Ask Lemmy

Get your daughter way from that kid as fast as you can.

| I don’t even understand if it’s an actual religion or one of those pay-to-level-up self-care courses.

yes, at about a ratio of 1 to 8. There's a mythology that these people fervently believe in, but pay-to-level-up is the core tenet. Distilling this down a bit, they believe that any problem you have is a ghost of long dead aliens clinging to you, and with enough abuse they can be scared away leaving behind the pure human.

When first you encounter them they seem to be offering self help courses or books. "Having trouble quitting smoking? Buy our book, join our class." For some these do genuinely help, if through no other mechanism than peer pressure. Then they pull out a bullshit device called an E meter and start talking about alternative therapies to realize your true potential, and then they've got you.

They are a high control group; they're like Mormons on amphetamines. Your life is centered on the church, people are kept in line through threats of destroying their families and support groups. They're particularly vindictive and are well documented to attack anyone critical of them.

Avoid these people with extreme prejudice, they are genuinely dangerous.

A cult

Teens can be complicated. I know. I have 5 kids. Youngest two are 14 and 12.

How close is your relationship to your daughter? If you are close, you can probably do nothing other than point out how weird things are, such as they way they won't discuss their beliefs, or the slavery thing. She'll probably eventually exit the situation on her own.

If you aren't close or you are prone to flying off the handle, that can be used as a wedge between you and your daughter.

Either way, this only ends in a few ways:

• Your daughter indoctrinated into a cult with you cut out of her life and labelled a "subversive person" (unless you decide to join, too)
• Them splitting
• Him leaving and losing all of his family, connections, and support

Scientology is a cult. And not just a cult, it is a vicious cult who take revenge on anyone they perceive as an enemy. People have found themselves surveilled and having their bosses called making things up to try to get them fired. They are extremely litigious.

Obviously I wouldn't want my kids in any cult, but Scientology would probably be the worst one. At least most other cults, if you make yourself available to help when they decide they need to leave, they can escape. Scientologists will literally house them on a prison ship.

Good luck, friend.

L. Ron Hubbard was a science fiction writer. He made a bet with another science fiction writer that he could get rich quicker by starting a fake religion, and collecting tithes, than he could selling science fiction stories. Scientology is the resulting pyramid scheme/ cult.

It's an acronym.

The S stands for "Scam".

the rest stands for bullshit.

I don’t have much new to offer here, but it’s 100% a cult and please be very careful with regard to your daughter. My impression is that any relationships with people outside of the cult will result in them trying to bring the outsider in and once they’re in, it can be difficult to break them out. They’ll have information on their members that they’ll use against them leaving, and they’ll at best be labeled a suppressive person and then harassed if they try to leave and at worst further isolated from their outside relationships, including family as their sucked further into the cult that drains them of their money and/or basically uses them ad slaves. Since the family is rich, they may have a little more freedom and be a little more laid back about the religion, but if they have slaves working at their house, they’re probably higher up and may be discouraged from dating outside their cult since they seem to place very high value on money and fame and likely don’t want significant others to break those people out of the cult.

Read this book, it's the story of L. Ron Hubbard, the god of Scientology and tells you everything you want to know.

Watch this series about life in Scientology and you'll get the idea pretty quickly.

TL;DR/DW: Get her away from him asap

I would just like to note that we’re on Lemmy, the land of 100 different opinions, and yet everyone has said the same thing about Scientology. That should be a huge flag there.

It's a cult. The "science" they base their beliefs on is called "dianetics". You can look that up and get more straigh-up explanations than by looking up "scientology".

In short, they think humans are possessed by the dead souls of immortal aliens from millions of years ago, but we can't perceive this due to traumatic memories which must be "cleared" using "auditing".

Auditing sessions are recorded, and as they involve confessing your darkest secrets to "clear" the relevant "trauma", the recordings can then be used to blackmail people into staying with the cult.

It's a pay-to-level-up religion, except instead of caring for your health they abuse you. They actively reject mental healthcare based on real science, and consider psychiatrists equivalent to murderers.

They don't believe in the concept of crime, instead considering anything and everything that happens to someone their own fault.

Members are not allowed to report crimes perpetrated by other members to the actual police, instead they must be reported to the church. When scientologists rape other scientologists, the victim gets punished with more auditing.

