Svp Connaissez-Vous Ces Sites

SVP CONNAISSEZ-VOUS CES SITES??? MERCI POR FAVOR CONOCEIS A ESTOS SITIOS??? GRACIAS BITTE KENNEN SIE DIESEN WEB SITE??? DANKE PLEASE DO YOU KNOW THESE WEB SITES??? THANX especially this one is from the "family" Mo's brotherhood: http://www.thefamily.org/dossier/legal/spain.htm

Is it alright? http://www.movingon.org/category.asp?sID=1&Cat=10

Related Links

Child Abuse Lawsuit -- A $400 Million Lawsuit was Filed by Former SGAs Against ISKCON (Hare Krishna) For Child Abuse on June 12, 2000.

Children Flogged for God -- An assortment of religious groups who believe in beating children for God.

In search of a lost childhood -- horrific accounts of abuse in Hare Krishna schools

In the Family: sexual abuse -- Statements from teenagers and young adults under oath of sexual abuse in the Family, summarised by the Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Ward

In the Family: Teen Training -- An article from a Sociology Prof. on the detention programs in the Family.

In the Shadow of the Moons : My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Family -- Book, written by a young woman who grew up in the Moonies and became a 15-year-old bride handpicked by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon for his son. Link is to Amazon.com

Information on the cult of Maharaj Ji -- site for people recovering from being involved in the cult of Guru Maharaj Ji/Prem Pal/Rawatt. Followers and their children have suffered abuse and deception, many are still recovering, some have committed suicide, and it's all been ignored or hushed up by the organisation (Divine Light Mission/DUO/Elan Vital/Enjoying Life.)

Signs and symptoms of potential child maltreatment -- Signs of maltreatment Silent Lambs -- Children abused in the Jehovah Witnesses

Tax-Exempt child abuse -- Accounts (mostly from former FGA) of child mistreatment in Scientology

The cult next door: Teen shares chilling tale of alleged abuse inside the Twelve Tribes sect -- From the Boston Herald, Sep. 4, 2001 http://www.nhne.com/specialreports/srsaibaba.html

INTRODUCTION David Sunfellow

SEX, LIES & VIDEO TAPE G.R.R. Babu

MY SAI HISTORY Jed Geyerhahn

MORE ON SAI BABA ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

INTRODUCTION By David Sunfellow

In SMORGASBORD 6, I wrote an article entitled, "A Power Greater Than Ourselves". Among other things, the article lamented the apparent lack of authentic spiritual masters in the world today. "I have yet to meet or hear of anyone alive today," I wrote, "who embodies the kind of perfection I believe is our birthright. And while there is certainly no shortage of people claiming to be perfect, those who proclaim spiritual mastership the loudest, often turn out to be the least developed and most lost. And this includes many of the eastern world's most celebrated 'masters' who, along with whatever genuine inner strengths and powers they tapped into, frequently demonstrate glaring moral defects and/or an inability to function gracefully in the real world."

While many readers wrote back saying that they, too, had grown disillusioned over the apparent lack of spiritual masters in the world today, one reader asked a question that has been nagging me for decades: "What about Sai Baba?"

I first encountered Sai Baba over twenty years ago when a friend showed me a book of his. After reading that Sai Baba considered himself the second coming of Christ, I promptly dismissed both him and his claims of spiritual mastership. Eventually, I came across a psychic reading done by Ray Stanford (one of a handful of psychics that I believe was genuinely gifted), in which Sai Baba was described as "an avatar of mind unspiritualized." This particular reading, which was published in 1976 in the Journal of the ASSOCIATION FOR THE UNDERSTANDING OF MAN, further accused Sai Baba of sexual indiscretions and said that he had physically beat people who did not do his will. According to the Stanford source, "There is a direct contradiction in the life of the individual involved, between what he claims of himself and what he does in practice. This is exemplified in the sexual life, in the intellectual life, and in the emotional reactions of the individual called Baba. Also is it exemplified in the external form of those attitudes mentioned -- such as the physical beatings which that one has done to individuals who did not do his will." The Stanford source also added this pointed reminder,"Realize that He who is the true incarnation of Love gives evidence of Himself by love. Do not deceive yourself by rationalization into believing that the giving of trinkets is the evidence of love, for love given purely need not conceal itself behind mere trinkets of gold, stone, and tinsel."

While I viewed Sai Baba as one more wayward guru, an increasing number of friends continued to sing him praises. Some of these friends actually visited him in India. Their first-person impression of Sai Baba was that he was, indeed, the high-powered spiritual master he claimed to be. Others, who spent years in close association with Sai Baba, swore that they personally witnessed many "miracles" that could not be explained by ordinary means. In addition, Sai Baba is well-known in India, and often visited by Indian government officials and world leaders -- in part because of his supposed powers, and in part because of his reported good works, which, among other things, includes building hospitals and helping poor villages.

So is Sai Baba a genuine master, or another charlatan?

To get to the bottom of this, I contacted officials connected with THE COMMITTEE FOR THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION OF CLAIMS OF THE PARANORMAL (CSICOP), based in the United States, India and London. One of these gentlemen, G.R.R. Babu, the Executive Director of INTERNATIONAL HUMANIST & ETHICAL UNION in London, faxed me an article he wrote that itemized many disturbing events associated with Sai Baba, including faked materializations, murders, corrupt government officials, money laundering, and other scandals. Since CSIOP and their affiliate organizations are staunch humanists, they have a vested interest to discredit all claims of supernatural and/or divine interventions in the affairs of humanity. Babu's report cannot, therefore, be viewed as an objective overview of Sai Baba. In addition, Babu's article has a sarcastic edge to it that compromises normal journalistic standards. It does, however, detail events that should cause any seeking person to seriously question Sai Baba, as well his claims of mastership. With permission, I have included a copy of Babu's report on Sai Baba in this NHNE Special Report.

I have also been in touch with Jed Geyerhahn, a past devotee of Sai Baba. With his permission, I have included a letter that describes his relationship with Sai Baba. Previously published on THE NEURAL SURFER (http://www.mtsac.edu/~dlane/saiessay.html), Geyerhahn's letter supports and elaborates on the accusations presented in Babu's eye-opening overview.

While Sai Baba may not live up to his "perfect master" billing, it is worth noting that many of the people who have been drawn to Sai Baba are sincere spiritual seekers. As David Lane, the creator of THE NEURAL SURFER points out in picking Sai Baba as one of his top ten "Scum Bag Guru's" (http://www.mtsac.edu/~dlane/gurumay.html), "I hesitated putting this Gumby blessing Avatar on my list for over a year because his followers can be (at times) so downright sweet."

Being a sincere, even a "sweet" spiritual seeker is, of course, no guarantee we won't be duped. Indeed, some of the most sincere, sweet, and discerning spiritual seekers I know were reeled in by Sai Baba -- or his devotees. But as increasing numbers of spiritual seekers mature, and our global network of ears and eyes expands, I believe it is going to be increasingly difficult for the Sai Baba's of the world to work their magic on those of us that really want to know the truth... ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

SEX, LIES & VIDEO TAPE: RETELLING THE SATYA SAI BABA STORY

By G.R.R. BABU General Secretary, RATIONALIST ASSOCIATION OF INDIA

THE SAI AVATAR When a luminescent ball of light entered Easwaramma while she was bathing, little did she or Pedda Venkappa Raju, her illiterate husband, realize that the Lord had chosen her surrogate womb for His next parthenocarpic incarnation. Official literature enlightens us that the Lord's coming was anticipated long ago by Jesus and Mohammed. For those who cannot find the relevant passages in their version of the Bible or Koran, a more contemporary declaration was made by the Lord Himself. In 1918 during His earlier incarnation as the Sai Baba of Shirdi, He had revealed that 8 years after leaving the Shirdi body, He would be reborn in Puttaparthi village of Easwaramma, "as the moon grows in the sky," and a male child was born on 23 November, 1926. To mark the momentous significance of the event, musical instruments in the house played by themselves at the time of the birth: the air, and a cobra, lord of reptiles, wailed in attendance to protect the Lord. It is fair to assume that just as with the birth of the Buddha, elephants trumpeted in joy, peacocks danced and the gods rejoiced.

Despite His omniscience, Satyanorayana Raju -- for that was his given name -- went to school where the playful display of his miraculous powers was soon recognized by all. Friends came to love him for his magically created gifts and teachers feared his just wrath: one of them would not come unstuck from his chair, unless he begged for forgiveness and expressed remorse at ill treating the children! In 1940, after tortuous treatment by doctors for suspected mental illness, at the age of 15, Satyanarayana Raju revealed His avatarhood to the world and identified Himself as Satya Sai Baba. As He was to reveal later to his disciples, "I, the Lord, incarnated at Puttaparthi. Buddha, Christ, Mohammed and others were not avatars. They had some divine power... My power is infinite; My Truth is inexplicable, even unfathomable. My task is the regeneration of humanity by Truth and Love." We are reassured that when the present incarnation would be over at age 96, in the year 2022, He would be reborn as Prema Sai in Mandya district of Kamataka.

MAN OF MIRACLES

Satya Sai Baba would often say "miracles are my visiting cards": a phrase which is also the title of a largely hearsay, cock-and-bull account of Satya Sai Baba's paranormal powers, by Icelandic parapsychologist Errlelndur Haraldsson (more about Haraldsson at the end of this article). Despite His insistence that His religious message was more important than the "tinsel" miracles He performed, the stupendous "powers" of Satya Sai Baba soon came to be know all over the world. Based on the "most reliable information", but mistaking God for guru, the READER'S DIGEST book Strange Stories, Amazing Facts - II gives us this credulous account: "Sai Baba is an Indian guru blessed with extraordinary powers. He can produce gold rings and coins out of thin air, change rock into candy, and flowers into jewels. He heals the sick with the aid of vibhuti (sacred wood ash), which seems to appear from nowhere as he waves his hand. Perhaps the most astonishing display of Sai Baba's powers took place in 1953, when the blue and stiff body of Radhakrishna which was cold, shrunken and starting to decompose, was brought back to life by Baba. In the 50 years that Sai Baba has been demonstrating his apparently miraculous powers, no one has found any evidence of trickery."

In addition to these reports, Dr. John Hislop, American industrialist and management consultant, and also Chairman of the CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF AMERICAN SAI ORGANIZATION tells us earnestly how in 1971 Satya Sai Baba resurrected Walter Cowan, declared dead due to cardiac failure. The late Dr. Suri Bhagavantam, director of the prestigious INDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE, Bangalore, Scientific advisor to the government of India and also Baba's interpreter narrated how once Satya Sai Baba created out of nowhere a copy of the Bhagavadgita (alas even the Lord is not immune to orthographic error, as a skeptic pointed out!) In a contemporary enactment of New Testament miracles, He once converted water into petrol by dipping His finger into the water. He relieves devotees' ailments by taking them onto Himself, conducts surgeries with psychic powers and plucks out-of-season mango fruit from tamarind trees. It is believed that Baba was responsible for repelling the Chinese army "invading India like locusts". Reports abound of His bilocation (having appeared in two places at the same time); He Himself claimed that He never sleeps.

In what can only be described as divine disapproval of capitalist claims on intellectual property rights, by the mere waving of His hand, Satya Sai Baba also "creates" and distributes trade mark protected Parker pens and Omega watches. The vibhuti He creates has been variously used by devotees in treating terminal cancer and for curing pimples. The irreverent skeptic is admonished: "Do not try to delve into Me; Baba is beyond the keenest intellect, the sharpest brain... How can the limited know the depth of the unlimited? How can the ant delve into the mountain? It is beyond you to know how or why I create things... the objects that I create, I create them by My Will, the same way I created the universe. Develop faith and veneration and derive joy through Prema (love). That is the utmost you can do, do that and benefit."

THE SATYA SAI COMMUNITY

Sai Baba's exhortation to believe has found many receptive ears. Today His followers number at least two million, with growing numbers being recorded in the spiritually-impoverished West. Australian journalist and theosophist Howard Murphet and London photographer David Baily came to scoff, but stayed to pray. "Noted" American psychologist Dr. Samuel Sandweiss was convinced when he was told, "I am everything, everywhere, omniscient, omnipotent, and so whatever I will, instantly happens." Dr. Hislop asks in tragically foolish wonder, "Baba has the inconceivably immense task of the Universe. How can He afford to spend time talking to people like us?" Baba reassures him: "Baba with his limitless bodies, is everywhere doing the tasks... that is Baba's omnipresence. God is not subject to any limitation." Dr. Hislop is delighted at this explanation.

The credit for polishing Baba's halting English and capturing his evident lyrical derangement goes to official biographer, the erudite Kasturi: "I am all that is, all that can be known, all that seeks fulfillment. Sunrise and Sunset keep repeating, for I have willed [them] to; the stars that lend sublime charm to the nocturnal sky hide their faces from human eyes during the day, in obedience to my desire; the wind blows with no respite in order to keep animate beings alive, since that is My wish; streams and rivulets giggle, laugh or roar along beds during their pilgrimages to the sea, for it pleases Me; mankind itself is molded into a million faces to present the variety I relish." This has obviously enlightened the person from whom I borrowed some Satya Sai Baba literature: he had written down in pencil, in fervent devotion: "I, befitting and fortunate slave, carry out every command of the master without any question of why and what... I am slave of the master who has released me from my ignorance, whatever my master does is of the greatest benefit to all concerned."

The confederacy of irrationality, gullibility and superstition establishes a kinship which transcends cultural and national barriers. Among the miracle mongering Satya Sai followers are top Indian political leaders and judges, Presidents and Prime Ministers of Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mauritius, several former Greek Prime Ministers, the Spanish Royal family, members of the International diplomatic corps, advocates, engineers, doctors and common folk. Perhaps because it is they who need the most spiritual advice, it is very common to see the pacific and teetotaler Satya Sai Baba in the company of power brokers, associates of international arms traders and liquor barons. Notable among Baba's international inner circle are Guilio Andreotti, former Prime Minister of Italy, currently on trial for murder of a journalist, former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, sentenced to 5 1/2 years of imprisonment for corruption and Princess Poihlavi, sister of the former Shah of Iran, caught in Switzerland in 1962 for carrying heroin.

BEGONE SATYA SAI!

Into such a community of God-fearing people came the late Srilankan Dr. Abraham T. Kovoor, Asian president of the WORLD UNION OF FREE THINKERS and Dr. H. Narasimhaiah, India's best known rationalist and former vice chancellor of the BANGALORE UNIVERSITY, who together led the most animated attack on Satya Sai Baba and his world view.

