The homepage of Tilman Hausherr
The cult of greed and power: Scientology and Dianetics
Scientology claims to be "the world's largest
mental health organization". What it really is however, is the world's
largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of
dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy. Scientology is
evil; its techniques evil; its practice a serious threat to the community,
medically, morally and socially; and its adherents are sadly deluded and
often mentally ill.
(Quotes from the Report
of the Board of Enquiry into Scientology of the Parliament of the state
of Victoria, Australia)
Introduction
Scientology is a form of pseudo-science invented by the mediocre late science-fiction
writer Lafayette Ron Hubbard (here is his picture).
Scientology claims to make people more able to communicate; but after taking
their courses, you'll find out that it will only help you to communicate
inside
Scientology. It claims to be compatible with other religions; but as you
progress, you will have to accept that Elron Hubbard
denies
JC's existance (also here
with more context). It first came up as Dianetics,
but Ron got in trouble soon, for teaching medicine without a license. After
(temporarly) losing the rights for Dianetics to one of his investors, he
founded Scientology, and declared it a religion for financial and
legal reasons. Religions don't pay taxes, and they don't have to prove
anything. As early as 1968, a magazine called Scientology a
menace to mental health. Here a description of
Scientology by ex-member Martin Hunt. Scientology is very
expensive; a father who didn't want to pay for the "services" of his
son received a threatening letter written by Reverend
Andrew
Bagley, a Scientology official. Recovery takes
long and is very difficult. The title of this paragraph comes from
the excellent and award-winning article in TIME
magazine called
The
thriving cult of greed and power, written by Richard
Behar.
Will the following become true?
"First the Scientologists went after their ex-members,
but I ignored it, because I had never been a Scientologist. Then they went
after the "squirrels" [Scientologists who practice outside of Scientology],
but I ignored it, because I wasn't a squirrel. Then they went after the
psychiatrists but I didn't care since I never needed a psychiatrist. Then
they went after the journalists but I didn't speak up because I wasn't
a journalist. Then the Scientologists went after the Christians but I didn't
speak up because I was an atheist. Then they went after me, and no one
was left to help me."
(from me, inspired by the Martin Niemöller quote)
Yes, Scientology would like this to become true. L. Ron Hubbard
suggested in different books to put people who disagree with in quarantine
(20% of the population), or simply to dispose
of them quietly and without sorrow (2.5% of the population)
Overview of things to look at:
Learn about Scientology in the USENET
The meeting place of Scientology critics and a few Scientologists is the
USENET newsgroup alt.religion.scientology.
See the list of frequently
unanswered questions to find out what questions Scientologists evade
most. If you have problems with your news provider, you can still read
through Google Groups
(allows searching the whole usenet for people and topics!).
Scientology has in the past arranged the cancellation of usenet articles
it didn't like. But not every article that disappears has been cancelled
by Scientology. So before complaining, read the Disappearing
Articles FAQ.
Links to Scientology critics
Scientology always considers critics part of a giant
conspiracy, controlled by psychiatrists,
bankers,
communists,
fascists, the Smersh
(Yes, really! The organization fought by James Bond), the CIA,
the BKA (german equivalent of the FBI),
the Max Planck Institute or just
space
aliens. The solution was to declare war against the internet, and as
expected, this is backfiring, because more and more information resources
are becoming available.
English language links:
Unusual Information about your mind, not directly
related to Scientology:
|
-
Do you want to buy a bridge? Mark Ebner's article in Spy Magazine
-
Chris Owen: Scientology audited,
has government reports and his own research articles, including
Scientology's
fight for apartheid. Also hot is his collection of documents
about Scientology's Secret
Service, the so-called Guardian Office, which still exists today,
but under a new name.
-
Ron the War Hero: a biography
of L. Ron Hubbard's laughable career in the US Navy
-
Documents
of a Lifetime - the uncensored L. Ron Hubbard papers: early details
about the life of the pathological liar, like when he was arrested
for petty theft
- Summary of the military record of L. Ron Hubbard
-
alt.scientology.war,
an article by Wendy Grossman, printed in Wired.
-
Free Speech
& Copyright Infringement on the Information Super-Highway, an article
by Jim Lippard and Jeff Jacobsen, printed in Skeptic
magazine.
-
Ron Newman's
chronology about Scientology
vs. the Net in 1995 - 1996
-
Legal: Maureen Garde's collection of judicial
opinions on Scientology
-
Steve's UK Scientology
Information page.
