Fair game
Scientology’s FAQ: How does Scientology view anti-religious groups and deprogrammers?
Q How does Scientology view anti-religious groups and deprogrammers?1
A So-called “deprogrammers” are money-motivated criminals who kidnap and harass for profit. Their methods include imprisonment, food and sleep deprivation and various forms of personal assault, including assault and battery and even rape. Deprogrammers in many countries have been jailed for their involvement in such violent and illegal practices. Such activities are against virtually every principle held by Scientologists.
Where families express concern over another family member’s religious beliefs or practices, the situation can generally be handled with communication. Kidnapping and violence do not resolve upsets. They destroy families.
The Church does not condone the use of violence in any form and holds that each person has an inalienable right to their own beliefs as well as their personal freedom.
Notes
- Authentic Information & Answers to Questions About Scientology: How does Scientology view anti-religious groups and deprogrammers? (n.d.). authenticscientology.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.authenticscientology.org/page38.htm ↩
Scientology’s FAQ: Is information divulged during auditing sessions always kept confidential?
Q Is information divulged during auditing sessions always kept confidential?1
A Absolutely and without exception. Traditionally, all communications between a minister and his parishioners have been privileged and confidential. That is certainly the case in Scientology, and this trust is never violated. The confidences given in trust during an auditing session are considered sacrosanct by the Church, and are never divulged. In fact, the Church would invoke all legal protections under its priest-penitent privilege to safeguard this confidentiality.
Notes
- Authentic Information & Answers to Questions About Scientology: Is information divulged during auditing sessions always kept confidential? (n.d.). authenticscientology.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.authenticscientology.org/page37a.htm ↩
Scientology’s FAQ: Does Scientology engage in brainwashing or mind control?
Q Does Scientology engage in brainwashing or mind control?1
A Not only is this question insulting, it is made even more offensive to Scientology since the exact opposite is true. Scientology makes people spiritually free and enables them to think for themselves. Indeed, one of the maxims used in the Church is that a parishioner should not just believe, but should observe the veracity and workability of Scientology for himself and only accept it when it is true for him.
The people making such accusations hold the opposite view. They seek to change opinion through “deprogramming,” a violent form of faith breaking which frequently involves kidnapping, forcible restraint, food and sleep deprivation, assault, battery and rape. These same people refuse to even allow Church representatives to show them the true information about Scientology or engage in any form of meaningful dialogue whatsoever.
Millions of Scientologists from literally all walks of life have attested to the positive benefits received from their religion. A common theme to their personal success stories is that they are now more in control of their lives than they ever have been.
Then, too, L. Ron Hubbard was one of the first to discover and expose actual mind control and brainwashing experimentation conducted by United States military and intelligence agencies during and after World War II. He called these techniques “pain-drug-hypnosis.”
In his 1951 book, Science of Survival, he wrote:
“There is another form of hypnotism … This form of hypnotism has been a carefully guarded secret of certain military and intelligence organizations. It is a vicious war weapon and may be of considerably more use in conquering a society than the atomic bomb. This is no exaggeration. The extensiveness of the use of this form of hypnotism in espionage work is so wide today that it is long past the time when people should have become alarmed about it. It required Dianetics processing to uncover pain-drug-hypnosis. Otherwise, pain-drug-hypnosis was out of sight, unsuspected, and unknown.”
Not only did Mr. Hubbard uncover and expose such blatantly destructive experimentation, but the technology he developed, Dianetics, can undo the effects of pain-drug-hypnosis and free a person from the grip of mind control.
Years after Mr. Hubbard learned of and exposed these government-sponsored psychiatric mind control experiments, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act detailed the extent to which these techniques were being used—many of them on unwitting citizens. Release of these documents also resulted in Congressional investigations and actions to ensure necessary safeguards were established to prevent the recurrence of such abuses.
Notes
- Authentic Information & Answers to Questions About Scientology: Does Scientology engage in brainwashing or mind control? (n.d.). authenticscientology.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.authenticscientology.org/page35.htm ↩
Scientology’s FAQ: Why has the German government tried to portray Scientology as controversial?
Q Why has the German government tried to portray Scientology as controversial?1
A Germany and, indeed, much of Central Europe, has a long and bitter history of religious intolerance and persecution, a trend which has continued into the present. Many religious and ethnic minorities have become the targets of escalating incidents of violence, xenophobia and religious discrimination.