The most infamous scientologist is likely Danny Masterson, who is finally in prison for assaulting likely dozens and dozens of female members.

They also don't tell their followers what their beliefs actually are, before they've paid so much money for it that the sunk cost fallacy has them too committed to pull out.

You can find more info online about their actual beliefs told by people who have left the cult, than they reveal even to their own followers. Its all deliberately confusing, because no-one would buy into their crazy bullshit otherwise.

Get your daughter out of this relationship asap. Or even better, have a serious talk with her about scientology, explore what it is and what it does to its members, together, so she can then consider the situation and navigate it for herself.

It's bad, really really bad. Have a talk with her immediately. It doesnt mean her partner is a bad person, it just means her partner is caught up in something bad.

Don't interject yourself in between, just expose her to all the news articles of people who have tried to get out, and the cult like behaviors.

its a religion created by a sci-fi writer for monetary gain. he told everyone he was going to do so, and then did it.. but just as with every religion once there is a critical mass of idiots, people think it's "real".

It's a sect. Their beliefs are completely ridiculous and don't really matter much.
What matters is that they aggressively recruit new members into their cult, preferably people who don't fit in well in the "real world".
They promise that all problems you may have (psychologically, health or financial) can be solved by learning how to "free your soul" from past trauma.
You learn this in extremely expensive internal workshops (the first ones are free, but to raise to higher levels, you need to pay more and more money). The money goes directly to the leaders of the cult.
The methods are presented as scientific, but they are all 100% based on one book written by the founder L. Ron Hubbard, who was a third rate sci-fi author.
Members are encouraged to cut contact to all non-members.
If you try to leave, you are put under extreme pressure, harassed, and even threatened.

To everyone saying that this religion is a cult:

All religions are cults, but Scientology is one of the worst ones.

South Park: What Scientologists Actually Believe

Beyond that, it's a cult / pyramid scheme.

Also, check out Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath documentary for a good insider's perspective.

It's not the documentary, but here's Leah explaining the scam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM-FrI5Hqto

Depends a lot, whether you are in Usamerica or not.

They are the classical gang of cultists who manipulate people into donating all of their money (by buying "courses" and reaching "levels"), and then some more. People who have escaped are seriously damaged, emotionally.

But if you are in Usamerica, they have made some courts grant them full rights like any real church.

You need to visit https://www.xenu.net/ Aka operation clam bake. The evil these guys spread to the world is insane. And their sea org is slavery.

A doomsday cult set up as a religion so they can dodge taxes.

A sci-fi author who considered himself somewhat of a renaissance man created what he thought was a novel approach to psychology which was not accepted by the scientific community. He then made it into a religion to get it going and get tax breaks. As head of the religion he eventually was surrounded by sycomphant yes men zealots and over time he convinced himself it was real as a religion and was like its prophet holy man and expanded on it with sci fi elements that were only revealed to the cult memebers as it was run like multi level marketing where you buy the secrets of yourself and the universe. He died and like in any corpo cult the top ones are the most psychotic.

It started as a fake psychiatry scam, but when Hubbard realized there were laws regulating medicine he switched it over to being a religion where there aren't any of those pesky regulations or ethical oversight.

The fact that a science fiction writer was the one who created it in the 1950s should be enough cause for concern.

It's not really a religion, as much as it is a grift.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard

A very very bad cult. They remove acquired individuals from their (rl) social network and brainwash and get them to give them all their money.

It's mindboggling to me someone does not know of them.

You've already had some great replies, but in case you want to watch something rather than read, in addition to the Leah Remini documentary series, Louis Theroux also made a documentary (I'm pretty sure there were earlier ones, but the current one is dominating the search results and I can't find them on wiki or imdb) that is very good.

You should ask your daughter about Scientology.

Does she explain it like it's ridiculous, or credible?

You might want to show her that clip from South Park if she doesn't realize it's batshit crazy.

Teach her (don't force her, that never works) before she falls in with a cult and you lose her forever.

Oh boy...

Scientology is the very definition of pay-to-level-up. Unless you're famous, then you can stay for free due to the PR. Travolta, Tom Cruise, and many more are sciientologists, and it's reasonable to believe they are shielded from the darker side of the cult.

A cult.