Free Republic

In a groundbreaking case, a Paris court will decide for the first time whether to dissolve the Church of Scientology in France, which is facing charges of organized fraud. The demand was made by French prosecutors on Monday (June 15) as they wrapped up their case against the church's Paris headquarters and bookshop. If found guilty, the institutions may also face a nearly $6 million fine. Six members of the church are also on trial, and may also face heavy fines along with prison sentences if convicted. The plaintiffs, two former Scientologists, claim the church conned them into spending tens...

In the interest of fairness, cultural diversity, and moral ambiguity, The Last Crusade takes pleasure in publishing a rebuttal to our article “Meet America’s First Muslim”. From; Supreme Minister Chief Minister Dr. Ra Saadi El The Moorish Science Temple Islam & Greetings, Would like the opportunity to defend the integrity of our religious organization and to give light as to what is The Moorish Science Temple of America and what we actually stand for. Presently, Islam is seen as being the most rapidly growing religion within the United States and more so within the Federal and State prisons. In addition...

Why does the politcally correct left act the way they do? What makes them incapable of listening to reason and what is the driving motivation in their behavior? Political correctness is a religious cult. These are people who have replaced God in their lives with a God substitute that seeks to create a utopian world. So many politically correct leftists are athiests, others are neo-pagans and liberal Christians. The liberal Christians are the hardest to understand because they are the most confusing. They may go to the church where they grew up but their beliefs are not quite the same...

An American cult is what happens when radical individualism meets religion and philosophy. A cult becomes cut off from the mainstream of traditional religion and the global community of faith. It begins to converse only with self. This dangerous isolation is an important topic, as American religious communities such as the Episcopal Church drift in this direction. Mainstream global Christians do not delight in this drift as they recognize the temptations of the cult all too well from their own temptations to isolation. Extreme stories litter the paper every day that show the consequences of isolation. Cults begin to delight...

Marxists claim that Marxism is a science. It is not. It is a sort of pagan religious cult. It is a theology. It is a form of superstition. Marxists claim that Karl Marx understood capitalism and economics. He did not. They also claim that the entire validity of Marx's set of theories on all subjects rests ultimately on how valid Marxist economic thought is. Marxist economic thought was completely wrong. Marx claimed that all products contain value that is directly proportional to the amount of labor embodied within them. He was wrong. All the rest of Marxism is based entirely...

Euro chiefs ban 'Miss' and 'Mrs' The European Parliament has banned the terms 'Miss' and 'Mrs' in case they offend female MEPs. By Simon Johnson 15 Mar 2009 The politically correct rules also mean a ban on Continental titles, such as Madame and Mademoiselle, Frau and Fraulein and Senora and Senorita. Guidance issued in a new 'Gender-Neutral Language' pamphlet instead orders politicians to address female members by their full name only. Officials have also ordered that 'sportsmen' be called 'athletes', 'statesmen' be referred to as 'political leaders' and even that 'synthetic' or 'artificial' be used instead of 'man-made'. The guidance...

Scientology Spokesman Tommy Davis Confirms Xenu Story Los Angeles, CA - After years of dismissing the story as false, Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis has confirmed that the story of mankind's origins involving an alien overlord named Xenu is indeed authentic Scientology teaching. In the exclusive interview with KESQ News Channel 3 reporter[1], Nathan Baca, Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis was asked about the story of Xenu, known to senior Scientologists as part of "Operating Thetan Level III", or "OT III" for short. Davis denied the story at first (as he has done in the past), stating that these were claims "forwarded...

... Dawkins loves ‘science’, Darwinism in particular, and delights in singing its praises. Christians delight in science as well—as the handiwork of God. But Dawkins loves science as god, and consciously tries to build a world and life view around science, wearing many hats in the process...

