29 мая 2015 г.

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

& Paul Haggis: I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. And someone had told me about what they called— They said, «There’s this cult in New York called Scientology,» which I’d never heard of. «And if you give them all your money, they’ll make anything possible in your life.»

& Jason Beghe: And, uh, I was into this shit, and I was becoming an auditor. Like, I was in Scientology probably four months, and I had done more than John Travolta had done, and he’d been there for 85 years or some shit.

& John Travolta: Look, I don’t— you name me another philosophy, religion, or technology that one of its main goals— besides the three I mentioned [a world without criminality, a world without war, and a world without insanity]— where joy is the operative concept.

& Paul Haggis: The thing that absolutely got me and stayed with me forever was the very first thing I read when you open the course pack, and it said— I’m paraphrasing— «Don’t believe any of this. If it works for you, great. If it doesn’t, discard it.»

& Paul Haggis: I was troubled by the fact that they called it a religion, but I figured, «Oh, it’s some tax scam. It’s fine with me. I don’t really care about that as long as it works.»

& Sara Goldberg: He said many times that the only way to make any real money was to have a religion.
That’s essentially what he was trying to do with "Dianetics«— get a religion where he could have an income and the government wouldn’t take it away from him in the form of taxes.


& Narrator: The E-meter is a very powerful instrument. It’s one-third of a lie detector. A lie detector would also measure your respiration and pulse. ... According to the Church of Scientology, it actually detects the mass of your thoughts. Although there’s no evidence that thoughts have mass.

& Lawrence Wright: How would you describe your business model?
Tony Ortega: Rapacious. It’s all about making money. Hubbard, from the beginning, knew that people would pay for this counseling at a pretty good clip, and so he continued to come out with more and more levels. The real money was in paying for these higher and higher courses. They were getting into thousands of dollars. Those prices kept going up and up. That’s really where Scientology begins to create this indoctrination, is, «It’s Hubbard that came up with that, only Hubbard, and you have to be a part of our group to get that spiritual satisfaction you were looking for.»

& Sylvia ’Spanky’ Taylor: When you’re in the organization, all the good that happens to you is because of Scientology, and everything that doesn’t, that isn’t good, is your fault. They sell it all in the beginning as something quite logical.

& Lawrence Wright: Scientology really is a journey into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard. And the further you get into it, the more like L. Ron Hubbard you become.

& Lawrence Wright: How do you define a religion? It’s not so easy. Why is one body of thinking a religion and another body not? The only organization entitled to make those distinctions is the IRS as an agency— very poorly equipped to do that. I mean, they’re mainly accountants and lawyers, they’re not theologians. But it’s the only opinion that matters. Once the IRS has decided that you are a religion, then you are protected by the vast protections of the First Amendment. And, as the saying goes, the rest is history.

& David Miscavige: On October the first, 1993, at 8:37 PM Eastern Standard Time, the IRS issued letters recognizing Scientology and every one of its organizations as fully tax-exempt! The war is over!

& Narrator: The war ended because the IRS surrendered. It forgave the billion-dollar tax bill and granted Scientology its tax exemption. Even Hubbard’s novels were declared religious texts, their sales exempt from taxes.

& Tony Ortega: If you go to a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim, and ask them, «What do you believe?», they can basically describe the most important parts of their religion in a minute or two. Well, what does a Scientologist believe? You need to be in Scientology for seven or eight years, and in for a couple hundred thousand dollars, before you finally learn this backstory of Xenu the Galactic Overlord. Now, if you were told that on day one, how many people would join? But if they were upfront about it, I’d have more respect for them. But it’s that sort of bait and switch that people are told, «Oh, it’s an applied philosophy to help you with your communication.» Oh, yeah? So why is Tom Cruise paying 1,000 bucks to have invisible aliens pulled out of his body?

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On the IMDb

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