One of our tipsters briefly considered joining Scientology’s Sea Organization — the hardcore group of workers who toil for almost no pay and often do menial labor from dawn to midnight, day after day.
This person had second thoughts and didn’t join, but they still had a copy of the Sea Org’s application form and thought we might like to see it.
Boy howdy, were we glad they sent it over.
Get out your pens and pencils, kids, because it’s time to answer some pretty strange questions before you join David Miscavige’s planetary clearing crew for the next billion years…
Our tipsters have really come through for us this week with some fascinating new Scientology mailers. Has there ever been a better time to be a Scientologist? Just look at all the different ways you can donate money!
We’ll start with this weekend’s big event — the International Association of Scientologists (IAS) spectacular that took place in the UK. Each October, several thousand of the faithful gather to listen as, for three hours, Scientology leader David Miscavige takes the stage and goes on and on and on about all of Scientology’s good works and how this prison planet will soon become one big Narconon drug rehab clinic. Or something.
We can only hope someone will leak us video of the event soon. And that Chill EB was allowed to perform one of his amazing rap songs.
We talked this week with yet another longtime Scientologist who is quitting the church, 35-year member Steve Poore.
On September 30, Poore became the latest veteran church member to declare his defection at the website of former high-ranking Scientology executive Marty Rathbun. Since 2009, Rathbun’s blog has become the place where more and more Scientologists are publicly declaring that they’re fed up with church leader David Miscavige and are going “independent” — still adhering to the philosophies of L. Ron Hubbard, but ditching the official, corporate church.
On Friday mornings we leave our bodies and travel back in time to stand on the bridge of the Apollo with L. Ron Hubbard, circa 1968-1971, to watch the Commodore run Scientology as he sailed the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
We have an excellent set of excerpts from Hubbard’s shipboard dispatches this week, but we ran into a bit of a snag when we went looking for our other Friday morning feature, “OT Phenomena” — stories of superhuman Scientology abilities from old copies of Advance! magazine.
It turns out, editor Jefferson Hawkins left out the very popular OT Phenomena in some of the issues we’re looking through now, in 1978. But then, in Issue 55, from November/December, we spotted something monumental that we can’t wait to share with you.
It was then that L. Ron Hubbard changed life as we know it forever.
Brian Culkin sent over an interesting message this morning. Culkin, a yoga master and business consultant, was featured last year in the landmark Tampa Bay Times investigative series about Scientology’s cash-hungry methods, “The Money Machine.”
Although Culkin was only in Scientology for about a year, he provided some stunning testimony about how often he was hit up for cash once the church realized that he had a bit of money. In just a year with the church, he estimated that he turned over about $330,000.
But he’s been out since February 2010, and now he’s asking a cheeky question. If Scientology’s members who have reached Operating Thetan Level Eight really have “cause over matter,” shouldn’t they be able to replicate the yoga routine you see in this video?
According to a slick television ad that played earlier this year, Scientology is adding 4.4 million new members around the world every single year. At that rate, Scientology is adding more members than all the Jews in the world in just a little more than every three years!
Some of us have expressed some skepticism about those numbers. But now, even David Miscavige himself has gone and punched a big hole in his public relations efforts.
Recently, the Scientology leader’s attorneys filed a court document which asserts, quite vociferously and repeatedly, that…
“Mr. Miscavige conducts no business in the State of Texas, has no property (real or personal) in this state, maintains no employees, servants, or agents in Texas, has never filed a lawsuit in this state, does not maintain any bank accounts in this state, and is not registered to conduct business in this state.”
Well, so much for church recruitment in the second largest state in the union. But then, recent events had already convinced us that Texas is, for Scientology, a rocky place where it can find no purchase. Let us count the ways…
On Sunday, we reviewed Marty Rathbun’s new book, which makes some startling claims about the relationship between Scientology leader David Miscavige and actor Tom Cruise.
Rathbun is in a unique position to talk about that relationship, since he acted as Cruise’s Scientology auditor during a campaign by Miscavige to reinforce Cruise’s commitment to the church following the breakup of his marriage to Nicole Kidman in 2001.
Through 2004, Rathbun watched up close as Cruise and Miscavige formed a strong and unusual bond. In his new book, Scientology Reformation: What Every Scientologist Should Know, Rathbun provides a disturbing new wrinkle: the two men were so close, he writes, Cruise aped Miscavige’s increasing irrationality and even violence toward underlings.
Over the last two days, however, the tabloids have been promoting a very different story: that Cruise is fed up with Scientology after losing Katie Holmes. So we went back to Rathbun to ask him which is true: is Cruise still Miscavige’s pal, or are they quits?
Former high-ranking Church of Scientology official Mark “Marty” Rathbun has released a book that condemns current church leader David Miscavige for taking Scientology away from the concepts of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and blasts Miscavige and his best friend Tom Cruise for a litany of malfeasance and corruption.
In Scientology Reformation: What Every Scientologist Should Know, Rathbun argues that since the death of Hubbard in 1986, Miscavige has damaged the church he took over by placing an emphasis on fundraising for projects that have little do with what Hubbard wanted. Along the way, Rathbun says, Miscavige has discarded Hubbard’s plans for expansion in favor of raising huge sums that he can spend on himself and his friend Cruise, while imprisoning and violently assaulting his underlings.
Much of what Rathbun covers in this book we have heard about in news stories over the last few years. But Rathbun also provides startling new information about what he witnessed working closely with Miscavige, and also includes details of the Nazanin Boniadi/Tom Cruise story that seem as if they could have only one possible source — Boniadi herself.
On Sunday mornings, we love to reveal the latest Scientology fundraising mailers that tipsters have forwarded to us over the past week. And this week, our sources have not let us down.
On tap in this installment of Sunday Funnies: Jim Meskimen wants to party with you, librarians are going crazy for Ron’s new encyclopedia, and you really need to get to Flag to discover the abilities you’ve had for billions of years! Oh, where do we sign up.
Now safely ensconced in the bunker again, we’re going to make good on yesterday’s promise and deliver our weekly helping of ‘Scientology on the High Seas’ a day later than usual.
Nearly a year ago, we started excerpting L. Ron Hubbard’s “Orders of the Day,” which he mimeographed and distributed to the crew of his yacht, the Apollo, as he ran Scientology from the ship from 1967 to 1975. Our copies of his “OODs” (and yes, Scientologists actually pronounce it that way, “oods”) cover the period from late 1968 to the end of 1971. And soon, we’ll finish up our year-long project.
The OODs turned out to be very popular with our readers, and we think you’re going to find this week’s installment pretty interesting. Hubbard, for example, reveals what his own daily “stat” is!
One of our tipsters briefly considered joining Scientology’s Sea Organization — the hardcore group of workers who toil for almost no pay and often do menial labor from dawn to midnight, day after day.