-
Ted Mayett's picket page.
Great design by ethercat! Here a
photo from the
LA picket in March 1998 where I participated.
-
Jim Lippard's Information
about Scientology's private investigators.
-
Sloth's supressive person
page was the very first available; here is a response
to Scientology's non-answers 'What
Misconceptions Are There About Scientology'
-
Martin Poulter's Scientology
Critics' Info page and his new page
-
Prof. Dr. Dave Touretzky has
been very busy in the last years:
-
I took over Ramon Kolb's page about Boston University
and Scientology. Boston University had Earle Cooley, one of the most
infamous Scientology lawyers, as Chairman on the Board of Trustees. Yuk!
-
A collection of Judicial
Opinions regarding litigation with Scientology
-
Karin Spaink: I write therefore
I am: about the Dutch protest against Scientology.
-
FACTNet about
Scientology and Dianetics
-
Books that Scientology doesn't want you to read:
-
Margery Wakefield's The
Road to Xenu: a fictionalized account of her time in Scientology,
based on both her own experiences and those of people she knew or heard
about. Amazing because it describes the day-to-day life in the cult, and
although she was out at the time she wrote it, it reads like a diary. If
you want to know how a Scientologist life looks like, then read this book
-
Russell Miller's The
Bare-Faced Messiah: Scientology unsuccessfully tried to stop the
book in the UK, but was partly successful in the US. Because of that, the
US Copyright law was later changed.
-
Paulette Cooper's The
Scandal of Scientology: in revenge for this book, Scientology stole
stationery from her and sent
bomb threats to themselves, getting her indicted. Today she is still
a writer, her
last books is about cats. (They don't sue and harass authors)
-
Cyril Vosper's The
Mind Benders: he alleges that a copy of his manuscript disappeared
from his lodgings, and, while on holiday in Spain, he was questioned by
the police when they opened a parcel addressed to the place in which he
was staying, containing obscene caricatures of General Franco.
-
Robert Kaufman's Inside
Scientology: Or How I Found Scientology and Became Superhuman:
this was the first book that revealed OT
3.
-
Stewart Lamont's Religion
Inc.: The Church of Scientology (also here:
this book has a special flavour because Scientology tried to "support"
the author, who had (and used) a unique opportunity to see through some
of their propaganda by comparing it with the actual facts.
-
more books.
-
Jeff Jacobsen's page has
his article The
Hubbard Is Bare that explains where L. Ron Hubbard got some of his
ideas for Dianetics and Scientology. His tale
of two CDs is a good example of legal abuse of the law by Scientology
attorneys.
-
I took over Brett Achorn's hard data
pages on Scientology: where entities are opening, where they are closing.
He named it the 0% opinion page.
I name it the 0% expansion page.
-
Felipe Rodriquez about Scientology
cult attacks XS4ALL:
the cult made the unwise move to harass a Dutch internet provider.
Also read about the TV shows
covering the issue.
-
Jeff Lee's Scientology page.
The best is Visit
to Clearwater and NARCONON.
-
Greece uncovers Scientology
by Tony Bosnakoudis
-
The complete list of websites
critical about Scientology
-
newspaper search sources:
- Weird stuff dept:
That well sourced Wikipedia article was deleted four times.
Links in French:
Links in Spanish:
Links in Portuguese:
All cults, other cults (warning: do not contact the Cult Awareness Network
(CAN): it has been taken over by scientology as result of a lost lawsuit)
-
Fight Against Coercive
Tactics
Network
(FACTNet)
-
F.A.C.T.Net
archive
-
F.A.C.T.Net 'Do
It Yourselfe' press kit
-
The American Family Foundation (AFF),
and the latest edition of The
Cult Observer, a collection of newspaper articles about cults.
-
reFOCUS Network: Recovering Former
Cultists Support Network.
-
The Resource Center for Freedom
of Mind, by Steve Hassan, author of "Combatting Cult Mind Control"
-
Rick Ross
-
Carol Giambalvo
Jonestown:
-
Sun Myung Moon:
-
TM:
-
Mike Doughney's Ex-Cult archive for
the newsgroup alt.support.ex-cult.
-
Bruderhof:
-
Opus Dei:
-
Thakar Singh
-
Dialog Center International: This Christian
network with units in 20 countries informs about the true nature of "New
Religious Movements".
-
The Watchman Fellowship is a conservative
Christian answer to cults.
