LAS VEGAS - Vitina Marcus says she was being stalked, but this was no ordinary stalking. This one involved the Church of Scientology.
"I felt powerless. I felt hunted," she said. "Constant, constant, constant calls, mail - I couldn't take it anymore."
For more than a year, Marcus says she was targeted by the organization which she says tried to convert her. She suspects the church tried to recruit her, because she's famous.
"I was an actress in Hollywood, and I have done lots of shows," she said.
Marcus appeared in television programs such as "Lost in Space" and "Gunsmoke". Those weren't her only credits. She's shared the screen with actors Kurt Russell, Yul Brynner and Robert Duvall.
That was in her past, however. Now, she wants her privacy.
"This man called and he said, "Oh, you have such a fascinating resume,'" she said. "When I found out he was a scientologist calling me, I told him, 'Please never call me again.' But, that didn't stop him."
Her requests fell on deaf ears, so she contacted 8 on Your Side.
"Where they wouldn't listen to me, they listened to Channel 8," she said.
After 8 on Your Side called the organization, the calls and letters stopped - giving her some peace, quiet and privacy once again.
"I don't want them contacting me ever again and, hopefully, that's exactly what has been accomplished with Channel Eight," she said.
If you have a problem you want investigated, contact 8 on Your Side at 702-650-1907.
http://www.goddiscussion.net/2013/06/13/women-abused-by-religion-and-cults-saturday-june-15-2013-2/
Scientologists distance themselves from Will Smith’s ‘After Earth’
For several years now actor Will Smith and his family have been dogged by rumors of an affiliation with the Church of Scientology, which the A-lister has repeatedly dodged.
Still. that hasn’t stopped some critics from reading into plot elements from his current film After Earth to find religious meaning.
“Will Smith has delivered an incredibly mainstream platform for the Church’s ideology,” wrote Matt Patches in a post for Vulture. “‘After Earth‘s subtext makes every beat feel like a nod to the lessons of [Scientology founder] L. Ron Hubbard.”
“The film’s tag ‘Danger is real, fear is a choice’…. may be a first clue to the scientology subplot. For bottling up fear and emotion is something that former scientologists admit they were encouraged to do,” adds The Sun‘s Grant Rollings.
The movie tells the story (which Will Smith helped conceive) of a father and son abandoned on planet Earth sometime in the future after a cataclysmic event has wiped out most of the population and highly-evolved creatures seek to attack them at every turn.
For their part, the Church of Scientology has distanced itself from any connection to Smith’s box office flop.
“After Earth has as much to do with Scientology as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Moby Dick, King Arthur, Homer’s The Odyssey or countless other stories about protagonists overcoming fears and opponents,” read a statement by the church to NextMovie.com.
Still, even if it isn’t a Trojan horse for Scientologist dogma, After Earth is still being compared to a movie that overtly was — John Travolta’s notorious bomb Battlefield: Earth.
That science fiction film (released in 2000), which was based on the literature of Hubbard, was a massive financial and critical disaster on par with After Earth and it temporarily sidetracked Travolta’s Hollywood career.
Similar questions have been raised about Will Smith’s bankability in his film’s wake.
Smith has tried to be light-hearted about the fate of After Earth, telling Jimmy Kimmel in a recent interview: “You get the [box office] information moment by moment. Someone is calling you every hour and I was like, ‘Uh oh.’ I felt like a fighter. It’s been over two decades since I’ve had a movie that wasn’t at number one. …That’s over now, buddy! Thanks!”
Movie-goers have every reason to be cynical about After Earth. The film is conceived, produced and co-written by Will Smith, one of Hollywood’s overrated and unabashedly narcissistic leading men. The Fresh Prince not only conveniently casts himself as a superstar warrior hero, but he also hands his spoiled-brat-turned-actor-rapper son Jaden an early 15th birthday gift: the lead role in a nauseating father-and-son sci-fi shtick.
But there’s more. The film’s much-repeated tagline, “danger is real; fear is a choice,” is taken straight from the Scientology quackery called Dianetics. Indeed, Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett are famous closet Scientologists who have made sizable donations to the famous cult.
Then there is the director, M. Night Shyamalan, hired by Smith to take his ego trip to the silver screen. The Indian-born American prodigy once showed tremendous promise by wowing audiences with The Sixth Sense and, one of my favourite alien movies of all time, Signs. The signature twist finales in his early films were so brilliant they shocked us to the core and knocked us right out of our seats. But then came an unfortunate streak of bad films, beginning with Lady in the Water, followed by The Happening and The Last Airbender. Airbender was so horrendous that I promised myself I would never go to another Shyamalan film ever again. Fool me once, shame on him; but fool me four times? Well, there won’t be a fourth time!
