Jere, I like Hanlon’s Razor, “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” – or collective stupidity, like organizational dysfunction.

Yes you could make a case for that, but since scientologists love to try to find a “why” to blame their failures on, I think that it’s most likely that at some point he decided – or bought into the excuse – that Scientology’s recruiting problems were because the orgs were so shabby (which like many things had a kernel of truth in it, but was overblown), and that eventually the resulting campaign sort of took on a life of its own. One of my suspicions is that they have sort of Ponzi-like internal financing, and no one wants to admit how much of the money donated towards “ideal” orgs has been used to prop up other things and keep other stats up, so they have to keep on raising new money to fund completion of some of the old projects whose actual funds were long ago plundered. This just gets perpetuated due to a mix of organizational dysfunction, shared delusion, and subordinates’ fear of being imprisoned in The Hole if they point out that the emperor has no clothes.

In the nests of snakes everyone whistlers and turn others around. The greatest snakes of them all eat the smaller snakes.

It’s a cult. I think that many of of the people in it are decent people- they just don’t realize they are being brainwashed…that’s the whole thing with a cult.

It’s amazing what brainwashing can do. Maybe this isn’t exactly a good analogy because I don’t want to say most COS members are animals….but have you ever gone to a circus and seen the huge adult elephants and wonder why the heck the elephants don’t just take off – why do they allow themselves to be made to do stupid tricks when they could run away at any time – who is going to stop them …the humans who are tiny in comparison couldn’t physically stop them.

Do you know how that happens? Do you know how gigantic elephants are able to be tied up with chains that would NOT physically hold/stop them??

The grown elephant doesn’t know it can get away. They chain the baby elephant up and the young elephant tries and tries to get away (because those chains CAN stop a baby elephant) and can’t and gives up.

It’s a concept called “learned helplessness . The adult elephant doesn’t realize it’s not the baby that can’t get away.

That’s Scientology in my opinion- that’s probably why they try to recruit children into the Sea Org.

I always put “church” in quotes – I am being sarcastic actually. I throw up in my mouth a little when using the word to refer to COS. 🤢🤮

I do not respond at all to phrases such as, “I need you to… “

What is worse is when someone says “you need to… “

The only time that type of phrase is acceptable is when it comes from someone who’s my supervisor and is paying me my very good rate of pay.

“I need you to come up with this money by Thursday at 2 PM.” This is the exact opposite of what I will respond to.

If you convert that to Ideal Orgs it means they only have about 160,980 left for it to become a true “Milestone.”

LmR, I agree with the Tombstone reference, as well as an earlier poster’s “millstone”.

We need patience; DM’s making steady progress dismantling Ron’s creation. Don’t disturb scientology as they’re making deadly mistakes under Dave’s direction.

There’s no need to bring your wallet; they HAVE your account numbers, including your checking account, including the account balances/credit available.

the ULTIMATE celebrity would be Satan channelling his inner “Hubbard”, of course, but I’d sorta like to get to see his red-headed spirit medium. She sounded like quite the looker, and frisky to boot.