-
Spiritual Counterfeits Project: SCP
is a resource to provide a biblical perspective on new religions
and spiritual trends. Sadly they endorse Marty Rimm (bogus "Cyberporn"
study) and creationism.
-
Prof. Dr. David Lane's neural
surfer is about Radhasoami, Sant Mat, Shabd Yoga, Eckanckar, the Development
of New Religious Movements in North America and much more. It contains
also several books he wrote.
-
Dan Dugan's PLANS: People for Legal
and Non-Sectarian Schools, educating the public about Waldorf education
(not sure if this is a cult, but it is certainly 1. quite close and 2.
deceptive)
-
Boston Church:
-
The Christian
Research Institute Archive
-
Wellspring Retreat & Resource
Center: Hope and help for survivors of group and relationship abuse
Xenu
Xenu is a sort of devil for customers of the Scientology cult. Since the
world of Scientology is quite similar to George Orwell's 1984, you
can compare L. Ron Hubbard to the Big Brother, and Xenu to Emmanuel Goldstein.
Xenu has web pages in Germany and in Norway.
According to the anonymously posted price list,
after a cultie has paid about $159,160 (or worked years for nearly no money
at all), and has been in good standing with the management, he is eligible
to read the OT
3 (operating thetan three) materials. He gets a xerox of handwritten
notes by the cult's founder explaining that all our troubles come from
an evil guy from outer space named Xenu. Here is an article
from the Los Angeles Times about what the cult did when the materials were
available in open court records. Hey kids! Listen to the Xenu
after-school special to know more about this guy! (You need to
have RealVideo installed)
Jerry Ladd researched about Xenu and came up with a different explanation.
According to him, Xenu was good, but an evil guy with the name "Phatmanotoo"
framed him to cover up his failure in nuclear science class. He created
the Knights of Xenu, a loose community of good people.
There's no sign-up, no contract; just affix KoX to your signature and you're
in.
How does Xenu look? See Xenu's
vacation in Ann Arbor, Michigan (formerly here). There are two other theories. My theory
is that Xenu is the monolith from 2001:
A Space Oddysey. Scientologists were forbidden to watch the film,
because it contains restimulative material. Another
theory is that Xenu is Deana Holmes' grey adopted cat.
Deana's mom is somewhat anxious about the name.
Xenu was pregnant; this didn't keep her from whispering encheferated
documents in Deana's ear. Xenu is now a Mom, and gave birth
to five kittens! Deana adopted one of the kittens, and gave her the name
Zoe.
This wonderful story does not end happily for Deana: Xenu is a deadbeat
mom.
Steve Fishman's daughter
Elysia
presented Xenu as work for her creative writing class,
but got only a B+ because her teacher considered it unrealistic!
Xenu's favorites:
Mozilla
Mozilla ist the little green monster from the Netscape
Corporation. For some time, he vanished from their home pages, so I built
the Mozilla Museum. Visit and enjoy!
"Bob"
J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the mighty pipe-smoking salesman, is discussed in the
newsgroup alt.slack, which is for members
of the Church of the Subgenius,
and he preaches Slack ! Read all about the weirdest cult ever.
Also read the success stories of some SubGenius
parishioners, who have improved their life thanks to DobbsThink [tm].
On
August 5th, the world ended - not!
Does "Tilman Hausherr" mean anything?
It does. "Tilman" has anglo-saxon origins and means "a suitable man, a
warrior". I am rather a desk warrior. Judge yourself if this is true. "Tilman"
is often misspelled, because other guys are named Tilmann, Tillman or Tillmann.
It is sometimes also used as a last name. My first name was given to me after they
thought about
Tilman Riemenschneider,
a german sculptor.
"Hausherr" is a German word and means "The master of the house".
The word is also used to mean the "host".
It is pronounced like the english words "House hair".
If you like the name, then visit the Tilman link
page.
What's in a name, and why does a name tell a lot about your parents? Read chapter 6 of Freakonomics. And don't name your child Kevin.
Who pays Tilman?
From time to time, Scientologists allege that critics are paid by evil
people to destroy other people's religions. First, unlike many cults, Scientology
is not a religion, but a business; second, critics not only do
it for free, but even pay for it: with less free time to watch TV or read a book.
