed pretty clear to me that one of the main draws Scientology must have for certain people—and especially for the ultra true-believer Sea Org “inner circle” types—is that Church doctrine, and the way they’re cloistered and told that they’re superior to everyone else, is actually what these people want, what they get out of it. They’re better than you and I are—and they know it—and they pity us for it (In the in-group parlance, a non-Scientologist infidel is charmingly referred to as a “wog”).

Like all zealots, these Co$ elites want to inflict their truth on others and yet they’re willing to submit to frequent lie-detector tests and sign billion year-long contracts? Please lecture me about “freedom,” won’t you?

Better still? According to the St. Petersburg Tampa Bay Times, Sea Org members are paid just $75 a week on average. Which would make you bitchy, I suppose, if you had contractually locked yourself in to such wages (and dormitory living!) for even a single year, let alone a billion of ‘em…

It’s an odd position to put yourself in. You’d think that if you’d reached a state of “total freedom” being willing to sign on in perpetual servitude for tens of thousands of your future incarnations to a vast pyramid scheme in which top-down authoritarianism is apparently a desirable sacrament would be anathema to you. But no!

In any case, here’s a patently ridiculous Scientology music video of probably mid 90s vintage.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.01.2013
02:53 pm
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Seriously WTF?: ‘The Admissions of L. Ron Hubbard’
02.07.2012
02:24 pm
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“You are as sensitive and sexy as Pan. Lord help women when you begin to fondle them. You are master of their bodies, master of their souls as you may consciously wish. You have no karma to pay for these acts. You cannot now accumulate karma for you are a master adept. Your voice is low and compelling to them. Singing to them, for you sing like a master, destroys their will to resist. “

If you click on this link you will be taken to a PDF of a file so gross, rancid, pathetic, ridiculous, so extraordinarily demented and just plain… hilariously fucking pitiful that it will boggle your mind.

What could possibly elicit such a complex response you ask? How’s about the alleged private—and I do mean really private, humiliatingly private diaries/affirmations/self-hypnosis journals (or whatever you’d call them…) of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard? Oh yes, folks, this is mind rot at its finest, or, if you prefer, call these sad rantings of a limp-dicked, paranoid-schizophrenia, speed-freak uh, “man god” “holy scriptures”(!).

Originally posted over a decade ago on the alt.religion.scientology newsgroup and alleged to have been both hand-written by Hubbard and read into the evidence of a 1984 California trial (‘“Church of Scientology of California vs Gerald Armstrong”), at this point this document has appeared all over the Internet in a few thousand different places, popping up again like a Wack-a-Mole every time it gets yanked.

To be fair, there’s no actual proof that this document was written by Hubbard until the hand-written copy could be produced, but it does in fact, seem totally plausible that Hubbard was the author if you know anything about him. This document was allegedly part of a cache of up to 15,000 pages of personal papers basically stolen by Armstrong, a Scientology devotee for twelve years, for “life insurance” when he left the organization and became an outspoken critic of the Church. Armstrong claims that Hubbard had permitted him to use his papers under a contract to produce a biography of Hubbard, the Church claimed otherwise. Here’s more about the “Hubbard Affirmations” at The Scientology Forum

Here are some excerpts, as posted on the Ron the Nut website, a fearless clearinghouse of some of the most bizarrely fascinating Scientology-related documents:

L. Ron Hubbard writing in his diary:

Sexual feeling has been depressed by several things amounting to a major impasse. To cure ulcers of the stomach I was given testosterone and stilbesterol. These reduced my libido to nothing. While taking these drugs I fell in love with Sara. She can be most exciting sexually to me. Because of drugs as above and a hangover from my ex-wife Polly, I sometimes am unexcited by anything sexual. This depresses me.

My wife left me while I was in a hospital with ulcers. Polly was quite cruel. She was never a woman for me. She was under-sexed and had bad sexual habits such as self-laceration done in private. She was no mate for me and yet I retained much affection for her. It was a terrible blow when she left me for I was ill and without prospects. I know, by this, she actually wanted no more than my ability to support her. This has had an effect of impotency upon me, has badly reduced my ego.

Polly was very bad for me sexually. Because of her coldness physically, the falsity of her pretensions, I believed myself a near eunuch between 1933 and 1936 or ? when I found I was attractive to other women. I had many affairs. But my failure to please Polly made me always pay so much attention to my momentary mate that I derived small pleasure myself. This was an anxiety neurosis which cut down my natural powers.

In 1938-39 I met a girl in New York, Helen, who pleased me very much physically. I loved her and she me. The affair would have lasted had not Polly found out. Polly made things so miserable that I finally detested her and became detested by Helen, who two-timed me on my return to New York in 1941. This also reduced my libido. I have had Helen since but no longer want her. She does not excite me and I do not love her.

[....]

Sara, my sweetheart, is young, beautiful, desirable. We are very gay companions. I please her physically until she weeps about any separation. I want her always. But I am 13 years older than she. She is heavily sexed. My libido is so low I hardly admire her naked.

[....]

