we could do with a lot more lilith in the world these days – open that gate back up!

Not quite….Try Jack Parsons

A Central Leader – Virtually all cults are headed by a single person (sometimes a couple or triad) who either claims special knowledge and status or who claims special access to it (contact with superhuman intelligence).

Not really true. The leader can be a philosophy like Marxism or Reaganism. In the day-to-day running of a cult, rank-and-file members do far more to enforce the rules and mindset than the leadership does.

To the basic question of ‘what is a cult?’, maybe the best answer is simply, a group in which there are many of these indicators:

Extreme Promises – Unconditional, eternal love; financial security; complete certainty about life; answers to all questions; superhuman abilities; radical personality change; profound and constant peace of mind; perfect health; eternal life–all are promises commonly made by cults.

Restricted Freedoms – Because these groups want control, they need to limit their members’ basic freedoms. This includes restricting physical mobility; forbidding doubts or questions; removing the right to choose whom to spend time with, and when; prohibiting the exploration of other ways of thinking and living.

Assumptions Of Power – Often restrictions of freedom can also become active abuses of power. The group leader, or others designated to have power, may require members to perform tasks, acquire money, perform rituals, and to provide sexual services. And rather than use outright authority, cult leaders will present these demands or requirements as “opportunities” offered to those in special favor.

A Central Leader – Virtually all cults are headed by a single person (sometimes a couple or triad) who either claims special knowledge and status or who claims special access to it (contact with superhuman intelligence). A particular indicator of a cult is being told that this person knows what is best for you, regardless of your opinion or that of others you trust. To defy him or her is dangerous and can result in anything from disapproval to ostracism to physical punishment. Although a cult may claim to follow an absent leader (dead spiritual master, a non-corporeal intelligence, a being from another planet or physical plane), there will always be a present leader who benefits from the groups’ existence.

Deception and Totalitarian Views are other components of cults. We may notice that what is told to “recruits” and “outsiders” is different than what is professed within the group. This sort of lie can be as basic as soliciting money for the group under false pretenses. Also, “black or white” or “we and they” thinking is common. “They” are bad, or ignorant, or deceived, or unevolved, or dangerous. “We” are good, enlightened, special recipients, evolved, or under siege. However, in some groups, pervasive ambiguity can be used as camouflage from the cult’s actual beliefs and intents.

The Co$ has long had a controversial history on the Internet, and has initiated campaigns to manipulate material and remove information critical of the organization from the web.
Co$ editing on Wikipedia refers to a series of incidents that led in 2009 to Co$-owned networks being  banned from making edits to  Wikipedia articles relating to $cientology.

It is the things that makes Scientology unique that are fascinating. The internal prison camps, the espionage-like attacks on the journalist like Paulette Cooper, who wrote the first book about them.

Also, unlike Mormonism even, Scientology is uniquely well-documented. Every aspect of Hubbard’s life, from the falsification of his war record, to the step-by-step growth of Scientology from a best seller to a self-help cult, to a “religion” are very well documented, including people who were there in the beginning.

For years, Scientology successfully kept its cult of systematic brainwashing, punishment and money extraction secret, but then came the Internet.

Again, this is history in the making–what open access to information can do to a fraud disguised as a religion, like Scientology, no matter how powerful or influential its adherents. It’s also an intersection of Hollywood celebrity power, and religion, which is something unique. Most people LOVE movies, and so you can see the influence of a worldwide star like Cruise on this fraud being as successful as it has been, if you read the history, like in Reitman’s book INSIDE SCIENTOLOGY, or free online Russell Miller’s book BAREFACED MESSIAH.

 L. Ron Hubbard, also, was a fascinating character — a liar and teller of tall tales. How could a person who was so well-documented as being a con man and liar, be this successful in starting a new “religion.”

What happens to Scientology is a harbinger for the fate of many other religions too. Since people do start wars over religion, it isn’t inconsequential. A leader of a cult like Scientology must be carefully watched because as his cult goes down the tubes, will he go nuts?

Now, your choice is to cope with what’s going on, or run away from your whole life. It is not as easy as emptying your desk and walking away from a shitty job when you quit.

So much as uttering the name Hubbard alongside names of actual sci-fi greats like Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov is a mortal sin.

Have you not read Friday? Heinlein defended Scientology (and by implication, Hubbard). Clarke wrote about Hubbard in (I think) a view from serendip. Hubbard was one of that group but he did disappear around the 1960s.

The IRS is not a dictatorship. The US Government can (and presumably does) appoint new managers to run it from time to time. Why would a new manager react the same way about a blackmail attempt? Not reporting it to law enforcement would surely be a crime. Why would all successive IRS managers commit the same crime and retain tax free status for Scientology?

To be brutally honest I couldn’t care less about what cultist do to each other.

you seem to be saying that because you’re ignorant of how various cults work, the practices depicted cannot have happened.

Ok, but I don’t understand why I seem that way. I have been saying this is not just something normal, but seriously abusive and worth paying attention to. How does this question whether it is the sort of thing that can and does happen in awful cases?

Edit: and given that Jonestown is one of the worst mass killings in US history, and not all cults even make the news, where do you think it goes on the bell curve?

just off the top of my head, I can think of two cults, Heaven’s Gate, Aum Shinrikyo, which committed mass suicide and mass genocide. oh, yeah, and Jonestown.  i also don’t see how Jonestown is a “special case”; it’s just another “case.” 

comparatively, the punishments the scientologists inflicted are much more tame. 

At the time of this meeting, the IRS was attempting to nail the Church for a long list of tax violations, and the Church was tying up the IRS’s resources by filing hundreds of frivolous lawsuits against the IRS across many widespread jurisdictions — a judicial DDOS of sorts. All of this vanished and the IRS capitulated completely. The suspicion is that high-grade blackmail was dropped on the boss’s desk.