(4) Sat 2 Aug 97 19:21 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: A Scientology Story 1/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:c786 23029aa0 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000320a8 A mind-bending experience What are the secrets of Scientology? Is its central doctrine - that you should purge yourself of all emotional baggage - helpful? Joe Boyd was curious. The band he managed had enrolled with ambiguous results. Byline: Joe Boyd 01/04/97 The Guardian - London Back in 1971, I `infiltrated' the Church of Scientology. Inspired by curiosity, my adventure took me through more than 60 hours of `auditing', the central `sacrament' of this so-called religion which is supposed to unburden you of your past and lead you to certain success in life. It culminated in a confrontation with aspects of the organisation that I found sinister, flawed and even potentially dangerous. Last August, I was reminded of my experiences by a Guardian article that raised many questions about Scientology. The answers to some of them were what I set out to discover all those years ago. It all began in the early Sixties with a former dope dealer and harmonica player named David Simons. I'd known him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he went under various imaginative aliases, such as Hugh Biali and Rex Rakish. Then he disappeared into the underworld of hippy drug culture (or so I thought), while I moved to London and was producing records and managing various groups, including some of the leading characters in this story, the Incredible String Band. The Incredible String Band were Sixties icons with one of the highest fame- to- obscurity ratios it is possible to imagine. At the height of their success between 1967-70, they filled the Royal Albert Hall over and over again, as they did the Fillmore West in San Francisco and the Lincoln Centre in New York. They were the first world-music group, combining Blakean mysticism with exotic instruments and rich, inventive harmonies. They were, first and foremost, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron, who were subsequently joined by their girlfriends `Licorice' McKechnie and Rose Simpson. The psychedelic Sixties have again become fashionable in the Nineties. But the Incredible String Band has remained in the un-hip twilight of musical history - partly because of their folksy image, but not entirely. Perhaps the lack of recognition has more to do with their precipitous decline following their `conversion' to Scientology in 1968. When I met Mike and Robin in 1965, they had long served as advance scouts into the territories of drugs, Orientalism and mysticism, but they were far from mindless flower children. They were, still are, highly intelligent and thoughtful people, besides being inventive and original musicians. One evening in the autumn of 1968, following a sell-out concert in New York, I took the band to a vegetarian restaurant on East 5th Street, off Second Avenue. To my amazement, the manager of the restaurant was David Simons. He found us a good corner table, where he and I reminisced about long- lost acquaintances from the Cambridge underground. After he had taken our order and disappeared into the kitchen, I took the fateful step of telling the band everything I knew about him. I said I was stunned by the transformation in him: when I'd last seen him, he had been a mumbling, stoned, shambolic figure, witty and sardonic, but seemingly determined to jettison any positive course open to him - in music, for example - in favour of a darker and more chaotic path. Now he had metamorphosed into a friendly, efficient and energetic restaurant manager. Then I made my second mistake of the evening: I left the band in the restaurant, as I was going on a short business trip to California early the next morning. The first inkling I had of the events that followed came when the band's US agent telephoned me at my LA hotel. He wanted my approval to give the group all the cash that was due to them from the mini-tour of the east coast which we were just one concert away from completing. The request puzzled me. After all, I'd already given them what they had asked for as spending money, the hotel bill was taken care of, and we had agreed that the balance would be sent to the group's UK bank account. I called the Chelsea Hotel, where the band was staying, but could not find them. The day before I was due to return to New York, I finally got through to Licorice. She told me they wanted the money to pay for some `courses' at the Scientology headquarters. I had barely heard of the cult at that time, but what I had heard was not positive. I suggested a meeting for when I returned the next day. The band had always been fractious - Robin and Mike had no great fondness for each other, while the girls had a barely-concealed mutual contempt - but at the Chelsea Hotel that day I was confronted with a strangely unified foursome. They wanted all the money and they wanted to give it to the Church of Scientology. Then they told me why. After I had left the restaurant, Simons had joined them at the table. They'd been intrigued by what I had said about him and his transformation which, it emerged, was due to the Church of Scientology. Simons had invited them along to the church's New York celebrity centre. By that same evening, Robin and Licorice were convinced. In the face of my reluctance to write the cheque and my insistence that they think it over, Mike and Rose agreed to wait until we'd got back to London before making their final decision. But within days of their return, the die had been cast. I understood little then of what was involved in becoming a Scientologist. The band spent weeks in London being `audited'. They told me about `going clear', when the auditing process reaches its first plateau of accomplishment. I hated the jargon, but I began to notice positive changes in their personalities. All of them had always avoided any discussion of money; now, though, they eagerly convened meetings about the group's finances. It had always been hard to get answers from them about future touring schedules and recording plans; now, such matters were sorted out quickly and efficiently. They even took the time to thank me for the job I was doing for them - previously unheard of. And among themselves, their simmering quarrels and jealousies seemed to evaporate overnight. They stopped taking drugs or alcohol. They became charming company. They never tried to push me into joining. I was torn. Everything I'd read or heard about Scientology seemed horribly obscure, self-important and dubious. But the results were there to see: a happier, saner group of people who had become a pleasure to deal with. The first recording sessions after their `conversions' went very well. There were some great new songs. We finished the double album Wee Tam And The Big Huge, and it was released to critical and commercial enthusiasm. Everything was going smoothly. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (5) Sat 2 Aug 97 19:21 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: A Scientology Story 2/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:c776 23029aa0 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000320aa I was intrigued by what I took to be the sexual evolution of the group. Mike and Rose remained close friends and shared a cottage in the Row, a group of eight cottages on the Tennant estate in Scotland that the band rented. But they seemed to sail effortlessly through various other entanglements - Rose with David Crosby during a visit to San Francisco, Mike with various other girls who Rose just laughed about, even a brief affair between Rose and myself, and finally, a more serious relationship between Mike and Suzie, the woman I had hired to take care of the band's day-to-day management. But I was confused. I retained my hostile scepticism about Scientology, particularly as I watched thousands of pounds flow from the ISB's account into `church' funds. Another thing that worried me was the music. Slowly, over the two years following their encounter with Simons, ISB's output lost its inventiveness, its charm and the wild beauty of its melodies. They were more efficient in the studio, but there were fewer moments of surprise and inspiration. Songs began to sound much the same. Was this a natural decline after years of tremendously original output? Or was it Scientology? Soon after, other things changed too. Together with the other residents of the Row, the group organised a pageant called U. They wanted to take their new creation on tour, but I was unsure: with a cast of ten dancers and musicians, plus sets and costumes, it was going to be an expensive show to take on the road. Many of the songs had meanings even more obscure than those of their opaque masterpieces in the past. Promoters who had earlier been happy to book the ISB were dubious about U. Guarantees were reduced, the group was financially at risk everywhere, and audiences began to level off. Poor reviews and responses to U's first few performances made me beg them to call off the rest of the tour and rebuild ISB. They would hear none of it. Their confidence was impossible to dent - they were sure U would work. It didn't, and we lost a great deal of money. The saga of U helped me decide what to do next: I sold my production company and moved away from London. I left Suzie - who by this time was living with Mike and had become a Scientologist herself - in charge of the band. They continued to live at the Row, to tour, and to record, but U had slowed their momentum. I headed to Los Angeles to take up a job with Warner Brothers, supervising film scores. My first new friend at WB was the late Don Simpson (who went on to produce Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Flashdance, among others, and who added a whole new chapter to Hollywood's saga of sexual, chemical and financial excess before his death last January). From our first meeting, Don and I got on famously. We talked about anything and everything - sports, music, books - and met up most mornings for breakfast and again for late-night dinners after watching movies. Back in 1971, California was notoriously the centre of `self-improvement' -much as it is today, in fact. Meditation, re-birth therapy, Buddhism, yoga, encounter groups, Esalen - the list was endless. Don was fascinated by them all, and very cynical about them. He brought up the subject of Scientology one day, and I told him of my experience with the Incredible String Band. We were unsure about Scientology's motives, but were nevertheless intrigued enough to take it further. I had already met the head of the Scientologists in LA - the LA Org, as it is known - backstage at an ISB concert, so I rang her up and made an appointment for Don and me to go and see her. She and her staff were very eager and friendly - L Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology, in Los Angeles in 1954, had always emphasised the importance of media. Being the former manager of one of their prime catches, namely ISB (jazz musician Chick Corea was the only other prominent Scientologist at the time), who now held down a big job in the film industry, I was to be treated with special care. Great, we thought. We could make all sorts of demands. We'd heard how people who'd had `personality tests' were often subsequently bombarded with mail shots and phone calls, so we made it a condition that we would receive no mail and no phone calls. The Scientologists agreed. Usually, beginners take the `communications course', but we hated it, and walked out almost immediately. They said no problem, and let us go straight on to the auditing - the communications course was just for `wogs' (their term for non- Scientologists), anyway. We were different. We paid for the auditing courses - it cost about the same as a good shrink, around $30 per hour - and I went down to the celebrity centre in downtown Los Angeles one or two evenings a week, where I sat for several hours with my auditor. I held a pair of tin cans which were wired to an `E-meter' (a device which measures electrical impulses and so, apparently, indicates your mental state). Thus hooked up, the auditor would then give me a series of commands: `Recall a time when you had fun,' or `Recall a time when you gave something to someone.' Then there would be a more resonant command: `Recall a time when you lost something you loved.' The purpose of these commands was to trigger `engrams'. These, I was told, were `cellular records of moments involving pain, loss or a real or imagined threat to survival'. Scientologists hold psychiatry in contempt, and for valid reasons: they say that a shrink and a patient can go around in circles, endlessly following the analyst's theories and the patient's idealised stories about himself, which is true enough, I suppose. The E-meter, on the other hand, like a lie- detector, does not permit such indulgences, they claim. It goes straight to the heart of your inability to live `in the moment'. Each of the auditor's commands is designed to trigger a response of some kind, so that when an image of an incident comes into your head, the E-meter responds. If the image is engram-free, the meter just `floats', but if there is `charge' attached, the meter reacts strongly. Then, instead of moving on to another command, the auditor instructs you to recall the incident in every detail: the sights, sounds, smells, emotions, thoughts, fears, pains etc. Once you've done that - internally, to yourself, not out loud to the auditor - you are requested to do the same thing again. Eventually, as the incident is gone over again and again, without judgement or blame attached, it ceases to trigger the E-meter. The same incident can be called up a day later and provoke no reaction. Then you get a new command: `Recall an earlier similar incident.' You keep going in this direction until you can recall no `earlier similars'. It is astonishing how much you can remember that you'd previously thought had gone forever. There is much merit in the theory behind this approach. After all, it seems logical to assume that if, at the age of two, you were dropped on your head in a room with pale blue walls, while chicken soup was on the stove and Haydn was playing on the stereo, your mood might well decline - at the very least - should you enter a room 30 years later where some of those same sounds, smells and sights were present. