Tory Christman is a former member of the Church of Scientology. She left the organization in 2000, after being a member for about 30 years and is now one of its most visible and high-profile critics, having appeared on CNN, NPR and in the LA Times, and many other media outlets.
In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, Christman recounts her experiences in Scientology, as well as her views about the church’s practices with current and former members. She describes her participation in the church’s anti-free-speech activities on the internet in the 1990’s, and her views on the group Anonymous, a new web-based organization that seeks to respond to Scientology’s activities. She explores some of the doctrines and beliefs of Scientology, including the church’s views on medical science and psychiatry, auditing, Xenu, becoming a “clear,” and e-meters. She also stresses the important role of science and critical thinking in confronting the challenges Scientology may bring to its detractors and adherents alike.
Thank you so much for running this interview! It was a great way to while away the hours until the protests against the “Church” of Scientology February 10th!
I oppose any organization that demands you give up critical thinking skills.
In the matter of faith, it is a choice in what you want to believe. I know there are a few extreme religions that will not allow any deviation from belief, scripture, text or whatever without consequences, but most do.
I am a Christian, not the kind that knocks on doors or preaches on street corners, but my faith is very private and personal. In fact most people don’t know I am unless they ask and I rarely even identify myself on the net as a Christian. I have questioned the Bible, my faith, other Christian views, and don’t attend church that much, etc., but I have never been hauled in by anyone in my church and told what I can or can not do, think, read, or whatever. And then made to pay money to take a course because I dared question a belief.
I have chosen to speak out against Scientology is not because of their beliefs. I don’t care if they believe in Xenu, aliens or whatever. They can certainly continue to believe whatever they want. They can’t continue to abuse. exploit and lie to their parishioners and the public.
I originally spoke out because of their bashing the Mental Health field. I am a nurse and get very frustrated that Scientologists will not even look at some of the research and studies of real science. I work with people that have developmental disabilities. Scientology believes these people should be “disposed of quietly and without sorrow”. That also goes for people that are terminal and other “downscale” human beings.
These are L. Ron Hubbard’s own words from “Science of Survival”
“The only answers would seem to be the permanent quarantine of such [’1.1, or covertly hostile, low-toned’] persons from society to avoid the contagion of their insanities and the general turbulence which they bring into any order, thus forcing it lower on the scale, or processing such person until they have attained a level on the tone scale which gives them value.
In any event, any person from 2.0 down on the tone scale should not have, in any thinking society, any civil rights of any kind, because by abusing those rights he brings into being arduous and strenuous laws which are oppressive to those who need no such restraints.”
“There are only two answers for the handling of people from 2.0 down on the tone scale, neither one of which has anything to do with reasoning with them or listening to their justification of their acts. The first is to raise them on the tone scale by un-enturbulating some of their theta by any one of the three valid processes. The other is to dispose of them quietly and without sorrow.”
“The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the tone scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered. It is not necessary to produce a world of clears in order to have a reasonable and worthwhile social order; it is only necessary to delete those individuals who range from 2.0 down, either by processing them enough to get their tone level above the 2.0 line - a task which, indeed, is not very great, since the amount of processing in many cases might be under fifty hours, although it might also in others be in excess of two hundred - or simply quarantining them from the society.
A Venezuelan dictator once decided to stop leprosy. He saw that most lepers in his country were also beggars. By the simple expedient of collecting and destroying all the beggars in Venezuela an end was put to leprosy in that country.”
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/krasel/germany/quotes.html
Scientology is a cience of fiction. that is what an Spanish magazine wrote about it. The objective of Scientology is to get data from the countries where there is a church of scientology. I think that if “ mentally ill “ persons are looking for a new place to stay, that place should be far away from psychiatrists, instead of a new church. Dianetica and other stories by the author were strange stories before the appereance of this rare book. Antipsychiatry is not good, because antipsychiatry wants to “cure” the “ mentally Ill “ when mental illness does not exist. the mind is intangible, and you can have diseases in organs, not in thoughts ! Good Show !
Scientology is a cience of fiction. that is what an Spanish magazine wrote about it. The objective of Scientology is to get data from the countries where there is a church of scientology. I think that if “ mentally ill “ persons are looking for a new place to stay, that place should be far away from psychiatrists, instead of a new church. Dianetica and other stories by the author were strange stories before the appereance of this rare book. Antipsychiatry is not good, because antipsychiatry wants to “cure” the “ mentally Ill “ when mental illness does not exist. the mind is intangible, and you can have diseases in organs, not in thoughts ! Good Show !
Sorry Sergio but I think you are very very wrong.
