all right welcome to our last lecture for the semester today we're going to be talking about religious cults and so i want to start by just asking this general question is there such a thing as a bad religion now a lot of students give me different answers on this and i think that it's a question that everybody should be asking if there is such a thing as a bad religion what criteria would you use to try to evaluate that in other words what makes something a good religion versus a bad religion now we could offer all sorts of different answers but this i think at the heart of it it comes to the the question of what makes something a religious cult and so in order for us to talk about cults today we first have to identify what criteria we're going to be using to evaluate that now how you define the word cult is going to vary from you know place to place and person to person and and therefore we have a difficulty talking about this concept because we don't have it agreed upon definition definitions matter as you've seen from even the first day of class throughout the semesters we've tried to define things even like christianity or judaism or islam how you define it ultimately depends on what kind of criteria you're using to evaluate that term so how do you define cults well one definition we could give is to say that a cult is a religion or sect that is generally considered to be unorthodox extremist or false i don't like this definition but it is probably the most commonly used definition for for cults simply because when people use that term they're usually just describing something that they consider to be unorthodox or they consider to be extremist or they consider it to be false and if that's the definition for this word then this word really doesn't have any meaning to it it's basically just saying anything you think is false which could apply to pretty much any religion so if you think that a particular religion is false then that religion is false to you it is a cult to you but that makes the term very subjective everyone thinks some other religion is false and therefore all religions are cults according to this definition so it's not very useful it's also very vague in the sense that what is extremist to one may not be extremist to another so if you think that you know chains are extreme in their pacifism then does that make them a cult just because that you find them to be more extreme than your middle path or moderate view of religion and then the term unorthodox we noticed in the first day of class or first week of class is a very problematic term for the reasons that we talked about then what is considered to be orthodox teachings if orthodox means the correct teachings then how do you establish what are the correct teachings of any one religion let alone all religions so when people use the term unorthodox they usually just mean it to mean anything that they disagree with therefore occult is just something that other people disagree with and that's probably the case for every religion so that makes the term useless uh it would be like saying well you know every religion is a cult because somebody else thinks it's false well then why don't we just call this philosophy 155 world cults in other words we already had a term for that we called it religion and i don't see that there's a need to come up with another term cults just to describe something that you disagree with it doesn't make much sense so one of my professors or one of the colleagues here at rock valley college actually does use the word cult in this definition he actually says that every religion begins as a cult and he says that because it is considered to be unorthodox for the first i don't know a couple of 100 centuries or a couple centuries of its existence when a religion first gets started there aren't that many followers to it and therefore it is probably considered to be false by the vast majority of people just go through time and look at that right when zoestreanism started teaching when all these people were polytheists they considered zoastrianism to be a cult until eventually it became the dominant religion of the persian empire when judaism emerged out of the middle east it was considered to be a cult because it was so different than all of these other polyphasic societies until eventually it became the dominant religion of the middle east when christianity emerged right remember when paul was practicing judaism he considered christianity to be a cult because it was something he considered to be unorthodox until eventually christianity became the dominant religion of the middle east and then out of that came islam and islam was considered to be a cult until it became the dominant religion of the middle east and then came baha'i and and baha'i was considered to be a call until eventually it will become one of the most dominant religions of the middle east you see what i'm saying here if you just use the word cult to mean any any religion that's just getting started why make that distinction and then when does a cult become a religion when it becomes popular how popular does it have to become does it have to you know be in the millions or is it in a hundred thousands you see what i mean by this this seems ridiculous we already have a word and it's it's religion why not just call them religions instead of calling them something negative like cults that term just seems to be completely useless so usually when people talk to me about cults they're like they identify any religion that's not their own as a cult and i'm just like okay that just seems really redundant and a question begging but there is a study of cultism in academia so when we as academics try to study cults we're not basing this on our personal beliefs so we're not basing it on any kind of subjective criteria we're asking the question what kind of objective criteria could we use to try to pinpoint what makes something a cult versus a religion and and here's a definition that i think kind of fits that and everything we're going to be talking about today it kind of describes these uh more objective criteria for cults so i came up with a definition for cult that says that a cult is a religion that practices manipulation or thought control using misguided or coercive means toward the potential for harm indicating the difference between a religion that doesn't do those things and a cult that does it might manipulate people it might use thought control or brainwashing techniques it may try to misguide people or coerce them into doing things they wouldn't otherwise do and then toward the potential for harm to say that many cults oftentimes lead to this uh harm-like state it's something about the nature of them that maybe will become evident as we go throughout today's lecture that the more cult-like they are the more likely they are to create harm either for themselves or for other people and so cults have these characteristics so as academics we can then study any religion that uses these traits or has these qualities to identify them as a cult and to distinguish them from other religions now i first became interested in this topic when i was at niu at niu there were actually two cults on campus and i was kind of curious about it because one of them got kicked off of campus by niu and i thought wait a minute how does a secular institution like niu get to decide which religions can practice on campus and which ones can't and so this became an intriguing topic for me and uh part of the problem was the the cult that was kicked off campus came back the next semester but under a different name and i niu had no recourse to kick them off because technically they were a different religion at least that's what they were claiming but i already got to know these people because i had heard that they were on campus and of course you know me i like to go investigate people and to interview them so i already knew these people were and they came back and i was like wait a minute were you guys kicked off last semester and they're like oh no they said we're a completely different religion now and i'm like but you're the same people and you're teaching the same things and they're like no no we're reformed so i was like you know niu then you know i couldn't kick them off campus so instead what they did is they sent out these flyers to all the students saying here's how to identify a cult and if you spot these characteristics then uh you should probably stay away so in other words they were trying to equip these students with the material for how to spot a cult and that's why i think this lecture is perhaps one of the most important lectures of the semester if if nothing else i want