Dr. Kovoor narrates in his book Begone Godmen! that in 1973, during a newspaper debate on Satya Sai Baba, Dr. Bhagavantam (Baba's interpreter from Telugu to English) wrote of the "awe-inspiring, wonderful experience of the Seiko watch manufacturer", who, when on a visit to Puttaparth was presented by Sai Baba with the very watch that the manufacturer had, pending tests, kept in a safe in Japan. With this materialization, all his doubts about the divine powers of Satya Sai Baba melted away. "He fell prostrate at Sai Baba's feet and worshipped him. Since then he is an ardent devotee of the Bhagavon." Since Dr. Sbhagavantam was not forth coming with details, a suspicious Dr. Kovoor made inquiries with Shoji Hattori, President of SEIKO WATCH COMPANY in Tokyo to verify the facts. Mr. Hattori wrote back "...I am in no way able to further your knowledge as regards the man mentioned in your letter, Mr. Sai Baba. Neither I nor any members of my staff have ever made the acquaintance of this individual. I am sure that these reports are completely unfounded." Bhagavantam remained silent when confronted with the response. The national scandal that broke out when Dr. Kovoor released his correspondence to the press, describing Satya Sai Baba as a "sleight-of-hand" trickster and exposing one of India's brilliant scientists as a Satya Sai agent, was only surpassed by nuclear scientist, Dr. H. Narosimhaiah's crusade as Vice-Chancellor of BANGALORE UNIVERSITY, when in 1976 he appointed a 12 member official committee "to investigate rationally and scientifically miracles and any other verifiable superstitions." Dr. Narasimhaiah's committee exposed Sai Krishna, a 7 year old child-protege of Satya Sai Baba, by pulling out the packet of vibhuti hidden in the underclothes of Sai Krishna. Several sundry godmen immediately confessed that they did not have any miraculous powers. It was Satya Sai Baba's turn now and the committee requested Him to allow them an investigation. When they visited Him, a terrified Satya Sai Baba locked Himself up in His Whitefield residence, close to Bangalore. All He could do was spew helpless vitriol at the Narasimhaiah Committee.

AVATAR OF THE NIGHT

As if these resounding rationalist responses and public humiliations were not enough, in 1976 another bomb shell was thrown at Him. Tal Brooke, born again Christian who spent 14 months with Satya Sai Baba, wrote the book Avatar of the Night, (all three thousand copies of the book released in India were purchased and destroyed) describing Satya Sai Baba's homosexual lust (how can a good Christian accept that?) and assaults on young boys. It is quite revealing of the submission and intelligence level of the Sai devotee that despite Sai Baba's enticement: "What is mine is yours, money, food, anything. Just ask!", Tal Brooke said to himself "Lust contradicts Baba's nature; therefore it does not exist in him. Blind faith... Baba is innocent". It took Tal Brooke three such consummate encounters and numerous similar accounts of pedophilia from friends to realize that Satya Sai Baba's nudging pelvis, pawing hands and intimate behaviour were not part of any soul-cleansing encounter.

With news of these events and later incidents, the seeds of doubt were sown in many minds. How is it that Sai Baba's own brother-in-law died of rabies? Why did Baba, Himself a psychic surgeon, have to be hospitalized for ruptured appendicitis and broken leg? And preaching simplicity, why does He travel in Mercedes cars and require heavy protection? Why did Sai Baba have to wave his hand in circles, before producing anything? Was it because of prestidigitation, as emphatically asserted by the renowned Indian stage magician P.C. Sarcar Jr. and skeptic E. Premanand? Does His occasional transvestism and derision for women really illustrate the Male-Female principle of the universe? Why is it that some doctors have gone on record stating that post mortems of bodies of several women coming from Puttapathl showed signs of torture? Is it true that some of the foreign nationals visiting Puttaparthl were disappearing after entire properties were bequeathed to the Satya Sai Organization? And is it true that Proshanti Nilayam (Satya Sai Baba's "abode of peace" at Puttaparthl) was the campus of criminals? Is it not surprising that the police, in a routine security combing of Prashanti Nilayam before the visit of the Home Minister of India, discover, apart from cyanide and land mines, the deadly plastic-explosive RDX used by Hindu-Muslim terrorists in Bombay? And why did Satya Sai Baba, whose religion officially also embraces the values of Islam, welcome the anti-Muslim Hindu fundamentalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad's campaign?

"LET THERE BE A NECKLACE..."

But the most spectacular fodder for doubt for the believer was the unique birthday gift given to Satya Sai Baba by the DECCAN CHRONICLE of 23 November, 1992. This largely circulated, Hyderabad- based English daily published what the rationalist could only dream of. Splashed on the front page were pictures from a video recording of Satya Sai Baba's "creation" of a gold necklace, in the presence of the Prime Minister of India, Mr. P.V. Narasimha Rao. The video tape shows unambiguously Satya Sai Baba being passed clandestinely a necklace by his personal assistant Radhakrishna Menon, which later Satya Sai Baba "materializes" after a wave of his hand. Filmed by a state television crew covering the Prime Minister, the cassette was suppressed. However, a copy was leaked and several copies of the cassette were distributed in India and abroad. A big meeting was organized by us to felicitate the courageous journalist Venu Kodimela and for a long time, watching the cassette became a necessary ritual of all our public meetings. Some were shown on local and district cable television too -- at great bodily risk as some rationalists came to know. However, the publicity remarkably affected the number of devotees visiting Puttaparthi, though some still insist that "miracles" are performed to attract people to the good work being done by Baba and that Baba never claimed any special powers! CRIME AND KARMA: MURDERS IN THE BEDROOM

Much worse was in store when on 6 June, 1993, six inmates of Prashanti Nilayam were murdered in Satya Sai Baba's bedroom. It is alleged that two were killed by the assailants and the police claimed to have shot dead -- in self defence -- four of the assailants, who were armed only with knives. Realizing the danger to his person, Baba Himself ran for His life, jumped out of an open window and started off a secret alarm, whose existence even the inner core did not know of. Interestingly, all the people killed were part of the inner circle of Sai Baba, among whom Radha Krishna Menon, the personal assistant who was caught on video passing the necklace clandestinely to Baba. Baba Himself spoke of the murders in His Gurupoornima lecture and dealt with the question of whether the deaths of his near and dear were unavoidable. "Birth and death go together. One should realize that death is a natural phenomenon and avoid worrying about it... You must note that Swami's life is in His own hands and not in those of anyone else. If I will it, I can live as long as I please. Because He is the almighty, God cannot behave in any arbitrary manner. Not realizing this truth, men who are involved in worldly ways ask questions as to why in certain situations, God did not use his limitless powers to avert certain untoward events..."

The police report was twice changed, from attempt to murder Baba to internal squabbles in Prashanti Nilayam. Mysteriously, Shankar Dayal Sharma, the President of the Indian Republic deviated from protocol and propriety and said that the murders were "all about a girl". When asked why Satya Sai Baba, the head of the Institution in whose bedroom the murders took place, was not interrogated, Home Minister Chavan who visited Sai Baba twice immediately after the incident insisted that Sai Baba was not present at the time of murder, further compromising the investigation. Surprisingly, Prashanti Nilayam authorities themselves filed no police complaint.

B. Premanand, magician, former devotee of Baba and today the most important Indian Skeptic -- Sai Baba baiter alive, however refused to accept the interference into the investigation and hauled the government to court, accusing the police of having willfully destroyed evidence. Amusingly, in the post, Premanand and K.N. Balagopal, rationalist advocate in the Supreme Court of India, had dragged Satya Sai Baba to court for violation of the Gold Control Act which imposed restrictions on the "manufacture, possession, sale and transfer of gold", since Satya Sai Baba "materialized" gold ornaments to be given to devotees. While rejecting the petition, the High Court Judge Justice Y.V. Anjaneyulu, a member of the Satya Sai inner circle, allowed the argument that an article materialized by spiritual powers cannot be said to have been manufactured, prepared or processed. Perhaps for the first time in jurisprudence spiritual powers were recognized as valid defence in law!

In the present murder case, however, Premanand petitioned to the High Court in a public interest petition that the case be transferred to an impartial investigative agency so that justice might be done. In the High Court, while dismissing the plea, Premanand was admonished by Chief Justice Mishra, who even threatened to punish him the next time he "misused" the Court with such complaints, with the intention of defaming Satya Sai Baba. In January, the SUPREME COURT OF INDIA expunged all the remarks made by the High Court Judge, boasting rationalist morale. Also, chastened by the SUPREME COURT OF INDIA, in the first week of May the HIGH COURT OF ANDHRA PRADESH STATE admitted a contempt of Court petition by Premanand against the government and the police. Premanand and Satya Sai Baba have been brought to the front pages of news papers again. The judicial mood in India is remarkably different since the past few months, what with the INDIAN SUPREME COURT taking up an "operation clean hands", arresting several corrupt politicians and also forcing the Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao to arrest his favorite Godman and arms dealer- power broker Chandraswami in the first week of May. Rationalists keep their fingers crossed...

THE CASE OF THE MISSING KIDNEY

In the Marathi language weekly LOK PRABHA, of 19 January, 1996, was published a most shocking account concerning the SATYA SAI INSTITUTE OF HIGHER MEDICAL SCIENCES, set up at an expense of 2000 million Indian rupees and where all medical treatment is done free. Triambak Karvande, a peasant from Latur district of Maharastra was to have received his son Balaji's kidney in a transplant operation. A week after the operation, a dying Triambak was informed that the transplant was a failure and father and son were sent back home. Back in their town, two CT scans and a sonography done by Dr. Kastur of the MAHARASTRA INSTITUTE OF MEDICAL SCIENCES AND RESEARCH CENTRE revealed that Triambak was never operated for a kidney transplant, the scans also confirmed that Balaji's kidney was indeed taken out of his body. So where did Balaji's kidney go? Is the hospital -- with a hitherto very good reputation -- in fact a part of the international organ theft business? Initial complaints made by the victim went unheeded , but the MAHARASTRA SUPERSTITION ERADICATION COMMITTEE, after its own independent investigation, is working on helping the Karvande family get legal aid. The Truth might be out soon.

SAI EMPIRE & PHILANTHROPY

B. Premanand, also advisor on miracle exposure to the RATIONALIST ASSOCIATION OF INDIA and editor of INDIAN SKEPTIC, estimates the Sai Empire to be worth 60000 million rupees (1714 million USD). Puttaparthi now has an airport and 3000 small apartments are available for rentals to accommodate the cash-rich Americans, Scandinavians, Belgians, Germans, Dutch, Malaysians and Japanese who come. Prashanti Nilayam itself has adequate infrastructure to feed 10,000 people at one time. To have an idea of the scale of operations, consider the fact that in 1982, the target of the SATYA SAI ORGANIZATION was adoption of 6000 villages, to "fulfill all the physical and spiritual needs of the community". There are 3000 Satya Sai centres in India and 400 centres abroad in 85 countries and they publicize and market the fact that more than 100, 000 children are taught free in centres run by SRI SATYA SAI BAL VIKAS TRUST and do propaganda about their social service activities. UNION BANK OF INDIA, owned by the state, does not charge any fee for money transfer to Satya Sai Baba and the money keeps flowing.

When Satya Sai Baba celebrated his 70th birthday in November, '95, the President and the Prime Minister of India were in attendance and applauded the SATYA SAI WATER SCHEME meant to provide drinking water to every village of the dry district of Ananthapur. It is a matter of detail that five months after the inauguration, water is yet to flow from village taps, as tanks have crashed and pipes burst because of inferior construction material used due to corruption. Importantly, this is an instance of how when governments default in their duties, religious organizations occupy that space. On this single birthday, a little known foundation from America and another from Japan donated 1600 million Indian rupees (45 million US Dollars) for the Satya Sai charity work. Premanand is investigating whether this is in fact a money laundering operation.

A look into the world view of high-school dropout Satya Sai Baba should help clarify why His style of philanthropy and education must be combated: "At the centre (of the world), everything is liquid. Everything is melted. No temperature. Everything is liquid, like water. Gold, iron, silver all are liquid. Next there is solid. Then trees. Then human beings and animals. At the very centre is the divine. It is the support of everything. First is liquid, chemistry. Then solid, physics. Then trees, Botany. Then man, the pinnacle of life. But at the centre, supporting all, is the divine. Without the divine, where is chemistry, physics, botany? Like this will be the teaching of all courses at the university." A few years ago, the SATYA SAI INSTITUTE OF HIGHER LEARNING has been declared a deemed University by Madhuri Shah, devotee and Chairperson of the UNIVERSITY GRANTS COMMISSION, on par with the rest of India's Centres of Higher Learning!

Alas, news of philanthropy in poor countries drowns out rational discourse. Sadly, Indians are still racists, and when pale face comes and approves, there is little else to doubt. State Radio & Television do propaganda for him. Journalists are either gullible or are on payroll. Judges are at times prone to decide based on personal beliefs: the situation is worsened by the political patronage received (Sai Baba's influence increased manifold ever since superstitious Narasimha Rao and his cabinet retire and President Sankar Dayal Sharma started visiting Him even in their official capacity). And in India, criminal and political identities overlap. Scientists, advocates and intellectuals mislead the others and set examples by their own mistaken devotion for this modern Tartuffe. Many well meaning people -- and there are many such among the Satya Sai Baba followers and admirers -- fail to realize that philanthropy is merely an investment in the Satya Sai Baba cult and empire and a way of evading tax. Thanks to the intellectuals and the common man's willful suspension of disbelief and critical faculties, the Satya Sai octopus has been able to spread its tentacles far and wide with the lure of miracles.

BALA SAI BABA, THE REAL AVATAR! Disillusioned by the bedroom murders, exposes in newspapers, news of Premanand's court battles, power struggles in the Sai empire and reports like that of the disappearing kidney and the failed water project, and disappointed by birth day extravaganzas, many disciples are turning away from Satya Sai Baba. Their destination now is the Palghat (Kerala) born BALA SAI BABA (the child Sai Baba), who at 35 years of age is a bit overgrown for his name. He claims to be the real Sai avatar, set up an ashram in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh and resembles Satya Sai Baba trait for trait. This till-recently- unemployed youth also hints that Satya Sai Baba is an impostor! He dresses like Satya Sai Baba, performs the same tricks as Satya Sai Baba does and has been very successful in attracting a large number of devotees. He also recruits devotees from Europe and else where and seems to have hit at the right marketing mix.

Dr. Narasimhaiah said to me in Bangalore once that our work is like that of Sisyphus. It does not matter even if the SUPREME COURT puts Satya Sai Baba on trial. Our work has to continue: after working to expose Bala Sai Baba in the year 2022 we might still be busy with Prema Sai...

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HOW NOT TO STUDY PARANORMAL PHENOMENON LESSONS

Associate Professor of Psychology at UNIVERSITY OF ICELAND, parapsychologist Dr. Erlendur Haraldsson came to India several times (twice along with Karlis Osis, co-author of their book on near- death experiences At the Hour of Death) to investigate Satya Sai Baba's paranormal powers. The result of his efforts over ten years is the book Miracles are My Visiting Cards, An Investigative Report on the Psychic Phenomena associated with Sathya Sai Baba, published in 1987.

Dr. Haraldsson's repeated requests for controlled experiments were firmly rejected by Satya Sai Baba and his team was asked "not to pester" Baba with more requests. Charmed by the charisma of Baba and more predisposed to believe than to investigate, Dr. Haraldsson settles for his own inefficient and subjective-personal-informal observation as well as hearsay accounts from devotees. Yet, in their article, The Appearance and Disappearance of Objects in the Presence of Sri Sathya Sai Baba in the JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH Vol. 71, January, 1977, Haraldsson and Karlis Osis express their gratitude to Sri Satya Sai Baba "for his kind co-operation in their investigation"!