Thoughts are the byproducts of the brain which is an organ. Specific types of thoughts can be prevented with specific types of brain damages. Such as damage to Wernicke’s area in the brain would make it impossible for you to understand language. Did you know that? Did you know that it would be that easy for you no longer to ever understand language again, just a little neurosurgery and its gone. If damage occurs in your amygdala and you will not know who to trust anymore, according to neurology data, if you damage a human’s amygdala they just trust everyone. Did you know that? A little neurosurgery and you can be made into a sucker.
Did you know that if enough damage is done to your occipital cortex you won’t remember or be able to imagine what things look like. Did you know that? fMRI data reveals that when we imagine what something looks like our brain has to use our occipital cortex to do so. So a little brain surgery and what your loved ones look like is no longer accessible to your mind.
I’m afraid your wrong. The mind is the brain, and to treat the mind those who are trained on the brain are the best qualified.
Dear Friend. The mind is not the brain. The thoughts, to say the mind, are a reflex of what is happening in the brain, but is not the brain. Someone with Parkinson´s disease has troubles with the thought, the memory and speech. and you can do fMRI or SCAN and you will find what is wrong. But you cannot do that with Schizophrenia. When someone goes to a psychiatrist, the psychiater judges what the patient is saying, he does not do fMRI SPECT or SCAN. he inmediately prescribe a drug, and label the patient as “ mentally ill “. when someone goes to a neurologist for his-her Parkinson´s Disease, the neurologist do fMRI SPECT SCAN and all the tests for to know if the patient has Parkinson or not. Psychiatrists are a danger for all the people in the world. if you want to support them, do not regret when someone in your family be enslaved with psychiatric drugs and you cannot do NOTHING.
Dear Friend. The mind is not the brain. The thoughts, to say the mind, are a reflex of what is happening in the brain, but is not the brain. Someone with Parkinson´s disease has troubles with the thought, the memory and speech. and you can do fMRI or SCAN and you will find what is wrong. But you cannot do that with Schizophrenia. When someone goes to a psychiatrist, the psychiater judges what the patient is saying, he does not do fMRI SPECT or SCAN. he inmediately prescribe a drug, and label the patient as “ mentally ill “. when someone goes to a neurologist for his-her Parkinson´s Disease, the neurologist do fMRI SPECT SCAN and all the tests for to know if the patient has Parkinson or not. Psychiatrists are a danger for all the people in the world. if you want to support them, do not regret when someone in your family be enslaved with psychiatric drugs and you cannot do NOTHING.
I’m a little confused by what you’re arguing, Sergio. Are you claiming that the mind is a separate substance that is different from the brain? There is not a shred of evidence for this position, unfortunately. Every mental event is correlated with changes in the brain. For example, vision processing happens in the visual cortex. Memory processing happens in the hippocampus. Etc.
One does not need to do a scan of a patient to determine if he has schizophrenia because it is quite obvious enough from the patient’s behavior. However schizophrenia is a disease of the brain, and one can determine quite a bit about it by doing brain imaging. See for example HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, et cetera.
Psychiatry is far from a perfect science at this point; the brain is extremely complex and still poorly understood. But the claim that psychiatry is somehow a danger or involves “enslavement” is simple nonsense of the sort that is peddled by cults like Scientology.
Scientology is like crazy....like....right?
Did anyone else find the interview at least a little annoying? This subject is a great one for point of inquiry to discuss because its so popular right now and so profoundly irrational, but I really can’t get over the fact that I continuously felt like DJ was having a discussion with a 50 year old valley girl. Another disturbing aspect of the interview is that I heard the quote from Will Smith about the belief of the virgin birth also being absurd, which made me think back to the many times I have used this exact same argument to draw correlations between Mormonism and Scientology’s beliefs (which most Christians despise and even joke about openly) and the fact that they themselves (Christians) don’t find their own highly unlikely belief systems equally absurd. Do you think Will Smith realizes that replacing one absurd belief system with another equally absurd belief system isn’t really solving that “rationality” problem? On the other hand, I have reason to believe that Lord Xenu may have revealed to Will Smith the “final solution” when he was on location filming the mother ship scene of Independence Day so I doubt he has actually considered any of the alternatives.
[ Edited: 09 February 2008 02:35 PM by derekdyson ]
I just listened to this while walking the dog, and like the poster above me, I think that this was one of DJ’s more “challenging” interviews to conduct. I kind of wonder what was going through his head when she was referring to the book “Blink” and the internet as practically infallible sources of information.
That being said, I found it interesting to listen to. I still remember seeing those Dianetics commercials on the UHF channels when I was growing up--it really made me want to go out to the bookstore and get it. All those volcanoes and stuff must be cool!
