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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