Here's another robbery done by the COS;
http://www.tampabay.com/news/scientology/article1201168.ece
How much do you have in the bank?
"Anywhere else in society
it's a very rude, invasive, kind of offensive question," Brian Culkin said.
Not in the Church of Scientology.
Culkin balked when fundraisers for the International Association of Scientologists questioned him about his bank balance in the summer of 2009. But they kept pressing.
Why don't you just tell us?
What are you hiding?
Culkin trusted his new friends at Scientology's Flag Land Base in Clearwater, so he gave in and told them.
The six-figure sum got the attention of Flag's "registrars," the religious workers who collect payments for church services and solicit donations for Scientology causes....
Snipped from the article:
A New York-based "Flag service consultant" named Charlie Bills pushed him to buy "the L's," an intensive counseling regimen available only in Clearwater. The price tag: $80,000. Culkin was miffed by Bills' aggressive approach, and says he was well aware that Scientology had its problems. That intrigued him all the more.
"I thought, 'Well, God, if they're saying all these bad things, I want to figure out for myself if that's actually true.' "
"I grew up in an Irish Catholic family. I was an altar boy. I still go to Mass occasionally," Culkin said. "But I've never in my life had a priest personally bring me into his office and say, 'We need $50,000 right now.' "
People who get into cults are almost always "on a spiritual journey". But even though many/most seem to be college educated, they just seem to lack common sense and smarts to me.
I mean, here's a guy who is annoyed by an aggressive power pitch and who is well aware of all the criticism, but forges ahead because "if they're saying all these bad things, I want to figure out for myself if that's actually true". That sounds like the excuse a 17 year old girl makes for why she hooked up with a notorious "bad boy" who later started beating the tar out of her.
How does that make any sense at all? And then his annoyance is increased and clearly all the criticism is proved true because when he arrives at their sales center in Clearwater, he is hounded to death over a period of what, months? And what does he do in response? He gives away more and more of his savings until he ends up with nothing left. Wow.
You know, if I hear that a group is a cult, that's not going to make me want to go join them or go on their turf and let them "teach" me. And if any organization, religion or self-help group tells me that the way to salvation or freedom is for them to have control of my pocketbook or my day-to-day life - what I eat, the medication I take, my sex life, who I speak to, what I read, how much time I spend working for them - I run the other way.
I'm not a joiner, not fond of belonging to a group in which everyone thinks the same way and I am not fooled by flash, silver tongues or pressure tactics. So none of this makes sense to me and I have a very difficult time understanding how an intelligent person can be sucked in.
But then again, I am a Spanish-Gypsy and in our culture, we are taught from the time we are small how not to be conned, how to always be alert for danger and avoid it and to never trust anyone outside our culture or family. And, we are exposed to how to get people to see things a certain way or do certain things.
We call suckers "primo" which means "cousin". The term is used in a friendly way to someone unrelated who you like but it can also be used to call some easy mark a sucker - without him knowing it. The context and subtle inflection tells other Gypsies how you are using the term but the mark wouldn't know it.
Perhaps, then, my background made me especially immune to cults? I don't know, but I just don't get it. Doesn't a person have to be super, super naive, super, super emotionally vulnerable, super narcissistic and/or lacking in streets smarts and common sense of any kind to fall for these classic shoe salesmen techniques?
Help me out here. I want to be understanding but how the heck does this happen?