Dr. Haraldsson's book does not indicate that he is aware of Satya Sai Baba's father's brother being a tantrik-conjuror. He could perhaps have been Satya Sai's teacher. Despite assuring us that he "tried his very best" to trace all critical rumours about Sai Baba, in the chapter titled "Critics" only Dr. H. Narasimhaiah is mentioned. No mention of Dr. Kovoor's whirlwind tours of Andhra, his challenges to Satya Sai Baba, his largely attended public meetings (30,000 people for instance) to the accompaniment of stupendous publicity! Contributors to the national debates in the then prestigious ILLUSTRATED WEEKLY of India, and the tabloids BLITZ and CURRENT WEEKLY are ignored. Interestingly, Dr. Haraldsson is unaware even of the Seiko watch controversy. Later, he says that he was unwilling to take it up because of the various versions of it! One has not heard of an "investigative" researcher shy away on such dubious grounds.

Nor does Haraldsson mention Satya Sai Baba specialist B. Premanand, whose first book in English on Baba, Lure of Miracles, was published in 1976. Dr. Haraldsson's excuse on 6 April, 1988 to Dale Bayerstein, editor of the excellent 1994 book, Sai Baba's Miracles: An Overview is that no one in India mentioned Premanand to him. Dr. Haraldsson writes in his letter of 21 October, 1988 to Dale Bayerstein that Dr. H. Narasimhaiah did not think it worthwhile for him to visit Premanand. When informed of this, Dr. Narasimhaiah issued a written clarification that he respected Premanand's work and could never have said what Haraldsson reported. This is not the only complaint of misquoting about Haraldsson. Two chapters of the book Miracles are My Visiting Cards are devoted to M. Krishna and Varadu (in no way critics, looking at the contents of the book), former personal assistants to Satya Sai Baba in the earlier days; Krishna converted to Christianity later. Now, Mr. Krishna's son, a good friend of mine, insists that I report his late father's intense displeasure with the way in which Dr. Haraldsson blocked out some of the things told to him and in the manner in which some statements were transformed to suit Dr. Haraldsson's purposes. In an interview with me and Premanand, P.V.N. Nair, editor of DECCAN CHRONICLE, whom Haraldsson accused of misquoting him as saying that he was "disappointed with Satya Sai Baba", regretted that out of good faith he had not tape recorded the interview. Premanand has shown how different versions and sequences of the same event (production of ring for Karlis Osis) have been written by Haraldsson. When Premanand asked for clarification and explanation in an undoubtedly long questionnaire, the very prolific Dr. Haraldsson suddenly has no time to write!

Haraldsson is aware that propaganda of the claimed resurrection from death of Walter Cowan and Radhakrishna had the support of Satya Sai Baba. He is also aware that Dr. Fanibunda, himself a medical doctor, testified to the resurrection of Cowan. Haraldsson's own conclusion is that the stories of resurrections are false. Yet, to our scientist-investigator the role of Satya Sai Baba is not suspect. Nor that of Dr. Fanibunda, whose testimony he approvingly uses in another case. It also does not occur to this impartial investigator, forever solicitous of being scientific and objective that since he himself has found some stories to be false, he has necessarily to work under controlled conditions. This is how professional credentials become suspect. Some of the stories Haraldsson reports are not even amenable to verification by us. For example, he mentions how a burglar prowling in the house of a Satya Sai Baba devotee was scared away by Satya Sai's bilocation. He does not mention the name of the devotee, nor the name of the police station which later caught the burglar.

In the April, 1995 issue of the JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH, Haraldsson and Richard Wiseman write an article Reactions To and An Assessment of a Videotape on Satya Sai Baba, where they make pathetic attempts to show that from the DECCAN CHRONICLE- Doordarshan tape no evidence of fraud by Satya Sai Baba can be deduced. Haraldsson and co-author are invited to watch our copy of the tape, or watch one of the episodes of the British program, The Guru Busters, a television program on Rationalist work in India, which has quite clear visuals. They should also read the analysis of a Satya Sai Baba video tape by Dale Bayerstein, Leon Mandrake's et al (a team of professional magicians) where among others they detect Satya Sai Baba "thumb palming" a necklace, before "materialisation" (published in Bayerstein's book). Perhaps, Haraldsson is also unaware of Premanand's video cassette of Satya Sai Baba producing a gold necklace at a wedding in Balakrishna Eradi's family (a former judge from Kerala).

While waiting to watch this, the authors should find time to read the account of the Dutch author Piel Vroon who wrote an expanded version of his article Sinterklass in India (Santa Claus in India), published in De Volkskrant of 5 December, 1992. Piet Vroon was at Puttaparthi to film Baba at "work", and he and his partner detected Baba remove rings, necklaces and watches from behind flower vases and from pillows of his chair. They also detected Sai Baba holding vibhuti balls in one hand, transferring them to the other hand, pulverising them and distributing them. Vibhuti is also hidden in the mouth and removed while wiping the face, which Baba does very often. Piel Vroon's conclusion is unambiguous: "we just think that he's a trickster and a cheat."

It is easy to see these things, especially when one's work, and perhaps livelihood, does not depend on funding from parapsychology foundations! ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

MY SAI HISTORY By Jed Geyerhahn

First published May, 1997, on THE NEURAL SURFER: http://members.tripod.com/~dlane5/saiessay.html

My Sai history is what would really be compelling about my word against Sai Baba. I have received 3 rings, many interviews and lots of personal attention. I was a very close friend of Hal Honig, an aquaintence to Sam Sandweiss and others. These names may not be familiar to you, but they are prominant names in Sai circles. My aunt is Elizabeth Elwell, a well known Bhajan teacher, who lived in the Puttaparti Ash Ram for 9 years, and is still active in the organization in New Hampshire. I have rings, a pictures of me with baba, and could get more witness accounts of sleight of hand. As I said, I just need to get this stuff together, and I am very excited for this oppurtunity... My first witness account of sleight of hand was in Brindaven. I saw Baba come out of the personal interview room and sit down. As he was sitting there, I noticed a large gold watch under his small hand, which he was unsuccesfully trying to hide. A moment later he made the familiar circular motion with his hand as if he were materialising the object, and then gave a student the watch. On another occasion, I saw Sai Baba reach between the cushions of hischair for something, and then moments later he made the circular motion and showed everyone a small container filled with vibhuti, the gray ash. I then noticed that behind the cushion in his chair there was something shiny, and he paid careful attention to correct the position of the cushion to hide the object. Another time I saw him take a worn bracelet from a man, then with his hand cupped blew on it three times at the same time moving his hand up and down. On the final movement, he tossed the chain into the side of his chair so it slid down between the inside of the chairs large arm and his leg. He then discreetly took took something from his other hand and made the circular motion and gave the man a new bracelet. What is really funny about that situation is that Sai Baba forgot to take the old bracelet from his chair when he left, so when he got up, there it lay in plain view for everyone in the room. A student I was with, and who was very devoted to Baba, picked it up and looked at it, confirming that it was the old bracelet. When Baba returned and noticed his mistake, he scolded this student, who was sitting right at the foot of Baba's chair and could not miss the bracelet. Then Baba sat and in a flash picked up the bracelet and very discreetly tossed it into the outside upper corner of the arm of the chair. There were no visible pockets there, but there is a very large seem, and the arms of the chair are huge enough to store lots of things.

It is also well known that prominant figures in the Indian government make fairly frequent stops to visit with Sai Baba, including the president of India. (I was in India when the president came to visit Sai Baba. When this happens there is huge comotion and Indians crowd darshan to see the president, not Sai Baba). The students also know that Sai is a hoax, that he does not materialise a thing. However, they are getting a very inexpensive education, so they keep there mouths shut. The student I talked with most, would not tell me other things that he knew, but I am sure that it had to do with the students who spent the night with Baba. I know this because this is where he would no longer answer my questions. Everyone knows that Sai Baba has students spend the night with him. They stay up to "serve" him at night. It's a very well kept secret as to how they serve Sai Baba, but little will come out because no student wants to be kicked out of Sai Baba's school. As stated, they are receiving a very good educations there, very inexpensively. I say very inexpensively because many believe it to be free, but this is not the case. Students pay for room and board, which to many is rather expensive. The education part is free, but there are bills.

This brings me to my very questionable experiences with Sai Baba. On my second trip to Sai Baba I had four interviews. Each time I saw Baba, his hand would gradually make more prominant connections to my groin. The first interview was a slight swipe, the second a definite touch and the third time he grabbed me and with a very stern face looked me directly in the eye and said "you are very weak!" Needless to say, he scared and embarassed me. I was guilt ridden to have sexual passion, though I was a healthy 16 year old boy, a testosterone machine. I was not going to talk to anyone about the experience. In the final interview he asked me to take my pants down. I was totally confused, so he took them down for me. He then made vibhutti and rubbed it on my genitals. On my third trip, he did the same thing, but rubbed oil on my genitals. Fortunately, I was never taken advantage of any worse, but I was humiliated when I realised his true intentions, and I felt I had really lost an innocence that I would have cherished keeping.

When I finally did talk about what happened to me, the first two reactions were to never speak of it with others because the whole thing would be taken out of context and misconstrued. Then I talked to others my own age and they told me of similiar experiences. I even heard terrible stories of children who would meet with Sai Baba twice a week to play "sex games" and the like. Oral sex and masturbation were common in these meetings. Many of my own friends told me about attempts by Sai Baba to touch them, but they wouldn't let him. I need to really put this together better, but this is a sketch of what I have. Any comments would be helpful, and you can do what you like with any of this material. You can also post my email address for anyone who like to contact me ([email protected]). I would be very greatful to talk with any X-devotees who have had similiar experieces with Sai Baba. It might encourage me to get this all together quicker, and they might help me put something larger together.

Sincerely, Jed ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

MORE ON SAI BABA:

The Findings - NPI News: http://www.npi%2Dnews.dk/page152.htm

The Sai Critic: http://www.geocities.com/the_sai_critic/

The Neural Surfer Website: http://elearn.mtsac.edu/dlane/saidebates.htm

Sathya Sai Baba Exposed: Cult, Magic, And Brainwashing: http://www.myfreeoffice.com/saibabaexposed/index.html

Sai Baba: A Critical Page: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Cyprus/4972/eng/main_e.htm

Beyerstein's Critique of Sai Baba's purported miracles: http://psg.com/~ted/bcskeptics/sbmir/contents.html

Freedom of Mind's "Sathya Sai Organization" Resources: http://www.freedomofmind.com/groups/sathya/sathya.htm ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

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Special Article Sai Baba: Divine Pedophile Wednesday, July 25, 2001

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EDITOR'S COMMENT:

We published our first report on Sai Baba in February of 1998 (http://www.nhne.com/specialreports/srsaibaba.html). More recently, in October of 2000, we followed up with a lengthy expose', published by the Electronic Telegraph, that elaborated on the growing accusations whirling around the controversial guru (http://www.nhne.com/specialreports/srsaibaba2.html). And today, another eye- opening report surfaced. Written by Michelle Goldberg, who recently traveled to India to see what was happening first hand, the article provides yet another look at how gurus, and their adoring, often discernment-impaired devotees, can run amuck -- and, occasionally, also do some good in the world.

Maybe someday, eons from now, there will be no need to be, or follow, gurus like Sai Baba. Until then, it seems wise to learn what we can from these larger-than-life dramas. Studying the likes of Sai Baba may not save us from believing magic tricks are miracles, or inner visions of dubious holy people are sure-fire visitations from the Divine, but it can't hurt. And who knows: maybe we'll learn more about ourselves, and the turbulent, often schizophrenic forces that populate our inner worlds...

Thanks to Stephan A. Schwartz for alerting me to Goldberg's article.

--- David Sunfellow

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UNTOUCHABLE?

Millions of people worship Sai Baba as God incarnate. More and more say the Indian guru is also a pedophile. By Michelle Goldberg Salon July 25, 2001 http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/07/25/baba/print.html

PUTTAPARTHI, India -- One of the most powerful holy men in India presides over the world's biggest ashram, Prasanthi Nilayam, or Abode of Peace, in a remote town located in a barren corner of Andhra Pradesh, a desperately poor state in a desperately poor country. The town boasts a shiny planetarium, two hospitals that treat patients for free, a college, a music school and immaculate, colorful playgrounds. Luxury apartment buildings are springing up on land that just a few decades ago was covered with ramshackle mud huts. And there's a brand-new airport to serve the wealthier devotees of Sathya Sai Baba, a 75-year-old south Indian man with a big bushy Afro and a warm smile.

Somewhere between 10 million and 50 million people worship Sai Baba as God incarnate, and they stream into Puttaparthi from six continents, sleeping in one of the ashram's 10,000 beds or at one of the town's many guesthouses. Meanwhile, the growing number of ex-devotees who decry their former master as a sexual harasser, a fraud and even a pedophile has hardly put a dent in his following, though their voices are getting louder.

"Sai Baba was my God -- who dares to refuse God? He was free to do whatever he wanted to do with me; he had my trust, my faith, my love and my friendship; he had me in totality," says Iranian-American former follower Said Khorramshahgol. What Sai Baba chose to do with him, Khorramshahgol says, was to repeatedly call him into private interviews and order him to drop his pants and massage his penis. Other former devotees contend Sai Baba did even more. No matter -- in this part of the world, faith is absolute. Believers don't refuse God, and they don't question him.

On Puttaparthi's outskirts, a Hindu temple has a statue of Sai Baba among its pantheon of deities, standing right next to Krishna. In the town, every conceivable surface is adorned with pictures of Sai Baba wearing an orange robe and a benign smile. There's a photo of him garlanded with fake pink flowers in my hotel room and a giant portrait behind the reception desk. Each afternoon, a speaker across from my bed pipes in music praising the guru. When I buy a pen to take notes, it has Sai Baba's smiling face on it.

Days at the ashram revolve around an event known as "darshan," when Sai Baba walks through an open-air, pastel-colored hall (called a mandir) and shows his precious self to the assembled multitudes. It takes place once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and people line up for hours beforehand. Everyone is desperate to get in first, because sitting near the front means that Sai Baba might say a few words to you, accept a letter or even invite you into his special chamber for a private interview. Private interviews are the raison d'être of life in Puttaparthi. They're where Sai Baba does most of his famous materializations -- ostensibly conjuring up objects like rings, watches and necklaces from the air as gifts for the faithful.

The afternoon I went to darshan, I spent 45 minutes waiting in a line outside and 45 more minutes sitting cross-legged amid thousands of other worshipers on the marble floor of the mandir. There were almost as many foreigners in the hall, which can seat about 15,000 people, as there were Indians. Dozens of chandeliers hung from the ceiling, which was decorated with gold leaf. At the foot of the mandir was a stage, with a door leading into the guru's private interview room.

Just when the boredom was growing interminable, recorded music started up and a charge went through the crowd as necks craned for a glimpse of Sai Baba, a slightly frail figure wearing his customary floor-length robe and fluffy nimbus of black hair. He gave a little Princess Di wave as he walked from the women's side to the men's side (everything at the ashram is strictly segregated by sex) and then back again, taking some of the letters that were fervently offered to him as he passed. All around me women's eyes were shining, and some of the women rocked back and forth ecstatically. Sai Baba then exited the way he'd entered, and it was over -- in less than 10 minutes. An angelic-looking retired woman from Denmark told me she'd been doing this every day, twice a day, for three months.