Scientology, Seizures, and Science by Edward Hudgins January 13, 2009 -- Jett Travolta, the sixteen-year-old son of actors John Travolta and Kelly Preston, died recently of what the autopsy found to be a seizure. The boy had a history of seizures and unconfirmed reports suggest that his parents acted responsibly to ensure he was on medication to mitigate his condition. We don’t know yet what caused the seizure—a change in medication or dosage, or a worsening of the underlying condition that caused the seizures. I’ve held in my arms a dear loved-one during her seizures, someone who fortunately now survives...

Some interesting new audio and video of Jim Jones and the citizens of Jonestown doing, among other things, declaring that their "Revolutionary Suicide" is to further the cause of Marxist-Leninism. They took a vote three weeks before Ryan arrived and unanimously voted for it. It includes some video of members specifically discussing dying for Maxist-Leninism. Also, unseen VIDEO (not just audio) of the various members singing the Soviet National Anthem (note: I actually have them doing this 2 times all the way through and the third time for just the last part of the song). Also includes more previously heard...

The radio call came before the suicides began. On Nov. 18, 1978, Jim Jones Jr. was 18 years old and living in a Peoples Temple compound in Georgetown, Guyana, 150 miles from the Jonestown settlement. The previous night, he and his teammates on the Peoples Temple basketball team had played in a tournament, narrowly losing to the Guyanese national team. That afternoon, via shortwave, the Rev. Jim Jones, the boy's adoptive father, contacted him with a chilling order: All 60 Temple members living in Georgetown should immediately "get knives, wire and scissors and take our own lives." The son tried...

Congresswoman remembers day of horror Rep. Jackie Speier November 16, 2008 "I'm 28 years old, and I am about to die." I was curled up behind the wheel of an airplane on a jungle airstrip in Guyana, South America. This isn't what I expected when I signed on to work for a United States congressman. Our fact-finding trip to investigate the Peoples Temple in Jonestown had gone horribly wrong. I lay as still as I could, pretending to be dead, as an unknown gunman pumped five bullets into me at close range. Pop-pop. Pop. Pop-pop. When the shooting stopped, I...

Hundreds of thousands of tourists flock each year to the Virginia estates of George Washington, at Mount Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson, at Monticello. Now, a Dutch businessman in Jakarta is hoping a Nov. 4 victory for Sen. Barack Obama will turn a house where he once lived into a presidential landmark—though on a much smaller scale.Bartele Santema, who runs a string of bars in the Indonesian capital, already has a name for the cafe-museum he wants to open where Sen. Obama lived between the ages of 8 and 10 with his mother and Indonesian stepfather: Sweet Home Obama.Mr. Santema...

Barack Obama sought to close the deal with American voters yesterday as he heralded the dawn of a new politics that will heal divisions, appeal to “our better angels” and restore a sense of “higher purpose”. His speech in Canton, Ohio, was designed to frame the final days of an often bitterly fought presidential contest around the uplifting themes he had emphasised at the outset of his campaign. While he was at pains to tell supporters that they cannot afford to “let up for one day, one minute or one second”, Mr Obama told an exultant crowd: “In one...

In recent times, America has been experiencing an explosion of neo-pagan movements in concert with a relentless assault on truth, reality, first principles, universal moral law, and the created order of being---the two sexes (male and female) for example. These movements interface with mystical, quasi-Buddhist, occult Gnostic, and other ‘blood and soil’ notions: New Age cults, transcendental meditation, Wicca, goddess worship, ‘gay’ shamanism, reincarnation, Luciferian Theosophy, the Great Apes Project and all other animal rights agendas, Gaia worship, deep ecology, channeling and other such notions. All are types of pantheism, which stress in one way or another that mankind is...

I am neither against Scientology or am i a Scientologist. I am trying to educate myself and I want to know what other FReepers think about it. Please give me your honest impressions good or bad. Let it rip

Can Mormon women wear pants when visiting a temple? Can men wear cummerbunds during a marriage ceremony? Are vasectomies an appropriate birth control option? The answers to these (no, no, and not really) and similar questions about Mormon practice and leadership might not seem to be especially secret, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints isn't pleased about secret church documents hitting the Internet. In this case, the cause of the displeasure is the confidential Church Handbook of Instructions, published by Wikileaks on April 16. The church is currently trying to get the information pulled down using copyright...

