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YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT MAKES THIS POSSIBLE:

Keeping a close eye on bogus religions, destructive cults, controversial
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NHNE Scientology Resource Page:
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/438/Default.aspx

NHNE On Sun Myung Moon:
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/444/Default.aspx

NHNE On Joseph Smith & The Mormons:
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/437/Default.aspx

"Stripping the Gurus" By Geoffrey D. Falk
http://integralnhne.ning.com/forum/topics/stripping-the-gurus-by

Frederick Philip Lenz, III (aka Rama)
& His Association With American Buddhism
http://integralnhne.ning.com/forum/topics/frederick-philip-lenz-iii-aka

Ex-Followers On Andrew Cohen
http://integralnhne.ning.com/forum/topics/exfollowers-on-andrew-cohen

Ken Wilber & Adi Da
http://integralnhne.ning.com/forum/topics/ken-wilber-adi-da

The Exceedingly Dubious Tale Of Gary Renard
http://bit.ly/86LjOD and http://bit.ly/7OiuAv

Emissary Of Light (Special Report on James Twyman)
http://www.nhne.com/specialreports/sremissary.html

NBC Dateline's Undercover Report About Gabriel Of Sedona
(aka Gabriel Of Urantia & Anthony J. Delevin)
http://www.nhne.com/misc/gabriel_dateline.html

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CELEBRITIES LEAD CHARGE AGAINST SCIENTOLOGY
By Peter Beaumont in London, Toni O'Loughlin in Sydney, and Paul Harris in
New York
The Observer
November 22, 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/22/scientology-cruise-haggis-us-aus
tralia

The security at the red-brick and glass-walled horseshoe of the John Joseph
Moakley courthouse on Boston's waterfront was unusually tight. Anybody who
was not a member of the city's bar association was swept with a search wand.
Photo IDs were checked. Mobile phones were taken from guests, who included
the Hollywood star Tom Cruise.

The occasion was a memorial service for Scientology's top legal adviser for
a quarter of a century, Earle Cooley. The controversial head of Scientology
worldwide, David Miscavige, delivered the eulogy, thanking his late friend
for his contribution to the neo-religion during his career, much of which
was spent pursuing journalists and former members who spoke out against it.

Miscavige may since have wondered privately what Cooley would have made of
the events of last week. Scientology, founded in 1953 by the late science
fiction pulp novelist, serial fantasist and inveterate self-publicist L Ron
Hubbard, is under fire again across the globe, following years of struggle
to be recognised -- with some success -- as a legitimate church.

The church has just been denounced in the strongest possible terms in the
Australian parliament. Prime minister Kevin Rudd has expressed his concern
over allegations of "a worldwide pattern of abuse and criminality" and is
contemplating a parliamentary inquiry. The organisation is under police
investigation and yesterday angry ex-Scientologists, spurred on by the
claims, converged on its Australian headquarters calling for its tax-exempt
status to be revoked.

And it is not only in Australia that Scientology is facing problems. A new
book in America -- Blown for Good: Behind the Iron Curtain of the Church of
Scientology -- by Marc Headley <http://bit.ly/8rwflF>, an employee of the
church's Los Angeles headquarters for 15 years, details -- as others have --
allegations of systematic abuse and bizarre episodes, such as the three
weeks Headley claims he spent under instruction from Cruise in how to move
bottles and other objects by concentrating on them.

Headley's book follows a year in which Scientology has been plagued by
unwelcome revelations from high-profile defectors and fresh media
investigation into its practices.

Last month the church narrowly avoided being banned in France after being
prosecuted for fraud, following claims that four leaders -- all given
suspended jail sentences -- had preyed financially on several followers in
the 1990s. In Belgium, too, Scientology is embroiled in a long criminal
investigation. Perhaps most embarrassing for an organisation that prides
itself on its wealthy Hollywood followers, Oscar-winning director Paul
Haggis, an adherent of 30 years, abandoned Scientology in October, accusing
it of homophobia.

That is not all. Some of the worst damage done to Scientology in the past
two years appears to have been self-inflicted. Earlier this year the
official spokesman in the US, Tommy Davis, son of the actress Anne Archer,
stormed out of an ABC TV interview with Martin Bashir when Bashir had the
temerity to ask about one of its central beliefs -- relating to an evil
intergalactic warlord named Xenu.

More ridicule was invited, unwittingly, by Cruise, the church's most
high-profile member, in a leaked video produced for the organisation last
year that went viral on the internet. It showed a rambling Cruise laughing
inexplicably while saying that Scientologists were uniquely equipped with
the knowledge necessary to cure most of the world's ills, including crime,
drugs, mental health problems and violence.

