Critical Q&A

The tenth installment of my question-and-answer video show, where I take up questions subscribers and commenters have asked me in my videos and answer them as best I can. Questions in this video are:

(1) Do you think most staff members are there to truly help a person spiritually or is it more about the stats and how much money or sales they can make? I always wrestle with that question and would like to think they are there to help. I’ve heard other people say they don’t care at all about people in general and it’s all about the money.

(2) I was in Scientology a long time ago, and only recently realized it was a cult. I don’t remember much about the thought control that apparently went on, I just remember reading a lot. You’ve talked perhaps to many others. Do you know of a book that would be good to read, or a person I might talk to, just to ferret out any effects it has had on my thinking? I am fine, just thought I should do it.

(3) I was never ‘in’ but have taken a huge interest in seeing the Church of Scientology go down and you are doing a great job in helping that happen. My question is, did you start doing this (or do you still do it) primarily to help others get out and stop people from taking those first tentative steps to get in? Or do you think it’s as much for your “recovery,” if that’s the right word? In other words reconciling the who you are now with the guy who was “in” for so many years?

(4) Why don’t all you ex-Scientologists get together and create an organization to meet the needs that all drove you to it in the first place? It could also be a place to which current members could escape. It would be a skeptical organization, an intellectually honest organization, an open organization that would embrace the scientific method of gaining knowledge.

(5) I have a tough question for you: When you were in the Sea Org, did you engage in the atrocious behavior that you now attribute to the entirety of the Sea Org? Just wanted to know if this organization had a negative affect on your own personal morality. I wonder if most people who are otherwise decent people would sink to levels of depravity and cruelty like we have heard about in the Sea Org. Thanks Chris, you rock!

(6) With whom does the guilt/blame for Scientology lie? LRH? Miscavige? Is it to be apportioned among all the members of Scientology somehow? Does it lie with Scientology itself, as something somehow distinct from actual people? Is there no guilt involved anywhere?

(7) Atheists don’t think or say there is no God. That’s an anti-theist. Atheists think there is not enough proof for them to believe in a god, so you’re actually an atheist but you don’t know what it is so you claimed not to be one and to be an anti-theist agnostic… agnostic just means the research of knowledge. You can be a theist or atheist and be also agnostic, it really doesn’t mean much.

AND

I don’t see how being atheist, meaning, not having a religious belief, is a religious belief. Please explain. Or did you not get the fact that being atheist doesn’t mean you don’t believe in God, it means that you fail to see proof of it? But of course, atheists all have their own beliefs on God and that’s a different thing altogether….

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