Louis Theroux tried to make a documentary about them. He's done some really good work showing the worst groups in the world as, you know, actual human beings. Like the westboro baptist church.
The Scientologists refused to talk to him. Him talking to ex-members unleashed a stampede of harassment both against them and him.
The result is called "My Scientology movie". It's worth a watch if you're interested in their techniques to keep people from leaving.
Everyone else has covered most of it, but another "neat" tidbit: To my knowledge, 4chan's protests and hacktivism against scientology was the largest coordinated action that community has ever taken.
Fucking 4chan. Land of the worst the public facing internet has to offer. Despite all their fucking racism, sexism, homophobia, supremacists... just overall despicableness... they came together in united action against this group.
High end cultists, get her out. NOW.
Get your daughter way from that kid as fast as you can.
| I don’t even understand if it’s an actual religion or one of those pay-to-level-up self-care courses.
yes, at about a ratio of 1 to 8. There's a mythology that these people fervently believe in, but pay-to-level-up is the core tenet. Distilling this down a bit, they believe that any problem you have is a ghost of long dead aliens clinging to you, and with enough abuse they can be scared away leaving behind the pure human.
When first you encounter them they seem to be offering self help courses or books. "Having trouble quitting smoking? Buy our book, join our class." For some these do genuinely help, if through no other mechanism than peer pressure. Then they pull out a bullshit device called an E meter and start talking about alternative therapies to realize your true potential, and then they've got you.
They are a high control group; they're like Mormons on amphetamines. Your life is centered on the church, people are kept in line through threats of destroying their families and support groups. They're particularly vindictive and are well documented to attack anyone critical of them.
Avoid these people with extreme prejudice, they are genuinely dangerous.
A cult
Teens can be complicated. I know. I have 5 kids. Youngest two are 14 and 12.
How close is your relationship to your daughter? If you are close, you can probably do nothing other than point out how weird things are, such as they way they won't discuss their beliefs, or the slavery thing. She'll probably eventually exit the situation on her own.
If you aren't close or you are prone to flying off the handle, that can be used as a wedge between you and your daughter.
Either way, this only ends in a few ways:
Scientology is a cult. And not just a cult, it is a vicious cult who take revenge on anyone they perceive as an enemy. People have found themselves surveilled and having their bosses called making things up to try to get them fired. They are extremely litigious.
Obviously I wouldn't want my kids in any cult, but Scientology would probably be the worst one. At least most other cults, if you make yourself available to help when they decide they need to leave, they can escape. Scientologists will literally house them on a prison ship.
Good luck, friend.
We’re close, and both my wife and I talked with her. She says she doesn’t care about religion, she just wants to be with him. She doesn’t seem to be able to understand that both him & his family care a lot about their “religion” though. His family won’t even acknowledge her as his girlfriend. They say “she’s a friend”, even though they’re not even a PDA discreet couple. My wife says they most likely view her as just someone who their son is fooling around with at the moment - they don’t take her seriously or see her as a “real candidate”. Wife believes she’ll most likely get angry about it all once the infatuation ends and break it off with him. The surveillance thing is scary, I wonder if we’ve already been “looked into” due to daughter’s association with this family…
Based on your description, I'd doubt any surveillance so far rises above going through any of your socials they can find. AFAIK, that sort of thing is generally for someone who has really pissed them off. Like if you were to become outspoken about them.
I'd probably just keep the whole affair (pun intended) at arms length and let it blow over. Chances are this will be an amusing anecdote in a few years.
L. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction writer. He made a bet with another science fiction writer that he could get rich quicker by starting a fake religion, and collecting tithes, than he could selling science fiction stories. Scientology is the resulting pyramid scheme/ cult.
It's a cult. The "science" they base their beliefs on is called "dianetics". You can look that up and get more straigh-up explanations than by looking up "scientology".
In short, they think humans are possessed by the dead souls of immortal aliens from millions of years ago, but we can't perceive this due to traumatic memories which must be "cleared" using "auditing".
Auditing sessions are recorded, and as they involve confessing your darkest secrets to "clear" the relevant "trauma", the recordings can then be used to blackmail people into staying with the cult.
It's a pay-to-level-up religion, except instead of caring for your health they abuse you. They actively reject mental healthcare based on real science, and consider psychiatrists equivalent to murderers.
They don't believe in the concept of crime, instead considering anything and everything that happens to someone their own fault.