He wrote to me in all innocence, a reader from a Catholic country where Mormon missionaries had only recently begun to gather congregations of believers. "I asked my priest," he said, "and he told me that Mormons are a cult." Setting aside the obvious riposte ("What did you think your priest would tell you, that Mormonism was true Christianity as restored by God to living prophets?"), I think it's worth considering just what we mean by "cult" and seeing whether it applies to the Mormon Church. Cult as Bad Word Anti-Mormons use "cult" the way gay activists use "homophobe"--as an...

[An oldie-but-goodie from 4/22/2005, appropriate for Earth Day and the environmentalist cult.] April 22, 2005 -- Today is a religious holiday that should make us all into atheists. April 22, 2005, marks the 35th anniversary of Earth Day. For many people it's simply a day to think warm and fuzzy thoughts about clean air, crystal lakes, verdant forests and soaring eagles. Until the 1990s May Day marked the worship by the communists of an abstraction called the "workers" at the expense of real flesh-and-blood workers and every other human being on the planet. The result was human carnage. Now Earth...

Ryan Alberti had a pretty good idea what to expect when he signed up for the Web class jointly taught by Eckhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey. He’d already listened to a CD of Tolle reading his books “The Power of Now” and “Stillness Speaks” and liked his simple, gentle way of speaking. “I think he’s really a genuine guy that has an ability to translate some spiritual things in a very down-to-earth way,” Alberti said. Alberti doesn’t watch Winfrey’s daily TV show, but his wife is a big fan and tells him about it. “Even though I haven’t seen (the...

cult: n. Obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle, or thing. Four men who are “called to lead a special mission”. Four groups of people who insist that their leader has found the true way; either to happiness, truth, safety, or all three. Four leaders, one method: all preach destruction that will surely be the outcome if others do not heed him and his One True Way. Four leaders, four different fates: one leader is dead, one is behind bars, one man is on the run for his life and one still walks free. 25 Signs...

The raid on a polygamist compound in Texas could signal the beginning of the end of a lifestyle that has flown under the radar in America, according to an expert on cults. The Fundamentalist Church of Latter-day Saints, which operates the compound near Eldorado, Texas, along with other communities around the country -- including Colorado City, Ariz. -- fits the classic criteria of a cult, according to Rick Ross. He says there are about 50,000 polygamists living in North America and Mexico. ``The level of harm done by polygamist groups is horrific, and, in particular, this group (FLDS) has a...

Prosecutors have new weapons against polygamy and marriage involving underage teens because Texas lawmakers heeded Utah authorities' experience with the Mormon splinter group raided in Eldorado. In 2001, Utah authorities began a crackdown on underage marriages and arranged marriages of teenagers, targeting members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon splinter group that had lived in two towns on the Utah-Arizona border. The allegations made national headlines -- young girls forced to marry older men, teenage boys ejected from the community to create a surplus of brides, and police officers who turned a blind eye...

ELDORADO, Texas - The secretive and insular community established near this West Texas town by a radical offshoot of the Mormon Church is considered by the sect's members to be a holy shrine populated by its most fervent adherents and is propped up financially by members of the group living in other states, according to law enforcement officials and former members. Interviews with law enforcement authorities and former members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints depict the Yearning for Zion Ranch, which was raided last week by Texas authorities, as an outpost whose adult residents...

What is private revelation? What is the meaning and purpose of private revelation? How does private revelation fit into the overall divine plan of glorifying God and saving souls? What is the significance and role of private revelation within the entire Mystical Body of Christ. the Church? What should be our prudent attitude toward private revelation? Before the Church has had time to investigate a particular apparition, how can we prudently determine whether an apparition is probably true or probable false? What is the prudent use of private revelation? What are the dangers of the imprudent use of private revelation?...

