Seattle Ethics Orders Project

Exposing Suppression in Seattle

Declaration of Independence

Tony & Marie-Joe DePhilips

Preamble:

We have always loved the writings of L Ron Hubbard. I (Tony) have not always understood what he has meant, but I have gotten a lot from the things that I did understand. One of my favorite statements is from the lecture Differences Between Scientology & Other Philosophies: “ If it is true for you, it’s true. And if it’s not true for you, it’s still isn’t true. Not even if Ron told you is it true. It’s just not true, that’s all.“ ~ LRH

With this as a foundation, along with ARC and granting of beingness, the code of honor, and not needing a license to survive are some of the building blocks we have used to improve our lives. We have had many great wins in Scientology and know many well intentioned staff and public Scientologists.

How we got here:

Our personal story of shock and disbelief will be added as an attachment for those who are interested.

After reading The Truth Rundown and Geir Isene’s Doubt formula we were deeply troubled about what was going on in the church. It all made so much sense and was so believable to us. After trying to communicate about this and other things that we felt were wrong with the church we started to get attacked. I realized then that the Church felt that I did not have the right to say what I wanted to in regards to my own church or upper management. I also realized that I did not have the right to be with people that the church thought were “BAD”. So I was supposed to give up that right also, deciding who I could or couldn’t associate with. To me these were fundamental rights of an American and quite a few people have died to make sure we had these rights!

I have never been good at being bossed around. It is a button that I have never quite gotten over. So somewhere in all this mess after I was given a “ Non-enterbulation order“, my wife and I decided to resign from the church of Scientology as an ethics gradient.

IJC 13 January 2010
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Tony and Marie-Joe DePhillips

This is a letter to let you know that we have decided to resign from the Church of Scientology.

We have given this decision a lot of thought.

We have both been in Scientology for over twenty years. We have contributed about 125K to the Ideal Org and over 60K to the IAS. We have spent in the neighborhood of 500K on services from the Church and donated a decent amount of time participating as volunteers.

We have had some great wins.

Over the last few years however we have noticed more and more things that we do not like about how the church operates. Heavy ethics, make wrong, heavy regging etc. We have made attempts at correcting these things with reports with no result.

We have seen and heard of too many abuses, human rights violations, misuse of resources [people, money,…], and worst of all, too many LRH policies being violated. We can’t, in good conscience, continue to participate and support the church as it is being managed at this time.

After making our own observations and hearing the stories of Marty Rathbun, Geir Isene, Mike Rinder, Amy Scobee, Jeff Hawkins, Mary-Jo Leavitt and many more Sea Org members, OT’s and highly trained auditors, we have made our decision.

We have always been told that these people on the internet were crazy SP’s.

After hearing their stories we were not able to come to that conclusion. We were shocked to realize that many who had been painted to us as evil and suppressive were in fact whistleblowers trying to expose the abuses and violations.

We both have experienced excessive sec-checking and heavy ethics even when our contributions (money and time participating) were showing that we were stellar members of the public.

We love Scientology when it is applied with ARC and not with enforcement to get everyone to conform.

We came into Scientology to find our own self determinism and to have gains. Progressively over the years we feel that we have been forced overtly or covertly to “toe the line”, or follow “command intention”, without being able to use our own judgment or our own ethics. If you do not do what is “expected”, you are shunned/punished in various ways. When you assert your own independent thought and it doesn’t align with command intention you are quickly shown you are not a good group member.

In conclusion, we no longer feel confident in this Church’s ability to operate in a manner that we can be proud of and disseminate to others.

We hope that the Church of Scientology will get it’s ethics in and make the changes necessary for it to be a church we can once again be proud of.

Sincerely,

Tony DePhillips Marie-Joe DePhillips

We continued to watch and read and listen. We heard the church lie about their not having a policy of enforcing disconnection.

My thoughts about disconnection.

I believe that any person has the right to disconnect from whoever they choose.
The church says that they don’t enforce disconnection.
Definition of enforce: 1. To give force to; urge 2. To bring about or impose by force 3.to compel observance of.
From Introduction to Scientology Ethics book: The following are Suppressive acts: Failure to handle or disavow and disconnect from a person demonstrably guilty of suppressive acts. Also, Continued adherence to a person or group pronounced a Suppressive person or group by HCO. page 312
If the Cof S feels that someone is Suppressive and I do not, and therefore do not chose to disconnect from them they can find me guilty of a suppressive act.
If the Cof S considers me a suppressive person then they will enforce the above policy and get people to disconnect from me in order to continue training and processing. If they don’t disconnect then they cannot continue training and processing. This is a form of enforcing disconnection.
So the Cof S’s statement that they do not enforce disconnection is a lie.

As someone famous said “If they lie about this, what else will they lie about?”

Our conlusions:

After all of this research and communicating, we decided that the abuses did occur and that there was a huge amount of it. We also saw that the church was actively involved in creating their own enemies and seemed to take very little responsibility in remedying their wrongs. Furthermore we wondered what kind of a leader would allow these things to continue to go unhandled and in fact seemingly encouraged such activity.

We got into Scientology to become more at cause in life and to do better in life based on our own realities. We still feel that this is what LRH intended as his product. We didn’t and still don’t believe or agree with everything that LRH ever uttered. But as LRH said, we don’t have to.

We believe that the church is being run in a fashion that, to us, is destructive overall and destructive to our personal goals as being at cause over our own life. The church says that on OT 7 you will be cause over life. That may be possible, but not if the church refuses to let you be at cause over your own church!!

Also, first and foremost to us is the abuse of the Sea Org members. This to us is obscene. These people dedicated their lives to Scientology only to be treated as sub-humans and when fed up with that treatment, and wanting to leave

treated in an abhorrent fashion. These people were some of our best and brightest. This cannot stand. What gives DM the right to run roughshod over these people? Who anointed him to be above the law?? The out-points are too many to be listed here, we are sure you all have examples of your own.

We believe that everyone who stands up and throws off their shackles will make it that much easier for others to do so. That has been true for us. The others coming out before us has made it more real for us to take our stand.

We could not live with the idea that we were too scared or bullied into having to hide our god given rights to be there and communicate. Especially when it is the right thing to do!!

So we hereby declare ourselves Independent Scientologists.

Independent. Noun. One who is independent in thinking, action, etc. That is how we see ourselves. We do enjoy the Scientology philosophy by LRH when we are practicing it as independent people, not having it forced down our throats.

Final thoughts:

We also really like LRH’s views on infinity valued logic. The idea of two-valued logic such as right-wrong, good-bad is too simplistic. The idea that any man or woman is infallible or perfect is not realistic. All men and women

have good and bad in them, it is just a matter of degree. And the fact that we feel Mankind is basically good means that there can be salvation for all, and no person has a monopoly on that. DM is not totally bad or totally good just like the rest of us. He is not above the law or above the Scientology justice system. DM IS NOT SCIENTOLOGY. I believe that it is the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics that DM step down from his position as leader and steps taken to reform the church of Scientology so it reflects the values of this current culture and promotes ARC, tolerance and all the other values usually associated with spiritual goals. I have finally answered this question for myself: Does the end justify the means? For us the answer is NO!! Or another way of looking at it is: The means are the end! Scientology was supposed to give us a way of setting an example as stellar people. That is an end in itself. The way Scientology has been treating it’s own people is a disgrace and a degrade of Scientology and has to be rejected.

Thank you for listening. Thank you all for what you are doing and will do in the future.

Much Love,
Tony and Marie-Joe