The Defection of Mr Magoo
Question answered by honorarykid in Scientology
remiel asked this question on 10/7/2000:
the last time I posted to alt.religion.scientology (about June, I
think), there was a very annoying poster there basically doing
denial of service attacks under the name of Mr Magoo. When I
checked a deja.com reference I was goven a few days ago on
here (I think it was by honorarykid), Mr Magoo was still posting,
now under the name of Tory, and was apologising for her
previous actions. Can someone who posts to a.r.s please tell
me what happened?
honorarykid gave this response on 10/7/2000:
Sure. Tory/Magoo is Tory Bazazian. Her story is a great one,
at least from my point of view.
Tory is L.A. area, 50ish lady, very gregarious, a 30 year
member of Scientology. She knows most of the highest
ranking Scientologists personally. She worked for a WISE
company (WISE=Worldwide Institute of Scientology
Enterprises).
She was taking the OT-7 course (OT-7 is the second most
advanced course in all of Scientology). The only problem
was, she had been on the course for 7 years, and had paid
over $60,000.00 JUST FOR THIS ONE COURSE ALONE! And
she felt she was getting nowhere in her efforts to complete
the level.
She says now that she was feeling inwardly bad about that,
feeling like she was wasting her time and money on the
course. But outwardly, she nevertheless did her best to
keep up a brave front, to preserve her image as a zealous,
in-good-standing Scientologist.
As a self-described OSA "volunteer" (OSA=Office of Special
Affairs, the PR, Intelligence gathering, covert ops branch of
the CoS), Tory manned the Warner Brothers Battlefield Earth
(BE) discussion boards. Apparently she annoyed the hell out
of everyone there with a series of repetitive non-sequitur
messages, meant to disrupt the many negative threads
which talked about how bad the movie was (does that
sound familiar?).
Tory's motives were not intentionally sinister. She claims to
actually have worked with John Travolta as an auditor
(auditing=one on one mental exercises of Scientology). She
felt loyal to and protective of him, and to her church. She
wanted to help. Her motives then are probably very much
akin to Mr. Rogers here, now. He probably just wants to help
Scientology's interests here on AskMe.com, in the same way
Tory wanted to protect Travolta and Scientology from the
negative messages on the BE message boards.
Anyway, Tory, disliked the bad reviews of the movie so
much, she convinced Warner Brothers to kill the Battlefield
Earth message board completely. Warner Brothers probably
didn't need too much coaxing. By that point, the movie had
been released, and was getting flamed by virtually every film
critic in the world. Ironically, Tory saw the movie herself,
and dispite everything she'd said on the message boards,
she admitted that she didn't "get" the movie.
But flush from her success at killing off the BE message
boards, she went looking for other on-line pits of entheta
(entheta=feelings and statements which are contrary to the
interests of Scientology) to clean up. She found the
newsgroup alt.religion.scientology which she decided to
handle the same way, by posting dozens of annoying
messages (from the samples I read, she was never malicious
or mean to people, as some Scientologists can be).
Most of the a.r.s critics were pretty hard on her, as you
might expect. I had her killfiled, and mostly succeeded in
ignoring her. One day, Andreas Heldul-Lund, the creator of
one of the best critical web sites in the world
(http://www.xenu.net), who Tory thought of as one of the
most evil criminals in the world, wrote her a brief e-mail,
suggesting how she might avoid some little technical problem
she was having with her newsreader or something. He made
this helpful and polite suggestion to her while she was in
full-speed, spam mode, telling herself she was going to
destroy the criminal a.r.s newsgroup.
And that was the trigger point of Tory's epiphany. She
suddenly realized that Andreas was not a criminal, and that
he was actually quite a nice guy. She started to cry, and
her crying went on for hours. She realized that she had been
forcing herself to believe Scientology's self-serving lies, in
order to get along inside her church. She realized the lies
were pervasive, and across the board, from her belief in the
OT-7 course, to her claims that BE was a good movie.
So, to a great extent, the lying to herself stopped. The
believing in Scientology-serving lies of others stopped.
She could finally read Andreas' web site without her
Scientology filters. She did, and began to realize that much
of what the critics have been saying about the Church of
Scientology for years, is true. She blew the cult (blow=walk
away from Scientology, become an apostate).
She also had to blow off her marriage. Her husband would
not stay with her, since she no longer planned to call herself
a Scientologist. That's what happens to families all too
easily when some members are Scientologists and others are
not.
On the upside, Tory was able to begin rebuilding a better
relationship with her mother, which had been strained for
the 30 duration of her Scientology membership.
She still claims that she had many "wins" from her
Scientology experiences. She still thinks highly of many of
the people who are in Scientology. But she knows they are
being lied to and led astray by the leadership of the church.
She has helped Stacy Brooks and Jessie Prince with a family
intervention, and she has picketed Scientology facilities,
demanding that Scientology stop breaking up families and
start talking and listening to the rest of the world.
Tory is an absolute gem of a person. It just wasn't easy to
see that, under the hundreds of desperate spammed
messages she posted.
To see her in action, point your RealPlayer or Real enabled
browser to the web site:
http://www.lisatrust.net/Media/picket091900.htm
PS. Mr. Rogers is probably a gem of a person, too. He just
needs one good epiphany. ;-)
remiel rated this answer:
Thanks for your informative answer. So do we happen to know
which posters she was on the BE board? I posted there a fair
amount myself and I'd like to see if she remembers me or just
thought I was a fount of frothing hatred.
I'll have to sort out my newsgroup access and mosey on back
to ARS.
Also, it's nice to see Andreas being the astonishingly good guy
he always is.
The funny thing about the BE board was that while there were
a number of fairly obvious plants, there were also around five
people who clearly had just loved the film. Some of them were
scientologists, some not. One of them, who posted under the
username janewith6, was, about all issues apart from the film
being an utter classic, reasonable and rational, but would not
shift from the point of view that the film was a classic and we
just didn't 'get' it.
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