"The Canadian government has ordered a Christian ministry that teaches doctrine and the differences between Christians and cults shut down because its reference materials were "critical" of the beliefs of those who are not Christian, WND has learned."..... For example, the ministry addresses the issue of "fads," including a "creeping Eastern mysticism" appearing in some churches, "turning meaningful prayer meetings into mind-emptying rituals called contemplative prayer promising experiences of a spiritual nature." "Feelings have often replaced the solid word of God," the website warns. "Numerous churches have become 'seeker' churches, disposing of the parts of the Gospel message that might...

The Canadian government has ordered a Christian ministry that teaches doctrine and the differences between Christians and cults shut down because its reference materials were "critical" of the beliefs of those who are not Christian, WND has learned. So what used to be called MacGregor Ministries with offerings in how to recognize and eliminate "faulty fads" in Christian churches has been re-created in the United States, and now operates under the name MM Outreach Media Ministries. Lorri MacGregor, who has dedicated her life to explaining the straight and narrow of Christian beliefs since she found her way out of the...

Obama - Cult of Change Are you one caught up in the hysteria of Obama mania?

The video is available at http://www.WeAreTheOnesSong.com and features appearances by Jessica Alba, Ryan Phillippe, George Lopez and others. Will.i.am’s previous video, “Yes We Can,” has racked up more than 10 million views.

<p>LOS ANGELES (Catholic Online) - First, it was Larry Sabato and then it was Rush Limbaugh. Sabato is the Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics of the Center for Politics at the University of at the University of Virginia.</p>

Bleeding-heart types looking for a "minority cause” for which to advocate in the 2008 presidential elections are torn between the candidacies of a woman, two African- Americans, a Hispanic and a former mayor of Cleveland who is more of a communist than Vladimir Putin. Tough choices, those, and all of them Democrats. In the interest of fairness, however, the name of Mitt Romney should be added to the shopping list of those searching for an oppressed minority to support. As a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), Romney is aligned with one of...

Was The Book of Mormon given to Joseph Smith by an angel or created from a work of fiction? Who was Solomon Spalding and did he have a connection with Joseph Smith? This book critically examines key historical documents, personal testimonies, and records of 19th-century Mormon history concluding that The Book of Mormon is an "adaptation of an obscure historical novel" written by Revolutionary War veteran Solomon Spalding during the War of 1812. In twelve chapters, the authors lay out the evidence for the assertion that Sidney Rigdon, Oliver Cowdery, and Joseph Smith Jr. adapted and embellished the Spalding manuscript...

With word that the FairTax political operation has run out of money, the talk in Iowa is that a new organization may be coming to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's aid. A 501c4 organization is said to be forming to help Huckabee in the 30 or so days leading up to the Iowa Republican caucus. Huckabee has been leveraging the support of two semi-obscure groups in Iowa, the FairTax group, a one-time offshoot of the Church of Scientology, and a second-tier home-schooling coalition, which operates a 501c4 and has been attempting to organize support for Huckabee in Iowa, South Carolina,...

On Sunday, someone handed me an article from the November 12 U.S. News and World Report, in which they interview one of the Mormon Church's Council of Twelve Apostles - the LDS governing body. Its tied in with the discussion relating to Mitt Romney's Mormon Faith. In the article, Elder M. Russell Ballard answers a series of questions posed by USN&WR reporter Jay Tolson. In reading the interview it's easy to see why dialogue breaks down so quickly between Christians and Mormons. Whether Mr. Ballard is disingenuous or clueless is tough to tell, but his answers to the questions show...

Tony and Susan Alamo were photographed with scores of their followers in 1974, at the height of their power. Today, Tony Alamo is back. Photo by Gilbert B. Weingourt/Zuma Press LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Clad in matching T-shirts with bejeweled cross logos, members of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries are once again saving souls on Hollywood Boulevard. Since the late 1960s, followers of notorious cult leader Tony Alamo have recruited and distributed literature on this star-studded sidewalk. On this sunny summer afternoon, they're handing out heavily footnoted, paranoid screeds proclaiming the end of the world is nigh and branding the U.S....

