When I attended the 6th Asian Heritage Street Celebration in San Francisco, I stopped at a booth for Shen Yun Performing Arts staffed with attractive, college age girls. My wife loves dance, and I thought she might be interested. I asked if this dance troop was part of a local college or university. The girl who handed me the brochure said yes. She lied to me.
6th Annual Asian Heritage Street Celebration
That evening, when I arrived home, I handed the brochure to my wife, who said, “That is Falun Gong.” I’ve written about The Falun Gong and Costco, about A Visit from the Falun Gong, and the more I learn about this group, the more sinister they become.
Turning to the Internet and using Google, I learned that New Tang Dynasty Television, Shen Yun Performing Arts and The Epoch Times all appear to be part of Falun Gong. I also discovered that Falun Gong must buy lots of Internet AD words so Google searches lead to one of the gears in the Falun Gong machine. In fact, I had trouble finding anything but Falun Gong propaganda and had to keep altering my search terms to get beyond the Falun Gong firewall.
In time, I discovered a piece published in the Buffalo News saying, “the promoters and creators of “Shen Yun,” who have picked up a reputation for misrepresentation and deception over the years, have adopted the questionable propagandist tactics of the very government they criticize in their productions.”
Digging further, the New York Times reported, “China’s decision to ban Falun Gong was made after 10,000 adherents staged a silent protest outside the gates of Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party’s leadership compound in Beijing, to complain about reports in the state-run media that the group said were defamatory. Security forces apparently had no advance knowledge of the demonstration, which took place on April 25, 1999. The Chinese government began treating the group as a threat to national security.”
How about visiting Belching About China
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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It’s a cult.
Cults are scary. I read a lot about Scientology and they scare me too taking over people’s thinking from kids on up. I don’t think freedom of religion should allow this kind of cult to control people like this.
I agree but there’s a danger in someone being put in charge of deciding what religion is a cult and the ones that aren’t. If we had laws that made it illegal to organize a brainwashing cult, then—for sure—powerful and wealthy religions/individuals would bribe elected officials to ban rival religions.
There’s an old saying, “Buyer Beware”. The same goes for any religion you join. The fact is we don’t have to belong to any religious to be close to God. All we have to do is study the Bible and join with a few trusted friends once a week to spend some time talking about what we learned from the Bible that week and what we think we learned from what we read. And when someone disagrees with you and insults your intelligence and ability to reason calming that they have the only right answer, beware.
The Bible was written metaphorically and not literally so take caution when translating what you think the scripture says. Wars have been fought, millions killed, and people tortured, burned at the stake and tossed in prisons because someone with power interpreted passages in the Bible in such a way as to give them the power to abuse others.
In fact, the Bible often warns of false prophets who will come among us to mislead us and take us down the path to Hell. In the end we are responsible for what we do to others in life and blaming the leader of a Church for what you do in God’s name will not get you off the hook when your judgement day arrives.