Members are not allowed to report crimes perpetrated by other members to the actual police, instead they must be reported to the church. When scientologists rape other scientologists, the victim gets punished with more auditing.
The most infamous scientologist is likely Danny Masterson, who is finally in prison for assaulting likely dozens and dozens of female members.
They also don't tell their followers what their beliefs actually are, before they've paid so much money for it that the sunk cost fallacy has them too committed to pull out.
You can find more info online about their actual beliefs told by people who have left the cult, than they reveal even to their own followers. Its all deliberately confusing, because no-one would buy into their crazy bullshit otherwise.
Get your daughter out of this relationship asap. Or even better, have a serious talk with her about scientology, explore what it is and what it does to its members, together, so she can then consider the situation and navigate it for herself.
Get your daughter out of this relationship asap, or even better, have a serious talk with her about what scientology, explore what it is and what it does to its members together, so she can then consider the situation and navigate it for herself.
Or even better, she's already being manipulated and scientology are GOOD at it while you are just yet another concerned relative they can easily cut off your daughter's life.
Get her out, even against her better judgement if she is a minor, but honestly even if she is not.
If the guy is renouncing Scientology, MAYBE, he can stay.
Allowing a person to think for themselves is always the best option.
But allowing her to accept scientology should not be an option, and isn't what I was suggesting.
I simply assume that OP, looking into scientology with a critical eye, is likely to have a good relationship with their daughter. And that the daughter being of dating age, and the offspring of someone seemingly reasonable, they are both capable of having an adult conversation. One that won't end with their daughter going "fuck you, I'm cutting you out of my life forever" but rather with their daughter accepting reality and intergrating the facts into her mind in a way where they can't be easily subverted.
If that isn't the case, then the heavy handed approach is absolutely warranted.
I don’t have much new to offer here, but it’s 100% a cult and please be very careful with regard to your daughter. My impression is that any relationships with people outside of the cult will result in them trying to bring the outsider in and once they’re in, it can be difficult to break them out. They’ll have information on their members that they’ll use against them leaving, and they’ll at best be labeled a suppressive person and then harassed if they try to leave and at worst further isolated from their outside relationships, including family as their sucked further into the cult that drains them of their money and/or basically uses them ad slaves. Since the family is rich, they may have a little more freedom and be a little more laid back about the religion, but if they have slaves working at their house, they’re probably higher up and may be discouraged from dating outside their cult since they seem to place very high value on money and fame and likely don’t want significant others to break those people out of the cult.
His family won’t even acknowledge her as his girlfriend. They say “she’s a friend”, even though they’re not even a PDA discreet couple. My wife says they most likely view her as just someone who their son is fooling around with at the moment - they don’t take her seriously or see her as a “real candidate”. Wife believes she’ll most likely get angry about it all once the infatuation ends and break it off with him.
Oh ok, not an ideal situation under normal circumstances, but it might be for the best if they don’t take the relationship seriously. It might be a good idea to check out some of the resources others have posted in the comments with your daughter just to prepare her. The Leah remini series is a great, comprehensive look at how it affected former members. The South Park episode shows how ridiculous the mythology of their religion is, but from what I understand, most people in the cult don’t even learn about that until you’re higher up and I guess by that point, they’ve invested so much money and resources that they just go with it. There are a few documentaries on streaming services like Netflix and max that cover a lot of it too. It might be worth getting ahead of it in case they start seeing your daughter as someone they can recruit. I don’t see how anyone could join them after watching the Leah Remini series, so that’s probably best.
I would just like to note that we’re on Lemmy, the land of 100 different opinions, and yet everyone has said the same thing about Scientology. That should be a huge flag there.
It's bad, really really bad. Have a talk with her immediately. It doesnt mean her partner is a bad person, it just means her partner is caught up in something bad.
Don't interject yourself in between, just expose her to all the news articles of people who have tried to get out, and the cult like behaviors.
The part that really stood up to me was that the boyfriend himself won’t talk about his religion’s beliefs or practices with neither my daughter nor us (her parents), if you ask him he’ll only say surface level abstract stuff & will say the rest is members-only. He’ll say the Church “is family and these things are family business”. It’s weird not even being able to get a member to explain things to you.
For a long while their innermost secrets were just that, secret. Members are tight-lipped on any real elaboration, and won't engage with outsiders.
It also makes it really difficult for outsiders to present any countering logic to their beliefs. People aren't gonna tell you you've fallen in with crazies, if you don't tell em the dumb shit you're being told is real.