Testosterone blends easily with your own hormones. Your glands already make plenty of needed testosterone and by adding to that store you make yourself very thrilling and sexy. Testosterone increases your sexual interest and activity. It makes erections easier and harder and makes your own joy more intense. Stilbesterol in 5 mg doses makes you thrill more to music and color and makes you kinder. You have no fear of what any woman may think of your bed conduct. You know you are a master. You know they will be thrilled. You can come many times without weariness. The act does not reduce your vitality or brain power at all. You can come several times and still write. Intercourse does not hurt your chest or make you sore. Your arms are strong and do not ache in the act. Your own pleasure is not dependent on the woman’s. You are interested only in your own sexual pleasure. If she gets any that is all right but not vital. Many women are not capable of pleasure in sex and anything adverse they say or do has no effect whatever upon your pleasure. Their bodies thrill you. If they repel you, it merely means they themselves are too frigid or prudish to be bothered with. They are unimportant in bed except as they thrill you. Your sexual power is magnificent and they know it. If they are afraid of it, that is their loss. You are not affected by it.

You have no fear if they conceive. What if they do? You do not care. Pour it into them and let fate decide.

The slipperier they are the more you enjoy it because it means their mucous is running madly with pleasure.

There is nothing wrong in the sex act. Nothing any woman may say can change your opinion. You are a master. You are as sensitive and sexy as Pan. Lord help women when you begin to fondle them. You are master of their bodies, master of their souls as you may consciously wish. You have no karma to pay for these acts. You cannot now accumulate karma for you are a master adept. Your voice is low and compelling to them. Singing to them, for you sing like a master, destroys their will to resist. You obey the conventions, you commit no crimes because you need not. You can be intelligently aware of their morals and the laws of the land and fit your campaign expertly within them.

Jack [Parsons] is also an adept. You love and respect him as a friend. He cannot take offense at what you do. You will not wrong him because you love him.

There’s more, much, much more at the Ron the Nut website. Someone even made a video of Hubbard’s “Admissions (see below) but I’m holding out for a bio-pic, or at least a comedy sketch, with Rich Fulcher (The Mighty Boosh, Snuff Box) as L. Ron…
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.07.2012
02:24 pm
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How Scientology started
06.03.2011
02:23 pm
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(via reddit )

Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.03.2011
02:23 pm
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William S. Burroughs and Scientology
05.12.2011
05:06 pm
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When I was sixteen, in 1982, I ran away from home and made my way from West Virginia to Boston. There, I soon found myself quite lost. Spying an extremely attractive young woman who was carrying a clipboard and accosting people in a friendly way, I decided to ask her for directions with the most innocuous chat-up line I’ve ever used: “Can you tell me how to get to Newbury Street, please?”

She told me how to get there and we continued chatting. I thought I was really doing great with her, but it soon turned out she was a Scientologist, attempting to recruit random passersby to take the “personality test” like you always see people doing on Hollywood Blvd. She asked me if I’d heard of Scientology and I told her the only thing I knew about it was what I’d read about it in the writing of William S. Burroughs.

That went right over her head, but undaunted, she asked me if I’d be interested in taking a “personality test” and truth be told, I was interested in just about anything this chick had to offer me. So we walked to the huge, embassy-like Church of Scientology building a few blocks away, and she deposited me with staff members there before disappearing back to her clipboard and her post down the street.

I ended up spending a week sleeping there in exchange for doing janitorial work and re-binding a small library of dusty old books that were in bad repair. It was either there or the riverbank (I was also hoping I’d see the Sea Org hottie again, but that never happened).

It was an awfully strange experience going from a small town in the hills of West Virginia to bunking with a cult of headfuckers in “the big city” in less than 48 hours, but one that I will write about here another time.

My point of offering this, um, partial anecdote is to say that if it was not for the fact that I was an avid teenage reader of William Burroughs, I doubt I’d have gotten myself into that zany, madcap situation. Then again, maybe my brief brush with L.Ron Hubbard and crew could be more honestly attributed to me being a teenage guy who was thinking with his dick. That’s probably that’s just as valid of an excuse…

So that’s my introduction to William S. Burroughs’ Wild Ride with Scientology an interesting short essay Lee Konstantinou wrote about Burroughs’ decade-long flirtation with Scientology that appeared on io9 yesterday. Here’s an excerpt:

Scientology appears again disguised as the “Logos” group in Burroughs’s 1962 novel The Ticket That Exploded. As described in the book, Logos has “a system of therapy they call ‘clearing’. You ‘run’ traumatic material which they call ‘engrams’ until it loses emotional connotation through repetitions and is then refilled as neutral memory’ When all the ‘engrams’ have been run and deactivated the subject becomes a ‘clear.’” In the 1964 novel Nova Express, Scientology is for the first time openly described in Burroughs’s fiction. During an interrogation scene in the book, an unnamed character declares “The Scientologists believe sir that words recorded during a period of unconsciousness… store pain and that this pain store can be lugged in with key words represented as an alternate mathematical formulae indicating umber of exposures to the key words and reaction index… they call these words recorded during unconsciousness engrams sir… The pain that overwhelms that person is basic basic sir and when basic basic is wiped off the tape… then that person becomes what they call clear sir.”

