Reply #13: You're wrong about Scientology. They go to great lengths [View All]

[pnwmom]

to force their adherents to stay inside the cult, which you'd know if you'd studied it at all. Many of their former members have testified to this. They've kidnapped some members to keep them from leaving; one woman was held in Florida and died in captivity. They've also blackmailed people trying to leave the cult, with information they obtained during their sessions. And if a parent leaves, they're denied any contact with their children.

On the other hand, they have kicked other people out -- after years of low paid service -- with virtually no resources. I personally know an elderly woman who was kicked out after thirty years because she couldn't work for them anymore. She didn't have any Social Security because they don't pay into it. Fortunately, she still had relatives who loved her-- after all those years away -- and took her in.

There is nothing comparable to this in Orthodox Judaism.

This excerpt is from the New Yorker, but the claims made here are similar to those made by many other former Scientologists:

According to a court declaration filed by Rathbun in July, Miscavige expected Scientology leaders to instill aggressive, even violent, discipline. Rathbun said that he was resistant, and that Miscavige grew frustrated with him, assigning him in 2004 to the Hole—a pair of double-wide trailers at the Gold Base. “There were between eighty and a hundred people sentenced to the Hole at that time,” Rathbun said, in the declaration. “We were required to do group confessions all day and all night.”

The church claims that such stories are false: “There is not, and never has been, any place of ‘confinement’ . . . nor is there anything in Church policy that would allow such confinement.”

According to Rathbun, Miscavige came to the Hole one evening and announced that everyone was going to play musical chairs. Only the last person standing would be allowed to stay on the base. He declared that people whose spouses “were not participants would have their marriages terminated.” The St. Petersburg Times noted that Miscavige played Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” on a boom box as the church leaders fought over the chairs, punching each other and, in one case, ripping a chair apart.

Tom De Vocht, one of the participants, says that the event lasted until four in the morning: “It got more and more physical as the number of chairs went down.” Many of the participants had long been cut off from their families. They had no money, no credit cards, no telephones. According to De Vocht, many lacked a driver’s license or a passport. Few had any savings or employment prospects. As people fell out of the game, Miscavige had airplane reservations made for them. He said that buses were going to be leaving at six in the morning. The powerlessness of everyone else in the room was nakedly clear.

SNIP

“The thing that was most troubling to Paul was that I literally had to escape,” Rathbun told me. (A few nights after the musical-chairs incident, he got on his motorcycle and waited until a gate was opened for someone else; he sped out and didn’t stop for thirty miles.) Haggis called several other former Scientologists he knew well. One of them said that he had escaped from the Gold Base by driving his car—an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—through a wooden fence. The defector said that he had scars on his forehead from the incident. Still others had been expelled or declared Suppressive Persons. Haggis asked himself, “What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear?”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright#ixzz1U8ets57j