you guys to be able to walk with this with the ability to understand how to identify a cult and therefore to try to avoid this because i don't understand why there aren't zero members in these cults well what is it that attracts people to like jim jones or heaven's gate or those types of uh cult like phenomenon so here's what the criteria was from niu and this is only about half the criteria that we study in academia i can give you the full list of 16 characteristics that make something a call but we'll just give you the standard eight that pretty much summarize the big points for cultism so you might be a cult if you practice fear and intimidation tactics the reason why cults like to do that is because if they can bully you they can manipulate you then they can actually control what your behaviors are they can control what you do what you think etc and so they oftentimes have to use fear and intimidation tactics to get people to do these things that they wouldn't normally do most i think sane people or rational thinkers would try to avoid cultism if they could but it would require them the ability to think that through and therefore scaring people oftentimes gets people in an emotional state of mind where they can't think rationally so this is one technique that they might use in a cult another characteristic of a cult is to limit access to outside information if they tell you who you can talk to or or you know what kind of information you can get in the outside what internet sites to go to which movies to watch even which classes to take that's one of the things that the cults on campus were doing is telling students which classes they can and cannot take well one of the classes they said you couldn't take was world religions they didn't want people learning about different ways of life and so they were trying to control their membership by saying no we only want you to read our books we want you to read you know see our movies we want you to stay on our website and they were trying to manipulate their followers in case they might find out some outside information and i think that's what they were afraid of because i'd already done the research when i first got to know them i traced them back to their origins and there is a trail on the internet that kind of tells you where they've been and how they've uh progressed throughout time so once i knew that information i can kind of spot where where they were and who they were what they were teaching and so this limited access to outside information i think is just simply a red flag you can think of all of these criteria it's like red flags to say something's wrong here it doesn't mean that they're occult because there might be religions that practice some of these characteristics but they're only a call if they i don't know if they pass certain numbers of them it's not like you know those like three strikes you're a cult there's a a a gray area between here where i would think of these as like degrees of cultinus if you will where the more red flags you have the more cult like they become and so uh yeah the the fact that they were actually limiting control or access to outside information indicates that something was wrong there because it was clear that they didn't want people following their their path from you know from boston to l.a to florida to chicago and then to dekalb and so if if they can control which websites you go to then maybe you won't be likely to find out about their their history their past because they're ashamed of it also if they practice information control and secrecy there's also a sign that they're occult if they're hiding something if they won't tell you all of their beliefs or they won't tell you who they are or where they're from something's up there actually one of the cults that was on campus came to campus and they would frequently stand in the free speech courtyard and try to you know lambast people yelling at them and stuff like that so i actually followed these guys afterwards and i was trying to get more information i just wanted to have a conversation and say tell me who you are tell me where you're from what you know where do you you know what's your religion and and tell me more about it and so i was trying to gather information as if i was like trying to learn i want as if i wanted to convert to their religion but they wouldn't even tell me what their names were they wouldn't even tell me what religion they were they wouldn't tell me where they were from it was really mysterious until eventually they just got in a car that happened to be waiting for them at a parking lot and then they zoomed off and i was like that's weird that's really suspicious that they were like you know planning this and they the car was planted there so that they could make this easy escape there's something weird about that and so again there may be religions that you know hide some of their teachings or don't share everything with you but i can't think of a good reason why they would want to do that the reason why this is a red flag is because if you're hiding something it means that either you're ashamed of it or you know it's wrong or that you just don't want people to find out because maybe they will prove it to be false and therefore they're trying to hide these things that they think might be revealed as faults so i can't think of a good reason why someone would do that you see why that's a red flag in my mind so if they're hiding information from you and that's one of the things that they were doing the the second cult that i mentioned were kicked off campus they just didn't want people hearing about some of their past and some of the stuff they've done in other places if they practice relationship control that's also a red flag that they might be at call and this is actually one of the easiest spotters for a cult if they're telling you who you can be in a relationship with specifically who you can marry and then in some cases who you should have sex with there are a lot of cults that actually demand sex with the founder and if that's the case that that should be like a big red flag if you're being told that you have to have sex with the founder get out of there that's a cult and you'd be surprised at how many times that happens with the branch davidians from waco texas to the nexium cult which actually isn't a religious call it's a secular call but still it was a sex cult that was going around in new york city and i think started to spread to other states as well there are a lot of cases like that where if you watch there's a netflix movie i think called how i escaped a cult and in that in that documentary it actually interviews people from these various cults and talks about what their experiences were i think in every one of those cases that that documentary has they had to have sex with their founder in some cases it was child molestation in some cases it was just some kind of relationship where you were you know married to this guy who was a polygamist and that's a serious red flag that's usually what cults do because it's all about the founder and their control and power over other people it might also be a call if they practice entrapment and isolation techniques and that's actually what got one of the groups kicked off campus at niu entrapment just means that they try to get you trick you into you know becoming part of a religion and then you know making you either financially or emotionally dependent upon them so for example if you give all of your money to the cult then they've got control over you because if you leave you leave with nothing but if you stay they give you everything so that's an entrapment technique and isolation techniques by cutting you off from other people making you feel alone if you leave but making you feel very much wanted if you stay and so one of the things that they did at niu was to lock certain people they were targeting certain people on campus and they would lock them into a dorm room and then they would just berate them inside the room until they eventually converted they were trying to bully them and scare them into saying look you know you're a terrible person and you need to convert to this religion and so they would just lock them in their dorm rooms well it turns out that's illegal you can't do that so the reason why they got kicked off campus turns out it's because they broke the law and so that's why they got kicked off campus but they returned the next year just under a different name claiming that they were reformed but they were still teaching the same stuff it might be a call if they use a reporting structure as well this is a a pretty common characteristic of cults because they