They should try Germany where the prosicuters office refused to indict on poetic belief and theology princiles.  The Germans simply called it what it is,  --  A for profit organization  --  ,  ergo not a religion.  Good ole'Germnay because of their Nazi past can  prosicute on "brain washing"  issues.     Scientology has never tried to appeal that court decision,  they know they would lose on brain washing.

They're all wrong, and most of them try to take your money in some way or another. But, I think Scientology is particularly annoying because it has a level of centralization, exclusiveness, and sophisticated brain-washing that few other religions rival.

I love France. They have work to do, but they're years ahead of this side of the world.

 ZOMG 1st Lutheran Lady Priest or what not.

BERLIN — Germany's Lutheran Church has elected a woman to lead the nation's Protestants for the first time in its history.

Margot Kaessmann was overwhelmingly voted into the church's top position on Wednesday.

The 51-year-old bishop holds a doctorate in theology and has four grown children. She is one of only two bishops in Germany's Protestant church.

She was ordained in 1985 and has held many offices within the church. Kaessmann is viewed as being politically active and media savvy.

 

Wow that is SOME progress. Oh wait, no you still believe in the jewish  zombie messiah. FAIL. It is funny to see them wiping off the deck chairs, but the iceberg is still on a collision course. The more the organized religions attempt to 'moderate' the more desperate they come off. 

Only Russia and China (to condense the list to world powers) say fuck you to political correctness. Everyone else buys the lie.

"Who is buying the lie? Not me."

But your government does, as does mine. That's what I meant.

"But if you think they treat their citizens well compared to the west, I'd disagree with that."

I didn't mean it that way. I meant only that they, to my knowledge, do not kow-tow to political correctness the way the West does. Which means they have that advantage over us. It hardly can be linked to human rights abuses and the like, which is an advantage we hold over them.

It doesn't matter what it's about. The point is they don't do it.

WHOA WHOA WHOA!  wtf?  did we drift back into the cold war here?  what is all this shit about russia?

i'll admit, they have a huge economic problem, an even bigger housing problem, an enormous organized crime problem, and their government is rife with corruption (then again, so is almost every post-communist government), but since when did they start having political prisoners again?  i'm pretty sure they've come a long way since the NKVD and the gulag. 

while there are visa requirements, russians and non-russians can travel to and from russia freely, and anyone who wants to protest anything is free to do so (at least, it seems so, since i've seen several anti-government rallies on slovak news over the last few years).  i've certainly never heard tales of government oppression from the russian students i've met, nor the american missionaries who are friends of my family who lived there for a year.

of course, one could rule the situation in chechnya, for example, as a human rights violation (and some have), but, right or wrong, that had to do with preventing territorial secession, not targeting an ideology (though the attempted secession was ideologically motivated).  still, this is a far cry from the iron curtain, five-year plans, and neighbors informing on neighbors. 

   Yes, I would love for the French government to go all beserker against the Muslims but I believe that I saw somewhere that France contains the largest Muslim community compared to all other Western societies. They number in the millions ?  Also, in the recent past wasn't there some major long-term rioting by Muslim youths over some perceived grievance, similar in scope to the Los Angeles riots of the early 90's ?

  If the French were going to regain the upper hand against these religious freaks they may have waited too long.   More power to them though ( let the French bring back the guillotine...the muslims weren't the only group that used decapitation as capital punishment. )

well, i don't know about that, but it sounds like hearsay to me, with no way of substantiating it.  anyhow, even in the most liberal western governments you're going to have advisors suggesting draconian methods every now and then, and occasionally they will be implemented.  shit, look at guantanamo.

my point still stands that at this time we can no longer speak of russia as a country that enshrines the suppression of individual liberties, regardless of its many infrastructural problems.  we certainly can't put it on a par with china.

actually, off-topic, i just read an interesting book called mao: a reinterpretation by lee feigon.  it's a rather positive look at mao's career, which automatically turns many people off, but i think it's good, if for nothing more than the fact that in the last 30 years mao scholarship has drifted overwhelmingly to the anti- side, especially with li zhisui's memoir and then jung chang and jon halliday's detailed but viciously biased study. 

lee doesn't excuse the terrible human loss under mao, but he doesn't dwell on it either.  nor should he have to, since there are buttloads of very thick books dedicated to it already.  instead, he argues that toward the end of his life mao tried to pull the country away from its soviet-style bureaucratic government toward a more western-friendly stance (hence his meetings with kissinger and nixon). 

his most interesting chapter is the one on the cultural revolution, in which he argues that it was ultimately positive, in that it challenged the chinese people to question and even rebel against the party apparatus.  he argues that this in fact led to china's drift toward capitalism, and that in the '80s deng xiaoping (who was ostracized during the cultural revolution) actually led a stalinist reaction against the effects of the cultural revolution (hence tiananmen), which by this time were too strong to stop.  feigon contends that it's only the serendipitous fact that deng happened to rule china at the same time as the effects of mao's later policies were beginning to manifest themselves that led to his being hailed by both modern chinese intellectuals and the west as a great reformer.

it's fairly thin and a quick read (about 160 pages, i think).  though it takes the form of a brief analytical biography, i would definitely read a thorough balanced biography of mao (philip short's, for example) before reading this, since it is short on details.  as a bit of an amateur mao scholar, however, i'll say i didn't recognize any factual errors in feigon's work, though the jury is still out on his analysis.