Free to shine
Shiny & Free
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/02/scientologys_di.php
Continued at link above. Wow.SCIENTOLOGY'S DISGRACE: AN OPEN LETTER TO TOM CRUISE
It's time for you to start talking publicly about Scientology again.
Your religion is in serious trouble.
In 2005, you ended a longtime policy of not talking about the church by suddenly bringing it up in interviews. Most memorable, of course, was the way you challenged Matt Lauer, telling him that you had a superior understanding of the evils of psychiatry because of your Scientology training. Some wondered if you'd gone off the deep end, especially after the episode involving Oprah's couch. Soon enough, however, you clammed up about Scientology again. But in 2008, a video of you the church had made four years earlier surfaced, and it had a huge effect, both on your reputation and the church's. For better or worse, your strange words about, for example, how only Scientologists can help out at the scene of a car accident cemented in the minds of many that you were not only the truest of true believers in L. Ron Hubbard's unusual religion, but that you had become, in fact, its public face.
And that's why, today, you must come forward and speak for a church in crisis.
Tom, last week I was in San Antonio, and I saw with my own eyes the sworn court testimony of someone you once knew and respected.
Her name is Debbie Cook, and for 17 years she was "Captain FSO" -- the top executive who ran Scientology's spiritual mecca in Clearwater, Florida, which is called "Flag Land Base." Back in 1975, when you were still a Catholic kid growing up in Ottawa, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard got tired of running Scientology from a yacht in the Mediterranean, and moved operations from his "flagship" the Apollo to Clearwater, taking over the old Fort Harrison Hotel and many other places in town. With "Flag" now on land, the upper-level spiritual training that Hubbard was delivering on the ship could now take place at the Florida base.