Skirv vs Scientology 

Newsgroups: uiuc.test
Message-ID: <tskirvin.20020619185533$0140@babylon.ks.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: NSA
From: tskirvin@killfile.org (Tim Skirvin)
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 14:21:27 -0500

Jeff Erickson  writes:

>| 	They tried to sue me once.  'Twas exciting.
>Do tell.  Or at least post an URL.

Well...the URL is tricky. It's mentioned on my Threats Page but I've never gotten around to actually posting the threats. They're saved on floppies somewhere, and I kinda doubt they're alive; they stayed there instead of being moved to more permanent media because, of the various people that have threatened me through the years, the CoS is the group most likely to actually do anything about it.

The story:

In around 1994, the Church of Scientology was beginning to learn of Usenet, and specifically alt.religion.scientology; various ex-members of the Church had begun posting there about the dangers of the cult, and the CoS didn't know how to deal with it. And so they decided to kill the group, by floods and cancels and physical intimidation and anything else

I got involved with Usenet during my Junior year of high school, and started caring about Usenet politics in 1994, right after the Green Card Lottery. Cancel messages and such fascinated me, and when I saw that there was an actual Black Hat organization out there issuing them! Wow! So I got myself involved pretty quickly; I'm sure you can guess the drill (killfiles, random insults, kook-baiting, the like).

What eventually got me most interested, though, was when the CoS critics started posting parts of the CoS scriptures. This was a big deal, you see - the Church is setup around a serial novel, where you get further parts of the story the higher your Rank is (which is determined by how much you've paid). By posting these later-level documents (called "OT VII" and such - Operating Thetan, Level 7), they were publishing documents that normally cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And the stuff was just funny.

OT IV is the stuff that really explains the background - millions of years ago, a bunch of people called Thetans lived on Hawaii, until an ancient force destroyed them all with nuclear weapons. The remains of these Thetans are attached to all of us, you see, and are the cause of our mental troubles. They can be removed with E-Meters (skin galvinometers). Yes, this is really what they believe.

That stuff, though, was already somewhat public knowledge; it was the OT VII stuff that really torqed off the CoS. OT VII is where they start getting into mind control of plants and animals. Someone posted it at some point, at the Church *really* got mad. They started cancelling it left and right, as people kept on reposting it or parts of it...

I was one of the "parts of it" people.

Oh, it was just a small section - six lines, to be exact, well into Fair Use. But the CoS, led by Helena Kobrin, claimed it was a "copyrighted trade secret", and cancelled my posts along with dozens of others. And then they sent lawsuit threats to me and my sysadmin, demanding I delete all copies of their documents...

Who can guess how I responded?

Out of this I received the rank of SP 4 - Suppressive Person, Level 4. Level 5 is actually being sued, and level 6 is winning your lawsuit (7-9 involve countersuing). I'm still proud of the title. And I didn't leave immediately or quietly, but I did leave, mostly because the people that were on "my side" were nearly as annoying as the ones I was fighting against.

Some interesting side notes:

Now that I've written all of this, it's going on my history page. Whee.

- Tim Skirvin (tskirvin@killfile.org)