Darshan is just about the only event that occurs at the ashram. There are no indoctrination or even meditation sessions. Aside from strict vegetarianism, Sai Baba prescribes no particular practices. His teachings are flowery and vague, combining colorful Hindu mythology, a Buddhist focus on transcending worldly desire, the Christian idea of service and an evangelical emphasis on direct experience of the divine. According to "Ocean of Love," a book published last year by the Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust, "there is no new path that He is preaching, no new order that He has created. There is no new religion that He has come to add or a particular philosophy that He recommends ... His mission is unique and simple. His mission is that of love and compassion."

This pleasant vagueness allows believers to project anything they like onto Sai Baba. People see his hand everywhere, and in Puttaparthi's spiritual hothouse nearly every occurrence is viewed as fresh proof of his power. Apart from letters and the coveted interviews, the accepted way to communicate with Sai Baba is via dreams and visions, and thus the town teems with people interpreting their subconscious hiccups as gospel. An American named George Leland said that Sai has come to him in the guise of a Tijuana, Mexico, traffic cop and a Japanese airline passenger. A 32-year- old Argentine woman told me she gave up her Buenos Aires apartment and her medical studies after Baba summoned her while she slept.

Stories of sacred synchronicity abound. A wheelchair-bound cancer patient from Holland, abandoned by her husband and living with friends who were Sai devotees, had a series of dreams in which the guru beckoned to her. She insisted that she told no one about the dreams, yet one day her friends surprised her with a ticket to India. The ring he materialized for her looks cheap to me -- one of the stones had even fallen out -- but to her it's a talisman that has helped fight her grinding pain.

To some, Sai Baba radiates love and whimsy, while to others he's stern and tricky, destroying their relationships or afflicting their bodies in the service of their spiritual advancement. Leland, a big, stately 61-year-old who looks like Hollywood's version of a powerful senator, told me, "Swami's job isn't to make you happy, it's to liberate you." In his case, that meant giving up his career as a motivational speaker and then his marriage. "Sai Baba is the most powerful being that ever came to the planet," he said over breakfast at a popular Tibetan restaurant in town. Leland, who has lived in Puttaparthi for four years, feels he must follow him, but that doesn't mean he enjoys it. He said sadly, "Even at this moment, my mind doesn't want to believe that God doesn't want me to be happy, to have a relationship, to be prosperous, to enjoy life."

"Sometimes I think the ashram is a madhouse and Swami is the director," said Rico Mario Haus, a recent 24-year-old convert. I'd met Haus, a Swiss man whose square black glasses lent a bit of quirkiness to his wholesome good looks, two months before in the seaside state of Kerala. We'd both been extras in an Indian musical, and we'd both learned of Puttaparthi from a Sai Baba follower on the set. Ironically (or, as it now seemed to Haus, portentously), we'd played Western devotees of a towering guru who saved the soul of the errant hero. At the time, Haus was a cocky kid planning to ride his motorcycle to Kashmir. Now, wearing white pajamas, he said, "Baba was calling me. When you believe in God, there are no coincidences." Nevertheless, he'd kept his sense of humor and found a certain subversive delight in telling us about the lunatics he lived with. "When you don't have problems, you don't go to the ashram," he said. Most of the time, Puttaparthi's ambient spiritual hysteria is fairly faint. With its good restaurants and relatively clean streets, the town can be quite pleasant. But there are occasional bursts of madness. One afternoon, a young Malaysian woman had a psychotic breakdown, attacked ashram workers and was dragged away by police. I later found her at the police station, half-catatonic, mumbling "darshan, darshan, darshan" over and over again. At dinner another evening, Haus pointed out a wan Austrian woman tugging around a listless little boy. She was frenzied because she'd had a dream in which Sai Baba instructed her to abandon her 7-year-old son and live on the streets as a beggar, and she didn't know whether she had the "strength" to do it.

Of course, outsiders expect insanity in fringe religions. But Sai Baba isn't just any cult leader. Because he isn't well known in America, it's hard to convey the awesome power he has in India. In addition to the droves of foreigners who flock to see him, Sai Baba's acolytes include the cream of India's elite. Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee is a devotee, as is former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. A 1993 article in the Times of India counts among the guru's followers "governors, chief ministers, assorted politicians, business tycoons, newspaper magnates, jurists, sportsmen, academics and, yes, even scientists."

Even if you don't believe in the miracles he's credited with -- resurrections, faith healings, materializations -- his phenomenal popularity in India is easy to understand. Just outside Puttaparthi is an enormous hospital he helped build that provides free cardiology, optometry and nephrology care to all comers. It was funded in part by a $20 million donation from Isaac Tigrett, co-founder of the Hard Rock Cafe. The pink facade looks like a cross between a Mogul palace and a wedding cake. One enters into a domed hall with marble floors resplendent with images of Sai Baba and other deities -- Jesus on the cross, the Buddha, the elephant-headed god Ganesh. Yet for all the architecture's Las Vegas excess, especially in a country where many can't afford even rudimentary medical care, the hospital claims impressive figures: 10,594 free cardiac surgeries, 9,090 kidney operations, 382,328 outpatient consultations.

A host of other charity projects has also won Sai Baba favor with the masses. One of his projects installed 2,500-liter cisterns in several villages in Andhra Pradesh. Indian children who might otherwise never have access to higher education covet spots in his free colleges. Though rumors of chicanery and worse swirl around all these ventures, even Sai Baba's critics admit that he has eased some of the region's suffering. "God or a fraud, no one doubts the good work done by the Sai organization," wrote the Illustrated Weekly of India.

All this helps explain why there has never been any official action against Sai Baba in India, despite the dozens of ex-believers who insist that his claims to divinity mask a wholly human craving for the bodies of the ashram's young men and boys. The evidence is strong that Sai Baba uses his power to get in his followers' pants. It's also strong that life is slightly less brutal for lots of poor Indians because he exists. Some call him a saint and some call him a lecher. Possibly he's something of both.

The stories about Sai Baba's sexual misconduct are all remarkably similar. "During my 'private audiences' with Sai Baba, Sai Baba used to touch my private parts and regularly massage my private parts, indicating that this was for spiritual purposes," wrote Dutchman Hans de Kraker in a letter sent to French journalist Virginie Saurel. In December 1996, when de Kraker was 24, Sai Baba allegedly asked him to perform oral sex: "He grabbed my head and pushed it into his groin area. He made moaning sounds," de Kraker wrote. "As soon as he took the pressure off my head and I lifted my head, Sai Baba lifted his dress and presented me a semi-erect member, telling me that this was my good luck chance, and jousted his hips towards my face." When de Kraker reported to others what had happened, he was thrown out of the ashram. American Jed Geyerhahn, who was 16 when Sai Baba started coming on to him, echoes de Kraker's account: "Each time I saw Baba, his hand would gradually make more prominent connections to my groin." The stories are endless, and endlessly alike, concerning mostly boys and men from their midteens to their mid-20s.

They're not new, either. In 1970, Tal Brooke published a book called "Lord of the Air," later renamed "Avatar of Night," (http://www.endrunpublishing.com/AvatarOfNight.html) a vivid, detailed account of his mind-blowing days as a questing young acolyte and his total disillusionment on learning of his guru's sexual rapacity. Yet it's only recently, thanks in large part to the Internet, that various victims, their parents and defecting officials from within the Sai Organization (http://www.sathyasai.org/organize/content.htm) have banded together to direct the energy they once poured into worshiping their master toward bringing the man down.

It all started with a document called "The Findings," (http://www.geocities.com/the_sai_critic/findings.pdf) published in late 2000 by long- term devotees David and Faye Bailey, whose marriage was arranged by Sai Baba. Part of the nearly 20,000-word piece is given over to evidence that Sai Baba fakes his materializations and doesn't magically heal the sick -- revelations that seem self- evident to nonbelievers but provoke fierce debate in devotee circles and blazing headlines in the Indian press.

Most of "The Findings" consists of testimony of sexual harassment and sexual abuse. "Whilst still at the ashram, the worst thing for me -- as a mother of sons -- occurred when a young man, a college student, came to our room, to plead with David, 'Please Sir, do something to stop him sexually abusing us,'" Faye writes. "These sons of devotees, unable to bear their untenable position of being unwilling participants in a pedophile situation any longer, yet unable to share this with their parents because they would be disbelieved, placed their trust in David; a trust which had built over his five years as a visiting professor of music to the Sai college." These pleas eroded the Baileys' faith and finally made them go public.

Since then, the movement against Sai Baba has been snowballing. In the past few months, ex-devotees have contacted the FBI, Interpol, the Indian Supreme Court and a host of other agencies, hoping for help in their battle against the guru. A California man named Glen Meloy, who spent 26 years as a Sai devotee, is trying to organize a class-action lawsuit against Sai Organization leaders in America, modeled on the one recently launched against the Hare Krishnas (http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2001/07/02/krishna/index.html).

His faith was shattered when he was shown excerpts from the diary of his close friend's 15-year-old son, detailing several incidents of molestation. The child of devotees, the boy had been raised to worship Sai Baba as God, and obliged when the master reportedly ordered his disciple to suck his penis. "You've got all these kids who are scared to death to do anything that will do disrespect to their parents, in a room with someone they believe to be the creator of the whole universe," said Meloy, his voice choked with fury. "This isn't just any child abuse; this is God himself claiming to do this."

Hari Sampath, an Indian software professional now living in Chicago and a former volunteer in the ashram's security service, is petitioning India's Supreme Court to order the central government to investigate Sai Baba. His greatest concern is for Sai Baba's Indian victims, who generally have a much more difficult time speaking out than Westerners do. During his time at Prasanthi Nilayam, he said, many students at the ashram's college told him they were pressured to have sex with the guru. "I've spoken to 20 or 30 boys who have been abused, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are 14-year-old kids made to live in his room and made to think it's a blessing. In most cases, their parents have been followers for 20 years and are not going to believe them," Sampath said by phone from Chicago. "Westerners have little to lose by coming forward. The Indians have to go on living among Sai Baba devotees."

Sampath also wants the American government to intervene, on the grounds that "American citizens have been knowing about this abuse and taking American boys to Puttaparthi and feeding them to him."

So far, the anti-Sai Baba forces have scored a few victories. Many senior devotees have defected. Last September, UNESCO yanked its cosponsorship of an education conference in Puttaparthi, explaining that it was "deeply concerned about widely reported allegations of sexual abuse involving youths and children that have been leveled at the leader of the movement in question, Sathya Sai Baba."

Late last year, after Conny Larsson, a Swedish film star who once traveled the world speaking of Sai Baba's miracles, went public about his coerced sexual relations with the guru, the Sai Organization in Sweden was shut down, along with a Sai-affiliated school. A cover story in the weekly magazine India Today reports that following a story in England's Daily Telegraph, "Labour MP Tony Colman raised the issue in Parliament. A former home office minister, Tom Sackville, also took up the matter, saying, 'The authorities have done little so far and that is regrettable.' There is a movement now to urge the British Government to issue warnings to people wanting to visit Baba's ashram."

Given all this, one might suspect that Sai Baba's following would be in decline. Yet when one looks around Puttaparthi, there seem to be enough bright-eyed converts to replace every defector, enough denial to obscure even the most well documented allegations and, perhaps most of all, enough fierce belief to trump ordinary moral judgments.

July 5 was a festival day at the ashram, a day when Sai Baba addresses his devotees. The faithful started queuing before 4 a.m. to get into the mandir. Arriving at Prasanthi Nilayam at around 5:15 a.m., I had to walk for 20 minutes to get near the end of the ladies line. Women were running and jostling from every direction to join the queue, and I'd have been pushed back about 150 feet if a pretty Indian girl in white hadn't yanked me in front of her. In the end, after waiting for more than an hour, I didn't get in, and ended up sitting outside the mandir in a crowd of hundreds who kept shoving to be closer to the gate, nearer to their lord's sacred energy.

Many of these people believe the official line that the charges are all lies. They're "completely false," said the director of the Sai Organization, a tiny, ancient man who, like every other Indian official I spoke with in the organization, asked me not to use his name because "nobody here works on an individual basis. There is no spokesman besides Sai Baba." He speculated that the accusers are driven by "jealousy or frustration. Maybe they are very ill and not being cured, or they have desires that are not being fulfilled."

Sai Baba, who hardly ever grants media interviews, alluded to the allegations himself at an address last year, saying, "Some devotees seem to be disturbed over these false statements. They are not true devotees at all. Having known the mighty power of Sai, why should you be afraid of the 'cawing of crows'? All that is written on walls [or] said in political meetings, or the vulgar tales carried by the print media, should not carry one away."

But the guru's alleged interest in his followers' phalli is pretty much an open secret among old hands at the ashram. The eerie thing about this story isn't just the evidence of widespread sexual abuse in one of the world's biggest cults -- after all, between the Roman Catholic Church and the Hare Krishnas, one is seldom surprised to find perversity in the shadow of piety these days. What's also strange is that many of Sai's followers seem to accept that their chastity-preaching guru takes young men, including minors, into a private chamber, asks them to drop their pants, masturbates them and occasionally demands blow jobs. They believe the stories, and they believe that he's God.

In an online essay called "Sai Baba and Sex: A Clear View," (http://www.saibaba-and- sex-aclearview.com/) an American devotee named Ram Das Awle says, "First of all, I believe that Sathya Sai Baba is an Avatar, a full incarnation of God ... AND, from what I've read and heard, I'm inclined to think some of the allegations about Baba are probably true: It appears likely to me that He has occasionally had sexually intimate interactions with devotees." After several rambling paragraphs, the essay concludes that Sai Baba touches men to awaken their "kundalini" energy or to remove previous bad sexual karma, and that "any sexual contact Baba has had with devotees -- of whatever kind -- has actually been only a potent blessing, given to awaken the spiritual power within those souls. Who can call that 'wrong'? Surely to call such contact 'molestation' is perversity itself."

According to Leland (the American ex-motivational speaker), "when he does it, he has a purpose." Leland says he knows a boy of 15 or 16 who was asked to touch Baba's "genital area" during an interview. "Then Baba beckoned him to touch his feet. When the boy looked up, Baba had his robe lifted and a big boner -- a Shiva lingam. Not much else happened." Leland suspects such incidents are part of Sai Baba's plan to spread his word. "Probably more people are going to know about you if there are allegations that you're a pedophile than if you say God is incarnated on earth."

Sai Baba has also been called a second-rate magician. Even some of his believers say they've seen him faking materializations, though to them it's part of his playfulness and ineffability. Yet there's nothing amateurish about his genius for suspending disbelief. Haus, the Swiss follower, seemed to have an open mind and didn't mind discussing the charges against Sai Baba, but he didn't believe them. "I think this is a projection of his devotees' problems," he said. "You hear a lot of rumors here, but for me it's not important. When you're happy, why doubt it?"

He's probably lined up outside the mandir gates right now, one of thousands of men hoping for a talk with God.

