If Christians Were To Use Scientologist Methods

From: "Entheta" 
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: If christians were to use scientologist methods...
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 14:51:21 +0200
Lines: 137
Message-ID: <37ea224e.0@news2.lightlink.com>
X-Trace: 23 Sep 1999 08:51:26 -0500, 193.72.145.40
Organization: Lightlink Internet
Path: news2.lightlink.com!193.72.145.40
Xref: news2.lightlink.com alt.religion.scientology:990390

You are contacted in the streets by "missionaries", asking you to fill a "personal ethics" test. Whathever the results of this test is, you are told that you carry the burden of a lot of sins. The Church can help you to get rid of these sins and live a better life. Feeling somewhat guilty for all these sins, you decide to pay a visit to that Church. Inside of it there are numerous pictures of a smiling bearded man. You are told that He is Jesus Christ and that His writings is the essential basis for you to get a better, free of sins, life. The people inside the Church look all happy singing wonderful cantics, and are all friendly towards you.

However, you are told that before reaching the sinless status, you have a lot of stages to go through. You first are offered to follow a beginner's cours on "prayer". Prayer is the basic tool to get rid of sins. Praying courses are organised at several levels. In the lowest levels, you have to learn how to memorize texts. In other courses, you will learn how to recitate prayers, with the suitable voice tone. Other sessions are provided, where you learn how to pray in your house, at work, on travel. You also have to learn a lot of actual prayers. For each prayer or course you have to take, there is a price tag. You have to go through all of them if you want to progress towards the sinless status. The Church has also developped a praying tool to help you keeping track of the number of prayers you have recitated. This tool is based on numerous patents established by the Church. Basically, it looks like some pearls made of a special alloy linked by kind of highly resistant chain.

To demonstrate your mastering in the praying techniques, you have to pass exams, recitating the prayers you have learned, under the stress of time and voluntary disturbances by priests. You pay for these exams. After recitating the same prayers again and again you feel somewhat better, and relieved of a bit of your initial guilt. Prayers work!

After some times you have been going to the Church, you are required to isolate in a room with a priest to confess your sins. It is the only way to actually get rid of them. The priest writes down all your confessed sins in your "paroissial records". Each confession session costs you money.

While you progress towards the sinless status, you are told that the Church founder has left a kind of testimony, referred to as "The Bible". It explains what sins are, but it is also believed to contain mysterious secrets, like the origin of our very universe ! However, the Bible is not something that is given freely to anybody. There are only a few full copies, heavily protected in special Churches.While you progress toward the sinfree status, you will get only a few pages at a time. Learning too much of these secrets of the universe sat a time without the proper preparation could kill you!

So while you progress in the Church, you learn more and more from this Bible. For each new chapter you receive, you have to follow a course that prepares you. Each course costs you money, in addition to the sums you have to pay to continue learning new prayers and the mandatory confessing sessions.

Each step you go forward, you learn more and more amazing things from the Bible : The 10 Commandments, how Jesus was killed by the Romans (BTW, the Church is engaged in worldwide campaign to get rid of the city of Rome, the source of all sins). The further you get, the more amazing it becomes. Jesus was able to walk on the water. If you continue to the following steps in the Church, you will be able to do like Him! You will able to multiplicate breads, to heal wounds, to resurrect people!

Going through all of this, you have finally reached the sinless status (although you do not feel very different from what you used to be and are not able to walk on water). But if the Church says so, then let it be.

At this point, you learn that the sinless state is just a milestone in your spiritual progression. You have just entered a new cycle where you will become an OS (Operating Soul). Then only will you be able to accomplish the same miracles as Jesus did. So you start your OS cycle. A first, you learn that you are not just a biological being, but there is something called a "soul" inside you. Unfortunately, a guy called Adam and a girl called Eva, many years ago, on a distant place called "Paradise" made a terrific mistake that created all the sins we know. It has something to do with an evil galactic snake called Xevil, that is now trapped inside a gigantic buried apple (or something along these lines). The souls of the previous sinners have remainded after their death and thousands of these souls, called "body souls", are clustered in various parts of your own body. To get rid of them, and be an Operating Soul, you have to learn a lot of new prayers (each costing $), and recitate these prayers to each body soul, until all have taken conscience of their sins and flown elsewhere. But you are stimulated by the lot of written testimonies from more advanced Church members that attest having been able to walk on water or multiplicate breads!

You also learn one the most protected secrets of the Church : there is a supreme being above Jesus, and His name is God, the father of Jesus. You are not allowed to tell that to sinners, not even to discuss that with lower ranking Church members. Learning this all enlightning secret has cost you 100'000s of $, but that was all worth it. If you want to be saved at the time of the Great Judgement you have to become a permanent member of Church, for the billions of years to come. This also implies that you are ready to work 16 hours a day for the Church, for an almost nil salary. But what are a few years of sacrifice to get an eternal life?

With your growing participation to the Church, you have noticed that non Church members (sinners) look weirder and weirder to you. Embeded in their material life, with their sinfull activities governed by their body souls, you do not feel the same communion that you have with the other member of the Church. Little by little, you start to deconnect from your non Church friends. Your husband does not understand why you spend so much money and time away from home. Your priest has recommended that you take a break from your husband: he is braking your progression towards Salvation with his sinning mind.

You also have noticed that one of your closest friends, a high ranked priest of the Church has suddenly disapeared. You are ordered not to have any communication with her anymore. But you can not prevent to talk to her while meeting her once on the street. She tells you that she has dared criticise the Bible regarding the evolution of mankind, the science showing that the man has evolved from the ape, while the Bible affirms that the man was created by God. For saying that, she has been ordered to perform lowly "penitence" tasks during several days, until she was completely exhausted. These days have helped her seing clearly what the Church was : a monstruous scam to get money from believers, and that the teachings of the Bible should be free ot everyone. She has been excommunicated from the Church. Having dared to tell his stories to newspapers, she is now the victim of a large blackmail campaign, where all the sins she has confessed, and other invented sins are revealed anonymously to his close friends or his employer. Her life has become a wreckage and the limited amount of money and energy that remained her is taken by different court cases the Church has involved her in. One of these case revolves around copyright infiringement : she has put scanned copies of Bible verses on an Internet site.

Her testimony opens your eyes : you have given a lot of money to the Church, have disconnected from your friends, your family, your former job. What have you got ? The promise of a better afterlife, but how can you trust a promise from people that have obviously been lying to you ? Your are still not able to walk on the water and are repeatedly told that this will come after you have performed the next (paying) cycle. So you decide to call it quit. But are you ready to face all the harassment that excommunicated sinner have to go through?

Entheta