Roger Gonnet,...is the subject of a special feature in the latest edition of French magazine XXI,....
This time however, his journey from dedicated Scientologist to the movement's most vociferous critic in France is told in the graphic-novel format.
Gonnet's story is the centrepiece of a 34-page dossier dedicated to Scientology in the latest edition of XXI, which appears quarterly.
L'Evadé de la Secte (roughly, He Escaped from the Cult) is built around his experience of the movement: but it also works in the basic story of Dianetics, Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard.
Bringing his story to life in a 30-page strip is Renaud De Heyn, a Belgian comic-book artist and illustrator with several books to his name.
...De Heyn recounts how Gonnet and his wife Françoise got pulled into Scientology by his uncle, who with an American friend ran a successful franchise of the movement.
At the time Gonnet was a business consultant and Françoise a teacher: but this was in 1973, at the tail end of what was still a thriving hippy movement in France, when people were open to all kinds of unconventional ideas.
"When I told you that I’d taken the title from Don Rogers, you immediately said, ‘Let’s Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky’ — Hubbard’s comment to Rogers about fleecing newcomers,..in 1950."
No body of knowledge needs an organizational policy. Organizational policy can only impede the advancement of knowledge. There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought. Suppose Newton had founded a Church of Newtonian Physics and refused to show his formula to anyone who doubted the tenets of Newtonian Physics? All organizations create organizational necessities. It is precisely organizational necessities that have prevented Scientology from obtaining the serious consideration merited by the importance of Mr. Hubbard’s discoveries. Scientologists are not prepared to accept intelligent and sometimes critical evaluation. They demand unquestioning acceptance."
In Snapping, Conway and Siegelman talked about ‘information disease’ and say that Scientologists take far longer to recover than other cult members. They reckoned twelve and a half years. While their investigation was far too small to confirm this, I can say, after talking to more than 500 former Scientologists, that it often takes much longer.
Back in the nineties, I was approached by a man who had been housebound for twenty years. His wife had persuaded him that they must return to Saint Hill, in England, to see if that would help. They stayed with a friend of mine, who gave the chap a copy of A Piece of Blue Sky. He read the book, came to see me for an afternoon and went home. A few weeks later, I received a post card, saying that he had found a job. If I’d seen him twenty years before, he would have returned to the world then. The thought scared me.
More recently, a second generation member, who left over a decade ago, told me, after one of our conversations, that she’d used scented fabric conditioner in her laundry for the first time. She had realized that scent may not be a psychiatric plot for world domination after all.
These ideas stick around, if uninspected. And some of the ideas are far more devastating than Hubbard’s infantile fear of perfume. Many former members spend the rest of their lives believing that people ‘pull it in’ and that we are surrounded by psychopaths. They think that illness is caused by connection to such psychopaths, though some strange psychic effect on the immune system. One former member even told me that I shouldn’t waste time helping Scientologists, because they have ‘pulled it in.’ I asked her if I should allow a child to go under a bus, based on the same reasoning, and suggested that it is only our compassion for others that makes us human. But compassion is not a major element of Scientology.
We all suffer from confirmation bias — pushing aside evidence which falsifies our beliefs, and grabbing at whatever seems to confirm it — and this can be deadly in former members. There are so many taboos to overcome. For instance, I felt quite guilty when I first read about the brain, but it reminded me of a Christadelphian meeting I went to as a teenager, where the congregation laughed uproariously whenever Darwin was mentioned. I realized that I’d been conditioned to feel disgust, which is a standard manipulation, used by all demagogues.
Scientologists steer clear of many taboo words. Very few will say ‘victim’ or talk about ‘sympathy,’ for instance, and there is often confusion about the real meaning of words such as ‘reasonable’ and ‘affinity.’ Hubbard alerted followers to ‘propaganda by redefinition of words,’ and then filled two 500-page dictionaries with his own complex and often contradictory examples (e.g., ‘it’s a tough universe, and only the tigers survive’, but a ‘tiger’ is a bad staff member. Maybe he had a point).
I encourage discussion of the principles of Scientology. It claims to be a science, so it should be susceptible to analysis and evidence-based investigation. Of course, Scientologists are discouraged from talking about the techniques (‘verbal tech’ is a ‘high crime’) or their ‘cases.’ They are also forbidden any complaint about fellow believers, unless it is in the form of a ‘knowledge report.’ So, talking about the principles can be difficult, but I believe that it is the only way to escape Hubbard’s implanting.
"After a few months of government-sponsored and media-promoted hysteria over guns, the mass roundup of toddlers and preteens wielding high capacity pointyfingers is hardly surprising.
Lefties are fond of lecturing (and writing books, and plays, and movies) about the famously dark days of McCarthyism, where right wing Bircher paranoiacs supposedly were looking for a 'Red under every bed.' I suppose to a certain extent they had a point, but the sum total impact of that brief 50's reign of terror seems to be that a couple of Hollywood writers lost screenplay deals.
Contrast that with our new age of left wing paranoia…"
HARTFORD — An attorney Friday compared the Women’s Gifting Table to Yale’s secret societies, while also taking aim at the government’s use of a grand jury to “force” people to talk during its investigation of the table.
