Crapaganda.com

Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years — in keeping with the church’s belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

But after 13 years and growing disillusionment, the Collbrans decided to leave the Sea Org, setting off on a Kafkaesque journey that they said required them to sign false confessions about their personal lives and their work, pay the church thousands of dollars it said they owed for courses and counseling, and accept the consequences as their parents, siblings and friends who are church members cut off all communication with them.

“Why did we work so hard for this organization,” Ms. Collbran said, “and why did it feel so wrong in the end? We just didn’t understand.”

They soon discovered others who felt the same. Searching for Web sites about Scientology that are not sponsored by the church (an activity prohibited when they were in the Sea Org), they discovered that hundreds of other Scientologists were also defecting — including high-ranking executives who had served for decades.

Fifty-six years after its founding by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986, the church is fighting off calls by former members for a Reformation. The defectors say Sea Org members were repeatedly beaten by the church’s chairman, David Miscavige, often during planning meetings; pressured to have abortions; forced to work without sleep on little pay; and held incommunicado if they wanted to leave. The church says the defectors are lying. Read more »

Airport security chiefs may have thought they had enough to worry about with shoe bombers, underpants bombers and people who forget to put their toothpaste into those little plastic bags. But, if so, they were reckoning without Benedict XVI.

At a meeting in the Vatican at the weekend, the pope made an authoritative – if entirely unexpected – incursion into the raging debate over the planned use of airport body scanners. He told an audience from the aerospace industry that, notwithstanding the threat from terrorism, “the primary asset to be safeguarded and treasured is the person, in his or her integrity”.

Respect for the principles he enunciated “might seem particularly complex and difficult in the present context”, he told his audience, which included airport managers, airline executives, security workers, pilots, cabin and ground staff.

They had to contend with problems arising “from the economic crisis, which is bringing about problematic effects in the civil aviation sector, and the threat of international terrorism, which is targeting airports and aircraft”. But, he warned: “It is essential never to lose sight of respect for the primacy of the person.”

The pope’s words will delight civil liberties campaigners opposed to a device that strips passengers virtually naked.

But those involved in airport security will no doubt point out that, when he himself travels — on Alitalia – the pope and his entourage are simply waved through security controls.

An exception was in 1984 when a permanently installed detection mechanism in Luxembourg alerted security officials to the fact that John Paul II and his aides were packing significant quantities of metal. It had been activated by their crosses.

Source: Pope enters airport body scanners row (Guardian UK)

Marci  and Jeff Beagley are charged with criminally negligent homicide in the June 2008 death of their son, Neil, from complications resulting from a urinary tract blockage that could have been treated.

The Beagleys are members of the Followers of Christ, an unorthodox offshoot of the Pentacostal Church, who believe in a literal interpretation of  The Bible including in the power of Faith Healing.

In the context of Pentecostal Christianity, Faith Healing is the use of prayer and laying on of hands to cure illness. Unlike many other churches which include faith healing as part of their doctrine, the Followers refuse all forms of medicine and professional medical care. The church practices shunning of those who violate or challenge church doctrine, including those who seek medical treatment.

In 1999 the Oregon Legislature pass a law to limit faith healing as a legal defense following a public outcry over the deaths of children of church members.

Oregon: Faith Healers Found Guilty (NY Times)

Ore. parents found guilty of neglecting ill son (Washington Times)

Amid the mass of aid agencies piling in to help Haiti quake victims is a batch of Church of Scientology “volunteer ministers”, claiming to use the power of touch to reconnect nervous systems.

Clad in yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the controversial US-based group, smiling volunteers fan out among the injured lying under makeshift shelters in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital.

“When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch.”

Some doctors at the hospital are skeptical. One US doctor, who asked not to be named, snorted: “I didn’t know touching could heal gangrene.”

When asked what the Scientologists are doing here, another doctor said: “I don’t know.”

Do you care? “Not really,” she said, wheeling an unconscious patient out of the operating room to join hundreds of others in the hospital’s sunny courtyard.

Scientologists ‘heal’ Haiti quake victims using touch (Yahoo News)

We all know that the  Catholic church has done a miserable job when it comes to policing themselves. Decades of sexual abuse of children by priests attests to that. In the US, children in parish after parish were assaulted by priests and nuns while their superiors covered it up.  We now find out that the orders for the cover-up came from the highest levels of the Vatican.

A secret document has been uncovered. The Crimen Sollicitationis, as it is titled in Latin, lays out church policy that calls for silence on the issue of sexual abuse by priests.

The policy, written in 1962 by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani and stored in the secret Vatican archives, focuses on crimes initiated as part of the confessional relationship and what it calls the “worst crime”: sexual assault committed by a priest” or “attempted by him with youths of either sex or with brute animals.”

Bishops are instructed to pursue these cases

“in the most secretive way…restrained by a perpetual silence…and everyone (including the alleged victim) …is to observe the strictest secret, which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office…under the penalty of excommunication.”

