Blog: Live and Let Die - 2014-05-22

Live and Let Die May 22, 2014, Chris Shelton, Critical Thinker at Large

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Why Criticize Scientology?

When I was a part of the Church of Scientology and in the Sea Org, I always used to wonder about people who attacked Scientology. I wondered what motivated them; why did they seem so passionate about what they were doing. Why couldn't they just leave well enough alone? Wasn't it enough that they didn't like it and left? Couldn't they just leave us Scientologists alone to practice our religion in peace? Why did they have to spend so much time and effort going out of their way to write blog articles, be interviewed by the press, write books and even make whole movies about how bad the Scientology experience was? In other words, couldn't they just live and let live?

We had lots of explanations fed to us about Church attackers in the Church, mainly out of the mouths of personnel from the Office of Special Affairs, (OSA), the Church's legal arm. In 2008, they carefully explained how Anonymous, for example, were a bunch of no-good hackers and bored teenagers who didn't have anything better to do. We were told that between bouts of masturbating to internet child porn in their basements and doing drugs, they were being funded by some mysterious ringleader who organized their efforts in each org area and paid them with pizza and $10-20 an hour to go dance around in front of the orgs with signs reading "Ask me about Xenu" and "Scientology is a trap". We were told that these mysterious ringleaders were being paid lots of money by Big Pharma to do away with Scientology because we (the Sea Org) were so effectively cutting into the profits from psychiatric drugging of children, profits which run into the billions of dollars per year. It's ironic now, knowing how much money the Church is hording in its off-shore IAS bank accounts, how condemnatory they always were towards psychiatry and Big Pharma's "billions in blood money." I've never seen a better example of the pot calling the kettle black.