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destructive cults

Deconstructing Scientology: Chapter 17

Hello again and welcome to the next installment in my on-going series deconstructing this book, Scientology, edited by James R. Lewis and featuring essays and articles by religious scholars, academics and the like about, you guessed it, Scientology. So far, almost all of these have been purely Scientology apologetics as these scholars rush to defend Scientology from its critics, which is what attracted me to this in the first place.Read More »Deconstructing Scientology: Chapter 17

Leah Remini’s Scientology and the Aftermath review

Leah Remini has produced a new television series called Scientology and the Aftermath which will be premiering tomorrow, November 29, on A&E. I was given an opportunity to see the first episode in advance and I wanted to give you my thoughts and feelings about it as someone who not only grew up in Scientology but who worked at its highest levels as part of the Sea Org for 17 years.Read More »Leah Remini’s Scientology and the Aftermath review

Deconstructing Scientology: Chapter 12

Hey everyone. This is the next installment in my deconstruction of the book Scientology, edited by James R. Lewis. We’ve gone through the introduction and eleven chapters so far and except for the bit of bright light we saw last week, so far it’s been a real slug-fest trying to just wade through the verbiage as well as counter most of the frankly asinine statements these academics have made about Scientology in their quest to make it seem like a legitimate religious movement on the same order as Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. I’ve shown time and again how their data is off, their thinking is flawed and their conclusions are almost imbecilic. So where are we at now?Read More »Deconstructing Scientology: Chapter 12

The Terrible Culture of Scientology: Part 3

This is the third and final part of my interview with Larisa Smith and her family about growing up with and in Scientology. All of what was gone over in the first two parts has been leading up to this. I think you’ll see why we wanted to cover her early life and experiences in such detail, so as to put everything that she describes here into a full context.

Read More »The Terrible Culture of Scientology: Part 3

The Terrible Culture of Scientology: Part 1

Scientology has been a lot of things to a lot of people, some claiming it did them a lot of good while others, not so much. One thing for sure is that Scientology is much more than simply some books that L. Ron Hubbard wrote or a New Age mix of feel good literature and plagiarized psychotherapy. Over the years since L. Ron Hubbard first unleashed Dianetics upon the world in 1950, he gathered a small but intensely loyal core of followers and created a sort of alternate reality, a bubble world of belief in both him and his outlandish mythology.Read More »The Terrible Culture of Scientology: Part 1