Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 02:35:51 -0800 To: fun@thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard) From: Conner Subject: Re: Why are you on a.r.s? - more wanted At 02:53 PM 12/29/97 GMT, you wrote: >Good morning, all! >I am looking for more stuff for my 'Why be a critic' page, which is at > http://thingy.apana.org.au/~fun/scn/why/others.html nice page! i added to my bookmarks. lots of good comments there. >I would be most obliged if you could write something about why you're on >a.r.s - what brought you here, what keeps you here, any involvement with >Scientology, that sort of thing. i am not, was not, and likely never will be a scientologist. i haven't taken a course nor a personality test. the closest i had gotten to the topic up until about 3 years ago, was attempting to read "Dianetics" some 10 years earlier (i threw it away after about a chapter of gobbledygook). i got into being a critic when the raid on erlich was posted to comp.org.eff.talk. i went over to alt.religion.scientology, and was fascinated at what i found. and it got to me. what got me the most was the lies. i'm not sure i'm such a lover of the truth, but i hate a lie. and i have never seen such liars as scientology. all forms of lies, more forms than i had imagined - PR, vague testimonials, acceptable truths, half truths, evasions, word-twistings, perversions of truth, and outright stinking whoppers. lies about everything - about hubbard, about their true cosmology, about the power of 'the tech', about legal cases, about scientology growing, about psychs doing lobotomies, about deprogrammers routinely raping, and slanders of anyone opposing them. lies in the form of redefining language, in redefining reality through conditioning and false memory induction. scientology lies, and when caught in its lies, lies some more. sometimes the same lie, repeated more loudly, as if it would make the lie go away. i hate lies because lies hurt people. scientology uses lies to hurt almost anyone's life it touches. it subjects those who oppose it to harassment, it condemns relatives of members to separation and bereavement, it strips publics of significant portions of their money and life years, it puts staff members into slavery conditions. scientology does it for greed, to obtain money and power as hubbard's grandiose ego programmed it to do. hubbard said "to control someone you've got lie to them". and scientology wants to control. so why am i on a.r.s? first, it's to understand the lies, so that i'll catch them in the real world, in my children's schools, in my social interactions, in my workplace. and having caught them, it's to provide the information to do something to stop them. i want to keep people - my friends and acquaintances, and their children - from being hurt by scientology and all of its lies. i want to keep people out of scientology, so that that sad, sick, corrupt organization and the sad, sick, deluded ideas of its founder can die peacefully from the face of the earth. why me? this i can't answer so easily. but i do believe in civic duty, and in cleaning up the messes one happens to come upon before they get worse. so that's what i try to do, and that's why i'm on a.r.s. oh, there are a couple of other benefits, too. sometimes there's some definite entertainment, just in watching scientology flail helplessly because they're so full of themselves. and i've had more than a fair amount of education in intellectual property law, religion and philosophy, and foundations of science, among other topics. it's been quite a trip, that's for sure. and there promises to be a fair amount of road before i'm finished. thanks for the stimulus to write this.