What's new

Looking for interviewees for anthropological fieldwork research

monicap

New Member
Hi, my name is Monica and I am an anthropology student at New York University doing a fieldwork project on Scientology. I was wondering if any of you would be willing to have a conversation with me about your experience in Scientology. I am mostly interested in what encourages people to join Scientology and reasons for leaving. If interested and willing, these are the questions I had in mind:

1. What should I expect entering a church of Scientology?
2. Is there a 'God' that is worshipped?
3. What were day to day routines in your life as a Scientologist?
3. Why did you join Scientology, or in other words, what were you hoping to gain from being a Scientologist?
4. Why did you decide to leave Scientology?
5. Do you believe Scientology to be a religion? Why or why not?

Thank you,
Monica
 

ThetanExterior

Gold Meritorious Patron
Asking about day to day routines as a Scientologist doesn't make any sense. You need to differentiate between sea org members, staff members and public.
 

Dulloldfart

Squirrel Extraordinaire
1. What should I expect entering a church of Scientology?
2. Is there a 'God' that is worshipped?
3. What were day to day routines in your life as a Scientologist?
4. Why did you join Scientology, or in other words, what were you hoping to gain from being a Scientologist?
5. Why did you decide to leave Scientology?
6. Do you believe Scientology to be a religion? Why or why not?

1. Dunno. Haven't entered one in 20 years and it's changed.

2. No. There may or may not be a PR "yes" answer somewhere, but the real answer is no.

3. I was a Sea Org Member for 23 years, with daily duties differing depending on which org/post/date applied. But generalising it, something like
7:30 get up, wash etc, breakfast, travel to org
8:15 muster (roll call, briefing on any news, pep talk, maybe team drilling)
9:00 start working on post duties
12:00 lunch
12:30 muster (roll call, sometimes more drilling etc, sometimes straight back to post)
1:00 post
6:00 dinner
6:45 muster (as before)
7:00 study
9:45 all-hands (where one contributes to some org activity not one's specific post, maybe letter-writing to public in the central files, maybe call-in -- usually phoning hapless public who had paid for services but had not arrived to start taking them, maybe cleaning org spaces)
10:30-12:00* secure (go back to where one sleeps and usually go straight to bed because sleep is precious.

*this time varies tremendously. Sometimes for weeks/months on end one gets to bed by midnight; sometimes for weeks/months on end it's 2 or 4 a.m. Some posts routinely work one or more all-nighters every week with zero sleep that night. In 23 years I usually got enough sleep to function, apart from about four months total: I would say that was an unusually lucky percentage.

4. I liked the idea of genuinely being able to help people.

5. It's not a binary process, one day one is a Scio and the next day one isn't. In my case I left the SO in 1996 and got straight on the Internet for thousands of hours a year. I started posting online in 2004, started on ESMB in 2007. I still considered myself a Scio at that time, although not a "good" one. Somewhere around 2013, give or take a year or so, I no longer considered myself a Scio.

6. I don't know, actually. As set up by Hubbard, Scn is a scam to aggrandise himself and make himself rich. To the Scn true believer, unaware of the scam and believing in the public-level Scn teachings, Scn well qualifies as a religion in terms of its spiritual qualities. If I had to give a yes/no answer I'd say no because the scammy cult certainly doesn't deserve its 501(c)3 benefits.

Paul
 

programmer_guy

True Ex-Scientologist
2. No. Scientology is a modern form of polytheism where we are ALL, supposedly,
fallen gods who can eventually be rehabilitated back to god-like abilities via Scientology auditing.
(e.g. Read the small book "Scientology: 8-8008" by L. Ron Hubbard)

3. When I was public (i.e. parishioner) it was like having a normal daily life and then
going to the franchise mission in the evenings for course or auditing.
When I joined staff I worked long hours for very little pay. I got half day off on
Sundays to do laundry and buy groceries.

