PROGRAM/MEETING

Tuesday, March 11,  at Christ United Methodist Church. Regular Meeting begins at 7:30pm.  Board Meeting at 6:30pm.   Our program will be a new video on cults compiled by John Ruth.

                                                                                                                                                            

SCIENTOLOGY TAKING HITS ONLINE
 Los Angeles Times, March 3, 2008  By David Sarno, Staff Writer

"We were born. We grew up. We escaped." So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.  One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.

The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website. 

These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.

No corner of the Web, it appears, is safe for Scientology. Blogger and lawyer Scott Pilutik recently posted a story noting that Scientology was yanking down EBay auctions for used e-meters, the device the church uses for spiritual counseling. EBay allows brand owners -- Louis Vuitton or Rolex, say -- to remove items they believe infringe on their trademark or patent rights. Basically, fakes. But, Pilutik said, the used e-meters being taken down were genuine. Reselling them was no different than putting a for-sale sign on your old Chevy.   "What's actually going on here," he wrote, is that the church is "knowingly alleging intellectual property violations that clearly don't exist." Within a day Pilutik's blog had gotten over 45,000 visitors -- so much traffic that his site crashed completely.

Facing a steady stream of negative publicity and a growing number of critical voices, Scientology has found itself on the defensive. The church has referred to Anonymous as a group of "cyber-terrorists" and, in a statement, said the group's aims were "reminiscent of Al Qaeda spreading anti-American hatred and calling for U.S. destruction."  "These people are posing extremely serious death threats to our people," said church spokeswoman Karin Pouw in a phone interview. "We are talking about religious hatred and bigotry."  A recent video posted to YouTube contained a threat to bomb a Southern California Scientology building. An FBI spokeswoman said an investigation was in progress but that no suspects had been identified.

Reporters have long had to tread carefully when writing about Scientology, fearful that lawsuits and other kinds of retaliation would follow any story that Scientology did not like. But that may be changing.   "Before this Internet onslaught," said Douglas Frantz, a contributing editor at Portfolio magazine who covered Scientology for the New York Times in the 1990s (and is a former editor at the L.A. Times), "they were always able to go after their critics and do a good job of being able to discredit or intimidate them."

Angry former church members also perceive a kind of safety in numbers afforded by the Internet, and more are coming forward to share their stories.   "People have been scared out of their minds to speak out about Scientology," said Hill, Miscavige's niece, in an interview. "Nobody should have to be that scared to speak out about a church."  Wiseman echoed the sentiment, adding that the Anonymous campaign had influenced her decision to reveal her identity last week. "The Internet is listening. If something happens to me, all of these people will know."

The current wave of anti-Scientology activity began in January, when a video of Tom Cruise extolling the religion's tech-based approach to enlightenment was leaked onto YouTube, where users holding it up to ridicule copied and recopied it; several sites posted it without hesitation.  It wasn't long before Nick Denton, who as publisher of the blog syndicate Gawker Media had put the video online first, received a legal threat from a law firm representing Scientology, alleging copyright infringement. But Denton refused to take the video down.  "It was an awesome news story," Denton wrote in an e-mail. "If we didn't race to post it up, some other site would have. That, rather than litigation by Scientology, was the fear going through my mind."  The church's whack-a-mole campaign with the Cruise video became a rallying cry for Anonymous, which saw efforts to remove the videos from YouTube as an unwanted incursion into the domain of digital culture, where information and media, copyrighted or no, are often exchanged freely

 

HAGEE ENDORSEMENT OF McCAIN HAS RISKS
Washington Post, March 3, 2008    By Libby Quaid, AP

SEDONA, Ariz. (AP) -- Endorsed by an influential Texas televangelist, Republican John McCain endeared himself to one group of voters but risked alienating another with the pastor's anti-Catholic views.   The controversy has been mild so far, but still, every vote counts in a presidential election that is expected to be closely contested.   Evangelical or born-again Christian voters were key to George W. Bush's victories, but so were Roman Catholics, who chose Bush over their fellow Catholic John Kerry in 2004 and over Al Gore in 2000.   The televangelist, San Antonio megachurch leader John Hagee, has referred to the Roman Catholic Church as "the great whore" and called it a "false cult system" and "the apostate church"; the word "apostate" means someone who has forsaken his religion.   He also has linked Adolf Hitler to the Catholic church, suggesting it helped shape his anti-Semitism.

Catholic groups are pressuring McCain to reject the endorsement, which he announced at a news conference with Hagee last week. The Democratic National Committee also is publicizing Hagee's views. "Indeed, for the past few decades, he has waged an unrelenting war against the Catholic Church," said Catholic League President Bill Donohue.   "Senator Obama has repudiated the endorsement of Louis Farrakhan, another bigot," Donohue said. "McCain should follow suit and retract his embrace of Hagee."

He was referring to Barack Obama, who said he would "reject and denounce" any help from Farrakhan when pressed in last week's Democratic presidential debate.

