Whether you're right about L. Ron Hubbard's motives or not is irrelevant. Considering most religions are equally absurd, I find no special reason to force Scientology to pay taxes while exempting other religions.

I happen to be against tax exempt status for religions, as most of the major ones continue to dabble heavily in politics with contributions to politicians and business interests.

There are much bigger fish to fry, spoco. Waste of good talent. Even so far as damaging religions go, scientology is way on down there. Everyone knows it's a joke. What's their death total, assuming they off 100 people a year, no, let's say 1000. They somehow secretly off 1000 people a year. Which obviously is a way overblown number. I'm not saying they do any of that stuff, but even if they did they wouldn't be near the top of the food chain for world evils. Well they'd still be far behind the kill count of other major religions. Meanwhile corporations, central banks, etc. rape the world unabated. We could go on.

I wish people would get this fired up about real problems.

That cost a lot of lives, says DrPawn. Wow. I mean wow.

Why don't you freaking look up the WWI casualties sometime. I'll give you one number, almost 1.5 million french soldiers. That's 1.5 million french pussies I guess? What an ignorant twit.

"A supporter of intelligent design would argue that there is the signature of a god or gods-- that's why the idea is termed "intelligent design." They see enough in creation to lead them to believe that someone was behind what happened."

We could spend a great deal of time discussing whether or not intelligent design has any credibility or not, but that is not what I was responding to. In the post I commented on, you specifically stated the book of Genesis as having explanatory power. Which, if that's true, I stand by my original statement that Genesis has all the explanatory power of any children's fantasy book.

That analogy isn't sound, bhyphenlow. If we suspect someone of arson, we can look for evidence to support this claim.

The genesis account of creation has all the explanatory power of Alice in Wonderland explaining what's in a rabbit hole.

and third world countries.

Tetra Vaal- Because we haven't fucked up third world countries enough yet.