Outrageous accusations against the Church of Scientology are coming to light in Australia, including the use of labor camps, torture and pressure to get abortions.
There's a lot of people who want to automatically believe every horrible tale about the CoS. To them, its obvious that the CoS is a monster, willing to do anything and everything to keep followers under control.
Let me remind people than in the Middle Ages, it was also "obvious" to many people that wells poisoned by Jews caused the Black Death. In the Renaissance it was "obvious" that tens of thousands of people were working in league with Satan to magically destroy Christendom. And just a few years again it was "obvious" to many people that JonBenet Ramsey was killed by her parents, both of which have now been cleared by police.
Also, as tales of these accusations spread, they get embellished. In some articles about these newest allegations, there is mention of pressure to have abortions. Pregnant women are told that having a child is contrary to the aims of their organization. But other articles imply women are forced to have abortions. There's a world of difference between the two scenarios. And as people get more and more angry, they tend to repeat the most foul version of the tales they hear. That ultimately doesn't accomplish anything positive.
Yes the story gets blown out of proportion, by the media twisting the facts to increase revinue but the facts are they have frowned upon woman having children. It is mostly the women who work for the church and it seems only so those woman don’t go out on maternity leave or the like.
As for your opening statements about religions not just poping up out of thin air I give you the CoS invented by a SciFi writer on a bet with his friends.
Hitler said, if you’re going to tell them a lie, tell them a big one. The Germans believed it.
I don’t believe it is ever wise to assume that wild accusations are true.
But consider that the Christians did most, if not all, of these things in the past. The Jews did these things as well, as have almost every other big box religion.
I don’t necessarily believe such wild claims but I don’t dismiss them off hand either.
Personally, and purely from my experience with people I knew who joined CoS, I consider them to be a cult. As such they seek to be all controlling over their members and to cut them off from contact outside of the cult. Usually when this behavior exist it is for a reason.
The idea that they might use labor camps as a punishment wouldn’t really shock me if it were found to be true.
Nor would it shock me to learn that they used any other means of punishment.
I just love cult apologists that deal in straw man and fallacious arguments. Maybe if you’d even bothered to look at previous convictions of scientology, you wouldn’t be so fast(funny how much time as passed since you now decided to write such piffle) to make such an apologetic speil about the CULT of scientology.
You obviously knbow nothing of HUbbard’s own criminal convictions, nor those of scientology in your own country. The largest ever infiltration into Government offices on U.S soil was perpetrtated by the church of scientology. Of coiurse, don’t let facts get in the way of you apparently being one of the few aplologists the cult trots out whenever the need to flail arms and distract people from finding out that scientology is far from what it professes to be
And exactly how does government infiltration prove the existence of forced labor camps and forced abortions?
But thanks for highlighting my point how people like to presume every accusation against the CoS is true because they’re the “bad guys.” (Also, incidentally, I haven’t taken a position on whether or not they are true. But thanks for playing.)
You could easily have spent twenty minutes googling to discover numerous congruent accounts of both the forced labor (the subject of numerous civil suits and criminal inquiries) and the coerced abortion- including a recent confession of both by a member of OSA, the cult’s intelligence organization. You’ve also all ignored the same accusations from Marty Rathbun, who was on of the three highest-ranked officials to leave the cult.
We’re not talking wild rumor of blood libel here, but verifiable, repeated accusation from members and former members. It only takes a little looking before hitting that ‘publish’ button.