IF you publicly repudiate your previous statements,
IF you undergo rigorous sec-checks and other auditing,
IF you do a bunch more grovelling and demeaning procedures/lowered conditions.

Its FAR worse for Sea Org who blow, since they’ll probably just be RPF for lyfe, yo. Public who leave and become critics will probably just have the above very expensive courses/auditing levied on them.

So, thats the crack: be willing to be a slave, or pay out your ass.

You’re a Scientologist, so maybe you can shed light on this for me. You write: “The Church’s policy is to keep the door open, at least a crack, for people who denounce it.”

But I was under the impression that if you manage to leave the Church, you get declared SP and are therefore fair game. And I was also under the impression that it is very difficult to leave and that people who try often get sent to the RPF. And that if you try to leave the RPF and get caught, you might get put in the RPF’s RPF.

Anyway, I’m obviously no insider, so I’d like to hear what it’s really like, but everything I’ve seen suggests that trying to leave Scientology is a nightmare.

It’s a positive sign that you actually show some awareness of the possibility that what an organization claims it is doing, and the actual effects of that organization’s behavior, may be completely different — and that the rank and file members may not be aware of the disparity between what they’re told they’re working for and the ends they’re actually serving.

When you have the courage to apply that analysis realistically to the Church of Scientology, you will see that the Church of Scientology is not going to honor all the beautiful promises it made to you. You will see that the Church of Scientology is itself an organization “that harms in the name of help” and that this is why so many people, from so many very different backgrounds, have chosen to oppose the CoS.

Did the Church of Scientology help or harm Lisa McPherson? Oh, yes, I know what you’ve been told by the CoS about Lisa McPherson: that she died of a blood clot and so the Church bears no responsibility for her death. But if you think about that, you’ll realize it doesn’t make sense. The CoS held Lisa away from medical care for seventeen days. Are you going to claim to the world that there was nothing that medical professionals could do in seventeen days to diagnose and treat a blood clot? Even when the CoS staffers who were “treating” Lisa with the Introspection Rundown finally brought her to a hospital , they insisted on bringing her to a Scientologist doctor forty-five minutes away — passing up four other hospitals on the way, including one just two minutes away. And she was dead on arrival. Are you going to claim to the world that forty-three minutes does not make a difference to a woman on the brink of death?

The fact is, the Church of Scientology harmed in the name of help.

The Church of Scientology also sent out its “Volunteer Ministers” in New York on 9/11 and in London on 7/7. I know what the Church told you the Volunteer Ministers were doing — it told you they were doing “touch assists” and it tells you that these “touch assists” help people heal. But the fact is that the Church of Scientology has never been able to show any medical value to the touch assist — if they could they would certainly do so as quickly as possible, because it would be the surest way to convince people that Scientology has real benefits. Moreover, Volunteer Ministers have been caught on hidden recordings boasting that they weren’t there just to push an alleged remedy with no demonstrated medical value on vulnerable people — they were there to keep real medical professionals from treating those vulnerable people. They boasted that they tried to keep psychiatrists — and remember that every psychiatrist is a medical doctor — from reaching trauma victims.

Once again, the Church of Scientology harmed in the name of help.

Observer, if you still believe that Anonymous members don’t know the true nature of the “organization” they’re in, what would you want them to do? Examine the evidence for themselves? Refuse to rely only on the group’s own representations to find out what it’s really doing? That’s exactly what you should be doing for yourself — finding out exactly what the Church of Scientology is doing from sources other than the CoS’s own representations, and then asking if they really match up with what they claim to be doing.