like to know exactly what's going on with their members and so they'll have a reporting structure where you'll have to either report about your daily activities your financial status well you know what you spend your money on and maybe even talking about reporting what other people are doing now notice if you're reporting on other people's behaviors that's not accountability that's spying and that's a red flag because the reason why cults like to have this reporting structure is so that they know exactly what's going on with each of their members so that they can manipulate you further it helps them to kind of keep tally of who's in and who's out and then they can also control your relationships as well so if they tell you who you can be friends with and say no you're not supposed to talk to these people that way they can make sure that you're only hearing information from them you won't hear any outside information that way also if they suppress critical thinking skills that's a huge red flag for me and i may be saying that just because i'm a philosophy professor but i mean to me this is like one of the biggest concerns if they tell you not to ask questions something's wrong there why can't i ask questions right shouldn't you have the answer ready for me and you know is there something wrong with me wanting to know more information about the religion i don't see any good reasons why anyone would want to do that and so if they can suppress your critical thinking skills by saying don't ask questions or don't question me on this or or don't think too carefully about this something's up there because if you think that your religion is true then wouldn't you want to share why it's true with other people and if you don't have an answer to those questions doesn't that mean your religion is kind of foundationless sometimes wrong if they don't want you to answer these ask these questions let alone to answer them you should have a reason for why you believe what you believe otherwise what good is that religion if you don't have any reasons for believing it then why would anyone want to convert to it why would anyone have to accept that if they can suppress your critical thinking skills then they can tell you anything no matter how absurd it is and you just have to accept that because i said so or you know because i am the founder or whatever it is and that that makes things really weird that no matter how odd it may sound to you you just have to accept it on what's called blind faith and i've already indicated this right the term blind faith does not appear in any scriptures in any religion and i think for good reasons cults love that kind of term blind faith because it means that you can you just have to accept it no matter what no matter how scary it is no matter how weird it is no matter how immoral it is you just have to accept it and do what they say so suppressing her critical thinking skills i think is one of the biggest red flags and then another another characteristic of cults is their pressure selling techniques calls love to just say hey you've got to make a decision right now or else right and therefore there's a little bit of intimidation here as well so if they're if they're trying to make you make a decision right now it's because they're worried that if you think it through you might come to realize that this isn't a good religion or that you might start to realize there's something wrong with this and that's how cults get people they're they're they're interested in just making these quick decisions before you have had time to process it and that can lead people into all sorts of weird and fascinating uh cultism right so pressure selling is a technique that they like to use so that you don't have time to go out and do the research and to figure out what was really true now one of my students looked at this listing and she said um i work at a used car salesman and and they actually practice a lot of these techniques and i thought about that and i was like okay that makes sense for used car salesmen because they're trying to sell you a lemon i mean there's a reason why those cars are for sale the p people didn't want them if they wanted them they would keep them so you have to like use pressure selling and suppression or critical thinking you might even have to control what information you share about the car you don't want to share its car history or something like that so you know this is what a lot of used car sales that's why sometimes used car salesmen are seen as kind of shady or slimy for that reason they're trying to sell you something that you don't want so be careful of that and then i had another student said my parents use a lot of these techniques and i was like i guess that's kind of true isn't it the parenting styles might use some of these these methods as well for a small child but then i thought about i was like well that makes sense right with a child the the person the kid doesn't really understand how to think for themselves i mean they're not fully rational yet and so you know they don't understand what the difference is between sugar and cocaine and so you know they might uh you know like i don't know i just want whatever it is and therefore uh they don't even think that through you might have to control relationships because you know you don't want them hanging around people it might be a bad influence or you might have to like make sure that they're reporting where they're at every time because you never know what a kid's getting into you see my point there for children this might make sense but that doesn't translate well with religion it doesn't translate well with religion because most most of the times that people are talking about calls they're talking to adults and so to treat an adult like a child and say just do as i say that's that's insulting that's perhaps immoral because you're trying to manipulate them you're trying to get them to a place where they're not thinking for themselves they don't have any reasons to accept this and you're just trying to cram it into them to get them to to believe this that i think is why cults like using these techniques is because it manipulates people it controls them so uh with that then i want to look at our last world religion of the semester scientology now you can decide for yourself if you think scientology is a call or not and i'll i'll leave that question open at the end of this lecture but i just want to go through some of the basic teachings of scientology just so you understand exactly what it's all about now scientology actually started in 1950 by a man by the name of l ron hubbard hubbard was actually served in the military and actually spent some time overseas where he was allegedly involved in pacific wars although the navy says he didn't actually serve in any battles he claims personally that he fought many japs as he calls them and the single-handedly wrestled them to the ground and defeated many people in the islands of the pacific ocean telling these great valiant stories but according to the u.s navy he was actually discharged due to health problems so we don't know exactly what the story is and elmer hubbard claims that the navy is covering this up and they're out to kind of get him because he eventually became this religious teacher and so they didn't like him but the 1950s was a time of rebuilding think about it it was just right after world war ii and world war ii was a disaster i mean you know it fortunately ended on the right note but i think about the cost of human lives the millions of people who died fighting the nazis the millions of people who died under the nazi regime in concentration camps and then at the end of world war ii we saw the creation of the nuclear weapons two bombs were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki and we suddenly realized that we had the power to blow up entire cities with just one hit of a button so people were kind of asking the question how did we get this evil like what what brought us at this point where we were suddenly like slaughtering the jews and you know blowing up the japanese and and millions of people were dying all because uh some some of these people thought that they were you know supreme supreme races like the nazis and the japanese and the italians and so you know people were kind of trying to figure out how do we get overcome this how do we rebuild and this is really where the self-help books started to become more popular scientology sees itself as a self-help religion that seeks to empower individuals through mental exercises and so you may be familiar with self-help books from barnes noble there's even whole sections in in libraries