Scientology is shrinking fast and getting richer. How is this possible?

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Even as Scientology in Australia has shrunk to fewer than 1700 adherents its wealth has increased with this country now a haven for $326 million in assets belonging to the controversial religion. So how has a church that's gotten much smaller become so ...

Paul Schofield was rebuilding his life. It was the late 2000s and he was working at a factory in Knox, in Melbourne’s outer east, when he noticed a Holden Kingswood parked across the street.

The process of leaving Scientology had been slow and full of loss and grief. “It was a continuing story of abuse,” Schofield recalls now of his time in the church. “But you had the mindset, ‘yes, it’s bad here but it needs to survive for the sake of the planet or else everyone is going to be dead forever’.”

“Perhaps the four most salient aspects of this have been its ongoing conflicts with mental health professionals and anti-psychiatric beliefs; its sometimes aggressive and litigious approach to critics; its disputed status as a bona fide ‘religion’; and concerns about its internal discipline of its members,” they write.

Hubbard knew Australia after having served here during World War II. He had once described it as “the country perhaps with the greatest and brightest future on the face of the Earth today”. The High Court found that “charlatanism is a necessary price of religious freedom” and that a “lack of sincerity or integrity” from a religious leader was not “incompatible with the religious character of the beliefs, practices”. Courts in Britain and New Zealand have cited that decision, while a decade later the IRS gave up after years of legal battles and granted Scientology tax-free status.

 

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Tax ALL Religion. Simple 👍

There are a lot of really dumb people who are easily parted from their money after being sold a lot of delusional snake oil by aggressive snake oil salesmen.

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