Word: aum
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...anticult arguments that Tung and his senior officials have advanced are forced and fallacious. Tung has said the self-immolation in Tiananmen Square of "cultists" who Beijing says are Falun Gong followers reminds him of Jonestown, 1978. A senior member of his Cabinet associated Falun Gong with Japan's Aum Shinrikyo sect, whose leaders unleashed a deadly gas attack in 1995 in a Tokyo subway, killing 12 people...
...What similarity is there between Falun Gong and Jones-town or Aum Shinrikyo? Almost none. What happened in Jonestown was mass murder, not suicide: Jim Jones misled his followers into drinking poison and 913 died. As for Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese court has refused the government's request to ban the sect though it has handed down death sentences to two leaders found guilty of the gas attack. The court made the distinction between violators of existing laws and citizens' constitutional freedom to practice faith, however unpopular those beliefs may be to others. To link Falun Gong with these groups...
...Japanese, one more wall of safety has been breached. One more belief exploded. Despite rising rates of violent crime, people still generally feel safe, safe enough to let 6-year-olds ride the Tokyo subways by themselves. Yet since the subway sarin-gas attacks at the hands of the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult in 1995 left 12 people dead and thousands injured, the Japanese have had to face the realization that something was becoming terribly unhinged in their well-ordered society. In 1997 a 14-year-old Kobe teenager killed and beheaded an 11-year-old playmate. A year later...
...full, the famously accessible doctor of metaphysics talked with full-bodied candor, for day after day, about his death, the increasingly public divisions within the Tibetan community and the new pressures of his spotlighted life. Accepting donations from Shoko Asahara, the head of the Aum Shinrikyo group in Japan that later allegedly planted deadly sarin gas in the subways of Tokyo, was, he says frankly, "a mistake. Due to ignorance. So this proves"--a mischievous gleam escapes--"I'm not a living Buddha!" He'd love to delegate some responsibilities to his deputies, he confesses, but "even if some...
...bill is a boon for other traditional faiths such as Islam and Buddhism. But it's theRussian Orthodox Church that was the driving force behind the move. The church has increasingly seen its hold over Russian souls wrested away by foreign upstarts from Hare Krishnas to Mormons to Aum Shinri Kyo wannabe-cults. Calling on a war chest (supplied by its duty-free, multimillion dollar oil export and cigarette import deals, according to the Russian-language weekly Kapital), the Church wields enough political clout to squelch the competition -- and keep Russian souls at home...