Chris Shelton, Social Science’s Blind Spot Regarding Cults |444|

Chris Shelton was born into Scientology and can’t understand scholars who don’t see it for the cult it is.

photo by: Skeptiko

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:00] Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris and as you may recall a couple of episodes back, I had an interview with Ohio State Comparative Religions Professor, Dr Hugh Urban, and what I found particularly interesting in that interview is the rather strange way, in my opinion, that many academics deal with cults like Scientology, or as they sometimes like to refer to them, new religions like Scientology. And as I explained in that episode, and as we’ll talk about today, I found that particularly strange in the case of Scientology because as we explored in that interview, we have direct provable links between Scientology and occult practices, number one. But also with CIA dabbling with extended consciousness, with programs like MKULTRA, MKOFTEN, and even Stargate, which we’ve talked about a lot on this show. So after the interview, one of the things I wanted to do was unpack both parts of that with someone who’s actually experienced the reality of Scientology and that led me to today’s guest, Chris Shelton. Someone who, at a very young age was indoctrinated into Scientology through his parents. Sometimes I think we forget how long Scientology has been around, it’s kind of multigenerational. So imagine as a very young kid, instead of going to Sunday School, you’re going to Scientology. It’s not like somebody corralled you in off the streets of LA and took you into some hokey experiment, like we always see, this is your parents going there and saying, “Hey, maybe this is the way to go.” So, Chris has gone on to create a very successful YouTube channel and a podcast called Sensibly Speaking, where he regularly interviews experts on cults, mind control and other related topics that are important to people who found themselves in this rather unfortunate situation. So Chris, welcome, thank you very much for joining me. Welcome to Skeptiko.  

Click here for Forum Discussion  Click here for Chris Shelton’s Website

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:35] So, as I was pulling together that intro, I had in the back of my mind that there might be some places where you don’t exactly agree with me and that’s totally fine. You do kind of come from this critical thinker, it’s a codeword for atheist skeptic kind of thing.

Chris Shelton: [00:02:53] Yeah, critical thinker, yeah. I kind of have a little thing about that.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:59] Well, I just say that because I’ve dealt with so many blockaded, closed minded atheists who kind of wave this flag of critic

al thinking. Oh gee, like everyone else is uncritical and you’re critical. I mean, doesn’t everyone claim to be a critical thinker? I think they do. I think there are people

 in Scientology, they’ll give you a real scientific explanation for what they did.

But I don’t want to get too kind of far afield here because I do want to serve that first purpose of, you were nice enough to look at the Hugh Urban interview and you shared,