Date: Mon, 29 Dec 1997 02:35:51 -0800
To: fun@thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard)
From: Conner <seekon@ix.netcom.com>
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.