I guess I might as well re-post this old post here, just to be thorough:
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Making blanket negative statements about every bit and piece of Scientology may feel good, but it may also drive a person further into Scientology.
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When confronted by a person, who is in the process of being lured into Scientology, and has just pleasantly used his newly acquired "Comm Course" skills to establish communication with, and happily extrovert, a withdrawn little old lady neighbor, and is very pleased with himself about his good deed, and equally as impressed with his success applying the "tech," don't go
on the person, because that probably won't help free him from the sucking power of Scientology.
The fact is the little old lady did feel better, and was cheerfully extroverted.
Recognize that, and then take it from there.
I'm a little late in replying to this post, BUT:
I think this is a key point. If participation in Scientology, in the early stages, didn't create 'wins', then there would be no need for anyone to post on this board - the organisation would have ceased to exist. It's no good telling someone who has just joined Scientology "It's a cult: they only want your money". People told me that when I first joined, and the internet didn't even exist then. I compared what they were saying to the new understandings of life I was getting, the gains I had from TRs (and also the promises of much bigger further gains to follow), listened to the warnings of the church about listening to nattery low-toned people, and decided that I would continue to give the CoS the benefit of the doubt.
The people warning me about Scientology had no personal knowledge of it. And besides, by the time you have read a few Scientology books, you can see that Hubbard had worked out a complete system of thought about the mind and spirit. And many of the ideas are very seductive. Discovering a group that tells you "you are an immortal being with infinite power. It's just a matter of recovering the use of that power" taps into the fundamental optimism that, especially, young people have, and perhaps older people who have gone down a blind alley in their life, and want a new start.
Telling these people that Hubbard was a fiction-writing conman doesn't gel with what they are observing and experiencing in their early days in Scientology, though it will be retained in the back of their mind as a vague doubt, to be added to as they observe more and more of the 'out points' of the organisation. When people told me "ah, he was a science-fiction writer, so OF COURSE the whole thing is a con", it made me vigilant, but it didn't persuade me that the fascinating body of spiritual writing that he had produced (and that I was gradually consuming) was bogus.
What WOULD have gotten my attention in those early days would be if someone who had reached into the OT levels and left had narrated to me their career in Scientology, and why they eventually left. I would have had to hear the whole story, otherwise I could have dismissed them by saying "ah, they were just out-ethics" or "they restimulated and didn't handle an implant on their OT levels" or whatever. It did get my attention when I heard that some OTV or OTVII had gone inactive. It didn't compute. Why would someone who had gone stably exterior and had whole-track recall suddenly decide to abandon Scientology? But I couldn't get their story, because Scientology kept you well away from people like that.
If I'd learned that Class VIIIs and Class XIIs and OTVIIIs had left in large numbers, then that really would have gotten my attention. But none of this information was accessible to a CoS member. I heard vague rumours that there were squirrel groups delivering OTIII, but people in the Org said that the version of OTIII they were running was squirrelled, and they didn't get any gains on it. It caught my attention, but it wasn't enough to make me think about leaving.
Anyway, the point is that screaming at someone that Scientology is bullshit, lies, the product of a conman's imagination, totally false, etc., is not going to induce someone to leave. And in fact, it will make a Scientologist less likely to listen to ANY critic. In my view, it's better just to give an honest, wins-and-all rendition of Scientology to someone. I wouldn't have stayed in the church for a few (expensive) wins: I wanted the state of OT.
When I was on the Purif, a public Scientologist who was on the fringes sometimes gave me a lift to the org. When I was about to join staff, he just casually commented that I had lots of talent, was young, and had a great career ahead of me. Was I SURE I wanted to join staff? Although his comment made me suspicious that he might be an SP, I could also see that he was genuinely concerned, but in a gentle, non-pushy way. His lack of pushinesss did give me pause for thought. I don't think you can drag someone out of Scientology. All you can do is give them a balanced rendition of the facts. The guy I speak of didn't really KNOW the facts, so he couldn't say enough to dissuade me from joining staff. But I am grateful to him for trying anyway. But armed with the facts, he could have dissuaded me, by just gently presenting a balanced view of what being on staff entailed.