active critic

Question answered by barb131 in Scientology

formerscientologist asked this question on 5/18/2000:

What prompted you to become a critic of Scientology?

barb131 gave this response on 5/19/2000:

I normally dodge personal questions, but this is a fair one.

A&E had a two hour special on Scientology a year ago. I didn't know anything about it. In college I dodged being recruited by a classmate. I have encountered Hubbard's sci-fi stuff, and liked it very little. So, I was at least dimly aware of L. Ron Hubbard.

The show was fascinating. The first hour was interviews with a pro-scientology bent, the second hour was people who had been abused by the cult.

At one point, there was a picture of a protest, with the http://www.xenu.net URL on a banner, so I went there to investigate further. And I did go to www.scientology.org as well!

Long story short, I found alt.religion.scientology. The A&E special was the topic of the day, and I posted my opinion. One little post!

Next day, I got this weird email. It said, "the message you wrote, Barry Bosnia is a pimping pedophile, has been sent to the following addresses: here was a long list of email addresses below.

Sounded like slander to me, and I was concerned enough to return to ARS to ask, "What the hell is this?" They said to me, "It's the scientology organization trying to intimidate you into staying out of this."

I do not intimidate well. I was still skeptical until I attended a picket. I was amazed that, no matter where in the country one pickets, one will see identical behavior from culties. They tried to chase us in cars. They followed me home (I walked slow to make it easy for them) and put amusing Dead Agent fliers on the door of my building. I discovered that the critics were not exaggerating. Ironically, (or L.Ronically) had the scientology organization ignored my initial post, I would have simply discounted scientology as a bunch of nutters, and sloped off, never to return.

As it is, the scientology organization pulled me in. I wouldn't say I'm an enemy, that's rather strong, but I definately inform people about them. I have even talked 2 people out of joining, which probably costs the org bigtime in the long run.

That's it. Not terribly dramatic, but following the cult's antics this year has been infuriating, amusing, entertaining, and sometimes a bit scary.

I want to be there for the grand finale!

formerscientologist rated this answer:

That's hard for me to beleive. I know use insane tactics sometimes. They haven't directly bothered me yet. But it's a big organization, with lots of different people and different branches.

You get 5 stars because I assume you're telling the truth.

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