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Japan may seek to dissolve Moonies church in wake of Shinzo Abe killing (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 136 points 11 months ago (13 children)

USA should have done this to Scientology after they infiltrated the CIA or whatever it was.

At some point you have to be able to do so, despite religious protections. Otherwise “we are a religion” is a “get out of jail” card.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

It was various offices but mainly the IRS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

Operation Snow White was a criminal conspiracy by the Church of Scientology during the 1970s to purge unfavorable records about Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. This project included a series of infiltrations into and thefts from 136 government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, as well as private organizations critical of Scientology, carried out by Church members in more than 30 countries.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I was watching a video by right to repair advocate Louis Rossman yesterday and he was basically saying that he's fine to go after big companies and the government to try and get right to repair passed, but he doesn't want to fuck with Scientology because they appear to be psychos that will harass the shit out of him and probably wreck his life if he gets in their way. Apparently they are anti-right to repair because they have some fake ass thetan reading machines they sell for $5000.

Anyway, he mentions some of the shit they did in his video, and while I'm not sure if it's a fact or not, he does mention that they were going after the IRS for years to try and get out of paying taxes after laws changed and they lost their tax-exempt status. After a huge amount of harassment and other crime against the IRS over 37 years, they eventually got their taxes reduced from something like a billion+ dollars to $12.5 million... How did they not just end up in jail?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

It is fact:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Cowen/essays/irs.html

On 1 October 1993, the Church of Scientology obtained tax exemption from the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This ended 26 years of what the Church itself has described as a "war" against the IRS, in which it used extraordinary and in many cases illegal tactics - bugging of government offices, theft of mountains of classified files, private detectives pursuing senior government officials, thousands of lawsuits, full-page attack adverts in US daily newspapers, and so on.

So perhaps it is not such a great surprise that the settlement itself came about in some very unusual circumstances, raising questions about the actions of both the Church of Scientology and the IRS. Neither party has been willing to provide answers, with the IRS refusing to disclose the terms of the exemption agreement in defiance of a court order and US taxation law. But with the leak in December 1997 of the secret agreement, the relationship between Scientology and the IRS is under greater scrutiny now than ever before.

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