From: whatis@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu (....What Is?....)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Re: religion??
Message-ID: <17112@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 20 Jul 91 18:24:23 GMT
References: <4621@beguine.UUCP> <46474@netnews.upenn.edu>
Sender: news@ai.mit.edu
Distribution: alt
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 41

In article <46474@netnews.upenn.edu> nweiner@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Norman Weiner) writes:
>   Actually, if I remember the Time magazine article correctly, the IRS won
>a court battle a few years back that took away the Church of Scientology's
>tax exempt status, saying that it is not in fact a religion.
>
>   Norman (no .sig)

To hear the other side of anything in the Time article, I recommend you
pick up a copy of "Fact vs. Fiction: A Correction of Falsehoods
Contained in the May 6, 1991 Issue of TIME Magazine" at any org.
The particular claim above is talked about in there.  It's about
80 pages long and takes on a lot of the strange claims of the Time
article, although it could not hope to tackle all of them.  The LA Times
article of Summer '90, however, is taken on in a 6 volume set, of whilh
I have two volumes.

In any case, the book says the following about the above claim:

The 1967 IRS ruling cited by Behar concerning the Church of Scientology
of California was invalidated by the IRS itslef and has been meaningless
for nearly 25 years.  That church also has not been the mother church
of Scientology for a decade.  (It refers to a copy of an IRS document
supporting it.)

Anyone who wants to discuss Scientology really ought to read Dianetics
first.  I am a computer science major and an engineer, and the theory
of the human mind laid out in Dianetics made sense from both an 
evolutionary and a systems designer's point of view.  That is, if
I were designing a mind,d I would probably have designed it much like
that, and if there was no designer, I can see how it would have
evolved that way.

Incidentally, I can personally attest that "blowing engrams" does in
fact happen and you can leave an auditing session with an incredible
sense of relief after blowing a few heavy engrams.  Dianetics describes
such a phenomenon.

--
Steve Boswell         | This opinion is distributed in the hopes that it
whatis@ucsd.edu       | will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY...
whatis@gnu.ai.mit.edu |