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (6) Sat 2 Aug 97 19:21 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: A Scientology Story 3/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:0727 23029aa0 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000320ac A `clear' defines someone who has completed the first course of auditing and is deemed ready to graduate to higher `OT' (that is, Operating Thetan, Scientology-speak for free spirit) levels on the `Bridge to Total Freedom', a `classification, gradation and awareness chart of levels and certificates'. Once you've been branded clear, and as you continue to neutralise the debilitating engrams, you become - in theory, at least - able to respond to the present moment in real time and spontaneously, unfettered by the charged memories which previously weighed you down. You should become lighter, happier, more effective. And I have to admit that, following my auditing sessions, I certainly had moments when I felt elated and lightened. Don Simpson had similar experiences. We soon discovered that there was more to Scientology than just auditing. Hubbard, who was known affectionately as LRH, had written many texts, and there were rules for almost everything. So great is Hubbard's influence that even today, more than ten years after his death, each `church' has a corporate-style office set aside for him, a plaque on the desk bearing his name. If clears follow LRH's rules, the organisation must, by definition, produce `up stats' - Scientology-speak for success. Mischieviously, I asked if there were any cases when the rules were followed, but the `stats' were not `up'. It was then that I found out about the dubious core notion of the `suppressive personality' and the Scientologists' obsession with past lives. LRH's teachings reveal that a suppressive personality is a thetan (spirit) who has suffered such a painful death in a previous lifetime that nothing will deter them from an agenda of revenge in the current one. All the auditing in the world will not alter their negative aims. But how do you know when there is a suppressive personality about, I asked. Simple, according to LRH: when an organisation that is run according to the thoughts of Chairman Ron does not have `up stats', there must be a suppressive personality at work within it. And a trained Scientologist can discover who the culprit is, isolate and then expel them. This explanation set the alarm bells ringing. This self-justifying definition was a classic scapegoating exercise, obviously designed to insulate Hubbard from any criticism that his methods might not be perfect or that clears might not be as all-powerful as they seemed. To me, it explained much about the overweening confidence that I'd noticed with the Incredible String Band. I became increasingly aware of an atmosphere of paranoia. The past-lives business and the jargon began to sound like a chapter from one of Hubbard's badly-written sci-fi novels. The clears who would speak about how their `earlier similars' took them into past lives seemed always to have been Egyptians, or princes, or something colourful and romantic. The clears had an unsettling lack of doubt: they had plans - often for show-business careers - and there was no question about them not succeeding. One Sunday afternoon, I hurt my neck body-surfing at Malibu. I reported for my Tuesday evening auditing session and was asked, as always, if I had consumed any alcohol or drugs in the past few days or if I was suffering any pain or discomfort. Auditing could not take place if the answer to any of these questions was yes, but the the pain in my neck had not gone away, so I owned up to it. The audit for that day was cancelled and I was sent instead for a session of `touch assists', which involved an auditor directing my attention to the light pressure of a finger on my body at a point `past' the location of the discomfort. In my experience, this sometimes works, because it steers your thoughts away from the pain. The experience of pain is primarily the experience of the resistance to pain, and the touch-assist process can loosen that resistance and evaporate the pain. This time, however, it didn't work. I was sent to a Scientologist chiropractor in the San Fernando Valley. The waiting room was full of literature from the far-right John Birch Society. After waiting a while, I decided the people and the place were too unpleasant and left without treatment. I got a call from the celebrity centre insisting that I go back. When I refused, I was summoned to theGuardian's Office to explain myself to the area leader. I was asked about my injury and was told that it was interfering with my progress in auditing. When I insisted that I would let it heal by itself, I was asked if I had been associating with `persons hostile to Scientology', which, I was told, could impede healing and prevent progress in auditing. I responded that most people I knew who were aware of the Church of Scientology were hostile to it and that I had no intention of cutting myself off from my friends. Robot-like, the guardian repeated phrases from Hubbard's texts to the effect that I could not progress with auditing while in contact with hostile persons. I got up, shook his hand and left the celebrity centre. I never returned. Soon after, Don had a similar run-in and also left the centre. We took stock. It had certainly been interesting, and auditing seemed to have some value as a therapy. But the context in which it took place was that of a paranoid cult. Any questioning of Hubbard's teachings meant the whole edifice fell apart. There was no middle ground, no respect for auditing as a valuable process in the context of a normal life. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (7) Sat 2 Aug 97 19:21 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: A Scientology Story 4/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:c696 23029aa0 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000320ae Don and I were relatively well-off, and were welcomed with open arms, but what of the average new Scientologist who was not earning a nice big Hollywood salary? Many people I met at the centre had been granted only a few hours of auditing and were desperate for more. It was like some pyramid- selling scheme - by volunteering and dragging people in off the street for personality tests, you earned auditing hours. Many inductees I met had been working long hours in their spare time for more than a year and had been granted less than 20 hours of auditing; in my cavalier fashion, I'd just gone out and bought 60 hours to indulge my curiosity. Obviously, the more time and effort people invested in Scientology, the less receptive they were to questioning or doubts. My own doubts, however, continued to grow. I read Barefaced Messiah, the unauthorised biography of Hubbard, which exposes his numerous lies about his military service and other aspects of his life. It also recounts his 1948 address to the Science Fiction Writers' Convention in which he advises that if they really wanted to make money they wouldn't bother with sci-fi novels, they would `start a religion'. Four years after Don and I left the LA Org, I had dinner with Mike and Suzie. After a few drinks (Scientologists aren't teetotal - they just don't drink 48 hours before auditing), Mike told me that during the 1974 Portuguese coup the previous year, Scientologists had gained control of one of the most powerful radio stations in Lisbon with the intention of taking control of the government. He was convinced that the `church' would definitely have control of a country somewhere by the end of the decade. Soon after, first the Incredible String Band, and then Mike and Suzie, broke up. Mike and Robin have both now left the Church of Scientology. Rose left LRH's cohorts behind years ago and, in her present capacity as mayoress of Aberystwyth, revealed in a recent interview how Scientology had narrowed the band's view of the world and how damaging that had been for their music. Licorice has disappeared completely. Suzie worked for a while as an executive for a major record company. She told me that she was sad that she and Mike had not had children, and said that she was finding it hard to meet people who could understand her experiences. Then she was offered two jobs simultaneously. One was a promotion at the record company, the other was a post at the Sea Org - Hubbard's Florida headquarters. We had lunch and talked about the options, after which I wrote her an impassioned letter urging her to stay in London and take the record company job. She dropped me a line soon afterwards to say goodbye: she was off to Sea Org. I haven't seen her since. I could see that the clears, despite all the engram-cleansing, retained all their old traits, positive and negative, but with the added disadvantage of being convinced that they had been transformed. Scrubbing engrams off my mind didn't seem to alter some essence of myself that remained unchanged. I was cured of the desire to transform myself into some super-efficient creature with no painful memories. Back in 1971, ISB and Chick Corea were the biggest names Scientologists could lay claim to. Now they've entered a different league, where some of the biggest names in Hollywood, from John Travolta and Tom Cruise to Sharon Stone and Demi Moore, are eager disciples of LRH's word. Its influence has grown enormously: the organisation now claims 8 million members world- wide and an annual income of pounds 200 million. Perhaps Scientology has changed since 1971, but I doubt it. Its sense of self seemed, at the time, to depend on the immutable genius of the writings of L Ron Hubbard. Despite the glossy packaging, it seems much the same today. I still see Hubbard's seminal work, Dianetics, widely advertised and even, occasionally, being read. From this distance, those evenings at the celebrity centre in LA seem like a surreal dream, but every day that dream is just beginning for many new recruits. It is hard to say if it turns into a nightmare for all of them, but I'm sure it would have for me had I continued. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (9) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Cult of Ron 1/2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:b547 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7f00 Cult of Ron beams in from the heavens 09/15/96 Sunday Times - London John Travolta says it changed his life, Tom Cruise claims it helped him to overcome dyslexia, and Sharon Stone, Priscilla Presley, Demi Moore and Shirley MacLaine are all devotees. All right, some Hollywood stars have lifts that stop short of the penthouse, but if the Church of Scientology is not only acceptable but positively trendy in the media capital of the world, why is there so much alarm here about its forthcoming advertisements on British television? Is the controversial Ron Hubbard, founder of the church, still pulling the strings from his celestial abode in the sky? The commercial - approved by the Independent Television Commission for broadcasting on the satellite channels UK Gold and UK Living this Wednesday - seems innocent enough, if not everyone's cup of tea. The single word "trust" is intoned by smiling people of various nationalities, after which a voice sonorously announces over triumphant music: "On the day we can fully trust each other there will be peace on earth." Well, thank you for sharing that with us, as they say in California. The trouble for the Church of Scientology (not recognised as a bona fide religion under British law), is that those not privy to its inner secrets find it either risible or sinister. Ian Howarth, general secretary of the Cult Information Centre in London, says: "I am very concerned for the welfare of anybody who might finish up going along to a Scientology meeting after seeing these ads." Yet can anyone who believes that the amount of pain a tomato feels can be measured by attaching electrodes to its skin really represent a threat to the nation's moral fibre? We have Lafayette Ron Hubbard to blame for the quandary we find ourselves in. Ron (or LRH, as he is respectfully known to Scientologists) was the portly science fiction writer who put the show on the road in 1950. According to Ron (who once claimed to have visited Venus), we are each merely the temporal vessel for immortal souls called Thetans, who created the universe. The Thetans' eternal enemies are Engrams, disruptive forces planted in our universe from outside the galaxy. Through "dianetics" - an intense form of therapy influenced by both western psychology and oriental religion - the Engrams can be purged. In practical terms, the level of Engrams in a person can allegedly by measured by an invention of Ron's - the E-meter. This consists of a small box with two electrodes attached that passes a current of 1.5 volts through the body (or even a tomato), and registers the result on a needle that swings all over the place - rather like a lie detector. An "auditor" listens, as the "pre-clear" (someone burdened by the past) talks about his problems in an attempt to become "clear" of Engrams. People pay quite a lot to be Engram-free, and, with a claimed 8m members world-wide (100,000 of whom are supposed to be in the UK), Scientology is big business. Its income has been estimated at Pounds 200m a year, with additional assets of Pounds 270m. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (10) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Cult of Ron 2/2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:b5b7 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7f02 Ron spotted the potential from the start, reportedly remarking to a colleague at a sci-fi convention in 1948 that the best way to make money would be to start a religion. Scientology's British headquarters is Saint Hill Manor, near East Grinstead in West Sussex (a former home of the Maharajah of Jaipur), which Ron bought in 1959, and where he lived for seven years. There, in oak-panelled rooms, students pore over Ron's huge literary output (according to the church his book, Dianetics, has sold 16m copies), and about 300 staff are dressed in dark blue naval uniforms, complete with epaulettes. This unusual kit is in recognition of what church members regard as Ron's heroic career in the American navy in the second world war. (Critics claim that "Commodore" Ron was once officially assessed as being "not temperamentally fitted for independent command"). As in all Scientology churches an empty office with a commodore's peaked cap on the desk is set aside in memory of the sea-crazy Hubbard. Criticisms of Scientology have taken several forms. In Germany (where there are reputedly 30,000 members), the authorities - ever-sensitive to perceived threats to German democracy - have alleged a conspiracy. Ursula Caberta, a former Social Democrat politician, who now heads an official working group set up to combat the cult, says: "There was once a guy in Germany who wrote a book, and we all said he was a bit crazy. That guy was Adolf Hitler, and I take Hubbard very seriously. Scientology is a state within a state, and it has to be combated. The aim is to take over the planet. That's no joke." The youth movement of the German Christian Democrats feels so strongly that last month it called for a boycott of Mission: Impossible, the latest Tom Cruise film, but Scientologists dismiss German allegations as fantasy. Indeed, through a series of advertisements that featured pictures of Nuremberg rallies and concentration camps, they have succeeded in persuading some segments of the American public that the Germans are guilty of the old sin of religious intolerance. Most criticism in Britain has concentrated on the way in which people can allegedly be persuaded to part with large sums of money to undergo "auditing" sessions. Graham Baldwin, director of Catalyst, a charity in London that counsels people who have become victims of cultist groups, provides a recent example. A man who had picked up a pamphlet from the Church of Scientology, and subsequently agreed to a personality test, managed to spend Pounds 28,000 on "auditing" in six weeks. To raise the money he cashed in an endowment policy intended to be protection for his Down's syndrome daughter. His wife only discovered the transaction by accident, with unhappy results for the marriage. Baldwin has repeatedly called the Church of Scientology to discuss the case, but says he has so far had no response. The initial video that most newcomers to the church buy is essentially a sales pitch for huge amounts of further material, with deeper secrets of Scientology being revealed for larger cheques. If a deity was being worshipped, the slogan could well be "Pay as you Pray". The difficulty is that people must be presumed to act of their own free will in taking such decisions, and there is an obvious difference between financial imprudence and coercion. The same principle applies to allegations that Scientologists have broken up families by "brainwashing" youngsters. Those who turn to cults often already have family problems. Hubbard's own children did not appear to gain much benefit from his discoveries. His elder son left the church in 1959 - publicly branding his father "insane" - and his other son committed suicide in 1976 (Hubbard himself died 10 years later). In the latest television campaign another advertisement for Scientology shows a girl manipulating a man's dour face. "Force yourself to smile and you'll stop frowning," she says. "Force yourself to laugh and you'll find something to laugh at." Perhaps the members of the Church of Ron will one day take their own advice, and look in the mirror. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (12) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Ron's Church 1/2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:644f 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7ef9 Church that Ron built Dangerous, sinister cult or a family-minded movement devoted to the spiritual welfare of all human beings? No other religious group provokes as much suspicion and hostility as the Church of Scientology - and no other religious group is so desperate for respectability. 08/29/96 The Guardian - London A SERIES of people in different national costumes but identical toothpaste smiles pop up on the screen to utter in their language one word, "Trust". Triumphant music rises as the voice-over starts, "On the day we can fully trust each other there will be peace on earth. The Church of Scientology provides practical wisdom which it believes can help you to lead a happier and more fulfilling life." This is the advert expected to reach thousands of homes this autumn when the Church of Scientology launches its first major television advertising campaign. It is guaranteed to provoke outrage from anti-cult monitoring groups for whom Scientologists are one of Britain's most dangerous and sinister movements. But the Scientologists, banned from the airwaves since 1993 - after "Trust" on satellite prompted one complaint - are celebrating their reprieve by the Independent Television Commission as one more sign of their acceptance into the mainstream. More adverts are planned to follow "Trust". They have the same mawkish, platitudinous quality to them. A small boy sits disconsolate as one hat after another is crammed on to his head over a voice-track of, "Why don't you be a doctor, a teacher, do what your mother says . . . " Eventually he himself chooses the hat he had been wearing in the first place - that of a fireman. "Be true to your own goals," growls the voice-over. Another advert features a girl sitting on a man's knee, manipulating his dour face: "Force yourself to smile and you'll stop frowning. Force yourself to laugh and you'll find something to laugh at . . . A Being causes his own feelings. The greatest joy in life is creating. Splurge on it." Both adverts end with that perennial stock image of anything spiritual - a sunrise over a mountain. The Scientologists are trying a new tack. After decades of an almost exclusively hostile press in the UK, and an increasingly aggressive campaign against them in Germany, they're trying a soft cuddly image of cute little children with a message of peace and love. Since their advert is barely distinguishable from the toilet paper genre, it's hard to imagine it attracting new followers into this bizarre belief system. Scientology either provokes incredulous derision, or sinister allegations. This hostility appears to be affecting recruitment. According to Scientologist figures, in 1994 in the UK, 3,947 people "participated in services for the first time", that dropped to 3,066 in 1995 and so far this year it is only 1,991. What European Scientologists take comfort from is that for all the criticism on this side of the Atlantic, Scientology has become hip in the US. John Travolta pronounces in their introductory video for interested newcomers, "there's no part of my life which it hasn't helped". Tom Cruise readily admits to being a member. In Germany, Cruise's beliefs prompted an attempt at a mass boycott of his new film, Mission Impossible.But in the US, the celebrities are finally managing to confer on Scientology a respectability which has eluded it for nearly 50 years. It is respectability that the Church of Scientology most wants. In their video, they make great play of the fact that 65 courts around the world have ruled that they are a religion, and most important of all, that the American tax authorities have given them tax-exempt status as a bona fide religion. Not in Britain. They have been rebuffed repeatedly by the Charity Commission which insisted as recently as last year that they could not be considered a religion under British law. But they are nothing if not persistent. Last week, three senior Scientologists set up a new company which has undertaken to comply with the terms of the 1993 Charities Act as part of a long-term strategy to win acceptance. Few other new religious movements in the UK provoke as much suspicion as the Scientologists. In comparison, the Moonies are seen as bungling amateurs, an equally crazy belief system maybe, but good-natured people. The Scientologists, though, are seen by cult monitoring groups as really dangerous. In Germany, an extraordinary clampdown on Scientologists - they are banned from the major political parties and from the civil service in some states - is fuelled by the belief that their aim is to take over the planet and that they are obsessed with "power, money and manipulation". There are two obvious reasons why the Scientologists scare everybody: they are rich and they attract a sizeable number of recruits. Most new religious movements struggle chaotically with a few donations and a tiny membership. For example, there are only 600 Moonies in the UK, and the vast majority of recruits leave within the first year. But the Scientologists are altogether different; they claim to have around 100,000 members in the UK and to attract several thousand every year, and they clearly have plenty of money. A clue to one lucrative source of income is that their video for newcomers is primarily a sales pitch to buy the vast tomes of Scientology scriptures with their message of eternal truth (copyright: Church of Scientology). But if they want to recruit new members so what - what religion doesn't? Nor can one justify the wilder allegations of breaking up families or brainwashing - the two charges regularly flung at cults by that unholy alliance of self-appointed fanatical cult-watchers and tabloids. But the more sober academic analysis vindicates neither. It has proved hard to pin the breakdown of a family relationship solely to membership of the Scientologists; often the relationship was always problematic or the family can't accept this new preoccupation. Scientologists point to their code of ethics, of which number five is "Honour and Help your parents." As for brainwashing, there is no evidence that it is possible to force a set of beliefs on someone who is unwilling. It's a convenient but baseless way of explaining why on earth anyone would become a Scientologist. Because, whatever way you look at it, Scientology to the outsider, appears completely loopy. The 300-odd staff at their Saint Hill Manor headquarters in Sussex wear dark blue naval uniform, complete with chains and epaulettes; they have committed themselves to the Sea Organisation - or the Org, as it is affectionately known - for a billion years. This originates in the passion for sailing of Scientology's founder, Lafayette Ron Hubbard - known as LRH. Equally loopy is the Scientologists' habit of setting aside an office for LRH in each of their churches. The corporate-style nameplate sits on the unused desk beside the unused blotter and unused pens. The door is open, the lights are on, but no one goes beyond the red rope across the threshold. Sure enough, a brand new naval peaked cap - white, gold braid - sits on the desk commensurate with LRH's rank of commodore in the Org. AT Saint Hill, LRH gets two offices: a new one in the lavish medieval- style castle study complex built after his death in 1986 and his original office in the manor which was his home for 20 years. The latter has been left untouched - his old pens, some notes - but the engagement calendar is kept up to date; the week beginning August 12 1996 is, of course, blank. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (13) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Ron's Church 2/2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:64bf 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7efb Everything in Scientology comes back to LRH. The photographs of this tubby short American sci-fi writer are everywhere. The 18th-century Saint Hill Manor is kept in an eerily perfect state as a shrine to the man. Every wooden table and marble mantlepiece gleams with polish, and rooms are delicately perfumed with the fresh-cut roses from the garden LRH used to tend. The study displays a selection of his enormous oeuvre as a writer which extends from pulp fiction in the thirties to sci-fi blockbusters such as Battlefield Earth. LRH is lavishly praised as the Renaissance Man; all his achievements are endlessly detailed. Novelist, film-maker, photographer, musician, artist, educational theorist, management theorist as well as inventor, mariner and criminal reformer. On top of all that, he devised a drug rehabilitation programme, and of course, Scientology, a system of "applied religious philosphy" which he develops in more than 40 books which make up the "scriptures" of Scientology. These are the books which, according to Scientologists "contain the answers that human beings have been looking for for eternity". Scientology is believed to be the summation of all previous religious insight, but it makes great play of being a belief system for the 20th century, and has the apparatus and language which reflects a technological age. This explains the absurd dependence on a machine called the electropsychometer (E-meter) which LRH claimed could scientifically locate and measure pain. Holding two tin cans connected to the meter in your hands, memories of pain translate into electrical currents which allegedly register on a dial. When I held the cans, the needle lurched erratically with no pattern - there were good reasons for that, they told me ominously. The E- meter is used during "auditing" which is a central part of the Scientologists's spiritual path. The belief is that our behaviour is determined by our individual history of pain which causes us to react in a particular way. This is the source of all our human failings and if this pain can be dismantled, the spirit will be cleared to achieve its full potential. In individual sessions a Scientologist talks out his or her problems to a fellow Scientologist whose job is to prompt the talker, and listen without judgment. It sounds much like counselling or psychotherapy, but to a Scientologist such a comparison is heresy. The great fraud of the 20th century has been the psychotherapeutic and psychiatric professions, according to LRH. Where many conspiracy theories orientate around a military-industrial