Tom Cruise is Nuts

So, I realize this may be old news by now, but I just wanted to state in a public place that Tom Cruise is officially nuts. I read an article today about Lauren Bacall stating that "His whole behavior is so shocking," she says. "It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially, but I think it's kind of a sickness."

The article suggests she is referring to his not-so-private life with Katie Holmes. But I prefer to be disgusted with his blatant hawking of the cult of Scientology. Yes, it's a cult, not a church. Because of all of Tom's public advertising of it, traffic on the Scientology website is up, as well as people walking into their churches, centers, or whatever you call them. And Tom Cruise continues to drone on about how no one really needs psychotherapy or medication for their chemical imbalances...just vitamins. Right....

I have a relative who got involved in Scientology when she lived in Portland, as a 17-year-old girl, fresh of the farm from Libby, Montana. Her parents eventually had to kidnap her to get her out of it.

Below is from a Readers Digest article on Scientology, which mentions my mom's cousin Julie:

Typical was the experience of 17-year-old Julie Christofferson, a high-school honors graduate who was invited by an acquaintance -- actually a shill -- to take a "communications course." (The church advertises that these "field-staff members" get ten-percent commissions on all money their recruits pay.) Unknowingly, Julie hooked herself onto a mind-scrambling conveyor belt of hypnotic "training routines" developed by Hubbard. The recruit, cynically referred to as "raw meat," sits knee to knee with a "coach" for hours, her eyes closed. Next she sits, eyes open, for hours. Then the coach tries to find "emotional buttons." Hours of commands follow: "Lift that chair." "Move that chair." "Sit in that chair."

As Margaret Thaler Singer, a University of California psychologist who interviewed Julie and over 400 former members of cults, observes, "These routines can split the personality into a severe, dissociated state, and the recruits are hooked before they realize what is happening."

Julie found that the next step, auditing, continued to erase the boundary between reality and fantasy. In this phase, Julie exhausted all $3000 of her college savings. Then she was told she could take college-level courses while going "on staff" and working full time to recruit and process new raw meat. She ended up working 60 to 80 hours a week, at a maximum salary of $7.50 [per week]. She had now reached the "robot-like" state.

Julie felt superior, one of the chosen elite of this universe. She was one of the faithful who are promised they will "go with Ron to the next planet." Thus, they are conditioned to the "us against them" outlook that characterizes so much religious and political fanaticism.

Julie Christofferson was among the lucky, however. After nine months, her parents removed her from the cult and snapped her out of her zombie-like trance. Last August, a Portland, Ore., jury found the church's conduct so fraudulent and outrageous that it awarded her $2,067,000.20 in damages.


All I have to say is, SAVE KATIE!

She always seemed like such a good kid on that Dawson's Creek program.