now dedicated to self-help that actually became popular in the 1950s as pop psychology became more well popular right that pop psychology is just popular psychology for people who aren't trained in the medical field and so this is the wave that started to occur at that time as people were writing books on try to you know improve yourself and to overcome whatever mental illnesses and elder hubbard rode that wave he was basically saying that scientology can help you to overcome any illness any mental uh disease or mental illness that you have uh through mental exercises he was going to train your brain to think the the correct thoughts so the key he says the key to unlocking our human potential is to understand how to perceive the world correctly if we can simply think about the world correctly then you know we would actually live better in it we'd be more successful in our daily lives and so you can see there's some similarities here with psychology and at this point i have a lot of students who are like wait a minute right that sounds just a light a lot like psychology and it's true if you read through the dsm-4 or the dsm-5 right most most mental illnesses are the result of us having a poor perception of reality because just go down the list depression thinking that things are worse than they really are anxiety thinking that things are a big deal when they're not paranoia thinking that people are out to get you when they're not anorexia thinking that you're too fat when you're not all of these different disorders are ways of thinking about the world incorrectly and that oftentimes leads us to either self-harm or harm for other people and therefore our relationships falter our you know our framework falls apart and scientology is just kind of saying the same thing if you truly understood what reality was then you would know how to fix the problems and so they think that they can do this through their religion now what what makes this any different for uh psychology is just that it has some religious beliefs attached to it so he kind of sees this as a rehabilitation of the human spirit that is you're just basically trying to heal yourself of whether whatever mental illnesses you suffer from on an individual basis so that's that's how scientology is framed as sort of like a self-help religion geared toward empowering individuals through mental exercises to train you how to be a better person now in his book dianetics element hubbard says that he can heal a whole bunch of different diseases illnesses mental illnesses and even physical illnesses he actually claims he can cure depression and anxiety cowardice even says he can cure things like cancer or radiation poisoning arthritis poor eyesight and nymphomania right now so he says he can cure all of these things through these mental exercises and dianetics is supposed to be the the results of all of his experiments and so scientists are reading this and they're saying look if you have a way to solve these problems if you can cure cancer why don't you show us your experiment so that we can duplicate it to see if it's true or not and then we can actually use that to help other people right you're not going to keep this for yourself if you're you know just if you've got the keys to stopping cancer and so they asked for the results and he said no i don't have to show you my uh experiments because we're a religion we're not a science even though in the book of dynamics he says that it is a science and it's on par with engineering he says it's an exact science in fact i don't know how he gets that out of this but he says that it is demonstrably proven that he can cure all of these things and they're like then show us the proof and he says i don't have to because we're a religion well then the government got involved and they're like wait a minute right so you guys aren't paying your taxes you're claiming to do scientific experiments on people but we need to see exactly what you're doing so the irs got involved and the fbi actually had to break in to some of the headquarters and eller and hubbard became paranoid of the government and scientists and especially psychologists since he thought that a lot of the psychologists that were evaluating his book said i don't think these methods work i think you're doing it wrong and he said that's because you guys are the bad guys and he started to frame that there's some big conspiracy out to get him because he had found the answers to these questions so he actually started sending out a memo to all of his churches saying to put this symbol on their their pamphlets their books and their their buildings to indicate that they were religious status because the irs is like you can't ask for tax exemption unless you're really a religious organization and so he puts the symbol on all of their churches and books to say see we are a religion i don't know if you recognize that symbol but that's actually the symbol from aleister crowley's the occult studies back in the early 1900s maybe late 1800s alistair crowley was famous for making the occult super popular in both europe and by extension in america as well and he used that as the symbol for the occult to try to indicate that he was tapping into some kind of mystical energy that he was going to help the world to overcome some of the the problems in the world all that stuff well aleister crowley influenced two major religions of the world elrond hubbard who who started scientology and anton levay who started the church of satan and so a satanism kind of flips that symbol upside down and makes it the satanic symbol but elmer hubbard uses the symbol as it is to make the religion of scientology both of which have a lot in common with each other but we're just going to be focusing on scientology here today so what does he teach well he says that each person needs to be audited spiritually not financially although that would be interesting he says that each subject needs to be audited by a spiritual counselor using an e-meter or electro-psychometer for evaluation that is this e-meter was a device that they would use to try to measure people's n-grams and so you can see in the picture here there's a person who's advertising a free stress test here in la and and they're they're not really saying where it's from or who they are which is suspicious to me but they've got the device there you can see on the table they simply have you hold these two bars and then they they turn some dials and they watch the needle go up and that's supposed to indicate how sick you are and so they're evaluating to see if they can help help you and of course inevitably there's something wrong with everyone so they're going to find something inside of you what they're looking for in this machine the electropsychometer are what call what are called engrams engrams are collected memories that create mental illnesses by trapping your mind and so you know as you go through these traumatic experiences these engrams sort of stain your soul so to speak they attach themselves to your to your spirit and they don't let go until you work them out through these mental exercises that scientology teaches you and so every time you go through a bad memory whatever it is you know maybe you had a car wreck or maybe you were molested by your parents uh or maybe you you saw a tom cruise movie or something like that and these things kind of like trap your mind they they cause you to become mentally ill and so you start to go slowly crazy because of this and so what they're doing is they're trying to measure how many engrams you have and the device does indicate that almost everybody has a whole lot of engrams that you need to work through in order to become sane in order to become saved so that's what they're they're saying now scientists are asking the question what are these engrams right we've never heard of this before we don't know what you're talking about show us your data so that we can see this and of course already paranoid says no yeah only scientologists can see these engrams because you have to be a believer to be able to see it well right that's a that's a belief trap right you're just saying that only the people who believe it see it so you have to buy into the religion before you can see the engrams you see how there's like a circular reasoning there it seems very suspicious in this regard but the scientologists claim that they can read this this device and if you look at the picture here you can see the e-meter up close and that's the device that they they give you to try to measure how many engrams you have now one of my students actually looked at a blueprint of these electro-psychometers and as an electrical engineer