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