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From: Oldtimer <oldtimer@cts.com>
Newsgroups: alt.clearing.technology
Subject: Free Zone - In the news
Date: 2 Sep 1998 11:52:09 -0400
Recently, Focus magazine [ A weekly/national periodical comparable to Time Magazine ], printed the following article
concerning the German Free Zone.The following is a very rough translation. Further translation can be found in
[[parentheses]].
Old Timer
www.freezone.org
www.freezone.de
www.scientologie.de
****************
Scientology
Auditing as a special offer
Former members enter into competition with the psycho cult by offering courses at much lower prices.
After 14 years on the bridge, which is the way to sanity in the controversial Scientology organization, 32-year
old Raidar Tavarez had had enough of the steadily increasing social pressure and the increasing prices for new
courses. He left the sect and lost his chance to reach the unvulnerableness promised by the highest grades of enlivenment.
Still, Tavarez does not say a word against the obscure teachings of the founder, L. Ron Hubbard: These teachings
are superior to all other known therapies.
Together with other ex-scientologists, he now tries to practice Hubbard pure. Whether it is just a circle of friends
like the group around Tavarezor the registered association with the name Free Zone, situated in Bavaria- a continuously
increasing number of ex-members become a serious threat to the self-named Church of Scientology. All these ex-members
have one thing in common: They refuse the cult as totalitarian but stick to Hubbardís teachings because they find
something very precious in his philosophy and techniques as the Swiss Ex-Scientologist Silvie S. says, who has
a Counseling Center in Walchwil, a place where numerous adherents of Hubbard from the southwest of Germany meet.
The ex-members offer Hubbardís teachings at dumping prices compared to the Church: Members of the Free Zone charge
100.- DM/hour for auditing which is a mixture of conversational therapy and an interrogation with the help of a
measuring instrument called e-meter. Scientology charges approx. 600.-DM/hour. Those who want to attain the highest
grades of the controversial psycho group have to invest about half a million Deutsch Marks.
Scientology commissioner of the senate in Hamburg, Ursula Caberta, judges the cheap competition as the lesser evil
which could facilitate the way out of the sect. Thomas Gandow of the Evangelic Church in Berlin-Brandenburg,who
is in charge of sects, shares the same opinion. The Free Zone acts as a transition stage on the way back to a normal
life. However, Gandow warns: Those who believe to get a positive Hubbard are wrong. As a therapy his teachings
are a vagary.
[[Gandow feels that the Free Zone is ok as sort of a gradient back into society (normal life). But also in the
Free Zone you don't get a positive Hubbard (because there isn't anything like a "positive Hubbard").
From a therapeutical view Hubbards teachings lead nowhere... (or "As a therapy his teachings are (or follow)
the wrong track"]]
The unfaithful however do not only wait for those who leave the church, but claim that they also want to actively
weaken the psycho sect. In the beginning of the 90's, Silvia S. and Ruedi M. addressed themselves in a mailing
action to known scientologists in Germany and Switzerland and tried to win them to their side.
But the sect and the ex-members do not only rival for adherents. The organizer of the Free Zone, Bernd L., who
does not want his full name to be published because of fear of persecution by the Scientology Organization,has
another trump-card in his hands: Members of the Free Zone acquired the rights to a book published in 1934 written
by the German-Argentinean A.Nordenholz and bearing the title: Scientologie. Therefore people of the Free Zone own
the copyright for the German writing of the sectís name.Tavarez, who published his experiences within the Hubbard
cult in a book called Enslaved Souls, thinks that it is absolutely possible that the Free Zone will soon have the
right to call themselves Church of the reformed Scientologie.
A. Kintzinger/T. Röll
Focus 35
24 August 1998
Association for Ex-members
The Free Zone has been founded by Bill Robertson, a high ranking Scientologist who left the cult in 1982. Members
of the Free Zone stick to the teachings of Hubbard but refuse Scientology as an organization. The members mainly
communicate on Internet.
