| «I am a critic of
the Church of
ScientologyTM. You may
well ask, "Why? Don't you believe in freedom of
religion? Can't you live and let live?", and the answer
is "Freedom of religion is very, very important, but
when a church uses fraud and crime to support itself,
then it's gone too far." To put it simply, the Church of
ScientologyTM hurts people,
sometimes deliberately.
Though I had
a very brief brush with ScientologyTM
while in college, I really knew very little about them
until recently, thinking of them as yet another new
religion, with its own particular quirks. Then in 1995,
an attorney named
Helena
Kobrin, acting on behalf of her client and church,
attempted to remove an entire Usenet news group, "alt.religion.scientology"
(called ARS for short). I had never read this group, but
I was shocked and appalled at the attempt to stifle free
discourse. At first, I followed this issue in other
newsgroups, primarily the ones devoted to "net abuse",
then on
a web site dedicated to the issue, then on
other web
sites as they sprang up and became cross-linked.» |