------

PREVIOUS SAI BABA NHNE POSTS INCLUDE:

Sai Baba: http://www.nhne.com/specialreports/srsaibaba.html

Sai Baba: Divine Downfall: http://www.nhne.com/specialreports/srsaibaba2.html

OTHER SAI BABA LINKS & RESOURCES INCLUDE:

Sathya Sai Baba [official site]: http://www.sathyasai.org/

The Sai Critic: http://www.geocities.com/the_sai_critic/

The Neural Surfer Website: http://vclass.mtsac.edu:940/dlane/saidebates.htm

Sathya Sai Baba Exposed: Cult, Magic, And Brainwashing: http://www.myfreeoffice.com/saibabaexposed/index.html Beyerstein's Critique of Sai Baba's purported miracles: http://psg.com/~ted/bcskeptics/sbmir/contents.html

Freedom of Mind's "Sathya Sai Organization" Resources: http://www.freedomofmind.com/groups/sathya/sathya.htm

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------CHILD ABUSE in google http://www.frouman.net/node/62 NYT: Murder and Suicide Reviving Claims of Child Abuse in Cult

Submitted by Peter Frouman on Thu, 2005/03/24 - 10:38am.

Murder and Suicide Reviving Claims of Child Abuse in Cult A excellent article by Laurie Goodstein that made the front page of the New York Times on January 15, 2005. One minor correction: I actually left the group on November 18, 1988 and not in 1987 as it states in the excerpt below. In interviews this last week, more than a dozen people who grew up in the cult gave detailed accusations about experiencing or witnessing sex abuse of minors. "At the time, I didn't think of it as abuse," Peter Frouman, 29, of Austin, Tex., who left in 1987, said in a sentiment echoed by many others. "I had no concept that normal people didn't do this sort of thing. I thought it was perfectly normal for parents to have sex with their children, and children to have sex with each other and with adults. "When I was 11, I had sex with a 28-year-old woman, and it was with the approval of everyone in the room. I found out later that my mom was watching."

Murder and Suicide Reviving Claims of Child Abuse in Cult

NATIONAL DESK | January 15, 2005, Saturday Murder and Suicide Reviving Claims of Child Abuse in Cult By LAURIE GOODSTEIN (NYT) 1717 words Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 12 , Column 1 Correction Appended DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 1717 WORDS - Growing up in the 1970's in a religious cult known around the world as the Children of God, Ricky Rodriguez was revered as ''the prince.'' The group's leaders were his mother and stepfather, and they taught that their son would guide them all when the End Times came. ... He... Correction: January 21, 2005, Friday A picture caption on Saturday with an article about Ricky Rodriguez, a man reared in a religious cult who the police say killed himself and his former nanny, Angela Smith, misstated the way Ms. Smith died. She was stabbed, not shot. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html? res=F10F14FF3E5C0C768DDDA80894DD404482

You can also find it here.

» Peter Frouman's blog | add new comment | printer friendly page Comment viewing options ------http://www.skepticfiles.org/false/malpract.htm To: MIT.EDU!witchhunt Date: Sun, 23 Oct 94 17:13 EDT Copyright 1994 Newspaper Publishing P

From: romulus.ehs.uiuc.edu!m-net.arbornet.org!aaron (Aaron Larson) To: MIT.EDU!witchhunt Date: Sun, 23 Oct 94 17:13 EDT

There'll be the devil to pay; The future of America's ' recovered memory movement' is at stake in a $ 35m lawsuit.

By Rosie Waterhouse

Until November 1985, the Schwiderski family lived moderately prosperous, God- fearing lives in Spring, an upper-middle-class suburb in Houston, Texas.

Dennis Schwiderski was earning $ 100,000 ( pounds 67,000) a year as a manager for a Texan oil company that he had been with for almost 20 years. At weekends he enjoyed outdoor pursuits - golf, fishing, hunting and bicycling. His wife, Kathryn, stayed at home to raise their three children, Kelly, Kari and Dirk, who were progressing well at school. The family regularly attended Lakewood United Methodist Church, Harris County, of which they were founder members.

Today, the Schwiderski family is destroyed, persuaded by therapists that they were victims and perpetrators of sexual and physical abuse as members of a murderous, cannibalistic, satanic cult.

After seven years in therapy, in and out of hospital until February 1992, Kathryn Schwiderski is divorced and has no contact with her husband, children, grandchildren, sister or parents. She was subjected to criminal investigation and interrogation and reported to the Child Protection Services, she says, without any evidence of abuse.

She became convinced she was a member and victim of a satanic cult since her childhood and that she sexually and physically abused her own children; now she believes the memories were false, implanted by therapists through hypnotism and drugs. She continues to experience extreme emotional problems.

Kelly, now 23, has disappeared. She apparently still believes she was a member and victim of the cult and is in hiding. While Kari, now 21, has rejected the notion that she and her family were caught up in a satanic conspiracy, her marriage in 1991 collapsed under the strain of her mental anguish and a divorce action is pending. She is still estranged from her parents. Dirk, now 15, was for two years unable to face the father whom he once believed had molested him. But now they are reunited. However, doctors fear that he, too, will probably continue to suffer extreme mental anguish for the rest of his life.

Dennis, 49, continues to suffer emotional distress. He was investigated by a grand jury for allegedly abusing his son, but the case was not pursued, he says, because there was no evidence against him. He is now trying to find Kelly and to rebuild relations with Kari. Ultimately, he hopes for a reconciliation between his children and their mother, but his marriage is over. He managed to hang on to his job but is $ 328,000 poorer after paying for treatment that led to the break-up of his family.

Now, the family has alleged in a $ 35m civil lawsuit filed this year that therapists created false memories as part of a scheme to collect millions of dollars in fees for the treatment of non-existent abuse at the hands of a satanic cult.

The case, which will go to trial next year, is set to rock the US psychotherapy and psychiatric community. The defendants include some of America's leading exponents of recovered memory techniques. They include Judith Peterson, a psychologist from Houston, who first treated the family; Roberta Sachs, a psychologist from Illinois; and Bennett Braun, an Illinois doctor who specialises in multiple personality disorder. The family members are also suing the hospitals where they were treated. In total, there are 25 defendants. Not all face every allegation, but all are defending the action.

At stake are the reputations of the therapists and the recovered memory movement, which spread across the US in the late Eighties and is now growing in Britain. Both could stand or fall by the Schwiderski case.

The story can be told only through documents filed in the District Court of Harris County, Texas, since the judge has banned all participants and lawyers from speaking to the media.

The beginning of the end of the Schwiderski family was in November 1985 when, feeling mildly depressed, Kathryn decided to seek help from a therapist, Judith Peterson. After spending the next few years in and out of hospital as her mental state deteriorated, Kathryn claims she went into a long-term, uninterrupted commitment at Gulf Pines Hospital, Houston, early in 1989. By this stage Ms Peterson and three other therapists had diagnosed her as having "multiple personality disorder, repressed memory syndrome and ritual abuse". They said she was a member of a satanic cult and participated in activitites that included rape, torture, electroshock, drugging, human sacrifice, cult programming, organised crime, physical, mental and sexual abuse, cannibalism, kidnapping, murder "and other nefarious activities".

While committed, Kathryn says, she was often placed in restraints and ordered to recall purported cult activities, and was punished or threatened with, for example, restrictions of her hospital privileges if she did not describe her alleged participation in "cult" activities. Kathryn claims she was also told that the cult would harm her if she was released from care; that she had killed people in "cult" rituals but had repressed those memories; that she sexually abused and tortured her children and others; and that she had been sexually abused since her childhood. She claims that, without producing any corroborating evidence, the therapists used techniques that encouraged her to guess, speculate and "confabulate" memories.

As a result, she came to believe her diagnosis of multiple personality disorder, repressed memory syndrome and ritual abuse, and that she had engaged in the satanic cult, ritual abuse, and sexual abuse.

Kathryn is now claiming up to $ 35m damages for the seven years she alleges she was subjected to continued confinement and therapy because of the therapists' erroneous diagnosis; their assurance that the therapy would help her; and because of the fear implanted by them that the cult was everywhere and she would not see her family again unless she co-operated with the therapy.

In March 1989, aged 18, Kelly was admitted to Houston North West medical centre after attending a "family conference" at which Ms Peterson concluded that she, too, was involved in the cult and joined in satanic orgies involving the abuse of her younger brother. Little is known about what she endured, as she is still missing.

In August 1989, Kari, then 16, went into the same hospital where she, too, had been called for a family conference. She had been a normal teenager attending a Houston high school where she was an excellent student and a flautist in the school band. After attending the family conference, she claims, she was locked into the psychiatric ward, rarely leaving the room for 21 months. She was diagnosed as suffering from multiple personality disorder and, she says, was told by Ms Peterson that she had killed babies in cult rituals and that she was in danger of being kidnapped by the cult if she left the hospital.

According to Dennis Schwiderski, his daughters were kept apart and forced into one-to-one therapy where a person would be with them every minute, watching them take showers and go to the bathroom. They were allegedly strapped down for "so-called therapy sessions". He has alleged the methods of treatment were "grossly negligent" and the administration of drugs "improper".

Dirk was a normal 11-year-old and a good pupil when, in September 1989, he was called for a family conference and then allegedly detained for two years at Gulf Pines Hospital. Ms Peterson diagnosed that he was the victim of mental, physical and sexual abuse attributable to the participation in a satanic cult by his mother and two older sisters.

Over the years, Dennis was sent bills totalling $ 2m - health insurance covered most of it, but when that ran out he had to pay $ 328,000 - for treatment which persuaded his family they were murderers and cannibals. Then he and his family decided to sue.

Dennis's claim alleges the therapists and hospitals "callously and recklessly perpetrated fraud upon him. They selected his family for treatment of satanic cult ritual abuse, not because his family had been part of a cult, but rather based upon gross negligence in the diagnosis and treatment of his family, as well as because they knew that such treatment would be profitable to them.

"Braun and Sachs hold themselves out as experts in satanic cult abuse and have offered for sale and profit videotapes on this topic. All the defendants deserve to be made an example of by the imposition of a large, punitive damages award."

Dennis explains: "I put the children in the hospital because of Dr Peterson's recommendations and because she told me that they needed to be there for their own protection from the cult."

All the defendants have filed a defence denying the allegations without detailing their arguments, as is common in US courts. They stand by the therapists' diagnosis that the Schwiderski family were members of a satanic cult and therefore their treatment was justified. ------http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-cult_q5.html

The Cult Test Questions 51 to 60 by A. Orange (To go back and forth between the questions and the answers for Alcoholics Anonymous, click on the numbers of the questions and answers.)

51. Members Get No Respect. They Get Abused. The cult has no respect for its members, on either the physical, mental, or spiritual planes. The cult demands total loyalty from its members, but the cult has no loyalty to its members. Cult members may be subjected to physical, mental, and/or sexual abuse. Cults are marked by the callous, cruel, and insensitive treatment of their members. The cult feels no obligation to tell its members the truth. The cult has no respect for the members' minds, opinions, integrity, or feelings. The cult often subjects members to psychological abuse and mental torture. There may be sexual exploitation and abuse. There may be physical abuse, beatings, or other torture. The group is considered more important than the lives of the individual members. The rank and file members are considered expendable; the guru and his cult are not. Cults often use members like just so much slave labor. Some cults coldly discard members when they have no further use for them.

• The Hari Krishnas closed down ashrams which were not profitable enough to suit the leaders, and the residents who had given their lives to the cult were just booted out onto the streets. • The Rajneeshees sent old school busses all over the USA, collecting homeless people and vagabonds to use as voters in the next election, in an attempt to take over the county government in eastern Oregon. After the election (and failure to win anything), the now-superfluous poor people were just dumped out onto the highways of Oregon. • One correspondent reports : "One of my friends gets to work with families who are thrown out by the Church of $cientology after their life savings are drained and all possible money from loans are wrung out of them."

52. Inconsistency. Contradictory Messages. Cults say things like: "We offer you unconditional love and acceptance. We are ushering in a new age of enlightenment and world peace. Oh, and by the way, don't fuck with us, or else you can end up dead, physically dead..."

Cults occasionally feature things like:

• Lying, cheating, and deceiving for Jesus (or for Krishna, or for Jim Jones, or for the newcomers' own good). • Prostitution to promote "Christianity" -- Happy Hookers for Jesus. • Committing violent acts against enemies in the name of Peace and Love. • Beating children for Jesus or for Krishna. • Instructions to practice "Rigorous honesty" accompanied by instructions to "Fake It Until You Make It" and "Act As If." • Bombing abortion clinics and killing doctors who perform abortions in order to "protect human life". • Teachings like, "You must learn to revere and love all life, and hold it sacred,", accompanied by teachings like "Only the people who practice our religion are going to Heaven." • And: It's All A Bait-And-Switch Con Game.

The actual value system of a cult is often the antithesis of the system that it advertises to the public. Charles "Chuck" Dederich, the leader of the "new drug and alcohol rehabilitation program" called Synanon: "Don't mess with us -- you can get killed dead, physically dead." "Yes, I do want an ear in a glass of alcohol, I really do." "Nonviolence was just a position we took. We change positions all of the time." (Photo by Charlie Downs) Rick Ross gave us an amusing example of inconsistency in Scientology when he posted the story of Lisa Marie Presley (the daughter of Elvis) claiming that Scientology had saved her from drugs and alcohol:

Presley touts drug cure

Typical of many Scientologist celebrities Lisa Marie Presley often uses exposure to promote her religion. In recent interviews she has touted the supposed salvation Scientology provided from her drug problems. She says her bout with "cocaine, sedatives, pot and drinking" climaxed at 18, but was resolved when she sought help from the controversial church. Presley said, "I woke up one day, drove myself to the Church of Scientology and said, 'Somebody help me right now'," reports Teen Hollywood. But here is the rub. Lisa Marie was raised within Scientology by her mother Priscilla who is an ardent adherent. So what went wrong in this Scientology household that produced such addictive behavior and drug lust in the teenager? Lisa Marie doesn't discuss this. Cult News, May 18, 2003

53. Hierarchical, Authoritarian Power Structure, and Social Castes The cult features an Undemocratic reality, Control-oriented leadership, and Superdemocracy or Pseudo- democracy. The cult has social castes, arranged in a hierarchical structure. The cult has Royalty -- The children of the guru are often the princes and princesses of the new kingdom. The inner circle of courtiers is blessed above others, and gets special priveleges. Such cults sometimes have pseudo-democracy, where anyone can express his or her opinion on any subject, and people can vote on anything, but somehow the elections don't really matter and nothing really changes. All real power is concentrated in the hands of the leaders, who consider such elections to be simply "advice", or "an expression of the popular opinion", but not binding.