Norm Pattis highlighted “sisterhood” and “empowerment” aspects of the table guidelines during the second day of a trial focusing on two leaders of the alleged pyramid scheme, as he and attorney Jonathan J. Einhorn continued pushing the “good faith” intent defense for their clients.
Both have said the defendants, Guilford residents Donna Bello and Jill Platt, cannot be found guilty of defrauding the IRS and gifting table members if they felt they filled out tax returns correctly and truly believed monetary exchanges between members were tax-free gifts, not investments. “
It’s not a crime to be misunderstood,” said Pattis, who represents Bello, and said table rules had a “Shirley McClain sensibility.”
Gifting table guidelines refer to a “journey” and “circulating the energy of giving and receiving.”
But this feel-good spot can't hide the real truth.
The narrator dares you to think for yourself, make up your own mind, and defy critics who just don't understand. And the ad is definitely visually appealing. It has even been compared to Apple's 1997 "Think Different" campaign. However, even that can't make people forget some of Scientology's most bizarre factoids.
1. It was founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard who believed negative emotions were caused by things called Body Thetans and devised a way to get rid of them.
2. They believe we are ruled by a galactic, alien overlord named Xenu.
3. They require quiet or silent births. That means the mama-to-be must not utter a word.
4. The church insists members that live on their compounds can leave anytime they want, but "defectors" tell a different story. Those that once lived in Scientology compounds claim they had to drive cars through gates to escape and were then relentlessly pursued.
5. After leaving the religion, director Paul Haggis said, "I was in a cult for 34 years. Everyone else could see it. I don't know why I couldn't."
One of the weirdest historical confluences you can imagine took place in Pasadena, California, in the 1940s. There, a darkly handsome young man and chemistry autodidact named Jack Parsons had just made a bundle of money by inventing solid rocket fuel and selling it to the military. He was part of a group of explosion-obsessed researchers at CalTech who founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where recently the Martian Rovers were made. He was also a goddess-obsessed acolyte and generous financial supporter of the infamous Pagan leader, Aleister Crowley.
Parsons used his defense contract money to convert an old mansion into a group house whose residents included other Pagans, artists, scientists, and writers. One of his boarders was a charismatic science fiction author named L. Ron Hubbard, who became Parsons' greatest frenemy, participating in rituals of sex magic with the rocket scientist, sleeping with his girlfriend, and finally absconding with all his money. Here is the true story of how Scientology and JPL were both conceived by men under the sorcerer Crowley's mystical influence.
“The more convoluted the explanation, the more unintelligible the practitioners are, the more people may be inclined to believe them. It makes it appear as though it is privileged knowledge, like real medicine and auto tech.”
I was convinced that Scientology had layered meanings and that, by continuing, I’d become more “causative,” and less sucker. So, getting suckered here and there only served to confirm for me that I needed more Scientology, not less, because here I am getting suckered by other Scientologists. Stating it slightly differently, I figured there were enough hidden gems waiting somewhere, hopefully, that it would all be worthwhile. And to the extent things were getting costly and for little gain, I figured that I had to mentally commit more in order to get more gains.
The negative aspect of the Law of Attraction, the truly vile part of it is that, if you are sick, it means that you’re “attracting” negativity and sickness to yourself,...If you think happy, healing thoughts, you’ll be healthy. If you don’t, if you think unhappy thoughts, if you have the slightest bit of negativity, the slightest negative mood (no matter how intangible, as Chopra himself says), you’re screwed. Chopra said so. You bear the responsibility for it. Chopra said so, and the result is the negative energy being transmitted to your cells.
Three U.S. congressmen and a top-level government official attended the opening of the Church of Scientology’s National Office in Washington, D.C., Thursday.
Their attendance marked a significant endorsement from members of a government that was once partially at war with the organization.
Lawmakers in attendance were Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton and Illinois Democratic Rep. Danny Davis. Liz Gibson, Senior Program Manager at the Federal Emergency Management Agency was also in attendance.
Jackson Lee applauded the organization.
“I want to thank L. Ron Hubbard for recognizing that courage is not rewarded but it is valued,” said the congresswoman. L. Ron Hubbard was the church’s founder.
“And to be able to have the wonderment of people coming together and ensuring that people come together for peace. That’s what I see in the Church, that you have come together for peace. I welcome and support that,” she said.And - along with remembering The People's Temple cult leader and mass murderer, Jim Jones, being welcomed to head the San Francisco Housing Authority by supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone - "what I see" is the phrase, "You can fool some of the people some of the time,…" being as relevant today as it ever was.
Hubbard's Scientology is based on revelations by the science-fiction author that can't be made odder by embellishment:
Mental problems, for instance, often are caused by traumatic memories of past lives as clams, sloths, and cave people.
You couldn't make this stuff up. But L. Ron Hubbard did — right here in Phoenix in the early 1950s.
"When a friend at a Scientology center in Florida, where [Nazanin] Boniadi was subsequently sent, asked why she was crying all the time, Boniadi broke down and told her about her relationship with [Tom] Cruise, which she had been forbidden to do. According to the knowledgeable source, the friend reported her. Boniadi’s punishment was to scrub toilets with a toothbrush, clean bathroom tiles with acid, and dig ditches in the middle of the night. After that she was sent out to sell Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics on street corners. Boniadi and her mother are no longer involved in Scientology."