student here at rock valley college he identified it was basically a crude version of a lie detector test and we already know that lie detector tests are pretty crude as it is this is like an older version of that and it says it doesn't do much more than monitor your heart rate uh your body temperature and it kind of indicates that you know you're you might be nervous especially if you're talking about something that's very personal so when you sit down with these spiritual counselors what they do is they ask you to recall some of your most traumatic experiences like a car record they'll ask you what's the worst thing you've you've ever experienced what's the worst thing you've ever done and they're no they're taking notes while you're doing this and they're writing it down to keep that in a file so that later they can use that information against you in a form of blackmail and so that's what they're asking so surely if you're rehearsing some of these events in your past that are very traumatic you're probably going to start to have an elevated heart rate your body temperature might rise you might get a little bit more you know emotional and then they say oh we see the engrams they're they're triggered here you can also see in this picture the book dianetics which is the first book that albert hubbard wrote in 1950 and so that's the key textbook of scientology it's a very big volume and it was very popular in the 1980s as scientology was becoming more popularized on tv i remember seeing the commercials all the time with the volcano exploding and it would just say dianetics across the bottom and so that was a very popular commercial in the 1980s that uh reflects the teachings of over and hubbard so that's the scriptures that i'll tell you about he wrote numerous other books in fact um a lot of the philosophy professors around the country got a full collection of element hubbard's books in the mail mysteriously in 2009. i was one of those professors and i opened it up and i was like oh my gosh like here's the whole books about hubbard i'm going to read these and so i have them all on my shelf and i'm still trying to read through them all as i have time to try to learn more about scientology which is why i teach this lecture but my other colleagues were throwing them away and like i'm not going to read that crap and so they just immediately dismissed it so i've been trying to do research on this ever since then for the past 10 or 11 years i've been learning more about scientology so what does he teach what is this religion really about well he says that each person has within them a foreign animating life force that he calls a satan now that's his word for the human soul but he's very reluctant to use that term soul because i think he he thinks it carries with a lot of religious baggage you might be thinking of other religions when you hear the word soul you might be thinking of hinduism or christianity or islam or other religions and and he says no the word for that being is a thetan which he says is is a combination of the word titan which is a reference to the greek gods the titans who live up on mount olympus and theos which is the greek word for god it says you combine those two words together you get the word satan and he says that's who you really are a foreign animating life force now there should be one word in that definition that stands out to you as kind of strange foreign he's saying that you have this alien spirit that lives within you and it's trying to get out it comes from a galactic war with the cosmic overlord xenus trying to take over the galaxy and you are his trapped uh cage right you were infested with not just one alien spirit but multiple alien spirits that have been placed inside your body as a prison under the evil lord galactic lord zenu now i'm kind of getting ahead of myself so i'll get to that stuff in just a second but that's what elwynn hubbard is saying you really are you are these alien spirits they live within you and you need to release them and and the way to do that is to take these training routines to help unlearn what you've been taught so that you can learn the true reality of scientology so that's what the point is here he says once a person does that they achieve a state known as clear which is their ultimate goal the goal of this religion is to reach clear which is a state of mental liberation where suddenly you'll start to recall all of your past memories you'll actually recall some of your childhood memories where you got your mental illnesses where you got these engrams from he says he even recalled what his birth experience was right because that's that's a traumatic experience if you come out of a small canal right you know that's traumatic for a baby that's why they cry and so he says you get an n-gram for that he even recalled memories in utero and then he recalled his conception experience i know that sounds a little bit far-fetched here right why because sperm don't have brains but he claims that he has a memory of his conception experience and therefore he could recall that and from there it was like a break breaking down a wall he could recall all of his past lives so ellen hubbard claimed that he could go back in time and remember who he was before this life and who he was before that time and he recalled all of his past lies until eventually he could recall back to the origin 95 million years ago when this galactic war was going on and suddenly he remembered the whole story so when a person reaches the state of clear that's what they're talking about the state of liberation where now you're no longer suffering from your mental illnesses you're no longer thinking these false narratives you're actually believing things that are true according to scientology now the way to reach that state is to attend a counseling session with an auditor a spiritual counselor of sorts that's going to work through you they give you all sorts of training routines so they put you in this locker room they you know they have rooms inside their churches where you go in and you meet with them and they train your brain one of the first exercises they give to you is to stare at the person without looking away for an hour and if you can do that right what they say that you're training your brain to concentrate and so this is just sort of a mental exercise to do and you have to do it for an hour and if you look away you fail the test if you if you fail the test then you've got to pay the money and do it again and all of these training routines cost money by the way so it's not free scientology is making a lot of money on these training machines because they're constantly charging people and saying here's what you got to do and so they give you these tests and they charge you for it and it costs like 100 bucks maybe 150 bucks at the beginning and it continues to go up in price from there so they they're doing these things to try to train your brain so that you can manipulate your mind so that you can heal your own mental illnesses and they believe all illnesses are mental right including things like cancer or arthritis report eyesight and so what they're trying to do is to train your brain to think these true thoughts but what they're really doing is wearing out your mind if you stare at a person for an hour without looking away you're gonna be a little bit woozy after that so whatever they tell you afterwards you're more susceptible to suggestion and therefore there have been people who have kind of walked out and been like i don't really even remember what happened in that situation because their brain is so worn out so you know this is this could be a form of brainwashing as well now once they have actually reached the state of clear they are known as what's called an operating satan these are people who have unleashed their powers of self-control and knowledge onto the world and freed their alien spirits their aliens are now able to use their alien-like powers to control the world they're going to then resume battles with the galactic lord xenu they're going to use their powers of self-discipline their mental skills their you know mental powers to fight this cosmic war that's going on in the galaxy and those are called operating phantoms or ot for short and we'll talk about that in a minute when i show you the chart there's all sorts of ot levels like ot1 and ot2 and ot3 and so it goes all the way up now at least to 15 as far as we know there might be uh powers even further than that but that's what they're trying to uh to reach is to become an operating satan where their alien spirits can now fight this cosmic war so they claim that these statements have actually been