About

Former Village Voice editor Tony Ortega has written about Scientology since 1995. He’s currently working on a book about the church, and while he toils away on it he continues to monitor breaking developments around the world from an undisclosed location in an underground bunker he shares with four cats and one of them wrinkly Shar Pei dogs. Despite his super-secret security protections, you can still reach him pretty easily by sending him a message at tonyo94 AT gmail.com (Drop him a line if you’d like to get an e-mail whenever a new story is posted.) Or check in at his Facebook author page. Or follow him at Twitter: @TonyOrtega94

24 thoughts on “About”

  7. What did I just stumble upon? Did I miss something?
    It seems Tony’s column didn’t really die, it just dropped its meat body and now exists as an entity of pure Theta.
    Seriously, this is a welcome oasis. Thank you for doing this.

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  12. WELL, I read the article about the Lemburgers, and this really is one of the way that these people show how manipulative they really are and how they use illogic and false thinking to promote/push their product (a person paying money to get clear or whatever):

    Here’s a quote from Dani Lemburger, and I find it extremely funny because it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, but is actually intended to have the person taking it at face value, without scrutiny (hence the generalities and no examples: simply stated as fact, when it isn’t fact):

    “In fact, he says, becoming a Scientologist will eventually save you money.
    How? He rattles off a quick list: “You’ll have much happier relations with your wife, so there will be no divorce costs,” he says, by way of example. “You’ll raise happy and productive children, so you won’t need to support them all the time.” The list goes on and on. “You won’t have illness, sickness or accidents. You’ll be better off mentally. And your career will take off,” he says. “That’s how.””

    Well, maybe he and his wife are still married, and he attributes that to his putting a lot of money and effort into Sci….but it is only his perception of his marriage. There’s a distinct possibilty they could still be married if they were both practicing Catholics or were agnostics. Maybe it’s because they complement each other, and have an inherent willingness to stay together. But it’s a patent falsehood that their willingness to put a hundred thou or more into Sci is the reason they are not divorced, and no amount of money put into a religion (or cult, in this case) is going to “save” you the money of not being divorced. You can’t save money when it isn’t being spent on something. Also, spending money to “save” part of it just doesn’t compute. You simply spend.

    Secondly, if spending 100 thou or even more (in most cases much more) is the road to not divorcing and raising kids who are productive citizens, etc. then I guess that Kirstie Alley, Tom Cruse, Mimi Rogers (formerly Cruise), Johnny Lewis’s parents, the former head honcho of Sci who’s being held in detention, etc. are all not Scientologists. Because spending their money would have prevented their divorces, or their kids doing drugs or needing psycho help. Even with this thinking, I think that David Miscavage must not be a Scientologist, because he certainly hasn’t shown his wife as being by his side and in a productive marriage. It seems she may be locked up in their prison, possibly cause she pissed him off somehow, maybe by thinking she was equal to him in some fashion, or even by the great sin of thinking on her own.

    I guess that being raised a scientologist didn’t take in Johnny Lewis’s case, as he evidently did have psychotic problems. Which if he or his parents truly were Scientologists just would not have happened. Their tons of money and commitment to getting Sci more money from others just would have overcome that and prevented it.

    Pushers really disgust me. And Sci is a total “pusher” entity. They want you to “try” it and learn about it on your own, so you can “decide”. That is a pusher mentality. They are no better than the most common drug pushers in any neighborhood. They use any type of manipulative ploy to get you “in” and then take your money and make you a Sci pusher.

    BTW, I understand that individuals can be conned (also called brainwashing) into doing/believing that they are not pushing. But they are and the only way they will ever be able to say they were is to get out of the cult and understand it’s mentality. So when I say pushers disgust me, I attribute this totally to Sci as the pusher. And the only persons I will put that with are the ones who know they are doing this purposely, and are not the ones who have been conned into it. I think a lot of the heads of Sci are actually con men in their own right (even if they are women). And the game to play is to keep ahead of the other con men at the top so you don’t get cast into the prison.

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