54. Front groups, masquerading recruiters, hidden promoters, and disguised propagandists. Cults often use front groups to further their goals. Scientology and the Moonies (Unification Church) are notorious for having dozens or hundreds of front groups that claim to have no connection to the parent church. Steve Hassan reported that when he was recruited for the Moonies' Unification Church, he didn't even know that he was joining the Church. He thought he was joining a secular organization that was doing social activism work for the improvement of society. He said that he was in the Church for three months before he learned that he was actually in the Unification Church. Scientology even has a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program that uses Scientology mind-control techniques to get people, it says, off of drugs and alcohol. The rehab program front is called Narconon, which is similar enough to Al-Anon, and Narcotics Anonymous to confuse a lot of people. In some cites, like Bowden, Georgia, and Clearwater, Florida, Narconon has represented itself as a successful drug and alcohol rehab program, and tried to get the city courts to sentence all drunk drivers, public drunks, and drug offenders to the Narconon program, as well as soliciting the local governments for funding and grants for "rehabilitating" addicts. Of course the Narconon leaders do not bother to tell the city council or the judges that the "rehabilitation" program actually consists of Scientology mind control training. Time Magazine reported on some of Scientology's front organizations:

HealthMed, a chain of clinics run by Scientologists, promotes a grueling and excessive system of saunas, exercise and vitamins designed by Hubbard to purify the body. Experts denounce the regime as quackery and potentially harmful, yet HealthMed solicits unions and public agencies for contracts. The chain is plugged heavily in a new book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, by journalist David Steinman, who concludes that scores of common foods (among them: peanuts, bluefish, peaches and cottage cheese) are dangerous. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop labeled the book "trash," and the Food and Drug Administration issued a paper in October that claims Steinman distorts his facts. "HealthMed is a gateway to Scientology, and Steinman's book is a sorting mechanism," says physician William Jarvis, who is head of the National Council Against Health Fraud. Steinman, who describes Hubbard favorably as a "researcher," denies any ties to the church and contends, "HealthMed has no affiliation that I know of with Scientology." Time Magazine special report on Scientology, The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power, Time Magazine May 6, 1991, page 50.

Hubbard's purification treatments are the mainstay of Narconon, a Scientology-run chain of 33 alcohol and drug rehabilitation centers -- some in prisons under the name "Criminon" -- in 12 countries. Narconon, a classic vehicle for drawing addicts into the cult, now plans to open what it calls the world's largest treatment center, a 1,400-bed facility on an Indian reservation near Newkirk, Okla. (pop. 2,400. At a 1989 ceremony in Newkirk, the Association for Better Living and Education presented Narconon a check for $200,000 and a study praising its work. The association turned out to be part of Scientology itself. Today the town is battling to keep out the cult, which has fought back through such tactics as sending private detectives to snoop on the mayor and the local newspaper publisher. Time Magazine special report on Scientology, The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power, Time Magazine May 6, 1991, page 50.

One front, the Way to Happiness Foundation, has distributed to children in thousands of the nation's public schools more than 3.5 million copies of a booklet Hubbard wrote on morality. The church calls the scheme "the largest dissemination project in Scientology history." Applied Scholastics is the name of still another front, which is attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial program in public schools, primarily those populated by minorities. The group also plans a 1,000 acre campus, where it will train educators to teach various Hubbard methods. The disingenuously named Citizens Commission on Human Rights is a Scientology group at war with psychiatry, its primary competitor. The commission typically issues reports aimed at discrediting particular psychiatrists and the field in general. The CCHR is also behind an all-out war against Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, the nation's top-selling antidepression drug. Despite scant evidence, the group's members -- who call themselves "psychbusters" -- claim that Prozac drives people to murder or suicide. Through mass mailings, appearances on talk shows and heavy lobbying, CCHR has hurt drug sales and helped spark dozens of lawsuits against Lilly. Time Magazine special report on Scientology, The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power, Time Magazine May 6, 1991, page 50.

And, true to form, the "Church of Scientology" sued Time-Warner for publishing the magazine article. The judge dismissed the case, saying, among other things, that "no reasonable jury could find that these statements were published with malice." Meaning: Time Magazine just reported the truth, and that isn't publishing "with malice".1

55. Belief equals truth The cult members like to think that truth is identical to belief -- specifically, identical to their beliefs. They like to imagine that things are true because they believe them to be true. When you tell such believers some true facts that they don't like, they often answer, "But what we believe is..." or "But what our church says is...", as if that somehow changed things. They like to imagine that their believing that something is true will make it so --

• As if their believing that the world is flat could really make it so. • As if their imagining that God is a certain way will force God to be that way. • As if their believing in faith healing will really make it work. (The converse is, of course, that if you don't believe in their faith healing, you will make it fail -- so you are an evil, harmful, person for not believing and not 'keeping the faith'.)

Some people want to know the truth, and some people just want to go on a big ego trip and believe in fairy tales. Cult members choose to believe in fairy tales and fantasies --

• They like to imagine that they have magical powers -- that their chants, incantations, beliefs, and prayers will really have some physical effect on the world. • They like to imagine that they are so powerful that their merely believing something will change the world. • They also like to imagine that their beliefs are very important -- o That it will ruin God's whole day if they don't believe what God wants them to believes. (And they are sure that they know what God wants them to believe.) o Or that the world won't get saved if they don't keep the faith.

That's just a bit grandiose and egotistical. --Which, in turn, reveals why they like to imagine that their beliefs control reality. Their magical fantasy world is just a big fat vain ego trip where they can feel important and powerful.

56. Use of double-binds The group uses traps where you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't. The classic old example of a double bind was witch trials. Women who were suspected of being witches were dunked in a river:

• If she sank and drowned, that meant that she was innocent. • If she floated and lived, it was because the Devil was holding her up, and she must now be executed by burning at the stake or hanging.

Likewise, if she confessed under torture to being a witch, then that proved that she was one. If she didn't confess, then that proved that she was a deceitful lying witch who wouldn't tell the truth. Damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Willa Appel recorded the following story of a double bind:

A form of the double bind frequently exists in the relationship cult members have with their leader. Robert Perez, for example, in discussing a typical experience in his cult, unwittingly described the classic double bind. Patterson Brown, the leader of Christ Brotherhood, had mowed the lawn one day. He had been unable, however, to cut a narrow strip of grass that sloped precipitiously and was riddled with pot holes. To help out, Robert took a scythe and cut down the tall grass. At that point the Guru became furious, screaming, "You know you should leave it alone! You know that if I didn't cut that, I didn't cut that for a reason. If you only knew what it was like to be a child, you'd know that it's fun to play in the weeds." Needless to say, Robert was taken aback. Criticized for helping, he knew that he would also have been criticized for not helping. "It was the kind of thing that in another frame of mind with him, a week down the line, he'd say, 'How come nobody's done that? Do I have to do everything around here?'" Cults in America; Programmed for Paradise, Willa Appel, page 103.

Such double binds induce a feeling of powerlessness in their victims, which helps a cult to maintain control over its members. Willa Appel continued:

Christ Brotherhood members never knew what to expect. Each morning they half anticipated to be told to get out and never come back. The unpredictability of their leader, as Robert expressed it, "made you completely paranoid about what you were doing and what you weren't doing. You'd do one thing and then he'd just flip-flop the other way. You never knew if he was going to turn around and yell at you or praise you." Unfortunately, the erratic nature of Christ Brotherhood's leader could not be easily dismissed by his followers because they depended upon him and his opinions to validate their own lives. "What Patterson said was how you felt about yourself." Cults in America; Programmed for Paradise, Willa Appel, page 103.

57. The leader is not held accountable for his actions. The leader answers to no one. He doesn't stand for (real) re-election. There is no functional Council of Elders or Board of Directors or Board of Trustees that can discipline him or replace him if he fails to perform his duties properly. Nobody even has the authority to define just what his duties are, for that matter. This rule can apply to the leadership in general, in organizations where several people jointly share power.

58. Everybody else needs the guru to boss him around, but nobody bosses the guru around. This needs no explanation.

59. The guru criticizes everybody else, but nobody criticizes the guru. Criticizing the leader would conflict with Cult Rule Number One -- The Guru Is Always Right.

60. Dispensed truth and social definition of reality The cult and its leaders are the source of all Truth, Wisdom, and Knowledge. The leader proclaims the new doctrine, the new revelation. The cult defines reality and declares what the truth really is and what good bad are. Any outsiders who espouse a different 'truth' are attacked as evil or stupid, or just ignored.

"Oh Lord, Grant that we may always be right, For you know that we will never change our minds."

Continue to questions 61 to 70...

Footnotes:

1) Judge Leisure's Opinion and Order (issued July 16, 1996), United States District Court Southern District of New York, 92 Civ. 3024 (PKL), CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY INTERNATIONAL, Plaintiff, vs. TIME WARNER, INC., TIME INC., MAGAZINE COMPANY, and RICHARD BEHAR, Defendants.

• 1. The Guru is always right. • 2. You are always wrong. • 3. No Exit. • 4. No Graduates. • 5. Cult-speak. • 6. Group-think, Suppression of Dissent, and Enforced Conformity in Thinking • 7. Irrationality. • 8. Suspension of disbelief. • 9. Denigration of competing sects, cults, religions... • 10. Personal attacks on critics. • 11. Insistence that the cult is THE ONLY WAY. • 12. The cult and its members are special. • 13. Induction of guilt, and the use of guilt to manipulate cult members. • 14. Unquestionable Dogma, Sacred Science , and Infallible Ideology. • 15. Indoctrination of members. • 16. Appeals to "holy" or "wise" authorities. • 17. Instant Community. • 18. Instant Intimacy. • 19. Surrender To The Cult. • 20. Giggly wonderfulness and starry-eyed faith. • 21. Personal testimonies of earlier converts. • 22. The cult is self-absorbed. • 23. Dual Purposes, Hidden Agendas, and Ulterior Motives. • 24. Aggressive Recruiting. • 25. Deceptive Recruiting. • 26. No Humor. • 27. You Can't Tell The Truth. • 28. Cloning -- You become a clone of the cult leader or other elder cult members. • 29. You must change your beliefs to conform to the group's beliefs. • 30. The End Justifies The Means. • 31. Dishonesty, Deceit, Denial, Falsification, and Rewriting History. • 32. Different Levels of Truth. • 33. Newcomers can't think right. • 34. The Cult Implants Phobias. • 35. The Cult is Money-Grubbing. • 36. Confession Sessions. • 37. A System of Punishments and Rewards. • 38. An Impossible Superhuman Model of Perfection. • 39. Mentoring. • 40. Intrusiveness. • 41. Disturbed Guru, Mentally Ill Leader. • 42. Disturbed Members, Mentally Ill Followers. • 43. Create a sense of powerlessness, covert fear, guilt, and dependency. • 44. Dispensed existence • 45. Ideology Over Experience, Observation, and Logic • 46. Keep them unaware that there is an agenda to change them • 47. Thought-Stopping Language. Thought-terminating clichés and slogans. • 48. Mystical Manipulation • 49. The guru or the group demands ultra-loyalty and total committment. • 50. Demands for Total Faith and Total Trust • 51. Members Get No Respect. They Get Abused. • 52. Inconsistency. Contradictory Messages • 53. Hierarchical, Authoritarian Power Structure, and Social Castes • 54. Front groups, masquerading recruiters, hidden promoters, and disguised propagandists • 55. Belief equals truth • 56. Use of double-binds • 57. The cult leader is not held accountable for his actions. • 58. Everybody else needs the guru to boss him around, but nobody bosses the guru around. • 59. The guru criticizes everybody else, but nobody criticizes the guru. • 60. Dispensed truth and social definition of reality • 61. The Guru Is Extra-Special. • 62. Flexible, shifting morality • 63. Separatism • 64. Inability to tolerate criticism • 65. A Charismatic Leader • 66. Calls to Obliterate Self • 67. Don't Trust Your Own Mind. • 68. Don't Feel Your Feelings. • 69. The cult takes over the individual's decision-making process. • 70. You Owe The Group. • 71. We Have The Panacea. • 72. Progressive Indoctrination and Progressive Commitments • 73. Magical, Mystical, Unexplainable Workings • 74. Trance-Inducing Practices • 75. New Identity -- Redefinition of Self -- Revision of Personal History • 76. Membership Rivalry • 77. True Believers • 78. Scapegoating and Excommunication • 79. Promised Powers or Knowledge • 80. It's a con. You don't get the promised goodies. • 81. Hypocrisy • 82. Denial of the truth. Reversal of reality. Rationalization and Denial. • 83. Seeing Through Tinted Lenses • 84. You can't make it without the cult. • 85. Enemy-making and Devaluing the Outsider • 86. The cult wants to own you. • 87. Channelling or other occult, unchallengeable, sources of information. • 88. They Make You Dependent On The Group. • 89. Demands For Compliance With The Group • 90. Newcomers Need Fixing. • 91. Use of the Cognitive Dissonance Technique. • 92. Grandiose existence. Bombastic, Grandiose Claims. • 93. Black And White Thinking • 94. The use of heavy-duty mind control and rapid conversion techniques. • 95. Threats of bodily harm or death to someone who leaves the cult. • 96. Threats of bodily harm or death to someone who criticizes the cult. • 97. Appropriation of all of the members' worldly wealth. • 98. Making cult members work long hours for free. • 99. Total immersion and total isolation. • 100. Mass suicide. • Bibliography

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Last updated 11 July 2005. The most recent version of this file can be found at http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-cult_q5.html

His death inspir

Back to: Church of Scientology International v. Fishman and Geertz Scientology: The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power.

This famous article critical of Scientology has been the target of an organized book-burning campaign by Scientologists as detailed in the Scarff deposition. The piece was awarded the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial journalism, the Worth Bingham Prize and the Conscience in Media Awards from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

By republishing it into the digital domain of the Usenet we hope to confer a kind of immortality on it that Scientology never does on either the perpetrators or victims of its crimes. Please use under the fair use provision of the U.S. Copyright code. Even as the cult of Scientology tries to destroy the truth, the truth shall be loosed over the planet forever. Time Magazine May 6, 1991 page 50. Special Report (cover story) Copyright © 1991 Time Magazine The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power

Ruined lives. Lost fortunes. Federal crimes. Scientology poses as a religion but really is a ruthless global scam -- and aiming for the mainstream

by Richard Behar By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a normal, happy 24- year-old who was looking for his place in the sun. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to obtain his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief. Scientology is now run by David Miscavige, 31, a high school dropout and second-generation church member. Defectors describe him as cunning, ruthless and so paranoid about perceived enemies that he kept plastic wrap over his glass of water. His obsession is to obtain credibility for Scientology in the 1990s. Among other tactics, the group:

• Retains public relation powerhouse Hill and Knowlton to help shed the church's fringe-group image. • Joined such household names as Sony and Pepsi as a main sponsor of Ted Turner's Goodwill Games. • Buys massive quantities of its own books from retail stores to propel the titles onto best-seller lists. • Runs full-page ads in such publications as Newsweek and Business Week that call Scientology a "philosophy," along with a plethora of TV ads touting the group's books. • Recruits wealthy and respectable professionals through a web of consulting groups that typically hide their ties to Scientology.