Unfortunately, many government officials in Germany continue to fuel the intolerance. The Kohl government left a dismal legacy as far as human and civil rights are concerned. Muslims, Charismatic Christians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hindus, Scientologists and in some cases even Jews are among those who have been denied fundamental rights because of their race or religion. In recent years, the German government has been strongly criticized in more than 25 reports from international human rights bodies including the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the Helsinki Commission, the United States State Department, and a British Ad-Hoc Human Rights Committee composed of Lords and scholars.
In 1997, a study by the Human Rights Centre of the University of Essex, England, found that, “In Germany, democracy is used as an ideology to impose conformity. It has been dismaying to discover that the state, and some of its politicians and people, are using what are known from the past to be well-worn paths of discrimination and intolerance.” The U.S. State Reporter has criticized the German government for the “clearly discriminatory practice” of “prevent[ing] a person from practicing his or her profession of participating in public or private fora solely based on that person’s religion or belief.”
Germany is generally regarded as the birthplace of institutional psychiatry which spawned the theory of eugenics, created the first death camps and instigated the wholesale slaughter of millions. As in the United States in the early 1950s, the Church of Scientology traced the source of false reports and government attacks in Germany to psychiatric vested interests seeking to protect a multibillion dollar mental health monopoly. Operating without popular support but with taxpayer funds, psychiatric special interests regard as a threat any religion that provides man with genuine freedom without the use of mind altering drugs or similar unscientific “therapies.”
Unfortunately, some priests from the predominant Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany have encouraged government persecution of Scientology and other new religions. Although supported through parishioner-paid government “church taxes,” the membership of these churches has been declining dramatically and so have their revenues. Rather than looking within their own organizations to find and cure the causes of declining membership, they have wrongly blamed Scientology, which continues to grow.
Fortunately, those who are upset by seeing man improve are small in number compared to the many who have followed Scientology’s invitation to “think for yourselves” and who consequently, have embraced Scientology and its efforts to create a harmonious and peaceful civilization and more freedom for the individual.
Notes
- Authentic Information & Answers to Questions About Scientology: Why has the German government tried to portray Scientology as controversial? (n.d.). authenticscientology.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.authenticscientology.org/page30a.htm ↩
Scientology’s FAQ: What does “suppressive person” mean?
What does “suppressive person” mean?1
A suppressive person is a person who seeks to suppress any betterment activity or group. The suppressive person, also called an antisocial personality, works to upset, continuously undermine, spread bad news and denigrate other people and their activities. While it has sometimes been said that a suppressive person is just anti-Scientology, the fact is they oppose anyone doing better in life. Such people are not always easy to identify; however, they can be known by specific characteristics:
1. He or she speaks only in very broad generalities. “They say…” “Everybody thinks…” “Everyone knows…”
2. Such a person deals mainly in bad news, critical or hostile remarks, invalidation and general suppression.
3. The antisocial personality alters, to worsen, communication when he or she relays a message or news.
4. A characteristic, and one of the sad things about an antisocial personality, is that it does not respond to treatment or reform.
5. Surrounding such a personality we find cowed or ill associates or friends who, when not driven actually insane, are yet behaving in a crippled manner in life, failing, not succeeding.
6. The antisocial personality habitually selects the wrong target. If A is the obvious cause, the antisocial personality inevitably blames B or C or D.
7. The antisocial cannot finish a cycle of action. The antisocial becomes surrounded with incomplete projects.
8. Many antisocial persons will freely confess to the most alarming crimes when forced to do so, but will have no faintest sense of responsibility for them.
9. The antisocial personality supports only destructive groups and rages against and attacks any constructive or betterment group.
10. This type of personality approves only of destructive actions and fights against constructive or helpful actions or activities.
11. Helping others is an activity which drives the antisocial personality nearly berserk. Activities, however, which destroy in the name of help are closely supported.
12. The antisocial personality has a bad sense of property and conceives that the idea that anyone owns anything is a pretense, made up to fool people. Nothing is every really owned.
Fortunately, such individuals are a very small percentage of the population. But because society as a whole has not had any means to identify them, the amount of havoc wreaked by the anti-social personality throughout the centuries is incalculable.
Virtually all the turmoil and conflict in an individual’s life can be traced to contact with such personalities. Individual men and women can usually sort out their differences through communication if they are not adversely influenced, often unknowingly, by an antisocial personality attempting to inflame, instead of resolve, conflicts.
Notes
- Authentic Information & Answers to Questions About Scientology: What does “suppressive person” mean? (n.d.). authenticscientology.org. Retrieved 18 May 2010 from http://www.authenticscientology.org/page39.htm ↩