complex, the Scientologists' seem to orientate around a psychiatric-industrial complex. Psychiatrists in league with government are inhibiting human spiritual development and infiltrating society with their poisonous drugs. Apart from auditing, devout Scientologists must study LRH's works. In the oak-panelled study rooms of the castle at Saint Hill, heads are bent over the huge tomes, or are listening on headsets to some of the 2,500 tapes. Scientology claims to make you happier, think more clearly, unleash your full creative potential and achieve more in your career. There are more than 100 courses to take, leading to ever more specialised and rarified fields of Scientology knowledge. It's all laid out in an absurdly complicated table called the "Bridge to Total Freedom," a "classification, gradation and awareness chart of levels and certificates". It is studying and auditing which Travolta claims has helped his career, deepening his insight into himself and others and developing his creativity. Scientology has a strong self-development ethos, claiming to improve your career and relationships, helping you to achieve your goals. Saint Hill last week was hosting a European Arts Festival and the place was teeming with families in painting, drama and music classes. There were Scientologists engrossed in offering counselling on careers or on artistic achievements. It was just the image the Scientologists want to project: harmless, devoted to the well-being of all human beings and family-minded. SO are the Scientologists dangerous? The self-reflection involved in auditing probably can do some good - it's possible to discern some Buddhist principles about the programmed nature of the mind buried in Scientology - and while the studying may seem like a waste of time, it's difficult to see it actually harming people. The concern is that people find themselves caught into a spiral of expensive courses and auditing which is made all the more imperative by its claims to ultimate truth. But perhaps the greatest concern is the nature of Scientologists themselves. After a visit, it is hard not to come away disturbed by their behaviour. The staff in the Org at Saint Hill manor all live on a big estate in Crowborough 13 miles away where their children attend a Scientology school. This is a deeply insular and introverted community which appears to have few normal contacts with the outsiders. That results in wariness. Perhaps after all the adverse publicity, it is not surprising that they are nervous. But they give a very good impression of people with something to hide. The public relations team talk quite happily about LRH or auditing, but their answers have a bland, slippery quality - making extravagant claims, and quoting unheard of "experts" and inaccessible research to support the point - which don't add to their credibility. Questions about their plans to expand or why they get such critical media coverage prompt unconvincingly vague responses. Even quite simple queries can't be answered on the spot but are referred to nameless higher authorities. There's no sign of a sense of humour and not a hint of self-deprecation. They take themselves very, very seriously. Wrapped up in their world of Scientology, they seem to have forgotten how mighty strange they appear to us landlubbers. FOUNDING SPIRIT * The inspiration behind the Church of Scientology is American science fiction writer, L Ron Hubbard (1911-1986) who developed a set of beliefs about the working of the human mind and spirit in Dianetics, published in 1950. He then developed Scientology, a practical philosophy to help people to 'clear' their spirit in a series of books published in the early fifties. * The first Church of Scientology was set up in Los Angeles in 1954. * In 1959, Hubbard bought Saint Hill, a 55-acre estate in East Grinstead, Sussex, where he lived for the next seven years. * The Church of Scientology claims 8 million members worldwide - 100,000 in the UK. * It is registered as a charity in Australia and had an income of pounds 5 million in 1993. Worldwide, its income has been put at pounds 200 million a yearwith another pounds 270 million in assets. * The cost of Scientology courses ranges from pounds 30 for the introductory, to pounds 15,216 for the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course, which takes a year. * Hollywood Scientologists include: Sharon Stone, Nicole Kidman, John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Priscilla Presley, Demi Moore, Shirley Maclaine, Kirstie Alley, Kelly Preston. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (14) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Scientology Critics 1/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:cedd 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7eeb New world war. (critics of Scientology) Byline: David G. Post teaches constitutional, copyright, and cyberspace law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is the co-director of the Cyberspace Law Institute. 04/01/96 Reason Magazine Cancelbunny and Lazarus battle it out on the frontier of cyberspace - and suggest the limits of social contracts. "Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man....It may peradventure be thought there was never such a time nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world; but there are many places where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America...have no government at all, and live at this day in the brutish manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common Power to feare...." -- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 13 (1651) It all sounds like the plot of a (mediocre) science fiction novel: strange beings with names like the Cancelbunny, an 144108, XS4ALL, and Scamizdat, fighting on a battleground with no fixed location any where on earth, using strings of binary digits as their weapons. But science fiction it is not; it is the ongoing battle in cyberspace between the Church of Scientology (CoS) and its critics, the first War - or Warre - in the Age of the Internet. If you want evidence that the Internet may indeed be a place like no other, please read on. And even if you have no interest in anything having to do with "cyberspace," you might wish to hear more of these bizarre doings if you care about the way that politics and law shape (or fail to shape) the way we live. For just as contact with radical new forms of civil society - places with "no government at all" - focused the minds of Hobbes and the other Enlightenment philosophers on the nature of government and political power, so too may contact with this curious new electronic world and its odd new rules of conduct lead us to think anew about what life "without a common Power to keep us in awe" might be like. Depending on whom you ask, Scientology is either a legitimate religion offering followers a route to spiritual enlightenment and salvation, or a fraudulent scam - and, let me say at the outset, I have no opinion as to which characterization is the correct one. What is clear, however, is that relations between adherents and critics have never been pleasant; passions run feverishly high on both sides, and the Scientologists have often been accused of dealing, shall we say, rather harshly with their critics. But at least until July 17, 1991, there was no truly organized opposition to the Scientologists' teachings and tactics, no true community of the disaffected. How could there be? Building an anti-church, after all, takes just about as much administrative and operational savvy, not to mention money, as building a church. But that feature of the landscape changed dramatically on the date mentioned, when a Scientology critic, Scott Goehring, formed a discussion group - alt.religion.scientology - on what is called the Usenet network portion of the Internet. (As a harbinger of complications to come, Goehring forged the return address of the message used to create air.religion. scientology, using the address "miscaviage@flag.sea.org" in an apparent reference to Scientology head David Miscavige.) Suddenly, in the 30 seconds or so that it took Goehring to type out his request, and the $0.05 or so it cost him to transmit that message to the computers responsible for Usenet network configuration, there was a place where the disgruntled can meet to exchange ideas and information - a new community, one of the li literally hundreds of thousands of such communities that have sprung into being on the Internet over the past few years. Alt.religion.scientology indeed became a hotbed of critical commentary on Scientology's teachings and tactics (as well as one of the Internet's most actively used discussion forums, with more than 2,700 postings per week). But things began to get really interesting when some participants in the discussions began appending to their messages long excerpts from - and, on occasion, the full text of - some of Scientology's secret scriptures, known as "the Advanced Technology." CoS followers hold fiercely to the notion that their revered, secret texts must never be disseminated except to the rigorously initiated - that it is, in fact, dangerous to allow people who have not reached a certain stage in their training to view these materials. CoS critics, on the other hand, claim that these documents are a critical part of the public debate about Scientology, and that exposing these documents to public view, with their seemingly bizarre descriptions of alien beings and prehistoric thermonuclear war, will help keep potential adherents out of the Scientologists' clutches. Upon discovering that the Advanced Technology was being freely disseminated across the globe, the CoS's legal staff sprang into action. These texts, they asserted, contain copyrighted materials as well as "trade secrets." Distribution - electronic or otherwise - thus constitutes bald-faced copyright infringement and unlawful misappropriation of confidential information. A number of lawsuits were filed - in Alexandria, Virginia, San Jose, Denver, and Amsterdam - against the individuals allegedly responsible for these postings, against the entities that provide those individuals with connections to the Internet, and even, in one case, against a newspaper (The Washington Post) that published excerpts from one of the sacred texts in its story about the cases. These cases are still pending, likely to drag on toward ultimate resolution for years. These cases, to be sure, raise some difficult and important legal issues. For example, trade secrets are generally defined under U.S. law as any information that gives one a commercial advantage over competitors and as to which reasonable precautions against disclosure have been taken - customer lists, industrial processes, and the like. Can a church even hold trade secrets? Are we prepared to recognize a religion market in which competitors are battling for commercial advantage? Or, to take another example, assume that the CoS holds the copyright to these texts. U.S. copyright law allows the "fair use" of a copyrighted work, including copying and distribution "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, [and] teaching." You may, for example, quote portions of a book in a review without fearing a copyright infringement lawsuit. Can posting these texts to the Internet, in the context of an attempt to generate greater public discussion and awareness of the Scientologists' teachings, be excused on these grounds? The fair use inquiry is a notoriously slippery one, decided by courts on the basis of an ad hoc balancing of various factors, including whether or not the work is being distributed for commercial gain (a factor favoring the Net distributors, who are making copies available at no charge) as well as "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole" (a factor strongly favoring the Scientologists). And finally, should the Internet service providers, who function as the "pipeline" connecting the individual posters to the Internet, be liable for any harm caused by these distributions? On the one hand, they can hardly be asked to monitor all of the thousands or hundreds of thousands of messages that flow through their systems each day to determine whether there is copyright infringement going on in any of them. On the other hand, liability under U.S. copyright law has in the past been broadly applied to intermediaries - bookstores, for example, are liable for infringing material contained in the books they sell, nightclub owners for infringing performances by musicians they have hired, etc. - on the ground that those who profit, however indirectly, from the infringing activities of others should be made to compensate the injured copyright holder. Why should those well-established principles not be applied here? These are questions that courts are likely to be struggling with for some time. The CoS has been largely successful in obtaining favorable preliminary rulings - that the documents do contain trade secrets, that fair use does not permit their posting to the Net, and that the service providers may indeed be liable for these postings - that strike many observers (including this one) as attempts to unthinkingly jam the square peg of existing law into the round hole of the Internet. But this entire episode has significance far beyond the boundaries of these important legal questions. In many ways it is a primer on the way that disputes will be handled in a networked world, on the nature of the anarchy that, in the eyes of many, rules (and may continue to rule) on the Internet, and on just how difficult it will be to exercise any degree of control over this environment using traditional legal tools. Whatever a "law of the Internet" ultimately looks like, it will somehow have to incorporate (at least) four principles that emerge from these battles. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (15) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Scientology Critics 2/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:ce2d 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7eef 1. THERE'S NO THERE THERE. Assume that all of the Scientologists' claims are true, that these documents really are protected under copyright and trade secret law and have been unlawfully posted to alt.religion.scientology. Assume further that some court, in this country or elsewhere, was persuaded that alt.religion.scientology is nothing more than a haven for unlawful activity and that it should be closed down. What then? Alt.religion.scientoiogy is not like, say, a bookstore or some similar physical "place" that can be located, boarded up, and its operators hauled into court; like the Internet itself, it has no owner, no operator, no central computer on which it "lives." Usenet groups like alt.religion. scientology come into existence when someone (like Scott Goehring) sends a proposal to establish the group to the specific newsgroup (named "alt. config") set up for receiving such proposals. The operators of each of the thousands of computer networks hooked up to the Internet are then free to carry, or to ignore, the proposed group. If a network chooses to carry the newsgroup, its computers will be instructed to make the alt.religion. scientology "feed," i.e., the stream of messages posted to alt.religion. scientology arriving from other participating networks, accessible to its users, who can read - and, if they wish, add to - this stream before it is passed along to the next network in the worldwide chain. It's a completely decentralized organism - in technical terms, a "distributed database" - whose content is constantly changing as it moves silently around the globe from network to network and machine to machine, never settling down in any one legal jurisdiction, or on any one computer. Not only is alt.religion.scientology immune from being boarded up, but what the technology giveth, sometimes not even the technology can taketh away. The Scientologists learned this early on, when Helena Kobrin, an attorney for the CoS, issued a "Remove Group" message to alt.config, asserting that alt. religion.scientology should be deleted from the network because a) it had been started by a forged message, b) it misleadingly used the trademarked name "Scientology" in its title, thus implying some official connection to the CoS, and c) it "has been and continues to be heavily abused with copyright and trade secret violations and serves no purpose other than condoning these illegal practices." But trying to stop a Usenet group this way is punching a paper bag; there's no forum in which to make these arguments other than Usenet itself, no central decision maker that can evaluate the validity of those claims and decide whether or not air.religion.scientology should survive. That decision is entirely in the hands of the owners of each of those thousands of computers, most of whom, in this case, simply chose to ignore the request to delete the air.religion.scientology group. 2. ANONYMITY CHANGES EVERYTHING. Many of the documents in question were posted to alt.religion.scientology attached to signed messages from identifiable individuals. Many, on the other hand, arrived in the Usenet feed beating addresses like "an 144108@anon.penet.fi," identifying them as having been transmitted through a well-known Finnish "anonymous remailer." Anonymous remailers like anon.penet.fi operate very simply: If Alice wants to send an anonymous message to Bob (or to alt.religion.scientology), she prepares the message and sends it not to the intended recipient but to the anon.penet.fi address (along with forwarding instructions); the remailer simply strips off all of the information from this message related to Alice (and the machines that Alice used to transmit the message), and it then forwards the message - now containing a "return address" indicating only the remailer from which it came - as instructed. What kind of rules - copyright, trade secret, or any other - can be enforced in a world where individuals can so easily hide their identities? The significance of this question was not lost on CoS officials. In a move that sent shock waves across the Net, many of whose denizens believed that anonymous remailer technology was somehow foolproof, CoS representatives in early 1995 marched in to the offices of the Finnish police and managed to obtain a warrant authorizing the police to search the anon.penet.fi mail logs for the identification information pertaining to an 144108. But while the Finnish police were indeed able to obtain the information they sought from the remailer operator, the Scientologists' tactics here may, inadvertently, simply have speeded up the development of more sophisticated techniques to ensure the security of anonymous messages. By these actions, all Internet users have been made aware that they might want to avoid remailers like anon.penet.fi that retain copies of incoming identification information if they want more protection from the forces of the "real world" in Finland or elsewhere. More important, many of the documents arriving on alt.religion.scientology's doorstep these days - including those coming from the as-yet-unidentified "Scamizdat," an individual (or is it a group of individuals? an arm of some multinational organization?) responsible for a number of postings containing large chunks of the Scientology secret materials - have begun to arrive through a chain of multiple anonymous remailers. This makes it far more difficult to secure the necessary cooperation from local authorities that would be required to trace the messages back to their source(s). And by combining the use of multiple anonymous remailers with use of widely available cryptographic techniques for "scrambling" messages, obtaining identification information becomes even more difficult - approaching, many suggest, complete impossibility. So now those possessing secret Scientology texts they wish to disseminate can, if they wish, avoid the unpleasant prospect of being hauled into court to be made answerable. for their actions, while still accomplishing their goal. As Scamizdat him/her/itself was quoted as saying: "While the Net has its own perpetual struggles among its orthodoxy and revisionists, it strobes into immobility lawyers and money that darken the battles in the ordinary world." Whether or not lawyers are "strobed into immobility" (?), the day of the traditional lawsuit as a means to settle disputes of this kind may indeed be numbered. 3. INFORMATION CAN'T BE CONTROLLED. To be sure, even in the non-virtual world - what MIT Media Lab's Nicholas Negroponte has dubbed "the world of atoms" - information is a pretty slippery quantity. But at least there is a measure of possible control over its dissemination and distribution in a world where newsletters can be seized, printing presses impounded, and bookstores boarded up. Perhaps the most obvious implication of the Scientology War is that on the new global network that measure of control has all but vanished. For example, the Scientologists have been able, on a number of occasions, to obtain court orders allowing them to seize and impound computers on which their allegedly proprietary material was stored. But whatever hardship such actions may impose on the individuals whose machines are taken, the information itself is blissfully undisturbed by assertions of control over physical hard drives and the like, as it continues to speed around the globe unimpeded. Indeed, shortly after the Scientologists were successfully able to impound a number of documents posted through a Dutch Internet Service Provider (known as XS4ALL), those documents - now dubbed the "Anti- Scientology Fact Kit" - appeared on several dozen sites on the World Wide Web, available to all for easy downloading. And if those machines could somehow be made to disappear, new ones would surely take their place. Once information crosses the border into cyberspace, it is uncontrolled and, at least with current technology, uncontrollable; if nothing else, our notion of what constitutes a "secret," trade or otherwise, in this kind of universe is likely to require substantial modification. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (16) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Scientology Critics 3/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:0e7c 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7ef1 4. NEW WEAPONS WILL ARISE. If the weapons that have worked in the past in the ongoing battle to control information flow prove ultimately toothless, the Scientology War has already given us a glimpse of what some of the new weapons might look like. Most primitive is the technique known on the Net as "spamming" - bombarding an area of the Net with an inordinately high number of messages. In the early days of the Scientology War, CoS staffer Elaine Siegel suggested in a memo flooding the Net with positive messages about Scientology as a counter to posted criticism. "Imagine 40 to 50 Scientologists posting on the Internet every few days; we'll just run the SPs" ["suppressive persons," in Scientology lingo] right off the system. It will be quite simple...to make the Internet a safe space for Scientology to expand into." The CoS has denied that this was ever official CoS policy, but in any event the church's critics quickly deployed countermeasures: software programs known as "kill files" that instruct their computers not to display any messages from particular e-mail addresses that may appear in the Usenet feeds, thus making it far more difficult for anyone to enlist an army of spammers trying to disrupt ongoing conversations. Subsequently a more sophisticated series of weapons made its way onto this battleground. The software that allows the Usenet discussions to proceed has a built-in cancellation function, which allows any person posting a message to a Usenet discussion group to send out a subsequent cancel command that propagates around the Usenet network from machine to machine and instructs each participating machine to ignore the user's previously posted message. Designed to allow users to cancel their own postings, this command can be manipulated, by widely available procedures, to allow you to cancel someone else's message, i.e., to forge a cancel command to make it look as though it came from the original poster. And thus it was that in late 1994, postings began to vanish from alt. religion.scientology, occasionally with an explanation that the postings had been "canceled because of copyright infringement." To this day, it is not known who was behind the deployment of these "cancelbots," as they are known. Again, the CoS disclaimed responsibility, and the anti-Scientology crowd began to refer to this anonymous participant simply as the "Cancelbunny," a tongue-in-cheek reference to both the Energizer bunny and to a well-known Net inhabitant, the Cancelmoose, who has taken it upon himself (itself? themselves?) to set up a cancelbot-issuing process to deal with other kinds of spamming incidents. But whoever or whatever the Cancelbunny may be, its efforts were quickly met by the development of yet another software weapon, appropriately dubbed "Lazarus," that resurrects canceled messages (or, more accurately, simply alerts the original poster, and all other participants in the newsgroup, that a specific message has been canceled, leaving it up to the original poster to reinstate the message if he or she was not the party that issued the cancel command). What is happening here? Surely the center of gravity of our law-making and law-enforcement apparatus is shifting away from the familiar rules and instruments that have served us, whether for good or ill, in the world of atoms. That's the polite version. Less politely, cyberspace looks a lot like Hobbes's quasi-mythical construct, the state of nature, where the inhabitants have "no common Power to feare" and where there is "no government at all." Of course, law and an ordered society will emerge from out of the state of nature - or at least so Hobbes (and Locke, and most of the other Enlightenment philosophers) believed - by means of a "social contract" voluntarily entered into by the inhabitants. Indeed, only law that emerges from something resembling this process - only law as to which the "consent of the governed" has been obtained, in Jefferson's phrase - is a truly legitimate exercise of state power. There has always been a strong fictional element to using this notion of a social contract as a rationale for a sovereign's legitimacy. When exactly did you or I consent to be bound by the U.S. Constitution? At best, that consent can only be inferred indirectly, from our continued presence within the U.S. borders - the love-it-or-leave-it, vote-with-your-feet theory of political legitimacy. But by that token, is Saddam Hussein's rule legitimate, as least as to those Iraqis who have "consented" in this fashion? Have the Zairois consented to Mobutu's rule? In the world of atoms, we simply cannot ignore the fact that real movement of real people is not always so easy, and that most people can hardly be charged with having chosen the jurisdiction in which they live or the laws that they are made to obey. But in cyberspace, there is an infinite amount of space, and movement between online communities is entirely frictionless. Here, there really is the opportunity to obtain consent to a social contract. Virtual communities can be established with their own particular rule sets; power to maintain a degree of order and to banish wrongdoers can be lodged, or not, in particular individuals or groups; and those who find the rules oppressive or unfair may simply leave and join another community (or start their own). That potential - not the availability of video on demand, or interactive games, or any of the other technological wonders - is what makes the emergence of cyberspace a truly extraordinary political event. The consent of the governed can move from a theoretical construct to a real principle of governance. No longer will we need to theorize about the content of the laws that people would choose if they were free to do so; the Net will reveal those preferences for us by means of the invisible hand of a worldwide open market for laws, with communities competing for our adherence. So if the inhabitants of air.religion.scientology want to have a community where copyright is ignored, why should we interfere, since anyone who finds that notion unattractive can simply