placed here on earth by the evil lord zino 95 million years ago in a cosmic war with all the other alien spirits of the galaxy and these spirits these captive satans were actually brought to earth in b-52 bombers that they used as their spaceships to fly across the galaxy to place these spirits these satans into the human bodies here on earth right now b-52s were actually invented just prior to him writing the book dianetics and so that was actually one of the planes that was used in world war ii to help win the war it was actually a very effective fighting machine and ellen hubbard's claiming that that's the very ship that they used to fly across the space airplanes need one key ingredient to travel air and so he's saying this is the space age technology that used 95 million years ago in this cosmic war with lord zenu and brought these bodies to earth here's the story the head of the galactic confederation which consists of about 76 planets around the larger stars visible from here founded 95 million years ago solved overpopulation i bet you didn't know that right the universe is actually teeming with life we haven't found any life yet but scientologists say it's actually really crowded out there so he solved overpopulation because there's about 250 billion or so per planet 178 billion on average by mass implanting so he's solving over population by putting multiple spirits into a single vessel in a single body to save room in the galaxy right ingenious this leader the tyrant named xenu set out to capture the trillions who opposed him and deposited them into volcanoes on the prison planet of tijuek otherwise known as earth he then eradicated them and all life on the planet with hydrogen bombs hydrogen bombs that's the same technology right that was just invented just a few years prior to him writing dianetics and he's saying that space ed space age technology is just is it a coincidence that we happen to invent that same technology just a few years prior to him writing dianetics i don't know it could be a coincidence so he says he eradicated life on the planet with hydrogen bombs leaving only the satans or souls of the captives which were then brainwashed or implanted to rid them of their original identities so now people can't remember who they really are they think they're humans but really they're aliens trapped inside a body and so they've forgotten their alien heritage they've forgotten their alien war with xenu millions of years later when life began again on tgf the traumatized statements attach themselves to human bodies and that is who you really are if you just simply recognize this is the real history of the world that you are an alien spirit trying to get out of your body then you would be able to fight this cosmic war and help tip the balance against lord zenu now scientology did try to make a movie about this in the 1990s called battlefield earth and it stars john travolta and force whitaker as two major thetans who are trying to dominate the human species on earth with their huge muscles and their giant packages and and therefore they're going to try to enslave humanity and and scientology was making this movie to try to teach the world about scientology apparently they were going to make two other films after this but this movie bottomed out at the box office it didn't make any money uh has poor special effects it has terrible script writing the acting is terrible it's like they forgot to put in a plot and i know what you're thinking you're thinking i want to see this now no don't you don't want to see this movie it is really terrible i thought i would enjoy something i thought i'd get something out of it no it made my eyes bleed okay you need to stay away from this i'm telling you you don't watch this movie you can't get those two hours of your life back this is the movie that they were trying to use to teach people about scientology and uh it it failed in every regard but what it illustrated was that the material universe was created by the satans as like a recreational home you know they wanted a planet with a sunset and mountains and waterfalls and animals and yes humans who they could have sex with and enjoy and just sort of kick back and have the leisurely life that's like a vacation home if you will until one day galactic lord zenu tried to take them over and defeated them in this cosmic war where he then placed those satans who were prisoners of war into the human bodies that they had created as part of their vacation spot and so that's how earth became sort of like a prison yard for lord zenu so these satans are entrapped by material bodies and they occupy numerous bodies over time so when you're when you when your body dies those state and spirits are then transplanted to another body when it's being born and therefore you there is a sense of reincarnation here right you are being re transmitted into another body and then you live that life and notice with every one of those uh lifetimes the effects of the engrams become even more severe further hindering your mind so let's say in one lifetime you go through some pretty traumatic experiences let's say your parents die in a car wreck or you know you're you're sexually abused or something like that then you die and all of those create engrams right so you carry those end grams with your soul and then your soul is then planted into a new body and then being born that's another engram and then you go through some more traumatic experiences right we have to go through puberty again that's an engram and then you go through you know other traumatic experiences and and therefore you keep accruing these these um engrams and that's making you crazier and crazier so you're you're becoming more psychotic the longer you wait and the only way you can stop this is salvation can only come from deleting these engrams using scientology's training routines that's the religious solution the training routines are those mental exercises that they're trying to give to people to help them to overcome their mental illnesses so that's the religious solution to the problem of engrams engrams are the problem your traumatic experiences creates all sorts of mental illnesses within you and so what are you waiting for you need to get to a church of scientology and get these engrams deleted before it's too late because if you if these engrams start to build up and they are they're making you crazier and crazier this is why he thinks that world war ii happened is that the humanity has just gotten so crazy that now they need to be liberated and now that elder hubbard has saved them by discovering these truths he can now charge people money to save them for all of the mental illnesses that they've accrued so there's this pressure selling technique if you wait too long you might be labeled as what's called a suppressive person or sp for short a suppressive person is a person who rejects the teachings of scientology and adamantly works against it that is they they you know they will not accept anything the scientologist teach the teachers them and scientologists have like a term for that and they have a special treatment that i'll get to in just a minute so the prime directive in scientology is survival by any means necessary and that's just the moral theory of moral egoism if you guys have ever studied ethical theories you may be familiar with the idea of moral egoism that you should always be looking out for number one well unless you're in a cow pasture and then you should look up for number two but in this case they're saying that you should always be doing whatever is best for yourself forget everyone else the only reason that you should care about other people is if that matters to you if they don't matter to you it's survival of the fittest folks and so scientology teaches a very similar ethic as satanism does in the sense that you should always be thinking of yourself first and then everyone else doesn't matter unless you care about them unless they do anything for you so that's the similarities between these two religions these are the only two religions that don't have a golden rule for example so that's the prime directive and here's a chart of all of the different classes that you can take in order to gain some of these abilities in the science the religion of scientology and each one of these classes costs a certain amount of money and they tell you on the sidebar there what kind of abilities you can gain by taking these classes until eventually you become clear and once you're clear you are then eligible for operating statement status and so once you become eligible for that you become ot1 ot2 ot3 etc and by then the classes cost thousands of