View an English translation of Crimen Sollicitationis (pdf)

Watch Sex crimes and the Vatican (BBC)

The Ugandan government claimed human sacrifice was on the increase.

According to officials trying to tackle it, the crime is directly linked to rising levels of development and prosperity – and an increasing belief that witchcraft can help people get rich quickly.

One man said he had clients who had captured children and taken their blood and body parts to his shrine, while another confessed to killing at least 70 people including his own son.

Human sacrifices ‘on the rise in Uganda’ as witch doctors admit to rituals (Telegraph UK)

In 1610, Galileo Galilei published his Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), describing his telescopic observations.  These observations pointed out what would become major differences between the physical world and the understanding of the universe discribed in the Holy Bible.  These statements renewed interest in the radical teachings of  the heliocentric theory of Copernicus.

Scholars of the time reacted by attacking the theory that seemingly contradicted several passages of Scripture.  Galileo’s part in the controversies over theology, astronomy, and philosophy culminated in his trial and sentencing in 1633 on a grave suspicion of heresy.

Galileo was found “vehemently suspect of heresy,” namely of having held the opinions that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe, that the Earth is not at its centre and moves, and that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture. He was required to “abjure, curse and detest” those opinions.

His offending Dialogue was banned; and in an action not announced at the trial, publication of any of his works was forbidden, including any he might write in the future.

He was ordered imprisoned; the sentence was later commuted to house arrest.

From 1634 onward he could be found at his country house at outside of Florence.  In 1638, blind and suffering from a painful hernia, he was allowed to travel to Florence for medical attention.  He continued to receive visitors until 1642, when he died.

His body was interred at Santa Croce Church in Florence, Italy.

95 years later, on March 12, 1737, Anton Francesco Gori removed one of the corpse’s bony fingers.  The relic (of science not religion), is on display at the Florence History of Science Museum.

Today it sits in a small glass egg among lodestones and telescopes, the only human fragment in a museum devoted entirely to scientific instruments. It is hard to know how Galileo would have felt about the final resting place of his finger. The long bony finger points towards the sky, as if to let the Catholic Church know that in spite of their tyranny and obfuscation of the truth the laws of nature will always apply on Earth.

Possession is  the term used to describe state when a demon is in control of a human body.  Reported symptoms of demonic possession often include: lost memories, missing personalities, convulsions, fits and fainting.  Other supposed symptoms may include access to hidden knowledge or foreign languages, drastic changes in voice and appearance  and superhuman strength.

The Bible never actually refers to people as being possessed by demons. The main expressions referring to demonic influence are: “to be demonized” (this is the most frequent expression) and “having a demon” (note that it is the person who possesses the demon, not the demon who possesses the person.)

The literal view of demonization is still held by a number of Christian denominations. Official Catholic doctrine affirms that demonic oppression can occur as distinguished from mental illness, but stresses that cases of mental illness should not be misdiagnosed as demonic influence. Catholic exorcisms can occur only under the authority of a bishop and in accordance with strict rules; a simple exorcism also occurs during Baptism.

Read about the exorcism of Mother Theresa of Calcutta.

The Malleus Maleficarum describes specific exorcism techniques. Depending on the severity of the alleged possession, solutions range from prayers of deliverance to the Solemn Rite of Exorcism as practiced by the Catholic Church.

Watch a modern day exorcism.

In 1481 the Catholic Church charged two Dominican monks, James Sprenger and Henry Kramer, with the task of writing a manual for hunting witches. The manual, Malleus Maleficarum, took 5 years to create.

The Malleus Maleficarum is the best known of the witch-hunt manuals. Originally written in Latin, the title is translated as “The Hammer of Witches”. Used for more than three hundred years, it was the justification for the witch trials in Europe and Colonial America.

The document specified rules of evidence and procedures by which suspected witches should be detected, tortured and put to death.

Buy your own copy of the Malleus Maleficarum or Read the Malleus Maleficarum online.

Witch hunts continue today.  In Nigeria, religious leaders in extremist Christian churches are  “identifying” some children as witches.   The children are then subjected to horrible purifying rituals.  Children have been hacked to death, poisoned and buried alive in an attempt to drive out Satan.

‘Child-witches’ of Nigeria Seek Refuge (Telegraph UK)

Guardian UK 11-18-2009

The Australian prime minister has said he would consider an inquiry into allegations of  forced abortions, assault, torture, imprisonment, covering up sexual abuse, embezzlement of church funds and blackmail.

Australian Senator Nick Xenophon has publically accused The Church of Scientology of being “a criminal organization.”

This comes less than a month after a French court convicted the Church of fraud and fined it more $900,000. The religion of John Travolta and Tom Cruise seems to be on the run.

AP 10-27-2009

In 2007, Germany banned the makers of Tom Cruise’s movie Valkyrie from filming at military sites in the country because he was a Scientologist. The German defence ministry said Scientology is a cult that masquerades as a religion to make money.

BBC 2007