Critical Thinking on Cults & AntiCults
AntiCults exist for every Cult.
An out-group of people who were former members of any religion, or minority religion, have always existed to protest their former religious or spiritual belief.
They have simply come to realize a loss of faith.
That loss of faith is colossally disorienting. All people use their ideology or belief system to make sense of the world. So when your sense-making system collapses on you, you feel a certain sense of fuckness for a short, or a long, while.
AntiCults exist where people take up the AntiCult Ideology, mostly promulgated by Lifton and Hassan.
Influenced by anticultism, they deny their own choices made to get involved in their own previous religious pursuit and turn all those personal decisions into things they were ‘brainwashed’ to believe against their will and consent.
AntiCults must be critically examined, and questioned, as closely as Cults.
An ideologue is so certain of the ideology he has adopted, and the rightness of how he sees the world, that he can sneer at people, knowing how superior he is. It is a lazy way to go through life, intellectually, but if you surround yourself with people who also never question their assumptions, either, it’s easier to live that way. One of the best examples is Tony Ortega.
As an Ex-Scientologist for 22yrs, I’ve identified the top 5 things that, over time, become the most toxic and corrosive things about being an Ex of any cult.
Max Scheler said that an apostate was ‘engaged in a continuous chain of acts of revenge against his own spiritual past’. Can you be an anti-apostate Apostate?
A point in your evolution as an Ex is exactly like the point when you woke up from the untrue things in Scientology: It’s when you wake up from all the untrue things in Anti-Scientology.
The more power that you assign to subversive techniques such as “mind control” the easier it is for Ex-members to explain their membership and participation in minority religious groups after they’ve re-entered the mainstream.
You’ll often hear people make the argument that something done by one group is not morally equivalent to the same thing done by their enemy.
To dismiss that part of your life, to wall it off as “delusional” or “crazy”, is to remain in a dissociative state – to continue living a fractured life.
A Post-Ex has integrated the arguments, and “truths”, he made as a Scientologist with the arguments, and “truths”, he made as an Ex/Anti-Scientologist. He has seen the disconnects and the contradictions there, and repaired them. He no longer walks around with an opposite self inside him, with which he is at war.
The human mind has certain biases which routinely, and falsely, color the perceptions of people. The most important for a former cult member is called the “hindsight bias”.
Sociologists who study the issues surrounding minority religions have identified 3 types of stories that form a socially-constructed narrative of a leave-taker’s experience inside their former group.
When you look at the cosmology of Scientology from the viewpoint of social science – its rituals such as auditing, training, dissemination, and its clearly religious teachings on the thetan, the mind, and even Xenu – it is inescapable that Scientology is a religion.
Leah Remini knows Scientology doesn’t teach pedophilia. She knows Ortega used that quote out of context for AntiCult emotional manipulation. Leah knows it is lie.
Now, I know you’re excited. I don’t want you to fly into a frustrated rage at me or anything. Or come at me like Brett Ratner. But No. Your anti-Scientology climax won’t be happening.
Consider this: Just as Scientology is not as good as a Scientologist tells you it is, Scientology is also not as bad as an Anti-Scientologist tells you it is.
If you were not abused in Scientology, and you say so in the various social media platforms on the Internet, then you can be accused of being heartless to those who were. A common way … Read more
In the same way that asking critical thinking questions can get you out of Scientology, asking critical thinking questions can get you out of Anti-Scientology, too.
Don’t catastrophize Scientology or your experiences in it. Always work to keep your experiences in Scientology in perspective.
Chris Shelton, the hysterical and abusive anticultist who runs a youtube channel devoted blind anti cultism, was finally suspended from Twitter yesterday.
If you’ve written enough screenplays, you learn that the main difference between the good guy and the bad guy in a movie is that for one, you know his motives for the actions he takes … Read more
One of the most hysterical & unscientific beliefs of AntiCultism is that “brainwashing” & “Mind Control” are at work whenever anyone becomes a member of a “cult”.