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	    BC Skeptics 22 March 1996 Meeting

	An Insider's View of the Kabalarian Church

Presented by the BC Skeptics and the Psychology Department, SFU.

 - Open to the public, free.
 - 7:30 pm, Friday 22 March 1996.

This meeting will be in the Halpern Centre at Simon Fraser University.
For more detailed directions, go to http://www.wimsey.com/BC_Skeptics
and follow the Next Meeting link and the Halpern Centre link. Even if
you know how to find the Halpern Centre, check out the web page anyway!

The speaker, who is currently a student at the Langara campus of
Vancouver Community College, wishes to remain anonymous until the night
of her talk.

She grew up in a family of Kabalarians and has recently begun to
question their beliefs. The speaker has agreed to discuss the doctrines
and practices of the sect. She will also provide an insider's view of
the recent scandals and lawsuits that have rocked the organization.

Kabalarianism is a home-grown Vancouver religion founded in the early
1930's by an English expatriate, Alfred J. Parker.  Parker claimed a
variety of mystical powers.  He was a follower of the spiritual master
Swami Rai Mohan Dutta who inspired him to "formulate a religion that
would combine the spiritual concept of the East with the scientific
concept of the West into one harmonious whole."

In its promotional tracts Kabalarianism claims to be "the master key
to all religious theories . . . (which) contains the answer to every
human problem, physical, mental, or material."  Although Parker wrote
that he had attained "perfect health" by following Kabalarianism's
esoteric health prescriptions, he died in 1964 at the relatively
young age of 67.

After Parker's death, he was succeeded by the present head of the
church, Ivon Shearing who, after temporarily fleeing the country, is
currently awaiting trial on numerous charges of sexual abuse of church
members and financial improprieties.

A dissident group within the church has tried unsuccessfully in the
courts to wrest control of the church's vast assets from Shearing and
the faction that remains faithful to him.  At stake are the church's
prime real estate on Vancouver's fashionable Oak Street as well as
properties and other assets in Edmonton, Calgary, the Okanagan Valley,
Victoria, Seattle, California, and the Netherlands.  The church also
owns a large commercial printing firm, Kal Printing.

A central tenet of Kabalarian teachings is numerology, the belief in
the mystical powers of numbers.  Many Kabalarians change their names
hoping to secure the benefits that names with greater numerological
significance will supposedly confer upon them.

In 1988 a mini-scandal (not necessarily related to Kabalarianism)
erupted in B.C. politics when it was revealed that then premier Bill
Vander Zalm was about to put a numerologist named Jud Cyllorn on the
payroll as a special advisor.  A critical examination of numerology
will be included in the evening's activities.

-- 
ted@wimsey.com  ted@eslvcr.wimsey.com  (Ted Powell)
http://www.wimsey.com/~ted/
Key fingerprint =  B0 E8 43 11 1B 6F A9 DA  FB 8A 89 64 1C C8 A8 E3