But a lot of it is now out in the open, if you know to look. Even then, the church AGGRESSIVELY wields the law in an active attempt to suppress public knowledge as much as possible. But as even top-level members have left the cult over the decades, even the innermost bullshit has been exposed.
It's probable that your daughters boyfriend himself knows much less than what is available online, because members are discouraged from interacting with any "harmful" media so as to not grow disillusioned, and aren't told anything substantial until it's way too late to painlessly pull out.
It's all quite deliberately set up to be as insidiously prolific as possible, while minimizing the chances people will leave.
And if people do show start to show signs of wanting out, the gloves come off really quick with stuff like blackmail and legal action.
Even its tax exempt status in the US is a complete farce, yet it lends the cult an air of legitimacy.
South Park s9e12 actually does a decent job rounding up and illustrating their beliefs. Might be worth a watch, if you don't mind South Park.
its a religion created by a sci-fi writer for monetary gain. he told everyone he was going to do so, and then did it.. but just as with every religion once there is a critical mass of idiots, people think it's "real".
It's a sect. Their beliefs are completely ridiculous and don't really matter much.
What matters is that they aggressively recruit new members into their cult, preferably people who don't fit in well in the "real world".
They promise that all problems you may have (psychologically, health or financial) can be solved by learning how to "free your soul" from past trauma.
You learn this in extremely expensive internal workshops (the first ones are free, but to raise to higher levels, you need to pay more and more money). The money goes directly to the leaders of the cult.
The methods are presented as scientific, but they are all 100% based on one book written by the founder L. Ron Hubbard, who was a third rate sci-fi author.
Members are encouraged to cut contact to all non-members.
If you try to leave, you are put under extreme pressure, harassed, and even threatened.
Honestly one of the most freakish things I’ve heard from my daughter is that even though her boyfriend’s family’s rich, they don’t employ actual household staff, but they use volunteers from an internal organization of the church (Sea Org I think?), and volunteers don’t get paid except for food, board and small allowance - it’s “a life of service”. Which sounds uncomfortably close to slavery to me…
Which sounds uncomfortably close to slavery to me…
That's because it is.
It's more than a life of service, the Sea Org sign a billion year contract to include any resurrections.
Are you joking or do they actually do that??
Not joking. Obviously it's unenforceable, but when you're already ensconced in the larger organization and made the choice to join Sea Org, you're really committed to Scientology and I'm sure the contract feels real. Makes it pretty hard to leave your cushy $10/day job scrubbing one of their cruise ships.
I believe they only have one cruise ship, and from reports I've heard it's dilapidated and getting worse
Read this book, it's the story of L. Ron Hubbard, the god of Scientology and tells you everything you want to know.
Watch this series about life in Scientology and you'll get the idea pretty quickly.
TL;DR/DW: Get her away from him asap
South Park: What Scientologists Actually Believe
Beyond that, it's a cult / pyramid scheme.
Also, check out Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath documentary for a good insider's perspective.
It's not the documentary, but here's Leah explaining the scam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM-FrI5Hqto
To everyone saying that this religion is a cult:
All religions are cults, but Scientology is one of the worst ones.
Some cults are understandable to a degree such as Mormonism, Jehovahs Witness, and Soka Gakkai but I can never understand people who are actually Scientologists.
It's an acronym.
The S stands for "Scam".
the rest stands for bullshit.
It started as a fake psychiatry scam, but when Hubbard realized there were laws regulating medicine he switched it over to being a religion where there aren't any of those pesky regulations or ethical oversight.
This is a good explanation because it gets at the source. L. Ron was a failed Freudian and had some mental issues of his own, he lashed out at the psychiatry community, and built this whole thing out of a hatred for what (rightfully) rejected him. He just happened to write shitty sci-fi, so he channeled that into pseudo-psychiatry (Dianetics). There’s a reason those e-meters exist: bullshit stress response devices to measure “clearing” certain negative thoughts. They don’t actually work, but that’s the principle: you have a “auditing session,” and let’s say you get asked about your propensity for lying in a certain situation. E-meter response is measured until you’re no longer stressed by the thing you were asked about (according to the meter), you pay them absurd amounts of money, they now have dirt on you in case you try to leave, etc. This is its core, reductively. Anti-psychiatry money mill.
You need to visit https://www.xenu.net/ Aka operation clam bake. The evil these guys spread to the world is insane. And their sea org is slavery.
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