The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part flimflam man. Born In Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the Navy during World War II and soon afterward complained to the Veterans Administration about his "suicidal inclinations" and his "seriously affected" mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a moderately successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years later, church brochures described him falsely as an "extensively decorated" World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in action, twice pronounced dead and miraculously cured through Scientology. Hubbard's "doctorate" from "Sequoia University" was a fake mall-order degree. In a I984 case in which the church sued a Hubbard biographical researcher, a California judge concluded that its founder was "a pathological liar." Hubbard wrote one of Scientology's sacred texts, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it he introduced a crude psychotherapeutic technique he called "auditing." He also created a simplified lie detector (called an "E-meter") that was designed to measure electrical changes In the skin while subjects discussed intimate details of their past. Hubbard argued that unhappiness sprang from mental aberrations (or "engrams") caused by early traumas. Counseling sessions with the E-meter, he claimed, could knock out the engrams, cure blindness and even improve a person's intelligence and appearance. Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers to climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made of clusters of spirits (or "thetans") who were banished to earth some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named Xenu. Naturally, those thetans had to be audited. An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped Scientology's mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal court ruled in 1971 that Hubbard's medical claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing could no longer be called a scientific treatment. Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking First Amendment protection for Scien- tology's strange rites. His counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were built, franchises became "missions," fees became "fixed donations," and Hubbard's comic-book cosmology became "sacred scriptures.' During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars from the church, laundering the money through dummy corporations in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts. Moreover, church members stole IRS documents, filed false tax returns and harassed the agency's employees. By late 1985, with high-level defectors accusing Hubbard of having stolen as much as S200 million from the church, the IRS was seeking an indictment of Hubbard for tax fraud. Scientology members "worked day and night" shredding documents the IRS sought, according to defector Aznaran, who took part in the scheme. Hubbard, who had been in hiding for five years, died before the criminal case could be prosecuted. Today the church invents costly new services with all the zeal of its founder. Scientology doctrine warns that even adherents who are "cleared" of engrams face grave spiritual dangers unless they are pushed to higher and more expensive levels. According to the church's latest price list, recruits -- "raw meat," as Hubbard called them -- take auditing sessions that cost as much as $1,000 an hour, or $12,500 for a 12 1/2-hour "intensive." Psychiatrists say these sessions can produce a drugged-like, mind-controlled euphoria that keeps customers coming back for more. To pay their fees, newcomers can earn commissions by recruiting new members, become auditors themselves (Miscavige did so at age 12), or join the church staff and receive free counseling in exchange for what their written contracts describe as a "billion years" of labor. "Make sure that lots of bodies move through the shop," implored Hubbard in one of his bulletins to officials. "Make money. Make more money. Make others produce so as to make money . . . However you get them in or why, just do it." Harriet Baker learned the hard way about Scientology's business of selling religion. When Baker, 73, lost her husband to cancer, a Scientologist turned up at her Los Angeles home peddling a $1,300 auditing package to cure her grief. Some $15,000 later, the Scientologists discovered that her house was debt free. They arranged a $45,000 mortgage, which they pressured her to tap for more auditing until Baker's children helped their mother snap out of her daze. Last June, Baker demanded a $27,000 refund for unused services, prompting two cult members to show up at her door unannounced with an E-meter to interrogate her. Baker never got the money and, financially strapped, was forced to sell her house in September. Before Noah Lottick killed himself, he had paid more than $5,000 for church counseling. His behavior had also become strange. He once remarked to his parents that his Scientology mentors could actually read minds. When his father suffered a major heart attack, Noah insisted that it was purely psychosomatic. Five days before he jumped, Noah burst into his parents' home and demanded to know why they were spreading "false rumors" about him -- a delusion that finally prompted his father to call a psychiatrist. It was too late. "From Noah's friends at Dianetics" read the card that accompanied a bouquet of flowers at Lottick's funeral. Yet no Scientology staff members bothered to show up. A week earlier, local church officials had given Lottick's parents a red-carpet tour of their center. A cult leader told Noah's parents that their son had been at the church just hours before he disappeared -- but the church denied this story as soon as the body was identified. True to form, the cult even haggled with the Lotticks over $3,000 their son had paid for services he never used, insisting that Noah had intended it as a "donation."

The church has invented hundreds of goods and services for which members are urged to give "donations." Are you having trouble "moving swiftly up the Bridge" -- that is, advancing up the stepladder of enlightenment? Then you can have your case reviewed for a mere $1,250 "donation." Want to know "why a thetan hangs on to the physical universe?" Try 52 of Hubbard's tape-recorded speeches from 1952, titled "Ron's Philadelphia Doctorate Course Lectures," for $2,525. Next: nine other series of the same sort. For the collector, gold-and-leather-bound editions of 22 of Hubbard's books (and bookends) on subjects ranging from Scientology ethics to radiation can be had for just $1,900. To gain influence and lure richer, more sophisticated followers, Scientology has lately resorted to a wide array of front groups and financial scams. Among them:

• CONSULTING. Sterling Management Systems, formed in 1983, has been ranked in recent years by Inc. magazine as one of America's fastest-growing private companies (estimated 1988 revenues: $20 million). Sterling regularly mails a free newsletter to more than 300,000 health-care professionals, mostly dentists, promising to increase their incomes dramatically. The firm offers seminars and courses that typically cost $10,OOO. But Sterling's true aim is to hook customers for Scientology. "The church has a rotten product, so they package it as something else," says Peter Georgiades, a Pittsburgh attorney who represents Sterling victims. "It's a kind of bait and switch." Sterling's founder, dentist Gregory Hughes is now under investigation by California's Board of Dental Examiners for incompetence. Nine lawsuits are pending against him for malpractice (seven others have been settled), mostly for orthodontic work on children.

Many dentists who have unwittingly been drawn into the cult are filing or threatening lawsuits as well. Dentist Robert Geary of Medina, Ohio, who entered a Sterling seminar in 1988, endured "the most extreme high-pressure sales tactics I have ever faced." Sterling officials told Geary, 45, that their firm was not linked to Scientology, he says. but Geary claims they eventually convinced him that he and his wife Dorothy had personal problems that required auditing. Over five months, the Gearys say, they spent $130,000 for services, plus $50,000 for "gold- embossed, investment-grade" books signed by Hubbard. Geary contends that Scientologists not only called his bank to increase his credit card limit but also forged his signature on a $20,000 loan application. "It was insane," he recalls. "I couldn't even get an accounting from them of what I was paying for." At one point, the Gearys claim, Scientologists held Dorothy hostage for two weeks in a mountain cabin, after which she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. Last October, Sterling broke some bad news to another dentist, Glover Rowe of Gadsden, Ala., and his wife Dee. Tests showed that unless they signed up for auditing Glover's practice would fail, and Dee would someday abuse their child. The next month the Rowes flew to Glendale, Calif., where they shuttled daily from a local hotel to a Dianetics center. "We thought they were brilliant people because they seemed to know so much about us," recalls Dee. "Then we realized our hotel room must have been bugged." After bolting from the center, $23,000 poorer, the Rowes say, they were chased repeatedly by Scientologists on foot and in cars. Dentists aren't the only once at risk. Scientology also makes pitches to chiropractors, podiatrists and veterinarians.

• PUBLIC INFLUENCE. One front, the Way to Happiness Foundation, has distributed to children in thousands of the nation's public schools more than 3.5 million copies of a booklet Hubbard wrote on morality. The church calls the scheme "the largest dissemination project in Scientology history." Applied Scholastics is the name of still another front, which is attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial program in public schools, primarily those populated by minorities. The group also plans a 1,000 acre campus, where it will train educators to teach various Hubbard methods. The disingenuously named Citizens Commission on Human Rights is a Scientology group at war with psychiatry, its primary competitor. The commission typically issues reports aimed at discrediting particular psychiatrists and the field in general. The CCHR is also behind an all-out war against Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, the nation's top-selling antidepression drug. Despite scant evidence, the group's members -- who call themselves "psychbusters" -- claim that Prozac drives people to murder or suicide. Through mass mailings, appearances on talk shows and heavy lobbying, CCHR has hurt drug sales and helped spark dozens of lawsuits against Lilly.

Another Scientology linked group, the Concerned Businessmen's Association of America, holds antidrug contests and awards $5,000 grants to schools as a way to recruit students and curry favor with education officials. West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV unwittingly commended the CBAA in 1987 on the Senate floor. Last August author Alex Haley was the keynote speaker at its annual awards banquet in Los Angeles. Says Haley: "I didn't know much about that group going in. I'm a Methodist." Ignorance about Scientology can be embarrassing: two months ago, Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, noting that Scientology's founder "has solved the aberrations of the human mind," proclaimed March 13 "L. Ron Hubbard Day." He rescinded the proclamation in late March, once he Iearned who Hubbard really was.

• HEALTH CARE. HealthMed, a chain of clinics run by Scientologists, promotes a grueling and excessive system of saunas, exercise and vitamins designed by Hubbard to purify the body. Experts denounce the regime as quackery and potentially harmful, yet HealthMed solicits unions and public agencies for contracts. The chain is plugged heavily in a new book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, by journalist David Steinman, who concludes that scores of common foods (among them: peanuts, bluefish, peaches and cottage cheese) are dangerous.

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop labeled the book "trash," and the Food and Drug Administration issued a paper in October that claims Steinman distorts his facts. "HealthMed is a gateway to Scientology, and Steinman's book is a sorting mechanism," says physician William Jarvis, who is head of the National Council Against Health Fraud. Steinman, who describes Hubbard favorably as a "researcher," denies any ties to the church and contends, "HealthMed has no affiliation that I know of with Scientology."

• DRUG TREATMENT. Hubbard's purification treatments are the mainstay of Narconon, a Scientology- run chain of 33 alcohol and drug rehabilitation centers -- some in prisons under the name "Criminon" -- in 12 countries. Narconon, a classic vehicle for drawing addicts into the cult, now plans to open what it calls the world's largest treatment center, a 1,400-bed facility on an Indian reservation near Newkirk, Okla. (pop. 2,400. At a 1989 ceremony in Newkirk, the As- sociation for Better Living and Education presented Narconon a check for $200,000 and a study praising its work. The association turned out to be part of Scientology itself. Today the town is battling to keep out the cult, which has fought back through such tactics as sending private detectives to snoop on the mayor and the local newspaper publisher. • FINANCIAL SCAMS. Three Florida Scientologists, including Ronald Bernstein, a big contributor to the church's international "war chest," pleaded guilty in March to using their rare-coin dealership as a money laundry. Other notorious activities by Scientologists include making the shady Vancouver stock exchange even shadier (see box) and plotting to plant operatives in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Export-Import Bank of the U.S. The alleged purpose of this scheme: to gain inside information on which countries are going to be denied credit so that Scientology-linked traders can make illicit profits by taking "short" positions in those countries' currencies.

In the stock market the practice of "shorting" involves borrowing shares of publicly traded companies in the hope that the price will go down before the stocks must be bought on the market and returned to the lender. The Feshbach brothers of Palo Alto, Calif. -- Kurt, Joseph and Matthew - have become the leading short sellers in the U.S., with more than $500 million under management. The Feshbachs command a staff of about 60 employees and claim to have earned better returns than the Dow Jones industrial average for most of the 1980s. And, they say, they owe it all to the teachings of Scientology, whose "war chest" has received more than $1 million from the family. The Feshbachs also embrace the church's tactics; the brothers are the terrors of the stock exchanges. In congressional hearings in 1989, the heads of several companies claimed that Feshbach operatives have spread false information to government agencies and posed in various guises -- such as a Securities and Exchange Commission official -- in an effort to discredit their companies and drive the stocks down. Michael Russell, who ran a chain of business journals, testified that a Feshbach employee called his bankers and interfered with his loans. Sometimes the Feshbachs send private detectives to dig up dirt on firms, which is then shared with business reporters, brokers and fund managers. The Feshbachs, who wear jackets bearing the slogan "stock busters," insist they run a clean shop. But as part of a current probe into possible insider stock trading, federal officials are reportedly investigating whether the Feshbachs received confidential information from FDA employees. The brothers seem aligned with Scientology's war on psychiatry and medicine: many of their targets are health and bio- technology firms. ""Legitimate short selling performs a public service by deflating hyped stocks," says Robert Flaherty, the editor of Equities magazine and a harsh critic of the brothers. "But the Feshbachs have damaged scores of good start-ups." Occasionally a Scientologist's business antics land him in jail. Last August a former devotee named Steven Fishman began serving a five-year prison term in Florida. His crime: stealing blank stock-confirmation slips from his employer, a major brokerage house, to use as proof that he owned stock entitling him to join dozens of successful class-action lawsuits. Fishman made roughly $1 million this way from 1983 to 1988 and spent as much as 30% of the loot on Scientology books and tapes. Scientology denies any tie to the Fishman scam, a claim strongly disputed by both Fishman and his longtime psychiatrist, Uwe Geertz, a prominent Florida hypnotist. Both men claim that when arrested, Fishman was ordered by the church to kill Geertz and then do an "EOC," or end of cycle, which is church jargon for suicide.

• BOOK PUBLISHING. Scientology mischiefmaking has even moved to the book industry. Since 1985 at least a dozen Hubbard books, printed by a church company, have made best-seller lists. They range from a 5,000-page sci-fi decology (Black Genesis, The Enemy Within, An Alien Affair) to the 40-year- old Dianetics. In 1988 the trade publication Publishers Weekly awarded the dead author a plaque commemorating the appearance of Dianetics on its best-seller list for 100 consecutive weeks.