A religion to some, a business certainly, and a cult to many, whose
innermost cadres wear pseudo naval uniforms, Scientology's religious tenets
are a mixture of therapy-style self-improvement steps -- at least at first
-- mixed with a weird space-opera metaphysics, which is revealed only to its
highest acolytes. The church has frequently been accused of breaking up
families and preying on the vulnerable. The history of Scientology and its
critics has been a story played out in the courts in interminable
proceedings that supported Cooley's very lucrative career, underwritten by a
very lucrative religious practice in which followers pay large sums of money
to progress through a series of training courses called "auditing".

In a quote attributed in the US courts to the late Hubbard himself, it is
made clear that the court cases serve a useful purpose, even when they are
lost. According to Hubbard, "law can be used very easily to harass... If
possible, of course, ruinŠ entirely."

Scientology has attempted to sue newspapers, including the Washington Post.
Time magazine beat off a court claim for $400m after describing the church
on its cover as "the Cult of Greed". It has pursued authors, those who have
campaigned against it, defectors and rivals. It has also made unsuccessful
claims that details of its most secret practices should be regarded as both
copyright and a trade secret.

The repeated attempts to use the courts to silence critics have been
criticised in the judgments that have been upheld against Scientology,
including one in 1996 that described its "documented history of vexatious
behaviour" and abuse of "the [US] federal court system by using it, inter
alia, to destroy their opponents, rather than to resolve an actual dispute
over trademark law or any other legal matter".

So when Nick Xenophon stood up last week in the Australian parliament he was
the latest critic in a long line. Xenophon made a carefully calculated
decision -- to use the protection of parliamentary privilege to denounce an
organisation that he claims "abuses its followers, viciously targets its
critics and seems largely driven by paranoia". Xenophon's aim was simple: to
challenge the tax-exempt status of Scientology as a religion.

If the allegations Xenophon detailed -- including the claims by former
high-ranking members that David Miscavige physically assaulted senior
Scientologists -- were familiar ones to critics of the movement, Xenophon's
speech brought to the widest audience possible a synthesis of the recent and
not so recent claims against the leadership of Scientology, allegations
picked up worldwide within minutes of him speaking.

He described claims of "false imprisonment, coerced abortions, embezzlement
of church funds, physical violence, blackmail and the widespread deliberate
abuse of information obtained by the organisation". At the centre of
Xenophon's long, impassioned speech were the allegations of Aaron Saxton,
who was "born" into Scientology and "rose to a position of influence in
Sydney and the United States".

According to Xenophon, Saxton's abuse started as a child when his mother was
coerced into signing over guardianship of him to the organisation and he was
made a security guard at the age of 16. "In 1991 Aaron says he was sent to
Scientology headquarters in Florida where he was involved inŠ putting five
individuals under house arrest" and "ordered by superiors to remove
documents that would link a Scientology staff member to murder".

"Aaron says women who fell pregnant were taken to offices and bullied to
have an abortion. If they refused, they faced demotion and hard labourŠ
Aaron says one staff member used a coat-hanger and self-aborted her child
for fear of punishment. He says she was released from the organisation and
the files were destroyed."

Saxton also "ordered more than 30 people to be sent to Scientology's work
camps, where they were forced to undertake hard labour", Xenophon said.

He said another former Scientologist, Carmel Underwood, who worked as a
financial officer in the organisation and claims to have been assaulted by
another member, "witnessed a young girl who had been molested by her father
being coached as to what she should say to investigating authorities in
order to keep the crimes secret". In a letter described by Xenophon as "one
of the saddest correspondences I have received", a father, Paul Schofield,
admits to being part of a cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the
deaths of his two daughters.

The Church of Scientology in Australia's response last week was to accuse
Xenophon of abusing parliamentary privilege and adding that the allegations
were "unquestionably false". "This was not free speech. It was abuse and
slander protected by the forms of our parliament," spokesman Cyrus Brooks
said in a statement. It did not, however, reply to a series of written
questions from the Observer about the cases detailed.

But if something has changed in the past few years, it has been the
emergence of an increasingly empowered and vocal global opposition to the
Scientologists. The development has been fuelled in part by the internet's
Anonymous movement -- which posted the Tom Cruise video to YouTube last year
-- and has been behind a series of denial-of-service attacks on Scientology
websites, protests and prank calls since the Scientologists had it removed
it from the site, inevitably claiming copyright infringement. The Australian
intervention by Xenophon was part of a wider and growing backlash against
one of the world's most controversial movements.

