Presenter: BC Skeptics and Department of Psychology
Title: An Insider's View of the Kabalarian Church
Speaker: TBA
Date: 7:30 pm, 22 March 1996
Location: Halpern Centre at SFU.
Admission: Open to public. Free.

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.