4. I left staff when I could see that I was getting nowhere in Scientology.
It looked like I was going to be in poverty for the rest of my life if I stayed on staff.

5. Yes I believe that Scientology is a religion (i.e. supernatural/spiritual beliefs).
But the spiritual beliefs/teachings are false.
 
Last edited:

Demented Hubbatd

Patron with Honors
Hi, my name is Monica and I am an anthropology student at New York University doing a fieldwork project on Scientology. I was wondering if any of you would be willing to have a conversation with me about your experience in Scientology. I am mostly interested in what encourages people to join Scientology and reasons for leaving. If interested and willing, these are the questions I had in mind:

1. What should I expect entering a church of Scientology?
2. Is there a 'God' that is worshipped?
3. What were day to day routines in your life as a Scientologist?
3. Why did you join Scientology, or in other words, what were you hoping to gain from being a Scientologist?
4. Why did you decide to leave Scientology?
5. Do you believe Scientology to be a religion? Why or why not?

Thank you,
Monica
1. Expect being offered very expensive Scientology courses and even more expensive Scientology procedures (Dianetics procedures, OT trips)

2. There is a god, kind of, his name is L. Ron Hubbard. There is a form of worship, which is a study of his works and acceptance of Scientology ethics. There are no church services in usual sense of the word.

3. I spent only 4 months in Sea Org working as a file clerk and after that as a paralegal. My paralegal activities were the same as in any other law firm.

4. Laugh if you must, but I joined the cult because I wanted to become famous by continuing Hubbard's research in Dianetics. At the time of my involvement with the cult he was already abiding in OT heaven so to speak.

5. I left the cult after realizing that Dianetics procedures do not work. I delivered close to 500 hours of Dianetics auditing (for some stupid reason Dianetics procedures are called "auditing") to my non-Scientology friends before realizing that Dianetics is bullshit. At that time I was an atheist, so Hubbard's theory of spirits (thetans) was of no interest to me.

5. According to psychologists who specialize in cults, Scientology is a cult. It fits almost all requirements that a religion must meet in order to be classified as a cult. Some of the requirements are disconnection from the family, sleep deprivation, prohibition from challenging the cult doctrine and severe punishment for disobeying the rules.

If you want more info, you can PM me.
 

TheOriginalBigBlue

Gold Meritorious Patron
I appreciate that some people may want to treat this forum like a survey but you will get much better results if you engage in conversation instead of hanging back and waiting for summarized answers that can be easily classified and tabulated.

You know, Scientologists habitually conduct PR and Marketing Surveys to name things and figure out how to position advertising or to find emotional buttons that they can then push for the desired effect. It is a study in itself to see how clumsily and convoluted they use this information. Often the surveys are biased to get a result or the people doing the survey intuit that if they don't get the desired result they will be punished so the survey reflects what they think is needed and wanted by their superiors so they base their surveys on previous surveys which creates a kind of closed loop survey culture. So much Scientology think and "logic" gets inserted into the process that it is hopelessly sabotaged to achieve any sane result. To truly be a Scientologist and to know what goes on in the organization you have to be disconnected from reality to diminish or disregard the abuse and controlling indoctrination but a Scientologist thinks they know what reality really is and everyone else is living a delusion. So you have deluded people surveying people who are connected to reality in order to figure out how to get them to want the Scientology reality.

Anyway, welcome to the warren. I left the Sea Org because I was tired of all the guilt tripping, I realized the organization was fundamentally dysfunctional and would never change and mostly because I knew that eventually I would get sick and die there from stress, lack of sleep, lack of proper nutrition, lack of medical care and the loss of a will to live because there was no me left, no free time, no hobbies, no toys and even the people I considered friends could not be trusted not to rat me out for the slightest transgression or to abandon me on a whim. I fully stopped being a Scientologist many years later when I started reading what other people I knew and respected were saying on the internet that put my own experience and observations into context.

And, oh yeah, I was in the Sea Org when LRH was still alive and very much running things.
 
Top