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After an embarrassing string of high-profile defection and leaked videos, Scientology is under attack from a faceless cabal of online activists. Has America’s most controversial religion finally met its match?
Clearwater is prepared for its enemies. It’s a warm, if overcast, Saturday in February, but all the storefronts lining the sidewalks of this sleepy town on […]

Nearly 300 demonstrators jammed the sidewalks out front on March 15, many of them young computer geeks in plastic Guy Fawkes masks honoring the 16th-century British subversive. Some hid behind party masks and bandanas. They hoisted signs: “Religion is free, Scientology is not,” “They want your money and your sanity,” and, in a reference to a string of mysterious tragedies involving members of Scientology, “How many more must die?”

In the religion children are regularly hooked up to a LIE DETECTOR made from SOUP CANS and ELECTRODES to test their commitment to the church.

Headley, 34, quit the faith after becoming disillusioned with it’s bizarre practises. He says of the 45-year-old Top Gun star, now second-in-command of the church: “Tom is on a mission… to turn EVERYONE into a Scientologist.

I was skimming through High Winds when I came across an article winningly headlined ‘Handling Suppression on the Fourth Dynamic’ (by then I had learnt that the ‘fourth dynamic’ meant the whole of mankind). In a tone of unforgiving militancy, it talked of ‘eradicating SPs’, and crowed about how they had ’shut down’ one particular defector who had criticised the movement. ‘Unemployed and abandoned by his family, this squirrel had schemed to make money by hawking his lies in a book. But the Office of Special Affairs had a court declare his book libellous. He has now been forced into bankruptcy…’

In July, 1968, following a governmental review, the Minister of Health told Parliament that the organisation “alienates members of families from each other” and had “authoritarian principles and practices” that were a “potential menace to the personality and well being of those so deluded as to become its followers”.

An anti-drug program with ties to the Church of Scientology will be barred from San Francisco classrooms because of concerns about its scientific accuracy, city schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said Tuesday.

Ackerman’s decision followed a review of the Narconon Drug Prevention & Education Program by school health officials, who found that some of its teachings were not “100 percent accurate.”

Scientology teaches its adherents to file reports on members who are acting against the church. Such people are deemed to have brought shame on their families and are sent to ‘ethics’ sessions, where they are questioned for hours about their thoughts and forced to make ‘amends,’ which can include manual labour.

Finally, Astra extricated herself from the movement in 1998, but not before she confessed to a list of petty crimes to avoid being declared a Suppressive Person.

Other Scientologists are ordered not to speak to such outcasts, who are declared enemies, and Astra didn’t want to lose contact with her family.