If you would like to read a FASCINATING article regarding a recent detractor from the church of Scientology, this just came out:
http://www.newtimesla.com/issues/2001-09-27/feature.html/printable_page
or click on "Sympathy for the Devil" at:
http://www.newtimesla.com/
Don't think that we are alone in having pissed-off Witnesses periodically try and hijack the board, create confusion, etc. Every high-control religion has its detractors. Scientology is no exception, and a recent defection of a 30-YEAR MEMBER is quite enlightening. She claims it was her JOB to disrupt ex-member sites. There appeares to be some very interesting similarities compared to the Watchtower. :-))
NOTE that the "devil" was actually a Norwegian! (go figure) Could it really be Kent in disguise???
Here are a couple of gems from the article:
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Within weeks, Bezazian's dive-bombing of alt.religion.scientology under the screen name "Magoo" had become relentless. Every few minutes, day and night, Magoo swooped in to drop incendiary messages attacking church critics. Newsgroup regulars say they had seen few defenders of Scientology take on critics with such unremitting force. By July Magoo had become the single most frequent poster at a.r.s. -- not a small feat in such a heavily used newsgroup.
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And she also wanted to talk about a man named Andreas, the most corrupt and evil human being on the planet, who one day shocked her by writing a kind letter.
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(kindness works! Sometime we forget.)
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Protesters regularly picket key church sites in Florida and Los Angeles. Bezazian had often been asked to "handle" picketers who demonstrated at L.A. Scientology facilities by conversing with and distracting them.
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"I bought the PR hook, line and sinker," she says. Instructed to ignore outside sources of information, Bezazian says, she and her fellow parishioners were clueless about what was happening not only to Scientology but in the rest of the world as well.
"I was in a cult," she says. "Scientology promotes not watching the news. It keeps you inside a Truman Show where you're totally unaware of things. It's like your own thinking gets shut down and you get used to not considering anything that might be critical of Scientology."
Bezazian says she and her fellow religionists were trained, if they did happen to stumble across negative references to their church, to simply ignore them.
But the church was taking no chances. In 1998, Scientology announced a program to give every parishioner who desired one his or her very own Website. CD-ROMs were mailed out to church members, who were told they could use software on the discs to create personal sites linked to the church's main Internet location, www.scientology.org. What parishioners weren't told, however, was that the CDs also contained a censorship program that would block sites critical of the religion. Church critics, likening the program to "net nannies" that parents rely on to keep their kids out of porn sites, have dubbed the program the "Scieno Sitter."
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But the OSA wanted Bezazian to keep an eye on such sites and to report back about what she found. Three years ago, she says, OSA operatives removed the Scieno Sitter from her home computer. She was asked to surf the Internet to find out what sorts of damaging things were being said about the church.
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Although Scientologists don't believe in Satan, Bezazian says, that's exactly what Heldal-Lund became in her mind. He was the archnemesis of everything she believed in, Lucifer to her godlike Hubbard.
She formed these opinions without even reading any of the material at his Website. She says she could barely bring herself to visit it, scan what was listed in its table of contents, and then report back to the OSA. "Why haven't you gotten rid of this guy?" she remembers asking her OSA contacts, who responded that they had been trying to do just that, without luck.
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She dived into the job, exploring Websites that criticized her church and reading bulletin boards where church defenders and opponents debated. (Some church members have always refused to put the Scieno Sitter on their computers and are regular combatants at a.r.s. and other sites). Bezazian began to engage in those debates herself.
And before long, she realized that she really, really enjoyed it.
As Magoo, she obsessively posted to alt.religion.scientology. Her messages were rarely very substantive. She was just there to jab and parry, to drop off stingers and comebacks -- most of which were non sequiturs -- and more than anything else, to keep hitting the "reply" button. Day and night, Bezazian told off anti-Scientologists and managed to annoy plenty of them.
Mark Bunker, a church critic and a.r.s. participant, says he bore the brunt of some of Magoo's harshest attacks. "When I found out who it was, and that Tory was the one being so incredibly nasty to me, I laughed." Bunker realized that he had met Bezazian when he picketed church sites and always found her to be pleasant, even though they disagreed so markedly about the church. "I was amazed that this nice person could be so damned nasty anonymously."
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She uses another analogy: For 30 years she had constructed her life like a skyscraper made of playing cards. Participating on a.r.s. had yanked away so many cards that only one remained holding up her entire belief system.
And then Andreas Heldal-Lund gave that card a pull.
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It was obvious to them both: As soon as Bezazian admitted her doubts, the Church of Scientology would instruct parishioners to "disconnect" from her. Heldal-Lund knew it would be a devastating experience. He tried to give her encouragement.
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"The experience of being in Scientology is so incredible, it's just very hard for people to believe," Brooks says. "Tory has a long road ahead of her to recover from her 30 years in."
The church didn't take long to react, Brooks say. "They turned on her on a dime. They're doing everything they can to label her a criminal. This is a lot for a person to take in who hasn't been out [very long.]"
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What do you think? Just another "disgruntled apostate"?