It remains to be seen how much Hagee's views may hurt McCain's standing among Catholics, a group that can hardly be considered monolithic. Though they lean Republican, their views span the political spectrum and split nearly evenly along party lines.

Despite the recent publicity, Hagee is not well-known outside his sphere of influence, which includes a congregation in the tens of thousands and an even wider television audience.   "What he holds about Catholicism in my mind is despicable," said the Rev. James Heft, religion professor at the University of Southern California. "I totally reject Hagee's view of Catholicism, but I don't know how widely known it is."   If Hagee's views become well-known, the endorsement could hurt McCain among some Catholics.   "If you offend even a small percentage, that could make the difference in an election," Donohue said in an interview Sunday.   Democrats are doing their best to keep the fracas alive, with Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean raising it Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition."   "What about a guy who is a vicious anti-Catholic, who is supporting John McCain, and John McCain does not denounce or reject him?" Dean said.

So far, McCain has enjoyed strong support from Catholics, who make up about a quarter of the electorate.   He won far more of the Catholic vote, 47 percent, than any of his Republican rivals thus far, according to exit polling. Mitt Romney won 30 percent and Mike Huckabee won 9 percent, doing well among Catholics in states where they did well overall, according to exit surveys in 21 presidential primary states.   McCain has been less popular among evangelical or born-again Christians, which is where Hagee comes in. Huckabee, himself a Baptist minister, courted Hagee last year by delivering a sermon at his church. McCain has lost or split support from those voters and is working to bolster his standing.   And McCain is not guaranteed support among Catholics, even though he opposes abortion and the two Democratic candidates, Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, support abortion rights.

While the church places utmost priority on its opposition to abortion rights, U.S. bishops issued voter guidelines last November saying Catholics may vote for someone who favors abortion rights _ so long as the voter is not making his or her choice because of the candidate's position on abortion, and if the candidate supports other positions that further the church vision of the common good.

Incidentally, McCain, Obama and Clinton belong to the Protestant faith; McCain was raised Episcopalian but now attends a Baptist church in Arizona.

McCain's response to the controversy has been tepid, Heft said. Following two days of criticism, McCain issued a statement saying only that he doesn't agree with everything Hagee says.  "In no way did I intend for his endorsement to suggest that I in turn agree with all of Pastor Hagee's views, which I obviously do not," McCain said. Before issuing the statement, he told reporters he was "proud" of Hagee's spiritual leadership of his congregation.   The Arizona senator's reaction stands in contrast to President Bush, who specifically apologized to Roman Catholic leaders for "causing needless offense" when he visited Bob Jones University during the 2000 election. The Greenville, S.C., school teaches that Catholicism is a cult.

McCain's reaction also stands in contrast with his own swift and unequivocal denunciation of a radio talk show host who denigrated Obama last week in Cincinnati. McCain immediately apologized and said he repudiated the statements of the radio host, Bill Cunningham.   Of course, there are differences between the two figures. Hagee is a religious leader; Cunningham is a talk show host. Cunningham made his comments at a campaign event; Hagee's intolerant words and views have come outside the presidential campaign.    Regardless, Heft said McCain should be more specific and more emphatic, and soon.   "You don't want to blow it on simple matters that you could correct," Heft said. "He probably would be wiser just to say he rejects his views on Catholics."

 

THE LUCIFER EFFECT
Daily Times (Pakistan), January 28, 2008  By Phillip Zimbardo, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. 

Why do good, ordinary people sometimes become perpetrators of evil? The most extreme transformation of this kind is, of course, the story of God’s favorite angel, Lucifer – a story that has set the context for my psychological investigations into lesser human transformations in response to the corrosive influence of powerful situational forces.    Such forces exist in many common behavioral contexts, distorting our usual good nature by pushing us to engage in deviant, destructive, or evil behavior. When embedded in new and unfamiliar settings, our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting no longer function to sustain the moral compass that has guided us reliably in the past.

Over the past three decades, my research and that of my colleagues has demonstrated the relative ease with which ordinary people can be led to behave in ways that qualify as evil. We have put research participants in experiments where powerful situational forces – anonymity, group pressures, or diffusion of personal responsibility – led them blindly to obey authority and to aggress against innocent others after dehumanizing them.

My recent book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, describes the radical transformations that took place among college students playing randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison created at Stanford University. It goes on to establish direct parallels with the abuses committed by American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, presenting much of the social science research illustrating the power of social situations to dominate individual dispositions.

This body of work challenges the traditional focus on the individual’s inner nature, dispositions, and personality traits as the primary – and often the sole – factors in understanding human failings. Instead, I argue that while most people are good most of the time, they can readily be led to act anti-socially, because most people are rarely solitary figures improvising soliloquies on the empty stage of life.    On the contrary, people are often in an ensemble of different players, on a stage with various props, costumes, scripts, and stage directions from producers and directors. Together, they comprise situational features that can dramatically influence behavior. What individuals bring into any setting is important, but so are the situational forces that act on them, as well as the systemic forces that create and maintain situations.