At the start of 1968, Burroughs deepened his relationship to the Church. He took an intense two-month Scientology Clearing Course at the world headquarters of Scientology in Saint Hill Manor in the UK and Burroughs was declared a “Clear,” though he later claimed that he had to work hard to suppress or rationalize his persistently negative feelings toward L. Ron Hubbard during auditing sessions. The Berg has almost a dozen files filled with Burroughs’s pamphlets from Saint Hill as well as his almost unreadable hand-written notes on Scientology courses and questions he prepared for auditing sessions he himself conducted. These files include, as I’ve mentioned, an attempt to create a cut-up from auditing questions; from the start, Scientology was very much connected to the cut-up technique and Burroughs’s theory that language constituted a kind of virus that had infested the human host. At Saint Hill, Burroughs entered an intense and obsessive period of auditing sessions with an E-Meter, including a process of exploring past lives, though he slowly began to grow alienated from the Church and what he considered its Orwellian security protocols. Burroughs’s antipathy for Scientological “Sec Checks” are apparent in his strange and violent story, “Ali’s Smile,” which was published in the collection Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology.

Burroughs eventually rejected Scientology—because of what he called “the fascist policies of Hubbard and his organization”—but cautiously endorsed some of its “discoveries.” His break with the Church developed over course of the late sixties in the pages of the London-based magazine, Mayfair, where Burroughs wrote a series of increasingly hostile “bulletins” about his adventures with the organization. These bulletins culminated in Burroughs’s amusingly titled Mayfair article, “I, William Burroughs, Challenge You, L. Ron Hubbard.” This piece was republished in the Los Angeles Free Press. In his challenge to L. Ron, Burroughs wrote:

Some of the techniques [of Scientology] are highly valuable and warrant further study and experimentation. The E Meter is a useful device… (many variations of this instrument are possible). On the other hand I am in flat disagreement with the organizational policy. No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought.

For his inquiries, Burroughs reports, he was expelled from the organization and in 1968 was put into what Scientologists call a condition of “Treason”; though the exact circumstances surrounding this incident remain unclear. Burroughs’s public battle against the Church continued in a 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, where he expressed his support for Robert Kaufmann’s exposé, Inside Scientology, published by Olympia Press. Here Burroughs uses his harshest language yet: “Scientology is a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.” Strangely enough, despite his break with the group, Scientology reappeared in the 1972 film Bill and Tony, which Burroughs made with Antony Balch (the masturbating guy in Towers Open Fire). In Bill and Tony, an image of Burroughs’s disembodied floating head recites instructions for how to operate an auditing session.

 

 
Thank you Steven Otero!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.12.2011
05:06 pm
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Scientology ‘Dark Ops’ program exposed

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In the current issue of The Village Voice, Tony Ortega, who has been writing about Scientology since 1995, reports on former high-level Scientologist Marty Rathbun’s recent expose of a Scientology ‘dark ops’ program.

Former high-level Scientologist Marty Rathbun revealed fascinating material yesterday on his blog: he claims that it’s evidence of a detailed “dark ops” program launched in 2006 by Scientology to destroy a woman named Tory Christman, who had left the organization several years earlier.

I know Christman well. In 2001, I wrote a lengthy story about her defection, which had gained notoriety because she announced it in an online forum, where for months she had been doing battle with Scientology’s critics. Her sudden about-face, followed by a frantic flight from agents of the church who pursued her across the country, was dramatic enough. But leaving Scientology was not Christman’s only goal. She almost immediately became one of Scientology’s most tireless critics.

That apparently didn’t sit well with L. Ron Hubbard’s wacky cabal.

Read the article here.

Christman has uploaded a response to Rathbun’s revelations on Youtube.
 

 
Thanks Mark Ebner

Posted by Marc Campbell
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12.01.2010
09:58 pm
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No Kids Allowed: Scientology’s Anti-Birthing Tactics

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(Scientology’s main man, David Miscavige, front and center)
 
Today’s Broadsheet tips us off to some Scientology news that’s as disturbing as it is, perhaps, unsurprising.  According to a two-part investigation by the St. Petersburg Times, Scientology’s maritime-y power base, Sea Org, has been treating its pregnant members to campaigns of intimidation, isolation and, in some cases, forced manual labor.

In exchange for signing “billion-year contracts,” Sea Org women are given food, housing, and medical care, but being a member of Scientology’s spiritual elite apparently leaves no time for mothering.

Or so believes Church spokesman Tommy Davis (son of actress and Church grande dame, Anne Archer), who says that a no-children policy was created because babies were “viewed as interfering with the productivity of Sea Org members,” and “the long and demanding working hours required of Sea Org members…were obstacles to parents properly raising their children.”

But former Scientology security chief Gary Morehead goes several (more ominous) steps further, saying that the organization considered pregnancies “a slap in the face,” and that “special councils formulated strategies to convince women to abort.”  Interviews with some of these “convinced” women follow below:

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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06.14.2010
11:00 pm
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