dollars each by the way they don't tell you about the aliens until you reach ot level three and by then you've already invested well over a hundred thousand dollars at least on their training routines so by then they've kind of got you that that you probably financially depend upon them by this point and that's not even the full chart if you look at the whole chart you can see you know that there are classes uh zero through 15 and uh all the way up through the training track and the processing track so that you're both teaching people scientology as well as being processed by other people who are higher in level than you are so that's uh this chart details all of the powers that you gain and the different tasks you have to do to to reach the next level so one of the practices that we know that they used was called overboarding and this was used in what's called the sea org the sea organization so they actually have a kind of a navy that he created by elder hubbard bought three yachts from one of his friends i don't even think he bought them i think he kind of stole them from him but he got us into financial trouble and eventually just kept the yachts and actually leaves those yachts out in international waters where he keeps a lot of the the core information some of the files on scientology their history and whatnot and the reason why he's in international waters is because that way the us government can't do anything plus how are you going to find a small yacht in a giant ocean it's very difficult for them to trace them so he oftentimes would stay out there in the ocean and hide away from the fbi the irs and even from what he thought was the evil psychologist organizations uh that were trained they were out to get him so while he was out there uh in in the sea he would have servants serving him these are people that we'll talk about maybe a little bit later and and therefore if the servants disobeyed him or did something wrong he practiced this technique where he would actually shove them into the ocean blindfolded and bound with their hands bound sometimes with their legs tied together and he would just dump them under under the water and then pull them out at the last minute and and make them confess make them say oh yes i'm sorry i didn't mean to do this and that was a technique that they used in the sea organization they also have a policy known as fair game and that's a policy in which a suppressive person is treated as if they have no rights and so remember the sps that's oppressive persons are people who reject scientology so fair game was a policy that was supposed to ward off those people that might be suppressing you that might be you know trying to deny or reject scientology and this actually first came about in a policy letter from 1967 in which el ron hubbard wrote a memo to all of the churches indicating what the penalties were for lower conditions lower conditions are people who are at the bottom of the rung and therefore they need to be disciplined he says this applies to both orgs and the sea org as part of this punishment routine and there are things like liability in which there's a suspension of pay and a dirty rag is actually worn on their left arm day and night and they're confined to the org premises so they're not allowed to leave because they're considered a liability there's the treason punishment where there is a suspension of pay and a deprivation of all of the uniforms and insignias that they'd have to wear scientologists often that's to wear uniforms in their churches and stuff like that and they have a black mark on their left cheek and confinement to the org premises or dismissal from their posts and a debarment from the premises if they are considered to be particularly evil or particularly uh treasonous then the third punishment is for doubt and these are people who are debarred from the premises they are not to be employed they they have a payment of a fine that is amounting to any sum that they have across the organization so they can just slap this fine on you and then make you pay it otherwise you'll be sued by the church for it and they are not to be trained or processed they are not to be communicated with or argued with so a person who is in a state of doubt is one step away from being um becoming a suppressive person and then we get to the one that i talked about fair game it's called the enemy order and it's a suppressive person order it's called fair game and it says this person may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any scientologist without any discipline of the scientologist they may be tricked sued lied to or destroyed now does that sound controversial to you you see why this is a problem he's saying that if somebody is labeled as a suppressive person according to the church of scientology you can actually trick them sue them lie to them or destroy them without any penalties to the scientologists that doesn't sound legal and so the next year people were getting these memos and they're like i don't think this is right like i don't think we're supposed to be able to do this and so albert hubbard had to send out a second memo the very next year this is 1968 and almost exactly one year after that previous memo was sent out and he calls this one cancellation a fair game so it sounds like you know these canceling the process right but listen to what it says here's what it says the practice of declaring people fair game will cease now you tell me what does that really say all right can you think about the meaning of that sentence the practice of declaring people fair game will cease it means you just can't use the words fair game it doesn't say anything about the practice just says you can't use these terms when declaring somebody a fair game go on it says fair game may not appear on any ethics orders why because it causes bad public relations it goes on this policy letter does not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of an sp in other words the way in which they're supposed to be treated is still in effect you just can't use the term fair game anymore because it would be associated with that previous memo so they're just canceling the name the treatment is still going on and that's perhaps one of the most controversial things about scientology so you you can determine for yourself if you think this is a cult or not now they have done a lot of things to people like uh paulette cooper who was a reporter for the la times and she wrote an article uh talking about scientology and kind of indicated that there may be some shady stuff going on she talked about their money-making scam and that they were perhaps manipulating people maybe brainwashing them and because of that the church of scientology sued her 18 times until eventually she just said i'm not going to talk about this anymore and she went bankrupt and she couldn't afford a lawyer anymore and that's pretty much how scientology works they'll just sue you until you run out of money because they've got oodles of money coming in and they don't care if they win or lose the court case what they want you to do is just become exasperated and then they can control you that's exactly what happened with paula cooper the reporter they also had what's called operation snow white where there were a couple of members of scientology who infiltrated the fbi headquarters at washington dc in order to copy and steal documents pertaining to scientology investigations so they wanted to know what did the fbi have on us right or hubbard was kind of paranoid and so he he orders these guys to go into the headquarters in washington dc and they copy what they have from the files they find the files copy stuff there at the headquarters and then they they leave with it they faked ids this is back when there wasn't as very good security in in uh the fbi offices well they were able to pull that off and uh ernest like oh my gosh that's amazing you were able to do that go back and see if you can find any more information and if you can take some files with you and so sure enough they go back in a second time they again find more files the sudden they steal some of those documents and they walk out and they got away with it again so then i remember was like do it again right if you guys look for more stuff and if in other words if we can if we could drain the fbi of all the information they have about scientology maybe we can actually prevent them from ever you know doing anything to us again so they broke in a third time and this time they got caught and because they got caught they used a plea bargain against them and the two guys confessed and said no you know we were put up to this by the church of scientology