What percentage of Scientologists grew up in Scientology? What percentage of the children of Scientologists followed their parents into Scientology?
Critical thinking is good, right?
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. It can restore a lot of an Ex-Scientologist’s self-worth after becoming emotionally manipulated by anti-Scientology and adopting the anticult movement’s self-destructive beliefs on ‘brainwashing’.
If the answer to this question is “90% of children in Scientology families followed their parents into Scientology”, then it tends to support the idea that 2nd generation Scientologists were “brainwashed” into joining. They had no choice – it’s all they knew, etc etc. Which is what you hear a lot of on “Scientology and the Aftermath”.
Both Leah Remini and Chris Shelton, 2nd generation Celebrity Anti-Scientologists, have blamed their mothers for getting them involved in Scientology.
But if the answer to this question is closer to “10-20% of children who grew up in Scientology families followed their parents into Scientology”, then it would tend to support the idea that they were not brainwashed into Scientology, and that they did have a choice in joining.
I think it’s an important critical thinking question to consider.
Don’t you?
You sound like a scientologist who’s trying to convince people Scientology is still okay and they can/should come back any time. Why would people leave the church if they believed what they were doing was right and just? If they still believed the church was doing good, they’d still be in the church. You’re totally pulling a manipulative move I can see scientologists pulling to try to trick people to come back so they can make more money off them.
DollyPartonBetch wrote:
No. This is a critical thinking question about the power of choice. Did 2nd generation Scientologists exercise their own power of choice to get involved in Scientology, or not?
Did they exercise their own power of choice to leave, or not?
The question exposes the superstition of “brainwashing”.
Apparently, Anti-cultists are just as defensive of their beliefs being critically examined as Scientologists are. I have lots of experience with that on both sides.
You’re pushing a absurd logical fallacy. By your line of reasoning, anyone who leaves any group does so because why anyone possibly want to leave unless their respective groups are involved in criminal abuse or are just plain evil. In other words, your argument makes about as much sense as insisting that 2 + 2 = 5.
Apply your logic to the Roman Catholic Church, which over a thousand year period committed countless atrocities (including against rival Catholic churches, Eastern Catholics and Orthodoxy, and during and after the Reformation, against the Protestants), genocides (wiping out entire minority religions like the Cathars, Manichaens, and the overwhelming majority of folk and pagan religions indigenous to Europe, West Asia and Africa), mass rapes, forced conversions under threat of beheading or burning at the stake (even of other Christians from other denominations or who rejected the leadership of whoever the Pope happened to be at the time), and on and on. And this is saying nothing of the mass child rape epidemic that has been shaking the RCC up for decades and which Vatican authorities went to extreme lengths to cover up.
Yet Leah Remini is a loyal and zealous member of the Roman Catholic Church, ignoring all of its crimes and its present day issues and the fact that the Vatican is still covering up evidence of mass child rape under its auspices, especially in Europe and Latin America.
There is no religious organization that has committed more crimes against humanity than the Roman Catholic Church. Keep in mind I wrote “religious organization,” not “religion” in general, because the issues at hand here are of a secular and temporal nature. In other words, if the anti-Scientology crusaders are to be believed, their campaign against Scientology is against the organization and not the actual religion itself.
Again, this is yet another example of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy from the anti-cult fanatics that is also a common feature of “cults” themselves.
Do you want to know why most people “leave” Scientology? Because most of them were never really “in” to begin with. There aren’t a lot of people in the Church who genuinely believe LRH was perfect or that he was godlike or whatever. If they did, the internal culture would be very different, more like the way it was during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Most people don’t respond well to any form of zealotry and fanaticism, religious or otherwise. There are people who become so obsessed with something that they turn it into a religion, like with the Star Wars and Star Trek fan cultures. Anime enthusiasts are even more extreme in their obsessions and compulsions. Compared to fandom and most religions, Scientology is very banal and ordinary. Even the OT III material is lightweight in contrast to most mythologies, including those of the LDS Mormons, Raelians, Nation of Islam, and Falun Gong, all of which have far weirder (at least to me) “space opera” mythologies.
Speaking of OT III, one of the biggest scams of the anti-Scn crowd is in the way Scientologists are ridiculed over it, most glaringly demonstrated with the notorious South Park sequence. Read the actual OT III materials and then watch the South Park interpretation which, in all seriousness, claims “THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE.”
The OT III narrative is so short, concise and basic that none of the anti-Scn “interpretations,” especially the South Park version, can be considered accurate. The anti-Scn descriptions of the OT III+ narratives are so far off the mark its like the movie “300,” which portrays the Persian Empire has having been totally and absolutely evil, populated mostly by freaks and monsters, with the Spartans portrayed as totally and absolutely good. In spite of the obvious racism and historical revisionism, as well as the fact that the movie (and the graphic novel) is pure fiction and fantasy, there are a lot of people who actually believe that the movie “300” is a more or less accurate dramatization of ancient history.
Yes, there are a lot of stupid people out there. And its this level of stupidity that has dominated the anti-Scn subculture ever since Tony Ortega began his daily anti-Scn blogging in 2011 to distract away from his involvement and complicity in the Backpage child sex trafficking scandal.