From: bogie@xs4all.nl (Boudewijn van Ingen)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Re: How did you find A.R.S. ?
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1998 20:27:03 GMT
Message-ID: <35fac85a.83546782@rambo>
On Wed, 09 Sep 1998 10:41:21 -0600, Rondata <5150@annex.com> wrote:
Just kind of curious, how so many people have stumbled upon this newsgroup and why you decided to stay.Some of you were here from the beginning.
Some of you are ex scientologists.
Some of you, (like myself) stumbled upon here by chance and was outraged by what they read and decided to stay.Anyone care to share?
I see many did already.
My story:
I was never directly involved with scientology myself. Although I did object to the methods their body routers used, wherever and whenever I encountered them. (Sadly they haven't been around here much for my amusement lately ...)
I had an XS4ALL account a long time already, when I got a job working for another ISP in The Netherlands. I was outraged about the onslaught on free speech by scientology when I heard about them raiding XS4ALL. That's how I got on ARS.
After that, it took me about a year to read almost all the material that is so abundantly available on the 'net, before I started actually posting to ARS.
Then I saw the report "The dark side of scientology" on German TV. I thought it would be very important that the revelations in that show were reported to the netizens outside of Germany, and it should be done ASAP. So I lured a friend with some beer, and we spent a weekend transcribing and translating that report for it's Web publication.
You can still see the result at "http://www.entheta.net/entheta/media/tv/ard/", and soon, as a test, again on my own new page: "http://bogie.dyn.ml.org/scn/dunkle_seite/".
Of course, directly after announcing the existence of the pages the legal threats came. Not from scientology themselves, but from the ZDF, apparently being pressured by scientology (as the report itself shows clearly in the words of Elliot Abelson). I withdrew the pages, because I considered my task finished.
Apart from my presence at a critical meeting in the "Melkweg" after the raid on XS4ALL and a single picket in Amsterdam, and of course my occasional rantings on ARS and nl.scientology, this is my whole "involvement" in this matter.
So you can imagine my surprise, when my name turned up in that list from the ClamCondom (or ScienoSitter, or whatever it's supposed to be called, can't really locate the right ARSCC(wdne) guideline right now).
But, with hindsight, I shouldn't have been surprised at all. I guess you have to learn the "standard" part of the expression "SOP" by experience. You could say that scientology "pulled me in" and I have no intentions to go away, until their fascist organisation with it's undemocratic and sometimes deadly policies is completely disbanded.
Of course I reserve the right to criticize and ridicule the socalled "religious", "scientific", "philosophic", "practical" and "workable" teachings of their founding con-man Hubbard, even after the organisation is gone. That is how things work in the "wog" world.
Groeten,
Boudewijn,
Kox.