remain outside its borders and move to other communities - the Microsoft Network, say - where other, more protective rules are in place? The answer, of course, is well illustrated by the Scientology War itself. After all, the Scientologists were not willing participants in this community. They did not choose to post their documents to alt.religion.scientology subject to this community's rules. In other words, each community's rules will have some spillover effects on the inhabitants of other communities, both within and without the boundary between cyberspace and the world of atoms. Sovereigns wielding power in the real world do not and cannot permit individuals from within other jurisdictions to lob explosives over their borders, and it is too facile to believe that they will permit these virtual communities to do so either. Cyberspace may indeed be difficult for territorially based authorities to control, but we court danger, and put this remarkable experiment in political life at risk, if we assume that it is impossible to control from within the non-virtual world. We have managed to stave off the Orwellian nightmare up to this point, but it is by no means foreordained that we can continue to do so. Cyberspace must, in short, take its place among the community of nations. This will require the development of a degree of mutual recognition and respect on both sides of the border between the world of atoms and the world of bits. Existing sovereigns must defer to the inhabitants of this new place regarding those matters in which the legitimate and unique interests of those inhabitants are paramount; it is the inhabitants of cyberspace, after all, who are in the best position to determine the varying shapes of a copyright law that can truly take account of the strange features of this new informational landscape. Any attempt to require slavish adherence to a copyright law designed for physical objects in an atom-bound world should be fiercely resisted. But the inhabitants of cyberspace, too, must develop mechanisms to recognize and respect the legitimate interests of individuals outside their borders. The challenge is clear and almost overwhelmingly complex, but we cannot fail to meet it lest we lose this opportunity, which may be unique in human history, to design a world in which people are finally free to live their lives as they see fit. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (17) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Scientology in Europe 1/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:e751 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7ef3 Making Waves: Scientologists Face Stormy Passage in Bid For European Growth --- Church and Followers Spark Skepticism and State Bans; Big Case Lost in France --- Applying for Religious Status By Shailagh Murray 2915 Words 11/25/96 The Wall Street Journal Europe COPENHAGEN -- Here at the European headquarters of the Church of Scientology, there is a large window at street level that looks into a small brightly lit room. A cross between an executive office and a shrine, it is reserved for founder L. Ron Hubbard, the American science-fiction writer and selfhelp guru who died a decade ago at age 74. This museum-like display includes shelves filled with leather-bound Scientology texts and a gold-braided yachtsman's cap -- Mr. Hubbard loved sailing and sometimes is referred to as the Commodore. A desk holds engraved stationery, fresh-cut red roses and a calendar opened to the current date. No doubt the date Nov. 22 will figure prominently in Scientology's European history. Last Friday, a French court convicted a former Lyon Scientology official of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the 1988 suicide of a man whom prosecutors had argued was under pressure to spend 30, 000 French francs ($5,905) on Scientology services. The church official, Jean- Jacques Mazier, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, an 18-month suspended sentence and was fined 500,000 francs. Fourteen church officials and other defendants were given suspended sentences on charges related to the case. A further eight individuals were acquitted. The ruling is yet another sign that while the controversial, Los Angeles- based Church of Scientology has made plenty of waves in the U.S., it looks to be headed for a much stormier passage in Europe. The group's determined push to gain acceptance as a legitimate religion on this side of the Atlantic is finding a Continent at best skeptical and at worst hostile to its unusual pitch for salvation. The church has encountered fierce resistance in Germany, and Friday's court ruling gives some idea of the reception in France. The French parliament has labeled Scientology a cult, and the government includes the church among 172 non-traditional religions or sects that it keeps tabs on. "It was a political trial and a political decision," says an obviously distressed Martin Weightman, director of Scientology's human-rights office in Brussels. He blames the church's French troubles in part on a backlash from last December's mass suicide of members of the Order of the Solar Temple in the French Alps. "We've gotten caught up in a hysteria," sighs Mr. Weightman, "and the court didn't have the integrity to admit it." Yet he vows his church will persevere. And by all appearances, Scientology in Europe has the organizational strength, financial resources and sales and marketing acumen to survive the ongoing barrage of problems. It has launched English-language newspaper and television advertisements and shown an uncharacteristic readiness to grant outsiders access to facilities and information. The group recently filed a formal application in Britain, its strongest European market, to attain tax-free religious status (recognition it took decades to establish in the U.S.). Scientology hopes to be the second recognized British religion, after Buddhism, that doesn't worship a god. Meanwhile, the church's complaints of human-rights violations, especially relating to a tough crackdown in Germany, are resonating with civil libertarians as well as with the United Nations and the U.S. State Department. Both have spoken out in the church's defense. A sort of postindustrial Buddhism, Scientology is at once a form of therapy, a business strategy, a lifestyle ethos, and a creed. To reach enlightenment, followers work across "The Bridge to Total Freedom" through intense counseling called "auditing." They pay fees for each step, or roughly $100,000 for the full journey. With its emphasis on self-improvement, futuristic lingo and nautical trappings that include blue, mock-navy uniforms and courses aboard the Freewinds, a church-owned cruise ship, Scientology is in many ways as American as fast food or Hollywood -- and about as incongruous in Europe, where religion tends to be defined far more narrowly. "Scientology doesn't look like a religion in terms of its language and activities," says Bryan Wilson, emeritus sociology professor at Oxford University and an expert in minor religions. Prof. Wilson has studied the movement for a quarter-century, and Scientology has submitted his and other experts' conclusions that it should be considered a legitimate religion to the Lyon court and to British charity authorities who are considering the group's pending application. "It's very rational and modern," Prof. Wilson continues. "Its techniques are not dissimilar from those of a secular movement. But it's certainly a religion that people can follow." To be sure, the debate in Europe turns on far more than Scientology's religious credibility. The organization has been dogged for years by criminal charges, tax problems and accusations of financial mismanagement. Over the years, it has been the target of multiple book and newspaper exposes, including a lengthy Time magazine cover story in 1991 that called the church a "global racket." Time recently agreed to settle a libel suit brought by one Scientologist whose financial activities were detailed in the article. The Church of Scientology International is appealing a U.S. court's dismissal of its own separate suit against Time. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (18) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Scientology in Europe 2/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:e7a1 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7ef5 The group's many critics include government and law-enforcement officials, former members, and sociologists and other academic experts. British authorities took such a dim view of the group in the late 1960s that they banned Mr. Hubbard and all foreign Scientologists from entering the country, a prohibition only lifted under the Thatcher government. Many observers continue to view Scientology as a self-help cult that has adopted the mantle of religion for tax purposes and to obscure what these critics regard as its real aim: collecting auditing fees from vulnerable people. Scientology reports a world-wide following of about eight million people, compared with over one billion Roman Catholics and about 240 million atheists. Yet after nearly four decades in Europe, it remains a small movement here centered around a devoted inner core. The Church of Scientology International operates 127 missions and 58 churches in Europe, including Russia, and sells between 8,800 and 10,100 books, cassette packages, and other basic products per week. Like the base in Denmark, every major outpost has an "office" for Mr. Hubbard. "It's just to put his presence here," says Scientology's European director of public affairs, Gaetane Asselin, as she stands at the office's roped-off doorway in the Copenhagen headquarters. "It's a mark of respect." About 8,000 people visit the European network every week for a free lecture or film. But the sites sell only 850 to 900 introductory courses each week, at a cost of about $60 apiece. The organization doesn't report how many people advance to the later, more costly stages of auditing. After the U.K., where the church reports a membership of 100,000, France is Scientology's second-largest European market, with 40,000 members, followed by Germany, with 30,000 members. But as with any religion, far fewer people practice regularly. In Denmark for instance, the church reports 14,000 official followers. But organization officials say that just 1,000 Danes participate in advanced Scientology courses and other services that require a larger commitment of money and time. Many of the true believers have made Scientology their careers. About 450 Scientologists work for the Copenhagen headquarters, and 250 are employed at a Sussex, England, complex that is the main office and study center for the U. K. A total of 3,853 Scientologists work at the European missions and churches. These employees receive auditing for reduced rates or for free. The big growth market is Russia, where Scientology has opened 45 missions since 1993. The group estimates that just in Moscow, it sells up to 1,200 copies per week of Scientology's founding text, "Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health," by Mr. Hubbard. Nearly 900 Scientologists work for the Russian centers, which deliver only limited services. But that will change as Scientology texts are translated, an exercise now being tackled by 25 Russian-speaking Scientologists in Copenhagen. Scientology promises practical results, from improving intelligence to bolstering self-confidence to relieving illness and pain. Members say they are attracted by the orderly progression of auditing -- and the promise of concrete answers to the mysteries of life. Celebrity members include American actors John Travolta and Tom Cruise and Elvis Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie. Its world-wide rank-and-file is an impressive assortment ranging from doctors and investors to lawyers and musicians. In France, a recent academic study of the group found the majority of French Scientologists are married men between 26 years and 41 years old; they have children, live in cities, are highly educated, and work in management, the arts or as small business owners. The story of Mr. Weightman is a typical Scientology odyssey. Twenty years ago the human-rights director was an aimless English lad with the usual counterculture obsessions: drugs and the latest cool bands. "I was lost, totally," he says. Then he learned that a favorite music act, the Modern String Band, practiced Scientology. That inspired him to buy "Dianetics" and begin auditing. Eventually he signed a symbolic one-billion-year contract as a member of Scientology's elite "Sea Org" (or Organization), which acts as the church hierarchy. His long hair and beard have given way to a clean shave and dark suits, and today Mr. Weightman looks like any of the lobbyists who roam European capitals in droves. "They attract a lot of socially ambitious people who haven't quite made it in the orthodox channels," Prof. Wilson explains. "I think it's seen as another way forward for intelligent people, mainly in their 20s and 30s. In this sense, [Scientology] is not to be underestimated." Mr. Hubbard saw promise in Europe early. In 1959, he bought Saint Hill Manor in Sussex, and through 1966 he conducted advanced courses for Scientology instructors on the property of the 18th-century estate. All told, Scientology's "scriptures," originating from Mr. Hubbard, total 500,000 pages of writing, 3,000 recorded lectures and over 100 films. Down the lane from Saint Hill is a sprawling new castle complex, complete with turrets, that the church built for study and training. As in Copenhagen, people hurry about purposefully, loaded down with books and worksheets and toting "E-meters," or electropsychometers, a Hubbard invention that works like a lie detector and indicates patterns of fear, pain, or other mental barriers. When one clutches the E-meter's two metal cylinder attachments, the needle waves about in ways that only Scientology auditors can read. Touted by Scientologists as a visionary genius, dismissed by critics as an egomaniac and a fraud, Mr. Hubbard was the epitome of an American self-made man. Born in 1911, he was the son of a U.S. Naval officer and traveled as a teenager through parts of Asia, where he learned of Eastern religion and philosophy. He later studied voodoo and other indigenous Caribbean rituals. Mr. Hubbard dropped out of university to become a prolific, if mediocre, writer of popular fiction -- mainly fantasy and science fiction -- turning out 200 novels, stories, and screenplays between 1934 and 1950. On May 9, 1950, Mr. Hubbard's book "Dianetics" was released in the U.S. Panned by the American medical and mental-health communities, it became a runaway best seller and made Mr. Hubbard rich and famous. The portly, red- haired entrepreneur soon parlayed "Dianetics" into sequels, lectures, training courses and eventually, in the mid-1950s, into the "applied religious philosophy" of Scientology. Two thick glossaries are required to sort through the arcane jargon of Dianetics and Scientology, but the basic tenet is that people (thetans) can realize their full potential (become clear) once they conquer negative thoughts and experiences. Where traditional religions might offer inner peace or happiness, Scientology holds that the state of clear will give the operating thetan control over his life and his environment. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (19) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Scientology in Europe 3/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:27f0 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7ef7 Money seems to play a central role in both the process and the criticism of Scientology. Many critics say the church shows little charity when it comes to its costly auditing. Church officials say scholarships and reductions are available. But former Scientologists in the U.S. and Europe attest to spending and even borrowing small fortunes to continue along the Bridge. In the French court case, the family of Patrice Vic claimed the 31- year-old man's desperation to continue auditing -- along with urgings by the church to come up with the 30,000 francs -- led him to jump from a window to his death in March 1988. On the other hand, Scientologists in less-receptive countries say government pressures on the group have cost them more than any auditing course. Carl Rohrig, a Hamburg artist, says he's lost count of the canceled exhibits, television appearances and commissions for his surrealist-style paintings, all because he is a Scientologist. One recent year he tallied up 600,000 marks ($400,534) in lost income, and overall, he says, the affiliation has cut his earnings by about half. Two of his paintings were returned by a prominent German entertainer after a magazine falsely reported that the entertainer was a Scientologist. Mr. Rohrig's bank inserts a notification of his Scientology connection whenever it releases copies of his financial records. He and his wife have even opted to send their three children to a Scientology school across the border in Denmark so that they can study without being harassed by other kids. The 43-year-old artist joined the movement in the mid-1970s and estimates he has spent 150,000 marks working his way along the Bridge. But despite everything, he insists he has no regrets. "It works for me," Mr. Rohrig says simply. "It has helped me personally, in communicating and reaching out to people, and so I've stayed." The secular facade of Scientology does make it an easy target for critics. There is no vow of poverty -- or even a nod to understatement -- about the Copenhagen headquarters or Saint Hill. The Sussex estate, with its fine carpets, overstuffed chairs and terraced gardens, is the picture of English country grandeur. The newly refurbished Copenhagen building is sleek, polished and better-furnished than the headquarters of many large companies. New Scientologists are not so much converted as recruited. Members receive undisclosed commissions for signing up newcomers, and some do work in body routing full time. Mrs. Asselin, the publicaffairs dirctor in Copenhagen, says there are "games and awards" to encourage growth at each church, and each is expected to be self-supporting. Posters pitch advanced auditing courses as if they were newly released movies: "Shatter the Darkness: Do New OT I." Or "Penetrate the Wall of Fire: Do OT III." The "OT" stages are part of advanced auditing and are available at limited sites. OT VIII, the final step for an operating thetan, is administered only on the Scientology ship, Freewinds. The group has secular interests in Europe, including numerous Narconon drug-rehabilitation centers and literacy programs in France, Denmark and Switzerland. Mr. Hubbard's volumes of management and administration theory are used by Scientologist-owned consulting firms. Church officials say that hundreds of mainly small European companies work according to Mr. Hubbard's techniques. The slim Hubbard book "The Way to Happiness," billed as a "commonsense guide to better living," has been distributed to Russian police officers and placed alongside Bibles in some hotel rooms. Norwegian Scientologist Dan- Viggo Bergtun, who shared a 1988 Noble Prize as a U.N. Middle East peacekeeper, says he is trying to have the book distributed to the Norwegian army by early next year. He also is urging the Norwegian Education Ministry to adopt Mr. Hubbard's teaching techniques. Scientology's many critics charge that in all such efforts, from auditing to drug rehabilitation, the church has only one end in mind. "The point is money, money, money -- and with it more power and influence," declares Manfred Beeres, spokesman for the German Christian Democratic party in Rhineland-Palatinate. Scientology's push into social services, education and business management is viewed by many German leaders as an effort to infiltrate and manipulate the unsuspecting masses. "We're dealing in a criminal organization, not a church," insists Mr. Beeres. Church officials call such allegations ridiculous. "Of course what's going on is that old, established religions in Germany and elsewhere are losing members, and they're blaming us," says Janet Weiland, vice president of the Church of Scientology International in Los Angeles. "But come on -- we have 30,000 members in Germany. It's hardly our fault." German states, especially conservative Bavaria, are under increasing outside pressure to ease up on the group. In reviewing Germany's adherence to the U.N.'s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, an evaluation committee raised concerns early this month that certain states are disqualifying Scientologists from public-sector jobs and are holding "sensitizing" sessions to warn judges against the practices of designated sects like Scientology. During the summer, when Tom Cruise's film "Mission: Impossible" was the target of an attempted boycott in Germany, a U.S. State Department spokesman criticized the move, saying, "we have some ongoing concerns about the treatment of Scientology in Germany." But the church may have miscalculated with a series of newspaper ads comparing its plight in Germany to religious persecution under 1930s Nazi rule. "We are outraged by the language" of the ads, the State Department spokesman said later. Gaby Brager, a Bavarian Scientologist, is doing her best to blank out all the controversy and stay focused on the Bridge. The architecture firm where she worked as a secretary recently fired her because one of the partners was worried about her loyalties. Mrs. Brager has been arrested seven times for body routing on the streets of Karlsruhe, her hometown. "As soon as we get into court, it's no problem. The judge always throws out the case," says Mrs. Brager, during a break from auditor training in Copenhagen. "The whole thing doesn't really bother me. It just takes a lot of time." -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (20) Sat 2 Aug 97 19:21 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: The Scientology Problem ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:c658 23029aa0 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000320b0 The Scientology Problem 03/25/97 The Wall Street Journal As no doubt befits a society founded by Pilgrims, America has a long tradition of controversial movements maturing to success, whether Mormons or Christian Scientists or Jehovah's Witnesses. Today, the latest cult forcing itself to our attention is the Church of Scientology. Scientology was founded in the early 1950s by L. Ron Hubbard, a science fiction writer. He fashioned a creation myth around Xenu, who froze and transported thetan souls to volcanoes in Teegeeack, now earth. The creed holds that humans have repressed memories of thetan life, or "engrams" and need to be "cleared" through "auditing," with the help of an "e-meter," a primitive lie detector. Adherents, including movie celebrities Tom Cruise and John Travolta, find this helps their personal lives and engenders religious conviction. Scientology is currently demanding acceptance throughout the world, mostly on the basis of a 1993 Internal Revenue Service ruling extending it 501(c)3 tax- exempt status. The State Department's human rights report, an ad by Hollywood figures and others have berated Germany over persecution of Scientologists. Other sects have also started with odd theology and behavior; is Scientology now traveling the road to respectability? --- Conceivably so, though the Scientologists have more history than most to live down, most of it written in court decisions here and abroad. Scientology performs its "auditing" and "clearing" according to a schedule of set fees. Those who are "cleared" at one level go on to the next with further training and further fees. To many authorities, not to mention alienated former Scientologists, Mr. Hubbard's creation looks a lot like the business of personal counseling or psychiatry (to which Scientology also raises theological objection). There have been repeated reports that Mr. Hubbard told his science-fiction colleagues that the way to get rich is to found a religion. In Church of Scientology of California v. Commissioner (1984), indeed, the U. S. Tax Court found that for the tax years 1970 to 1972 the California "mother church" was not tax-exempt "because it operated for a substantial commercial purpose and because its net earnings benefit L. Ron Hubbard, his family, and OTC, a private noncharitable corporation controlled by key Scientology officials." Millions of dollars were held in "trust" in Swiss bank accounts, and the court found, "The circumstances of this trust are just too bizarre to credit its validity." The tax court also found that for eight years prior to a 1977 FBI raid on the church's offices, it perpetrated a conspiracy involving "manufacturing and falsifying records to present to the IRS, burglarizing IRS offices and stealing Government documents, and subverting Government processes for unlawful purposes." Mary Sue Hubbard, the founder's wife, and ten other Scientologists served jail terms after conviction of a conspiracy involving break-ins and electronic eavesdropping at IRS offices. A long legal struggle between the Scientologists and the IRS started in 1967, when tax authorities revoked a previous tax exemption on the grounds that the organization operated for the benefit of Mr. Hubbard. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider appeal of revocation of tax exemption in 1988, but evidentiary and procedural issues involving the IRS and Scientology reached the High Court in 1987, 1989 and 1992. The Supreme Court did rule on a basic issue in Hernandez v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, (1989). It held 5-2 that payments for auditing sessions were not charitable contributions or otherwise tax-deductible. Two dissenters observed that in this case IRS litigation strategy was not to contest the issue of whether Scientology was a religion or commercial enterprise. They found the auditing payments similar to tithing or pew rents; the five majority Justices did not. --- Scientology also had poor luck with libel suits. "In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner," concluded an article by Richard Behar in Time magazine. In 1996, a judge threw out the last count of the church's libel suit against Time, saying "no reasonable jury could find that [the statements] were published with actual malice" -- that is, the intent to harm required when a libel plaintiff is a public figure. Similarly, Mitchell Daniels, an executive of Eli Lilly & Co., prevailed in a libel action. Following its anti-psychiatry theology, the church had supported lawsuits against Lilly contending that its anti-depressant drug Prozac induced patients into suicide and other aberrant behavior. Mr. Daniels was quoted as telling the editorial board of USA Today: "One thing we want you to understand is that the Church of Scientology is no church. It's a commercial enterprise. Every judge and every investigative journalist who has ever looked at it has come away with that conclusion. It is organized for only one purpose, which is to make money." The court held that this statement may not be strictly accurate as a matter of law, but that under the standard of actual malice, "it is impossible to conclude that Daniels entertained serious doubts as to the truth of his statement or spoke with a high degree of provable falsity." --- In October of 1993, however, the IRS reversed the position it had defended for a quarter-century, issuing 30 tax-exemption letters covering more than 150 Scientology enterprises. David Miscavige, chairman of the church's Religious Technology Center, led a rally at the Los Angeles Sports Arena declaring, "The war is over!" And, "Our road to infinite expansion is now wide open." The IRS has refused to explain its change of heart, claiming tax confidentiality. In an attempt to elucidate the tax law, Tax Analysts, publishers of Tax Notes, filed a still-pending Freedom of Information action three years ago. While the tax exemption ruling came in the first year of the Clinton administration, the process had started two years earlier. An exhaustive investigation by Douglas Frantz of the New York Times found that a special committee had been chartered in the Bush administration by Commissioner Fred Goldberg. The ultimate settlement also ended the Scientologists' litigation against the IRS and