A common gripe of the Left in general and the DUmmies in particular is that conservatives are a bunch of ignorant, superstitious, rightwing fundamentalists. They like to portray themselves as rational humanists who are somehow above religious "superstition." However, if you scratch a DUmmie, you will often find that, below the surface, there exists a bunch of groupthink ignoramuses who swallow outlandish cult rantings without question. As evidence I present this DUmmie THREAD titled, "I'm thinking of leaving my coven/school." Right away, the fact that DUmmie MorningGlow uses the word "coven" seriously is a clear tell of her irrational...

Tony and Susan Alamo were photographed with scores of their followers in 1974, at the height of their power. Today, Tony Alamo is back. Photo by Gilbert B. Weingourt/Zuma Press LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Clad in matching T-shirts with bejeweled cross logos, members of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries are once again saving souls on Hollywood Boulevard. Since the late 1960s, followers of notorious cult leader Tony Alamo have recruited and distributed literature on this star-studded sidewalk. On this sunny summer afternoon, they're handing out heavily footnoted, paranoid screeds proclaiming the end of the world is nigh and branding the...

Miami, the cruise ship "Mecca" and one of the top ten ports in the United States is also one of seven major U.S. cities listed by the FBI as "terrorist havens".  Miami Deputy Port Director, Khalid Salahuddin, an Orthodox Muslim, was a member of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakham's anti-Semitic thugs.  Today, he heads his own mosque, Masjid Al-Ikhlas, in North Miami.  Salahuddin has ties to radical Islam.  He officiated at a fundraiser for the American Muslim Association of North America, a group headed by Sofian Abdelaziz, who was Vice President of Hamas ran "Health Resource Center for Palestine"....

Sydney - An Australian Roman Catholic who considers himself the rightful pope and claims to communicate with the Virgin Mary once a month was jailed on Friday for having sex with an underage girl in the cult community he led. Self-proclaimed prophet William Kamm, who received a six-year sentence, showed the girl letters he said were from the Virgin Mary that blessed their union. The 56-year-old, who is already serving a term for a similar offence, told the girl she was chosen by the Virgin Mary to help him populate the earth with his "mystical seed". The abuse began when...

A PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS of a CULT at NECEDAH, WISCONSIN This article was referred to in the Thread (07/21/07): “A SIMPLE, COMMON SENSE REBUTTAL to SSPX, SSPV and CMRI”. Despite the fact that modern man has developed greatly the sciences and technology, we are in the midst of a cultural and historical as well as religious crisis which has contributed to the very proliferous increase of the cults today. This paper will analyze the dynamics of a particular cult at Necedah, Wisconsin. The analysis will follow closely a typical psychological analysis of the most basic system, the family. After a brief...

Wife seeks divorce from 'Jesus Christ reborn' Where was the money coming from? That was one of many questions that crossed my mind when the CNN Miami Bureau first began working on a story over a year ago on a religious group -- critics call it a cult -- that had sprung up in a working class area of Miami.... The group "Growing in Grace" is the kind of organization that causes one to ask questions. Its leader is a charismatic minister named Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda who preaches that he is the second coming of Jesus Christ. De...

The following article (with the university class reference documents) was written with the motive to help my sister and her husband, with seven children, to leave the traditionalist groups SSPX, SSPV and CMRI and to return to the one, true Catholic Church. If you want the reference documents (Ecclesiology.doc, Religious-Freedom.doc, Psy-Cult.doc and Subsists.doc), send an email to: josephdwight@hotmail.com; please specify if you want the documents in plain text format or MSWord format with the footnotes incorporated, or in one document all together in either format. A SIMPLE, COMMON SENSE REBUTTAL to SSPX, SSPV and CMRI When I was younger my...

