Critical Thinking on Cults & AntiCults
The hardest thing for a human being to understand is someone else’s “cult”.
Many never-ins have been told, over and over, in many different ways, that you don’t need to understand a “cult” because it is an illegitimate group, with illegitimate beliefs and practices, that are just crazy.
As a Never-In you have no idea how much harm you are doing to a vulnerable Ex, whose whole way of making sense of the world has collapsed on them, when you shove that attitude down their throats.
I’m a long time Ex.
I have some lessons for you on how to help an Ex, and how not to harm them.
Views: 0This is a paper written in 1980 on the AntiCult Movement, as it existed when the authors estimated when it was 10 years old. Can you see any differences in the AntiCult Movement today? … Read more
The recovery paradigm of Ex-Scientology sets up a whole bunch of things you think you need to “recover” from because you were in a cult.
Social scientists like Eileen Barker traveled to Moonie recruitment seminars where brainwashing & mind control was claimed to be in use. They found that more than 90% of the people in those “brainwashing” seminars did not sign up to be a Moonie, and all were gone from the Moonies within 2 years.
Angry Gay Pope tells an Ex-Scientologist what to think about their time in Scientology. This time with a major cognitive distortion.
Worldviews are fragile things. Don’t look at them too closely – they may collapse on you. Ex-Cult members know this better than you do.
Views: 0In the United States at the end of the 1970s, brainwashing emerged as a popular theoretical construct around which to understand what appeared to be a sudden rise of new and unfamiliar religious movements … Read more
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.
Once I’d spotted that my thinking was tribal, I was no longer consumed by my tribe’s survival. I resented that the tribe had taken over my thinking. I could finally see the eclipsed and thoughtless cruelty of my former tribe.
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.
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”.
Scientologist and Anti-Scientologist alike can not think. They are both too militantly tribal to be able to think rationally. Here’s how.
Scientology is a religious choice. And the people who get themselves involved and stay involved for years, do so knowingly and willingly.
The key characteristic of a pseudo-skeptic of Scientology is the furious and dedicated certainty of their position, and their squinting suspicion that anyone who would question them must be an OSA agent.
Views: 1The first book I purchased at a Scientology Mission was “Hymn of Asia”. And that is because it was the first book on Scientology offered to me at the mission to buy. They offered … Read more
Views: 1The best, most succinct description of Scientology auditing ever by Dr. John Gordon Clark of Harvard Medical School: “Auditing is a simple, thoroughly designed means, of concentrating the mind to the state of a … Read more