and so uh fbi said all right you guys can't do this and they have been on the watch list for fbi ever since time magazine once wrote an article about scientology calling it the cult of greed and that was in 1991 the church of scientology sued them for slander and libel and ever since then time magazine hasn't written anything else about scientology lisa mcpherson is an interesting case because she was actually a member of the scientology church in clearwater florida when she actually became seriously ill now she may have had a mental illness for real and therefore we don't know exactly what it was because scientology doesn't allow people to go to a psychiatrist to have it diagnosed but the church of scientology says they can heal anything through what's called a touch assist all they do is they simply touch you until you feel better so if you fall down and scrape your knee they just touch the area around your knee until eventually your knee feels better right and that's one of the techniques they used well they were doing that on lisa mcpherson because she was having a mental breakdown in their clearwater hotels and uh they were using these touch assists on her and it didn't seem to be working and she started to be become incoherent like she was starting to ramble on and on suddenly she wasn't making sense sometimes she wasn't even saying complete sentences and so they were really worried about her and they kept using these training techniques to try to help her with it and overcome this until eventually she stopped muttering together and just kind of went silent and she just kind of fell into this sort of catatonic state and they were you know they had to keep they had to force feed her because she was just not responsive and then she started to lose control of her bowel so you had massive diarrhea so they would actually have to clean her bed and wash her her body and then she would just have diarrhea again the next time they fed her so they actually placed her into a bathtub because they knew that she was just gonna go right through her system and so she's stuck in this bathtub and one of the guys is trying to feed her to give her some nutrients and as he was feeding her he said the spoon hit the back of her mouth and she didn't gag and he looked at his friend and he said i don't think she's she's with it anymore like i think there's something seriously wrong i think she might be dying because she doesn't have a gag reflex and there's something wrong there her brain may be affected by this so they actually took her from that hotel room and rushed her to the hospital to go to the er and the nurses that were in the hospital that night remember seeing her she said that her body was covered in bruises from head to toe she was just skin and bones malnutritions uh you know and it was very clear she was dying she was emaciated and the nurses said we need to prep the er room now because she could die at any minute and so they actually started prepping the er room when a group of scientologists from the church came in and said that's our patient you can't treat her which is kind of true if there's another doctor that treats this patient sometimes they can have jurisdiction over her they said we're going to take her to our doctors instead so she was actually ushered out of the er and on the way to the scientologist doctors that they were taking her to she passed away on the way there now scientology says it wasn't their fault she wasn't doing the training routines right and so they blamed lisa mcpherson for her death they also cremated her body immediately after she was died when she was deemed dead and they claimed that her final words to them was i i would prefer to be cremated her parents and her family are like no she would have never have said that and she never indicated that to us and they are still trying to sue the church of scientology for what they claim is murder they think that the church of scientology actually caused her death and so that's a lawsuit that's been going on the current leader now that elrond hubbard is dead the current leader of scientology is a guy by the name of david miscavige his father is also a scientologist and so while they were in the church of scientology david miscavige was raised in the church from from birth his father saw his son rise to power as he basically took over the church by force and he actually claims that his son beats him as punishment for things that he he says as criticism toward his leadership and other people have claimed the same thing so he wrote a book just a couple years ago called ruthless to indicate this this is the kind of stuff that's going on by the current leader of scientology laura de crisenzo is also claiming that she was forced to have an abortion while a member of scientology and she was one of the people that was interviewed in lea romini's miniseries called inside scientology or something like that in fact if you're going to read a book about scientology i encourage you to get this book inside scientology by janet reitman it is perhaps one of the most well researched book about scientology that i found you get a lot of information from these personal people like ron miscavige or or marty rathburn or other people that write these books but if you want to get sort of a compilation of all of the different things janet reitman is a investigative journalist she's done a great job she cites everything in the index of that book and so you can actually look up all the sources that she identifies throughout the books it's it's the best book on scientology i've ever found and then there's the problem that you can't leave scientology if you do they'll send what's called the squirrel squad out to get you and these are people that are trained to come and harass you until either you go back to their church and stay with them or you just stop talking about scientology and so they actually send these people to your house with cameras on their heads to film you no matter what you say no matter what you do they're trying to to film you doing something bad so they can then sue you for it and so they send these guys they've got t-shirts on that says squirrel squad on it where they're trying to harass a person named marty rathburn in this picture uh and and he he's one of the top three guys in scientology and he left in 2007 or maybe 2008 and he because he left a whole wave of people started leaving scientology because they realized if he can do it then maybe we can do it too and he helps people get out of these situations as well he's been helping people like leah romini as well to help people so since 2008 there's been a mass exodus of people who are trying to escape and then the squirrel squad will come to their houses they'll call them all hours of the night and they'll just harass you ringing your doorbell all day long to just drive you crazy until you either go back to their church and resume this or stop talking about them or they'll just sue you until you run out of money there's also a lot of parents who think that their kids have been kidnapped by scientology because once you join the church you're not allowed to talk to your family members if your family expresses any doubts about the religion so there's a whole series of women that are actually protesting this in la and new york saying hey our kids are disappearing and they want their kids back you know they say there's no disconnection but there is so what's going on here right we want to talk to our kids in fact there was actually one family that actually paid for a billboard just outside the church of scientology with the parents faces on it and their kid's name saying please call this number we want to talk to you so they're trying to communicate to the people inside the church of scientology by using billboards outside that and then here's some protesters who actually are standing outside the scientology office in london protesting and if you notice they're all wearing the guy fox mess because there are video cameras pointed at them to see who these protesters are so that the church of scientology can sue them so they wear these masks to hide their identity and they're holding signs that say are you fair game referring to that controversial practice that i just talked about in a few minutes ago so that's just the short version of this religion you tell me is scientology a cult is there such a thing as a bad religion how would you answer that question so that's what i want to leave you with that's our last lecture for the semester i hope you guys enjoyed this you are now ready for the final exam if you have any questions let me know otherwise have a great semester talk to you later you