its individual agents. IRS Whistleblowers, a Scientology- backed organization, had also succeeded in exposing IRS abuses. --- Mr. Hubbard died in 1986, transferring copyrights to his work and thus the principal assets of the religion to Mr. Miscavige's Religious Technology Center. The Scientologists promote anti-drug and anti-crime efforts, but even in the post-Hubbard era have been a magnet for controversy. For one thing, they are confronting the Internet, using copyright and other laws to inhibit their critics, who gather in a discussion group called alt. religion.scientology. Scientologists have succeeded with U.S. copyright suits against the posting of secret Hubbard texts, but have angered the Internet community. The texts keep appearing, for example on a Norwegian site calling itself Operation Clambake. Further litigation is currently under way in San Jose and Denver, with the patience of presiding jurists being tested by both Scientologists and "netizens." Internet defendants are now challenging the validity of the copyrights, and seeking to depose the secretive Mr. Miscavige about the circumstances of their transfer. The Scientologists have had more success in their battle with the Cult Awareness Network. A lawyer who is a Scientologist represented a group that bought the key assets of the CAN from a bankruptcy trustee. The CAN declared bankruptcy following a damage award to Jason Scott, an unwilling deprogramming subject. Though Mr. Scott is not a Scientologist, he was represented at the time by an attorney who is a Scientologist. Mr. Scott now has another lawyer, however, who complains that his interests were not served by the bankruptcy because his prospects of collection would have been better if it had remained in business. Finally, Scientology is also in a controversy over the death of one of its members in Clearwater, Florida, in 1995. Lisa McPherson, 36, was detained by paramedics after she took off her clothes following a minor traffic accident. In lieu of psychiatric treatment, doctors released her to fellow Scientologists; 17 days later she died en route to another hospital where the staff included a Scientologist physician. Joan Wood, the medical examiner for Pinellas and Pasco counties, found that Ms. McPherson died of a blood clot induced by "severe dehydration and bed rest," and Ms. McPherson's estate has filed a wrongful death suit in Tampa. Scientologists say that the death is an innocent tragedy, and charge that the issue is being exploited by local officials angry over the church's presence in Clearwater. The McPherson story, first reported by Cheryl Waldrip of the Tampa Tribune and quickly picked up by the St. Petersburg Times, has become a local cause celebre. --- We certainly hope that the Scientologists finally win the respectability they seek, though we note that the Mormons did abandon polygamy and the Jehovah's Witnesses no longer beseech potential converts by setting up loudspeakers on their lawns. In the meantime, we wonder why the State Department is so exercised over German statements that would be protected by U.S. libel law, indeed, over a German position that was the U.S. position until the current administration. And we certainly think the IRS should share with the rest of us whatever persuaded it that money from the disturbed seeking solace is no longer being siphoned off into bank accounts in Switzerland. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (21) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Unworthy Scientology 1/2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:1239 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7efd Scientology is as worthy of belief as Christianity or Judaism. True or false? Byline: Andrew Brown 08/27/96 The Independent - London I think I've got the dawkins; pray for me. It is a terrible condition, named after the distinguished atheist. This is not the ordinary cafard which descends like a cloud of ravening horseflies when I am trying to pay attention to an archbishop's thoughts. It is not even the sense of being stuck in a tumble drier half full of rocks that overwhelms me when I read papal encyclicals all the way through and try to follow their logic. It is worse than that. The full-blown dawkins is the state where there seems nothing to choose between any religion. They are all insane, all untrue - they might as well all be Aztecs. The Aztecs make a wonderful subject for a student of religion since - nowadays - they have neither temples, priests, nor libel lawyers. They never had much use for libel lawyers anyway, preferring stone knives, with which they chopped out the hearts of anyone who displeased them. It was quite an elaborate ceremony and would not nowadays get past the animal rights people if you were nasty enough to perform it on a veal calf. Yet the Aztecs were undoubtedly sincere in believing that if they did not perform the ceremony every day, the sun would refuse to rise. And they undoubtedly had experiences that validated their beliefs. They were certain that God wanted them to do these things. Is there any rational reason for supposing they were wrong? If one of my children announced that they were becoming an Aztec fundamentalist, how could I argue that I would prefer him to become a Buddhist, a Christian or Muslim instead? When I have the dawkins, I believe that there is no rational argument to make; that religions are simply beliefs that people catch, and there can be no reasonable grounds to choose one over any other. This is not to say there are no reasons for seeing some religions as more desirable than others: there are rational, anthropological arguments to be made from the side effects, so to speak, of certain religious beliefs. The Hindu peasant who believes his bullock is sacred will not kill it however bad the famine, and thus may be able to plough when the drought finally ends, whereas his more rational neighbour, who ate the bullock, will starve in the end because he cannot plough. Thus do the gods reward those who follow them. Even the Aztecs, as the anthropologist Marvin Harris pointed out, had a very ecologically sound religion. Central America in their time had no sources of animal protein larger than a guinea-pig; and though their god might get the prisoners' hearts, which were burned, the rest of the sacrificed carcass went to feed the soldiery. This protein bonus kept them motivated, as well as strong: the chief source of sacrifices was captured enemy prisoners, so any soldier on this diet will have known that surrender really was the option of the last resort. However, the Aztec religion did not survive competition with Christianity. This is not just because flint weapons are no match for firearms. It was also because the Aztec church could not survive disestablishment. Without coercion, people found it unconvincing. So here is one clue as to how we might discriminate between religions: those that have lasted longest and in the most varied circumstances are likely to have something to recommend them, even if it is not immediately apparent what. Religions do compete and do disappear. It is one of the oddest things about them. The disappearance is obvious: the Aztecs, the Romans, the Greeks, even the druids, have all gone. We do not really know what they believed, or how they believed it; only what they did. Almost everywhere that belief in many gods met belief in one god, monotheism triumphed. This pattern is odd. It suggests that religious beliefs do refer to some kind of metaphysical reality. The monotheistic religions have also struggled with each other. All have developed rational arguments to keep the waverers within the fold, and to convert unbelievers. St Thomas Aquinas's great summary of the Christian religion was written as the Summa contra Gentiles: an argument against the Muslims. In fact all the great religions that we now see have been shaped by competition with others. All of them can give good reasons why the choice of religious belief can be made reasonably and is important. And yet, when one has the dawkins, all these reasons look ridiculous. The mere existence of interminable disputes seems to guarantee that there is something profoundly wrong about all the arguments. This mood need last no longer than it takes to look at some real examples. Even within religions it is impossible to suspend judgement. An attitude of impartial and indiscriminate scorn cannot long survive contact with Ian Paisley or Morris Cerullo. Surely there must be Christians better than this. Compare the Dalai Lama with the staring-eyed cultists of some Western Buddhist sects, and there is no doubt which is the better Buddhist. I even have a soft spot for the late Ayatollah Khomeini, ever since I read his letter attempting to convert President Gorbachev to Islam. It was remarkably persuasive, lucid, and reasonably argued. Indeed, my own problem with Islamic fundamentalists is that they put too much faith in logic and expect the world to be more consistent than it actually is. Their arguments are by no means insane. If anything, the fault is that they lack the paradoxical quality which any explanation of the real world would seem to demand. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (22) Sun 3 Aug 97 6:33 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Unworthy Scientology 2/2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:12c9 23033420 @MSGID: 1:278/15 000c7eff But it is almost always a mistake to judge any religion by the apparent sanity of the things it asks us to believe. Otherwise there would be no way of distinguishing between, say, orthodox Judaism and scientology. The two are not yoked together entirely by chance. As the scientologists are pointing out every chance they get at the moment, both have been persecuted by Germans this century. But to make this claim involves a wilful blindness to the distinction between democratic and totalitarian governments. There is no evidence that the German authorities at the moment are behaving unjustly. None the less, there is clearly a considerable revulsion against scientology at all levels of German political life. The German post bank is refusing to handle deposits from the cult; various local authorities are refusing to allow contracts to go to businesses controlled by scientologists; the youth wing of the Christian Democratic Union organised demonstrations outside the film Mission:Impossible because its star, Tom Cruise, is a scientologist; the German minister of employment has announced that his country is at war with "the giant octopus of scientology". The German foes of scientology are claiming that its beliefs are so absurd it cannot be a religion. The scientologists claim, with neutral academic backing, that they are a religion, so their beliefs cannot be absurd. Both are wrong. To become a senior scientologist you have to believe, or pretend to believe, that we are all reincarnated alien spirits, persecuted by the ghosts of previous incarnations, which attach themselves to us in the form of body hairs. One can see why the organisation regards the psychiatric profession as a hostile conspiracy. On the other hand, to become Chief Rabbi one must believe, or pretend to believe, that Moses wrote the entire Pentateuch under dictation from God, including the bits where his own death is mentioned. We cannot distinguish between these two belief systems on the point of probability. Longevity is a better bet. The Cambridge theologian Professor John Bowker refers to the great religions as "well-winnowed". This is a way of saying that they address unchanging human concerns and come up with answers that remain realistic. A new religion tends to argue first that it is true, and second that its adherents prosper. A really confident sect will argue the second point first and loudest, as evangelical Christianity and scientology do now. But they only become trustworthy after they have abandoned the second point almost entirely. Under the stress of time and chance and suffering, religions change, and sometimes quite radically. Sometimes this is because of conflicts within their own belief systems, where contradictions suddenly appear. Christianity accepted slavery for most of its history, and had good biblical reasons for doing so. When finally it became apparent to Christians - and it was overwhelmingly Christians who ended the slave trade - that the biblical defences of slavery could not be reconciled with other parts of the gospel message, then slavery went. A similar thing now is happening to Christianity and patriarchy, something which would have come as unwelcome news to the great majority of saints through the ages. Orthodox Judaism, too, though it may reject historical criticism, has survived a much greater shock in its time; the final destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in AD70 and its replacement by scattered synagogues. Some such crisis is essential to the maturity of religions. Who can doubt that Judaism is better and richer now without the Temple - and that anyone who expects the Temple to be rebuilt, as prophesied, is probably looking forward to a nuclear war, since its remains are buried beneath the second holiest site in the Muslim world. The dangers that bad religions can produce show that we must distinguish between good and bad religions. But how can we? I think we must turn to a second sort of evidence, written in the lives of the believers. Religions all carry an ethical freight. They are injunctions to behave as well as to believe, and, in so far as the two can be disentangled, the behaviour is probably more important than the beliefs. But they cannot be very far disentangled. To a large extent the behaviour is the meaning of the belief. A Pharisaic injunction like "love your neighbour as yourself" cannot be properly understood without being acted on. The action shows you have understood it. By contrast, the action that shows you believe and have understood doctrines of scientology is to hand over money to the heirs of L Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer who made it all up. I think I can see which religion is more reasonable. The dawkins have quite gone away now, thank you. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001