What I meant is: Nobody is forced to take the first "test". People get there deliberatly. It's not like they're breaking down your door someday and "make" you take that personality test and the first "lesson". People CHOOSE to do that. Even after all the garbage they "teach" there has been made public long ago already. That's what I just can't understand.

I don't understand that either.... there is absolutely no spiritual gratification as far as I can see.... and yea, they verge on attacking you when you go to register, but you don't have to plunk down that 300 bucks and say "Alright, I'm in".

Well, for one thing, celebrities are treated far differently than everyone else and, secondly, Tom Cruise is a *dirty word* looney toon.

Celebrities have to be treated differently. Afterall, they're the "bait".

I guess everyday people are attracted to it for the same reason they are attracted to religion in general. Insecurities, wanting to get answers to the bigger questions in life, loneliness, fear of death, desire to belong to a group etc. Scientology might look to them as different and perhaps exciting, and when they "advertise" that they can solve all your problems, then, I guess it is not that hard to get new blood, I am sorry, I meant new people, in.

I have my own chirch its called the "patriot chirch". So all you americans who think you are patriots should give me $200 money and ill buy you a very neat book!
That way you will get even more patriotic!
After that you will have to send me even more cash to show your level of partio-atism(wow at word). The more money you send the better you are.
..... or do you support Osama.....no? then send me money :)

etc etc etc


(disclaimer using patrioatism as an example to get ehm... ah whatever its an example ffs!)

I'm always weary of religion bashing sites, mainly because it's hard to differentiate between ones that are only speaking lies, and ones are are actually telling the truth.

I run into a lot of Anti-Mormon websites all the time, most of which are either exagerations on the truth, things taken out of context, or simply not true. I always sites that speak badly of religions (no matter how bizzare they may seem) with a grain of salt, so I usually try to talk to a member of the religion directly. With Scientology however, this is very hard to do beacuse they get very very very very very very very secretive. My friend used to talk to me about what he knew, but now he won't really talk about it at all.

ALUCARD!!!!!!

Tom cruise is a gimp =)

Scientology is like that. It is so wierd that you have to assume that the statements are lies. However, if you dig a little deeper, it gets too wierd for anyone to make up this stuff. The OT3 account of the Xenu incident is available on the web, as a scan of Hubbard's original handwritten copy. We know that it is in Hubbard's hand, because CoS lawyers have been complaining about it violating copyright. Unfortunately for them, it is not the complete OT3 document, so webbing it falls under the fair use of quoting sections of a larger work for the purposes of criticism.

Scientologists do not talk to non-scientologists, all that much. Even knowing someone who is not a scientologist can be expensive. If a scientologist knows someone who expresses doubts about scientology, it can be a cause for failure to make case gain, which costs more money to deal with by $125/hour auditing. The only way to stop a doubting acqaintance from costing a scientologist thousands of dollars is to disconnect from them.

Scientology practices work (or so Hubbard would have people believe), so if you do a rundown and are not a more able person as a result of it, it is because of some buried incident that you have not admitted, even to yourself. The only way to handle it is to get enough auditting to uncover the incident and then redo the rundown (at the higher levels, this runs to hundreds of thousands of dollars). The point of this is that Scientology maintains that all of your problems with scientology are your own fault, and the only way to handle it is to spend even more money.

Why do cults flourish and why do so many actors and musicians flock to scientology? Some people have a positive need for attention. You show up at a scientology org and you are immediately lavished with attention. If you are not an attention junkie, you run away (screaming is optional). If you are an attention junkie, the initial highs of attention are of a low enough cost that you keep coming back. But the longer you are there, the more they extort out of you for each hit of attention. Scientology specifically attempts to recruit celebreties for two reasons: first because these people are more likely to be attention junkies than non-celebreties, and second, people pay attention to what celebrities say, no matter how unlikely it is for them to actually understand what they are talking about.

One of the really confounding things about Scientology is that most of the members are perfectly normal people who happen to subscribe to an "unusual" belief system. On the other hand, the higher-ups in the organization are dangerously similar to the Mafia (or any other organized crime organization). Look up Operation Snow White, Operation Feakout, or Fair Game some time.