FormerScilon

Good, then they could blow me.

I don't give a shit which magic sky fairy someone chooses to believe in. If it prompts someone to be a better person, help those around them and otherwise make the world less of a shit hole, I'll celebrate their holidays with them and, light their candles and eat their food.

Gay-to-straight conversion camps piss me the fuck off. Creationism/Intelligent Design or whatever else it might be called is just circuitous denial of reality and a celebration of delusion that should not be tolerated.

I am not terribly fond of the Abrahambic religions due to their endorsement of misogyny, slavery and other barbaric practices and beliefs, but the reformed churches, temples and mosques have done good work and I believe are composed of largely genuinely decent people on most days.

Fundamentalist pricks of any stripe are a blight upon the world.

That would be accurate.

In Scientology you are taught that you are an immortal spiritual being, with no end and no beginning. You have lived many lives and done most of the things you only read about or see in movies. As a being of infinite potential, you are capable of affecting the flow of time, perceptions of the less able and the very fabric of the universe. Every aspect of Scientology is set up to support this truth.

But what happens when you find that you stumble on an incontrovertible set of facts that contradicts all that you ever knew or believed?

The RPF broke me. And its the fact that they broke me I find even more damaging. You have no idea how hard it is to be told all your life that you are immortal, timeless and unstoppable and then suddenly find out that you can be broken.

It took breaking me physically to show me that I wouldn't last and that the damage wouldn't fade. First they made me bleed. It was the first cut I ever had that needed real attention to prevent dangerous blood loss and further pain. Then, they took my back. The one thing that every work safety video tells you to avoid hurting. Damaging a back has a way of bending a person... making them a slave to their pain. I can fake it because I was taught how to let non-shocking pains wash over me. They made me bleed again, but I was cut with a scorching hot blade so the wound was cauterize almost immediately, I still got 20-some-odd stitches... and despite the lidocaine, felt every one. All this time, I knew I would heal, that I would overcome, that I would remain whole and timeless.

It took various cuts later and burn, until they finally took my eye. Until then, I thought I was immortal, timeless. Until then, I couldn't see the end. Until then, I hadn't experienced real pain.

The initial pain of losing my eye, should have been much more severe, when in fact, it hurt very little... but I KNEW, what had just happened. Camera 2 had just gone down and none of these chuckle heads knew how to fix it. That's what hurt. Then came not knowing what was happening to me. I knew I was blind, I knew I was fucked, but in getting over to the hospital, was the first time I had physically reacted to pain. All pain up until that point was in my head, just “loud” signals that the damaged area sent upstairs. This was pain that sent a very quiet signal, no worse that bumping into a counter on the way out of the kitchen.

But the reaction in my guts was astounding. I was immediately nauseous. I held it back from the 6th floor Main Building to the security offices by the horseshoe. I wanted it to come when the medic was patching up my eye. A comedic strike back at the institution that hurt me. But my guts weren't ready to launch, so I held it.

I held it for the two block car ride to the emergency room. I held it on the bed until the doctor looked at me. I held it for the IV being put in and the specialist being called. I held it until the Ophthalmologist called in his team and prescribed a steroid. I held it until I just had to relax.

Then it came. My guts had shut down everything. Undigested food was jettisoned as cargo too heavy to make it home. All fuel must be used getting to safety. Today, safety was on an operating room table under a microscope.

I woke up from the surgery knowing that I wasn't going to die soon, but that I was going to die.

Every day from that point on was spent dealing with the problems of a finite life.

And I'll be honest, the pain sucks, the physical wrenching my damaged body accumulating day after day, but the worst is knowing that it will end me, that one day, I will be so hurt and damaged, that I won't be able to get back up.

I wanted to get out when I was on the RPF. I had recently lost my left eye due to an accident and I was being denied visitation to or by my mother during her cancer treatments (I ran away and saw her anyway... that didn't go over well). This was after the process of being assigned to the RPF which clearly violated SCN justice procedures and making no gains from what by all accounts are "standard Scientology"

There was no end in sight, I was being hospitalized roughly every 6 months (cut bad cuts on hands, taking a copper pipe to the eye, more bad cuts on the hands, sawzall dropped on my leg by another worker, bad scald on my hand and arm).

First was to just get out of the Sea Org which took about 8 months. I probably could have just walked away at a certain point, but then I would literally be out on the street with no support structure of any kind... I knew that I would need the help of my SCN family to re-integrate into society. I also still considered myself a Scientologist, but was only dealing with one set of contradictions at a time.

Once I was out of the Sea Org and off the RPF, I finally had the mental space to start processing my experiences. Its hard to think when you are kept hungry and exhausted. After some not great experiences with Scientologists, I decided it was time to just drop the label all together. I've not considered myself a Scientologist for nearly 10 years.

• I don't think that they know, I don't think they are capable of knowing since they have spent so long in a position of awe and privilege among Scientologists. I think if they were to hear it straight from myself or others without bias, they would have too much of their own baggage to sift through for it to really register as anything other than "SP lies." As such, I don't really care. Fuck 'em. I don't have to pay for their shitty movies... although if Tom Cruise could stop doing Sci-Fi pictures, that would be great.

• As a Scientologist, you are explicitly told that just by READING the OTIII materiel, you could die and that it could really fuck up your mental state. When I read it, nothing happened... in fact, its so often referenced as the great cataclysm that happened 67 million years ago, and with all the other space opera stuff littered throughout SCN, it came as no surprise and I was kinda disappointed.

• I couldn't really say... a relatively small minority is my best guess.