Comment from The Underground Bunker

Scientology Desperately Wants Your Children: The Cruise Ship Come-On

I read a blog written by Tony Ortega, the same man who shared my story a few months ago. He has been reporting on Scientology for years, decades even and has done so much to expose the abuse that people suffer at the hands of this religion.



Here is an excerpt from his blog this morning:

Just yesterday, we published another appeal to church members about their children that was sent out with a mailer that boasted about Scientology’s outreach in Taiwan. We’ll post that here again and ask our readers this question: Is the church increasingly sounding desperate to get its hooks into Scientology kids?

His post was a couple of mailers from the Church about recruitment of children. The church is apparently launching a campaign to get Scientology children onto their cruise ship the "Freewinds" for a religions retreat. It was especially inflammatory for me because of my experience with Sea Org recruitment tactics. One of which is to separate children from their parents to make for easier recruiting which would be exacerbated by isolating these kids on a boat in the middle of the Caribbean.

If you read the blog post at The Underground Bunker you will see that no mention of parents is made anywhere and the questionnaire seems targeted directly to the children so it can be used to undermine their parents. One can only assume that the cruise is intended for children and not their parents.

It inspired me to leave a comment, which I decided to go ahead and post here.

Leaving your kids alone with Sea Org members is one of the worst decisions any sane parent could ever make. I was endlessly harassed by Sea Org members at the ripe age of 14 until finally, when I was 15, I broke down and signed the Sea Org contract.

Sea Org recruitment tactics are some of the most abusive tactics. They separate you from your parents, make you feel guilty for not being in the Sea Org, corner you for hours at a time with a contract in your hand.

They made me kick, scream and cry until they finally let me go at 11 or midnight from their recruitment offices. They called me at all hours of the night, followed me to school. At times I spent 14 hours at the big blue complex being cornered by tens of Sea Org members on rotating schedules to recruit me. They wouldn’t let me out of their sight for a minute. They wouldn’t let me speak to my parents.

Worse yet, they use their leverage in the ethics area to make parents feel guilty or even submit to confessionals and humiliating punishment if they stand in the way. I was constantly being asked by them if my parents were the reason I wasn’t joining, if my parents told me not to join the Sea Org. I always said no.

The offices I was always stuck in were tiny. There would sometimes be five people in there recruiting me. More than once I was screamed at for not signing the contract. I was made all kinds of promises: days off, regular work hours, regular paychecks. None of them turned out to be true. The only one thing I managed to do was to get a high school equivalency certificate.

I am not kidding when I say they used to chase me down at school. I used to walk home and they would be sitting outside my school in their car waiting for me. I tried to ignore them but they would follow me. Then they offered me a ride home, but instead took me to the big blue complex and took me into the recruitment offices again. They wouldn’t let me speak to my parents.

It was awful. Just horrible. To think of this fucking cult filling a boat with children free to be recruited for days and days. Goddamnit this needs to be stopped. I can’t even fathom words to express how awful this is. They are like child predators, but without the sex.

My time in the Sea Org was just the same. Sleep deprivation, food deprivation, emotional abuse and physical abuse in the form of long work days and no time off. I was constantly being screamed at and harassed. I wasn’t allowed phone calls for a time, constantly having submit to confessionals where I talked about my masturbation tendencies. I was humiliated in front of other Sea Org members if my stats were down. I was always in fear of being caught not working hard enough to meet someone’s standards.

When I was finally caught in a love affair with one of my roommates, I was humiliated yet again. I had to work in a huge industrial paper shredder shredding papers for hours on end. I would blow my nose and my snot would come out rainbow colored from all the dust. I was denied contact with the outside world. I was forced to submit to a long, drawn out confessional where I had to go into detail about my homosexual tendencies. I had to talk about my fantasies and all the times that I was turned on by fellow Sea Org members in the showers.

All of this was recorded and written down and sits filed away in a folder somewhere. All of these things happened between the ages of 15 and 18. I spent my 18th birthday being “sec checked” and having to do manual labor in the basement tunnels of LRH Way. Working with moldy paper.

To think that this cult is still allowed to do things like this to children, or even young men and women is just horrible. Now to see how hard they are working to pull children into their grips is even more disturbing to me. I can only imagine one reason they would do this: if they have a death grip on the children their parents will never leave.