Most institutions that are invested in an individualistic orientation hold up the person as sinner, culpable, afflicted, insane, or irrational. Programs of change follow either a medical model of rehabilitation, therapy, reeducation, and treatment, or a punitive model of incarceration and execution. But all such programs are doomed to fail if the main causal agent is the situation or system, not the person.   As a result, two kinds of paradigm shift are required. First, we need to adopt a public health model for prevention of violence, spouse abuse, bullying, prejudice, and more that identifies vectors of social disease to be inoculated against. Second, legal theory must reconsider the extent to which powerful situational and systemic factors should be taken into account in punishing individuals.

Although much of The Lucifer Effect examines how easy it is for ordinary people to be seduced into engaging in evil deeds, or to be passively indifferent to the suffering of others, the deeper message is a positive one. It is by understanding the how and why of such deeds that we are in a better position to uncover, oppose, defy, and triumph over them. By becoming more “evil smart,” we build up resistance to having our moral compass reset negatively.     In this sense, The Lucifer Effect is a celebration of the human capacity to choose kindness over cruelty, caring over indifference, creativity over destructiveness, and heroism over villainy. At the end of my narrative, I invite readers to consider fundamental strategies of resisting and challenging unwanted social influences, and I introduce the notion of “the banality of heroism.” After all, most heroes are ordinary people who engage in extra-ordinary moral actions.

With this in mind, I propose a situational perspective for heroism, just as I do for evil: the same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination and evil in some of us can inspire the heroic imagination in others. We must teach people, especially our children, to think of themselves as “heroes-in-waiting,” ready to take heroic action in a particular situation that may occur only once in their lifetime.
 

‘DEPROGRAMMING’ IRAQI DETAINEES
Washington Post, December 24, 2007  By Walter Pincus

Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, the commanding general in charge of detainee operations in Iraq, is seeking reinforcements from a contractor as he continues to maneuver on what he has called "the battlefield of the mind" and win over the roughly 25,000 Iraqi prisoners under his control.   In a proposal put out for bid Dec. 15, the Joint Contracting Command is seeking a team of professionals, including "teachers, religious and behavioral science counselors," who will "execute a program that effectively reintegrates [into Iraqi society] detainees, particularly those disposed to violent, radical ideology through education and counseling," according to the statement of work.

Part of the program will involve small detainee groups, possibly led by an Iraqi cleric and a behavioral scientist, "undergoing enlightenment, deprogramming and de-radicalization sessions" for six weeks.   At a news conference this month, Stone said he was segregating extremists from more moderate Iraqis being brought in by U.S. troops as potential security threats. Stone has already started voluntary educational and vocational classes for prisoners, plus one on religion with the help of 43 imams. He also instituted a release program for those no longer deemed security risks; it involves signing an oath not to take up arms against coalition forces.

Now, the general is seeking a contractor that will pull together a private group, made up of Americans, third-country nationals and Iraqis, "to provide the management, professional skills, curriculum and evaluation necessary" to take over this operational model.

The team, according to the proposal, must be led by an American with 10 years of experience in leadership and management, and with a security clearance at the "secret" level. It is strongly desirable for this person to have worked with Iraqis or third-country nationals and have five years of experience analyzing Middle Eastern religions, politics and culture. A master's degree in psychology or behavioral science is also desired.

The No. 2 in the group is to be a "lead analyst" who must also be a U.S. citizen, have a secret-level clearance and have management experience. This person must also have five years of background in intelligence gathering and interrogation.

The third person in the leadership team, who could be an Iraqi cleric or a third-country national, must have formal religious education in Islamic jurisprudence and the Koran. This person should be fluent in Iraqi Arabic dialect and have a working knowledge of English.

This person will be the lead trainer/counselor for the deprogramming and de-radicalization efforts. Assisting will be a "psychological enlightenment" specialist who must have a master's degree in behavioral science, speak and read Iraqi Arabic, and have five years of experience related to Middle Eastern radical ideologies. This person must alsointerview "radicalized detainees to collect information about their motivations and pathways to radicalization" in order to "identify openings for change."     Other team members will include a "juvenile psychological enlightenment" specialist with at least a master's in behavioral science who has knowledge of Iraqi Arabic. Also included will be an Iraqi social worker, an Iraqi cleric counselor and six teaching experts -- one to be a supervisor, another to be a "bilingual bicultural advisor" and others to be experienced in art, music and computers.

The team is to provide reports and advice to Stone's aides about "relevant ideological, religious, cultural and education conditions of adult and juvenile detainees," along with "comprehensive individual assessments" that would "enable prudent decision-making on release or continued detention of detainees." One stated goal for the program is creating "a refined program of instruction" that would be something the Iraqi government could "adopt and implement within its detention facilities."    

Bids for the three-year program must be submitted by Jan. 8. The contracting agency has capped the cost at $210 million, with a minimum offer of $5 million.