Romney 'unlikely' choice of evangelicals Posted on Jun 21, 2007 | by Rachel Waligorski KANSAS CITY, Mo. (BP)--The "overarching and primary concern" why evangelicals likely will not vote for a Mormon for president is the Mormon claim to be the only true Christian church, a Southern Baptist seminary president said during the International Society of Christian Apologetics' annual meeting in Kansas City, Mo. If Mormons were to call themselves "a new religious movement," that would be one thing, said R. Philip Roberts, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which hosted the June 1-2 meeting. "But I have a very difficult...

(AP) SALT LAKE CITY -- Mitt Romney said Saturday that criticism of his Mormon religion by rival GOP presidential campaigns is happening too frequently. “Clearly, any derogatory comments about anyone’s faith—those comments are troubling. The fact they keep on coming up is even more troubling,” Romney said during a fundraising trip in the home state of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormon church is one of the fastest-growing religions and claims about 12.5 million members worldwide. But many evangelical Christians in crucial primary states such as Iowa and South Carolina consider the faith a cult. Romney’s...

The Pakistani Tourism Minister resigned yesterday after hardline Islamic clerics accused her of obscenity for hugging her instructor after a charity parachute jump. Nilofer Bakhtiar was photographed in brightly coloured jumpsuit and hugging her instructor after a tandem jump to raise money for child victims of the earthquake that struck Pakistan in October 2005. The images provoked the wrath of clerics in Islamabad, who accused Ms Bakhtiar of posing in an obscene manner and violating the Islamic moral norms. A religious court set up by the clerics at a radical mosque in Islamabad issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against...

John Travolta has launched a bitter attack on a veteran BBC reporter over a Panorama film that exposes the methods used by Scientology and questions whether it is a "brainwashing cult". The Hollywood star has written to Corporation chiefs accusing journalist John Sweeney of venting "personal prejudices, bigotry and animosity" and harbouring "hatred against my religion Travolta also urges the BBC to halt the screening of the documentary tomorrow. The star's intervention is the latest in what Sweeney says is a campaign of intimidation since he embarked on his film, in which former Scientologists claim they were forced to cut...

Yahweh Ben Yahweh, the South Florida sect leader whose brand of black supremacist preachings drew his followers into a brotherhood of murder and terror in the 1980s, has died in Miami, his lawyers said. Lawyer Ben Kuehne said Ben Yahweh, 71, died in his sleep overnight. ''Cancer is the cause,'' Kuehne said. Ben Yahweh had been ill with prostate cancer. The self-proclaimed ''Black Messiah,'' Yahweh based his operation in the bunker-like Temple of Love in Liberty City, once telling his followers that white people were terrorists and that unbelievers were devils. Federal prosecutors, however, branded him the most notorious criminal...

I know that I'm going to get in trouble in some quarters for the following statement, but I'm going to say it anyway. I love Mormons, and I deeply appreciate the role played by the LDS church in our nation and our culture. I have returned from a lengthy absence from EFM (I was out of town working hard on my day job) to find a debate in these pages about whether Mormonism is a "cult," flipped on the TV to see a two part special about Mormonism on PBS, and turned on my computer today to see this absurd...

Am I an anti-Mormon bigot for simply raising this question? In this column two weeks ago (available here), I stated I would vote for Mitt Romney should he win the Republican nomination, and that “though I am willing to unite with and befriend Mormons in common cause to advance our shared values, I am hoping to be a voice of clarity – unwilling to allow Mormonism to be mistaken for orthodox Christianity and unwilling again to disqualify a candidate simply because he is from a faith tradition so different from my own.” I also stated, “many Mormons in recent years...

They call themselves the most hated family in the US and they picket funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. So what did Louis Theroux make of the Phelpses after three weeks? In any country, let alone one as patriotic as the US, few actions are as provocative as protesting at a soldier's funeral. The Phelps family pickets mourners across the country, to mark what it describes as God's revenge on the US for tolerating homosexuality. Their actions are in the name of the Westboro Baptist Church, which numbers 71 and is headed by "Gramps", preacher Fred Phelps. The church, which...