But how quickly I forgave and forgot. And so there I was, on a Friday night, watching another manipulatively suspenseful Shyamalanian tale. After Earth is about a stoic warrior Cypher Raige stranded with his attention-craving son Kitai on a hostile planet after their spaceship has crash-landed. Immobilised by an injury, Cypher must guide young Kitai via a walkie-talkie through perilous jungles to retrieve a homing beacon far far away. In the end, Kitai finds the beacon, kills the beast and proves his worth.
For a film directed by someone known for his unpredictability and twists, After Earth is surprisingly linear. Perhaps the only twist is that there is no twist at all. It is a predictable quest movie with a hackneyed coming-of-age underpinning. It is The Lord of the Rings meets Star Trek, with a bit of Avatar and Hunger Games tossed in. It is also punctuated by half-baked ideas like the weird accent with which some (but not all) actors speak and which adds nothing to the story. Jaden Smith’s performance is uneven but not terrible, thanks to Smith Senior's coaching. The acting lessons he gets from daddy on the movie set mimic the tutelage Kitai receives from Cypher in his jungle adventure, in a contrived case of life imitating art.
Notwithstanding everything you've read in this review thus far, if you manage to resist being cynical about the film or choose to stay blissfully ignorant of Will Smith’s planet-sized ego and his subliminal scientology message, then After Earth is an eye-pleasing film with a few bright spots that border on clever. What it is not, however, is the big comeback blockbuster that Shyamalan so desperately needed to revive his languishing career..
The one-sentence mock apology, which is trending on Twitter as the "best newspaper apology ever", is the Sun's response to a demand by lawyers advising Scientology's UK branch leaders.
The church - which says humans are aliens who landed on earth - took offence when the Sunpublished an article about flying saucers sighted over its headquarters in the English countryside.
The church demanded the apology for the article, subtitled "Close encounter of the absurd kind", and got more than it bargained for.
The story began last Saturday when the Sunpublished a report about the pilots of three passenger jets who saw "two flat, silver discs" in the airspace over the Scientology HQ in West Sussex as they were queuing to land at England's second major airport, Gatwick.
The encounter, which happened on the morning of December 30 last year, lasted seven minutes and was substantiated by air traffic control staff who spotted six UFOs on their radar before they suddenly vanished.
The Sun quoted a former UK Ministry of Defence UFO investigator, Nick Pope, who called the sightings "spectacular" and said the evidence was "first rate - the witnesses are experienced pilots and there is radar evidence to back up their stories".
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Source: Supplied
UK airport authorities said a Boeing 777 pilot first raised the alarm at 8.53am after spotting "two flat silver discs", followed minutes later by a Boeing 767 and an Airbus 319 which saw the same "saucer-like" shapes.
The 777 crew said they looked "man-made" and "toylike".
The Sun spoke with investigators, who had considered the objects might be balloons or kites - a notion dismissed by Mr Pope, who said "none of the theories hold water".
When the newspaper published the story with a Photoshopped picture of Scientology's West Sussex property, the church sent a letter of complaint, requesting an apology.
The Sun duly published it's apology yesterday:
"In an article on Saturday headline 'Flying Saucers over British Scientology HQ', we stated 'two flat silver discs' were seen 'above the Church of Scientology HQ'.
Following a letter from lawyers for the Church, we apologise to any alien life forms for linking them to Scientologists".
The Church of Scientology's Sydney branch told news.com.au that its followers didn't believe humans were aliens.
"It's a common misunderstanding," Sei Broadhurst said.
Ms Broadhrust said she thought the Sun's UFO article was "ridiculous" and that the idea that there could be "UFOs is rubbish".
Here are some facts about Scientology:
1. It has been widely reported that Scientologists believe humans are alien beings called Thetans who had innumerable past lives in extraterrestrial cultures before arriving on Earth.
2. The "religion" was founded in 1952 by L. Ron Hubbard (known in the Scientology biz as "LRH"), an American pulp fiction author of science fiction and fantasy stories.
3. A one-time US naval officer, Hubbard created an elite inner group of Scientologists called the Sea Organization whose members wear naval-style uniforms and address each other as "sir".
4. Scientology aims to restore the Thetan to a state of "total freedom" through long courses of study and "auditing", which rid the Thetan of "engrams", recordings of distressing experiences from this and previous lives.
4. Hubbard wrote a book, Battlefield Earth, about the year 3000 when the earth has been under the rule of the alien Psychlos, a brutal race of giant hairy humanoid aliens who have enslaved the remnants of humanity who are used for manual labour or survive in primitive tribes in remote areas outside Psychlo control.
5. Celebrity Scientologist, John Travolta, made a film of the book, often referred to as "the worst film ever made".
6. Celebrity Scientologists include Tom Cruise, Lisa Marie Presley, Kirstie Allie and Taylor Dayne.
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