Critics pan most of Hubbard's books as unreadable, while defectors claim that church insiders are sometimes the real authors. Even so, Scientology has sent out armies of its followers to buy the group's books at such major chains as B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks to sustain the illusion of a best-selling author. A former Dalton's manager says that some books arrived in his store with the chain's price stickers already on them, suggesting that copies are being recycled. Scientology claims that sales of Hubbard books now top 90 million worldwide. The scheme, set up to gain converts and credibility, is coupled with a radio and TV advertising campaign virtually un- paralleled in the book industry. Scientology devotes vast resources to squelching its critics. Since 1986 Hubbard and his church have been the subject of four unfriendly books, all released by small yet courageous publishers. In each case, the writers have been badgered and heavily sued. One of Hubbard's policies was that all perceived enemies are "fair game" and subject to being "tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed." Those who criticize the church journalists, doctors, lawyers and even judges often find themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or threatened with death. Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment. After the Los Angeles Times published a negative series on the church last summer, Scientologists spent an estimated $1 million to plaster the reporters' names on hundreds of billboards and bus placards across the city. Above their names were quotations taken out of context to portray the church in a positive light. The church's most fearsome advocates are its lawyers. Hubbard warned his followers in writing to "beware of attorneys who tell you not to sue . . . the purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage rather than to win." Result: Scientology has brought hundreds of suits against its perceived enemies and today pays an estimated $20 million annually to more than 100 lawyers. One legal goal of Scientology is to bankrupt the opposition or bury it under paper. The church has 71 active lawsuits against the IRS alone. One of them, Miscavige vs. IRS, has required the U.S. to produce an index of 52,000 pages of documents. Boston attorney Michael Flynn, who helped Scientology victims from 1979 to 1987, personally endured 14 frivolous lawsuits, all of them dismissed. Another lawyer, Joseph Yanny, believes the church "has so subverted justice and the judicial system that it should be barred from seeking equity in any court." He should know: Yanny represented the cult until 1987, when, he says, he was asked to help church officials steal medical records to blackmail an opposing attorney (who was allegedly beaten up instead). Since Yanny quit representing the church, he has been the target of death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment. Scientology's critics contend that the U.S. needs to crack down on the church in a major, organized way. "I want to know, Where is our government?" demands Toby Plevin, a Los Angeles attorney who handles victims. "It shouldn't be left to private litigators, because God knows most of us are afraid to get involved." But law-enforcement agents are also wary. "Every investigator is very cautious, walking on eggshells when it comes to the church," says a Florida police detective who has tracked the cult since 1988. "It will take a federal effort with lots of money and manpower." So far the agency giving Scientology the most grief is the IRS, whose officials have implied that Hubbard's successors may be looting the church's coffers. Since 1988, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the revocation of the cult's tax-exempt status, a massive IRS probe of church centers across the country has been under way. An IRS agent, Marcus Owens, has estimated that thousands of IRS employees have been involved. Another agent, in an internal IRS memorandum, spoke hopefully of the "ultimate disintegration" of the church. A small but helpful beacon shone last June when a federal appeals court ruled that two cassette tapes featuring conversations between church officials and their lawyers are evidence of a plan to commit "future frauds" against the IRS. The IRS and FBI have been debriefing Scientology defectors for the past three years, in part to gain evidence for a major racketeering case that appears to have stalled last summer. Federal agents complain that the Justice Department is unwilling to spend the money needed to endure a drawn-out war with Scientology or to fend off the cult's notorious jihads against individual agents. "In my opinion the church has one of the most effective intelligence operations in the U.S., rivaling even that of the FBI," says Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI's Los Angeles office. Foreign governments have been moving even more vigorously against the organization. In Canada the church and nine of its members will be tried in June on charges of stealing government documents (many of them retrieved in an enormous police raid of the church's Toronto headquarters). Scientology proposed to give $1 million to the needy if the case was dropped, but Canada spurned the offer. Since 1986 authorities in France, Spain and Italy have raided more than 50 Scien- tology centers. Pending charges against more than 100 of its overseas church members include fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion, illegally practicing medicine and taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people. In Germany last month, leading politicians accused the cult of trying to infiltrate a major party as well as launching an immense recruitment drive in the east. Sometimes even the church's biggest zealots can use a little protection. Screen star Travolta, 37, has long served as an unofficial Scientology spokesman, even though he told a magazine in 1983 that he was opposed to the church's management. High-level defectors claim that Travolta has long feared that if he defected, details of his sexual life would be made public. "He felt pretty intimidated about this getting out and told me so," recalls William Franks, the church's former chairman of the board. "There were no outright threats made, but it was implicit. If you leave, they immediately start digging up everything." Franks was driven out in 1981 after attempting to reform the church. The church's former head of security, Richard Aznaran, recalls Scientology ringleader Miscavige repeatedly joking to staffers about Travolta's allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior. At this point any threat to expose Travolta seems superfluous: last May a male porn star collected $100,000 from a tabloid for an account of his alleged two-year liaison with the celebrity. Travolta refuses to comment, and in December his lawyer dismissed questions about the subject as "bizarre." Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist. Shortly after Hubbard's death the church retained Trout & Ries, a respected, Connecticut-based firm of marketing consultants, to help boost its public image. "We were brutally honest," says Jack Trout. "We advised them to clean up their act, stop with the controversy and even to stop being a church. They didn't want to hear that." Instead, Scientology hired one of the country's largest p.r. outfits, Hill and Knowlton, whose executives refuse to discuss the lucrative relationship. "Hill and Knowlton must feel that these guys are not totally off the wall," says Trout. "Unless it's just for the money." One of Scientology's main strategies is to keep advancing the tired argument that the church is being "persecuted" by antireligionists. It is supported in that position by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Council of Churches. But in the end, money is what Scientology is all about. As long as the organization's opponents and victims are successfully squelched, Scientology's managers and lawyers will keep pocketing millions of dollars by helping it achieve its ends.

Mining Money in Vancouver

[Sidebar; page 54] One source of funds for the Los Angeles-based church is the notorious, self-regulated stock exchange in Vancouver, British Columbia, often called the scam capital of the world. The exchange's 2,300 penny-stock listings account for $4 billion in annual trading. Local journalists and insiders claim the vast majority range from total washouts to outright frauds. Two Scientologists who operate there are Kenneth Gerbino and Michael Baybak, 20-year church veterans from Beverly Hills who are major donors to the cult. Gerbino, 45, is a money manager, marketmaker and publisher of a national financial newsletter. He has boasted in Scientology journals that he owes all his stock-picking success to L. Ron Hubbard. That's not saying much: Gerbino's newsletter picks since 1985 have cumulatively returned 24%, while the Dow Jones industrial average has more than doubled. Nevertheless Gerbino's short-term gains can be stupendous. A survey last October found Gerbino to be the only manager who made money in the third quarter of 1990, thanks to gold and other resource stocks. For the first quarter of 1991, Gerbino was dead last. Baybak, 49, who runs a public relations company staffed with Scientologists, apparently has no ethics problem with engineering a hostile takeover of a firm he is hired to promote. Neither man agreed to be interviewed for this story, yet both threatened legal action through attorneys. "What these guys do is take over companies, hype the stock, sell their shares, and then there's nothing left," says John Campbell, a former securities lawyer who was a director of mining company Athena Gold until Baybak and Gerbino took it over. The pattern has become familiar. The pair promoted a mining venture called Skylark Resources, whose stock traded at nearly $4 a share in 1987. The outfit soon crashed, and the stock is around 2 cents. NETI Technologies, a software company, was trumpeted in the press as "the next Xerox" and in 1984 rose to a market value of $120 million with Baybak's help. The company, which later collapsed, was delisted two months ago by the Vancouver exchange. Baybak appeared in 1989 at the helm of Wall Street Ventures, a start-up that announced it owned 35 tons of rare Middle Eastern postage stamps -- worth $100 million -- and was buying the world's largest collection of southern Arabian stamps (worth $350 million). Steven C. Rockefeller Jr. of the oil family and former hockey star Denis Potvin joined the company in top posts, but both say they quit when they realized the stamps were virtually worthless. "The stamps were created by sand-dune nations to exploit collectors," says Michael Laurence, editor of Linn's Stamp News, America's largest stamp journal. After the stock topped $6, it began a steady descent, with Baybak unloading his shares along the way. Today it trades at 18 cents. Athena Gold, the current object of Baybak's and Gerbino's attentions, was founded by entrepreneur William Jordan. He turned to an established Vancouver broker in 1987 to help finance the company, a 4,500-acre mining property near Reno. The broker promised to raise more than $3 million and soon brought Baybak and Gerbino into the deal. Jordan never got most of the money, but the cult members ended up with a good deal of cheap stock and options. Next they elected directors who were friendly to them and set in motion a series of complex maneuvers to block Jordan from voting stock he controlled and to run him out of the company. "I've been an honest policeman all my life and I've seen the worst kinds of crimes, and this ranks high," says former Athena shareholder Thomas Clark, a 20-year veteran of Reno's police force who has teamed up with Jordan to try to get the gold mine back. "They stole this man's property." With Baybak as chairman, the two Scientologists and their staffs are promoting Athena, not always accurately. A letter to shareholders with the 1990 annual report claims Placer Dome, one of America's largest gold-mining firms, has committed at least $25.5 million to develop the mine. That's news to Placer Dome. "There is no pre-commitment," says Placer executive Cole McFarland. "We're not going to spend that money unless survey results justify the expenditure." Baybak's firm represented Western Resource Technologies, a Houston oil-and-gas company, but got the boot in October. Laughs Steven McGuire, president of Western Resource: "His is a p.r. firm in need of a p.r. firm." But McGuire cannot laugh too freely. Baybak and other Scientologists, including the estate of L. Ron Hubbard, still control huge blocks of his company's stock. [ Caption: ATHENA GOLD'S WILLIAM JORDAN. Cult members got cheap stock, then ran him out of the company ] [The following part was only in the international version of TIME] Pushing Beyond the U.S.:

Scientology makes its presence felt in Europe and Canada

By Richard Behar

In the 1960s and '70s, L. Ron Hubbard used to periodically fill a converted ferry ship with adoring acolytes and sail off to spread the word. One by one, countries -- Britain, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Venezuela -- closed their ports, usually because of a public outcry. At one point, a court in Australia revoked the church's status as a religion; at another, a French court convicted Hubbard of fraud in absentia. Today Hubbard's minions continue to wreak global havoc, costing governments considerable effort and money to try to stop them. In Italy a two-year trial of 76 Scientologists, among them the former leader of the church's Italian operations, is nearing completion in Milan. Two weeks ago, prosecutor Pietro Forno requested jail terms for all the defendants who are accused of extortion, cheating "mentally incapacitated" people and evading as much as $50 million in taxes. "All of the trial's victims went to Scientology in search of a cure or a better life," said Forno, "But the Scientologists were amateur psychiatrists who practiced psychological terrorism". For some victims, he added, "the intervention of the Scientologists was devastating." The Milan case was triggered by parents complaining to officials that Scientology had a financial stranglehold on their children, who had joined the church or entered Narconon, its drug rehabilitation unit. In 1986 Treasury and paramilitary police conducted raids in 20 cities across Italy shutting down 27 Scientology centers and seizing 100,000 documents. To defend itself in the trial, the cult has retained some of Italy's most famous lawyers. In Canada, Scientology is using a legal team that includes Clayton Ruby, one of the country's foremost civil rights lawyers, to defend itself and nine of its members who are to stand trial in June in Toronto. The charges: stealing documents concerning Scientology from the Ministry of the Attorney General, the Canadian Mental Health Association, two police forces and other institutions. The case stems from a 1983 surprise raid of the church's Toronto headquarters by more than 100 policemen, who had arrived in three chartered buses; some 2 million pages of documents were seized over a two-day period. Ruby, whose legal maneuvers delayed the case for years, is trying to get it dismissed because of "unreasonable delay." Spain's Justice Ministry has twice denied Scientology status as a religion, but that has not slowed the church' s expansion. In 1989 the Ministry of Health issued a report calling the sect "totalitarian" and "pure and simple charlatanism." The year before, the authorities had raided 26 church centers, with the result that 11 Scientologists stand accused of falsification of records, coercion and capital flight. "The real god of this organization is money," said Madrid examining magistrate Jose Maria Vasquez Honrnbia, before referring the case to a higher court because it was too complex for his jurisdiction. Eugene Ingram, a private investigator working for Scientology claims he helped get Honrubia removed from the case for leaking nonpublic documents to the press. In France it took a death to spur the government into action: 16 Scientologists were indicted last year for fraud and "complicity in the practice of illegal medicine" following the suicide of an industrial designer in Lyon. In the victim's house investigators found medication allegeally provided to him by the church without doctor's prescription. Among those charged in the case is the president of Scientology's French operations and the head of the Paris-based Celebrity Centre, which caters to famous members. Outside the U.S., Scientology appears to be most active in Germany where the attorney general of the state of Bavaria has branded the cult "distinctly totalitarian" and aimed at "the economic exploitation of customers who are in bondage to it." In 1984 nearly 100 police raided the church in Munich. At the time, city officials were reportedly collaborating with U.S. tax inspectors and trying to prove that the cult was actually a profitmaking business. More recently, Hamburg state authorities moved to rescind Scientology's tax reduced status, while members of parliament are seeking criminal proceedings. In another domain, church linked management consulting firms have infiltrated small and middle sized companies throughout Germany, according to an expose published this month in the newsmagazine DER SPIEGEL; the consultants, who typically hide their ties to Scientology, indoctrinate employees by using Hubbard's methods. A German anticult organization estimates that Scientology has at least 60 fronts or splinter groups operating in the country. German politics appears as well to attract Hubbard's zealots. In March the Free Democrats, partners in Chancellor Helmut Kohl' s ruling coalition in Bonn, accused Scientology of trying to infiltrate their Hamburg branch. Meanwhile the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, has been warning its members in the formerly com- munist eastern part of the country against exploitation by the church. Even federal officials are being used by the church: one Scientology front group sent copies of a Hubbard written pamphlet on moral values to members of the Bundestag. The Office of Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher unwittingly endorsed the Scientologists' message: "Indeed, the world would be a more beautiful place if the principles formulated in the pamphlet, a life characterized by reason and responsibility, would find wider attention." [end of Internationl Edition-only section]

The Scientologists and Me

[Sidebar, page 57]

Strange things seem to happen to people who write about Scientology. Journalist Paulette Cooper wrote a critical book on the cult in 1971. This led to a Scientology plot (called Operation Freak-Out) whose goal, according to church documents, was "to get P.C. incarcerated in a mental institution or jail." It almost worked: by impersonating Cooper, Scientologists got her indicted in 1973 for threatening to bomb the church. Cooper, who also endured 19 lawsuits by the church, was finally exonerated in 1977 after FBI raids on the church offices in Los Angeles and Washington uncovered documents from the bomb scheme. No Scientologists were ever tried in the matter. For the TIME story, at least 10 attorneys and six private detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an effort to threaten, harass and discredit me. Last Oct. 12, not long after I began this assignment, I planned to lunch with Eugene Ingram, the church's leading private eye and a former cop. Ingram, who was tossed off the Los Angeles police force In 1981 for alleged ties to prostitutes and drug dealers, had told me that he might be able to arrange a meeting with church boss David Miscavige. Just hours before the lunch, the church's "national trial counsel," Earle Cooley, called to inform me that I would be eating alone. Alone, perhaps, but not forgotten. By day's end, I later learned, a copy of my personal credit report -- with detailed information about my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home address and Social Security number -- had been illegally retrieved from a national credit bureau called Trans Union. The sham company that received it, "Educational Funding Services" of Los Angeles, gave as its address a mail drop a few blocks from Scientology's headquarters. The owner of the mail drop is a private eye named Fred Wolfson, who admits that an Ingram associate retained him to retrieve credit reports on several individuals. Wolfson says he was told that Scientology's attorneys "had judgments against these people and were trying to collect on them." He says now, "These are vicious people. These are vipers." Ingram, through a lawyer, denies any involvement in the scam. During the past five months, private investigators have been contacting acquaintances of mine, ranging from neighbors to a former colleague, to inquire about subjects such as my health (like my credit rating, it's excellent) and whether I've ever had trouble with the IRS (unlike Scientology, I haven't). One neighbor was greeted at dawn outside my Manhattan apartment building by two men who wanted to know whether I lived there. I finally called Cooley to demand that Scientology stop the nonsense. He promised to look into it. After that, however, an attorney subpoenaed me, while another falsely suggested that I might own shares in a company I was reporting about that had been taken over by Scientologists (he also threatened to contact the Securities and Exchange Commission). A close friend in Los Angeles received a disturbing telephone call from a Scientology staff member seeking data about me -- an indication that the cult may have illegally obtained my personal phone records. Two detectives contacted me, posing as a friend and a relative of a so-called cult victim, to elicit negative statements from me about Scientology. Some of my conversations with them were taped, transcribed and presented by the church in affidavits to TIME's lawyers as "proof" of my bias against Scientology. Among the comments I made to one of the detectives, who represented himself as "Harry Baxter," a friend of the victim's family, was that "the church trains people to lie." Baxter and his colleagues are hardly in a position to dispute that observation. His real name is Barry Silvers, and he is a former investigator for the Justice Department's Organized Crime Strike Force. (RB) [Photograph, page 51] The Lotticks lost their son [photograph of the couple standing beside the grave of their son.] [Photograph, page 53] Harriet Baker, 73, lost her house [photograph of Harriet Baker on front of her old home.] [Chart, page 52-53] The Bridge to enlightenment [shows costs of various "courses" ranging from a free Personality Test to more than $1,000 an hour for "finding and releasing" "body thetans" (BTs).] Back to: Church of Scientology International v. Fishman and Geertz

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