If there has been a catalyst for many of the Scientologists' most recent
problems it has been provided by a newspaper in Tampa, Florida -- the St
Petersburg Times -- which covers the area including the organisation's
spiritual headquarters in Clearwater. The paper ran an investigative series
featuring interviews with former members of the church's leadership. These
included Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, two of the highest-ranking
executives to leave Scientology.

According to the two men's accounts -- denounced as "lies" by Miscavige and
Tommy Davis -- Miscavige routinely assaulted his lieutenants, including
Rinder, 50 times. In one article, citing the testimony of four former
members, the newspaper described Miscavige administering a vicious beating
to another senior church figure, Tom De Vocht. The men described a complex
system of internal justice, enforced by security checks and the threat of
isolation as a so-called "suppressive person" or SP.

In the interviews the men admitted using violence against other members of
the church, often, they claimed, at the behest of Miscavige, also alleging
that the church used private information gathered on its members to bully
them and force them to do its bidding.

At least some of the recent allegations will be familiar to Jason Beghe, the
American actor. Last year he became the first of its celebrity followers --
for whom the church maintains a "Celebrity Centre" -- to break with it,
after giving Scientology more than $1m in donations over 12 years.

These days Beghe prefers to warn that the church is "destructive and a
rip-off". He claims that since his renunciation of Scientology he has been
pursued to seminars in Europe -- held to speak of its dangers -- by private
investigators employed by Scientology and "disconnected" from former friends
who remain within it.

The decision of Beghe and Haggis to quit Scientology appears to have caused
the movement its greatest recent PR difficulties, not least because of its
dependence on Hollywood figures as both a source of revenue for its most
expensive courses and an advertisement for the religion. The involvement of
such high-profile figures as Haggis, Cruise and John Travolta has acted as a
reassurance for potential recruits against the allegations of its critics.

And while Haggis quit the church over its attitude to gay marriage, his
lengthy leaked letter of repudiation of Scientology, written to Davis,
included another complaint: that he had lied on television about a key
Scientology practice.

Haggis said he had been stunned to see a CNN clip of Davis denying that the
church practises a policy of "disconnection" by encouraging members to cut
ties with non-members who may disapprove of their beliefs.

"I was shocked," wrote Haggis. "We all know this policy exists. I didn't
have to search for verification -- I didn't have to look any further than my
own home." He then detailed how his wife was ordered by the church to
disconnect from her parents because they were themselves ex-members.

His wife followed the orders and did not speak to her parents for a year and
a half. "That's not ancient history, Tommy. It was a year agoŠ To see you
lie so easily, I am afraid I had to ask myself: what else are you lying
about?"

The answer to that question may now be sought within the context of an
Australian parliamentary inquiry. Notoriously litigious and undoubtedly
secretive, Scientology is under the microscope again.

After a bad year for Cruise's church, things could be about to become a
whole lot worse.

..............

HISTORY OF SCIENTOLOGY

Founded by L Ron Hubbard (1911-1986), a science-fiction novelist who turned
to pulp writing after a wartime military career marked by a number of
disgraces. It was while writing for Astounding Science Fiction in 1949 that
he published his first article on the subject of dianetics, which would
later become Scientology. It was described by one critic as "a lunatic
revision of Freudian psychology". His book Dianetics: the Modern Science of
Mental Health was published in 1950. Attempts to set up dianetics as a
therapeutic practice collapsed.

1952 - Having failed to present dianetics as an empirically supported
scientific system, Hubbard founded a religion called Scientology, which he
claimed was the result of years of research. Using "e-meters" to "measure"
the mind, he claimed it could be "cleared" by a process of "auditing". At
this point based in England, he ran into problems with the authorities. He
founded the Sea Organisation, or the Sea Org, which would become the
movement's central group.

1970 - Scientology establishes its celebrity centre in Los Angeles, aiming
to attract Hollywood high flyers.

1977 - Scientology runs into trouble in the US, this time for domestic
espionage against the federal government, for which Hubbard's wife and a
dozen other officials were convicted of conspiracy.

1986 - Hubbard dies of a stroke in California.

1993 - Scientology is declared tax-exempt as a church in the US, ending a
40-year battle.

1999 - Refused tax-exempt status by the UK charity commission, which rules
it is not a religion. However, in the years that follow it is recognised as
a religion in a number of countries, including Sweden, New Zealand and
Portugal.

2006 - A repeat of a South Park episode that spoofs Tom Cruise and
Scientology is pulled from the air.

2009 - The church is found guilty of fraud in France. Screenwriter Paul
Haggis splits with Scientology amid accusations of homophobia. Tom Cruise
and John Travolta are still members of the Church of Scientology.

............

NHNE Scientology Resource Page:
http://www.nhne.org/tabid/438/Default.aspx

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