The truth is that I am an ordinary guy who has an ordinary job as a
software developer in a company that offers software services to medium
and large-sized clients. We develop and maintain optical archives, as well
as client & server software to manage them. We also arrange bulk scanning
and indexing and provide tailored solutions for our clients:
- Scanning of paper from DIN A4 - A0
- Microfiche scanning
- Indexing with or without control algorithms
- Processing of incoming paper mail, FAX mail and e-mail and forwarding on CD or over the network
- Semi-automatic indexing through OCR / ICR
I did a lot of server-related development on UNIX in the 90ies, and became somewhat disillusioned due to the poor reliability of this OS (this was before LINUX became widely popular; bugs sometimes took years to be fixed!),
and concentrated on Windows client applications with Microsoft Visual C++ and their really cool and powerful foundation classes (MFC). I make a better living from it than these
two.
Since 2005, I've also done some work with Java, JSTL and Tomcat. I have used MySQL and Oracle databases, including PL/SQL.
Around 2011, I started using Apache PDFBox. Unlike earlier experiences with open source communities, questions were not answered with insults, so I kept using it and even wrote improvements that ended up in the official code, like this one (about Gouraud shading, a 3D technique invented in the 70ies but still relevant!). My experience with Apache projects is that they seemed to have a friendly attitude. I learned a lot in the PDFBox project, despite being neither a graphics developer nor a math expert (although I best in school in math, but forgot all over the years). In 2014, I was invited to become a committer (i.e. have write access on the source code). In 2014 and 2015, I mentored students as part of the Google Summer of Code program.
I've also done some minor work for MediathekView and one bugfix for TVBrowser (both great projects!).
My PGP key
If
you feel you must send me a PGP-encoded message because you feel under
surveillance, go ahead. But do it only if it is really important and
confidential. A message like "Hi, Tilman, what's your opinion about this
topic" isn't!
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German Section / Deutsche Abteilung
Willkommen in der deutschen Abteilung.
Lexikon der Informatik und Datenverarbeitung
Jetzt in der vierten Auflage! Auch
als CD-ROM erhältlich!
Eine technische Beschreibung der Software LEXIKON befindet sich hier.
Man beachte, daß das Copyright für die Software nicht bei mir,
sondern bei Prof. Dr. Schneider liegt.
Meine Hauptarbeit bestand in der Software und deren Wartung. Die vierte
Auflage erschien im Oldenbourg Verlag
1996 pünktlich zur Frankfurter Buchmesse. Und am 25.10.1997 lag die
CD-ROM in meinem Briefkasten! Buch und CD kann ich empfehlen - die CD-ROM
jedoch noch etwas mehr, da das Buch recht schwer (Stöhn!) ist.
Ich habe damals auch die Gelegenheit ergriffen, selbst einige Definitionen
beizutragen. In der LEXIKON Software verweist ein Teil der hier kursiv
gedruckten Wörter auf andere Definitionen. Aus Copyright-Gründen
sind diese Links hier jedoch nicht implementiert.
Die hier folgenden Definitionen entstanden (vor dem Erscheinen auf CD-ROM)
aus der Ausgabe für den Lichtsatz, wobei die Steuerzeichen hier durch
geeignete HTML tags ersetzt wurde.
Zaubertricks entschlüsselt
Zwischen 1993 und 1995 hatte ich mir ein seltsames Hobby zugelegt: Zaubertricks entschlüsseln.
Mit einem Videorecorder ist dies gar nicht so schwer, auch David Copperfield
ist leichte Beute. Die Erkenntnisse habe ich
in einem Dokument zusammengefaßt. (Ist allerdings seit 1995 nicht
aktualisiert worden, obwohl ich dazugelernt habe) Inzwischen sind Diskussionen
zu diesem Thema endlich auch öffentlich möglich, Näheres
dazu hier. Frank Pronath, ein geschätzter
"Mitstreiter", hat inzwischen auch ein Dokument
online.
Impressum gemäß §5
TMG
Tilman Hausherr, Diplom-Informatiker
Poschingerstrasse 14
12157 Berlin
Telefon: (030) 216 28 27
Mail-Adresse: tilman at snafu punkt de
Es ist unzulässig, unverlangte Werbung an diese Adresse zu senden!
Hinweis gemäß §5(1)5b TMG: Die Berufsbezeichnung
Diplom-Informatiker wurde mir in Deutschland verliehen.
Ich distanziere mich ausdrücklich von allen Links zum Landgericht Hamburg.
Link broken? Typos? Poor grammar? Tell me: tilman at snafu.de