As an interesting side-note, a few hours after listening to this podcast, I found fliers posted by Anonymous (a part of which, being a somewhat avid Chan-style board poster, I would say I could at least affiliate myself with if and when I chose to), specifically for a planned protest on the 10th of February in memory of Lisa McPherson. I took notice of the action started by “Anonymous” a few weeks ago, when they crashed one of the Scientology servers, but I didn’t realize that “Anonymous” had gained so much attention in the main-stream media! I would never think that a board like 4chan would serve as the launch pad for a movement against such a fraudulent crock!
Though I do agree with one of the above comments that the internet should not be described as infallible source I do not agree that Tory Christman was a bad interview.
It takes a lot of courage to leave any religion and then to work to inform the public about its problems.
I was never a Scientologist, but I was a Charismatic Christian (Jesus Camp anyone?) and it was hard to leave and I have just recently come to a position of equilibrium with my old life and my new life. I left years ago.
She was just telling people that they can double check her claims.
I am glad to hear that “Anonymous” exists. From what I hear Scientology is like a mafia.
It takes a lot of courage to leave any religion and then to work to inform the public about its problems.
I was never a Scientologist, but I was a Charismatic Christian (Jesus Camp anyone?) and it was hard to leave and I have just recently come to a position of equilibrium with my old life and my new life. I left years ago.
She was just telling people that they can double check her claims.
I hear ya. I was thinking the same thing throughout the interview. I too noticed the somewhat less than rational arguments she made, but I have an easy time being forgiving of this. I was also in the ‘jesus camp’ boat some years ago, and find I have to work very hard to train myself to think rationally. My first instinct is to look for an authority on anything and then just trust what they say. It’s like I never learned to think for myself, and now, at 27 I feel I’m just beginning. I still can’t read the bible objectively because all I can read into it is what I was taught in church. It’s crazy how deep that association game runs. I can feel guilty almost immediately and have to talk myself out of it, because a random scripture can bring back fear of hell, and the thought that goes something like ‘isn’t it time you gave up all this rational garbage and came back to the true path’ or some such nonesense. Just bizarre. Honestly. I’m so excited to have come out of it in time to save my kids from such torture.
I’m still scared to have any kind of religious debate with anyone I know because they get mean really fast and I hate confrontation in general. Even though I have been studying and working hard to try and retrain myself and my ways of thinking, two minutes into a debate and I just have nothing to say. But that might be a bad example. What’s the point arguing with a brick wall.
All this to say, I think DJ did a good job with a somewhat challenging case, and I appreciate the bravery it takes to stand up against an organization like this.
One thing I did not agree with her on is that other religions don’t tell you what to think, or what not to read, etc. Coming out of a charismatic christian church, I would say there was definitely a lot of that going on, but very subtle. Books, movies, video games could easily lead us ‘astray’, and we were taught to steer clear of those things that would not glorify God. I would never have read a book by Dawkins for fear that it would corrupt my mind. We were told that when we play violent video games in the house, or watch a violent movie, even if the baby was sleeping, the evil could affect her and we were giving the devil a foothold in our lives and family.
I mentioned once that I was interested in checking out a gay bar mostly out of curiousity as I had never been to one and I was told that would be quite dangerous indeed, and it wouldn’t be safe for me. I was told it would be better for me to invite a gay person over to my house - basically where he/she would be outnumbered. I’m sorry if this sounds ridiculous, but there is like one gay person I know of in town the rest move away without coming out I am sure and it’s sad, but when I was younger I was curious and really wanted to befriend a gay person because I thought they would be likeable and a regular person and I wanted to test my theory. I’m embarrassed but that’s reality where I live. (Incidentally, this was one of the first red flags for me - because I was taught as a christian that I didn’t need to fear anything because Jesus was all-powerful - so why would I not be safe in a gay bar? How come because they have different sexual preferences would they want to hurt me? I remember the critical thinking moment and it felt rebellious, but also good. Asking questions became a guilty pleasure for me and I haven’t stopped since!)
There are churches in town that will discourage medications and encourage faith-based healing as better than science. It’s very subtle - so they won’t take your medicine away, but you will walk away from the sermon feeling that if you were a better person, you wouldn’t need the medicine. This can do much damage and lead to similar effects as taking the medicine away. And in some ways this is almost worse because on top of your illness, you’re feeling guilty for being ill and are tormented with the decision to continue taking the medicine, or have faith and go off… this goes doubly for parents who are trying to make these choices for their children, and that is also scary.
I could go on and on, but basically I think there are other religions and sects of Christianity for sure that will tell people how to live, and will discipline people in various ways for making the ‘wrong’ choices.
Scientology is just an easy target because it’s so elite and most people can see through it because they are on the outside looking in.
