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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

big move if they do - Christian cults have been a powerful force in East Asian societies since WWII, having been seeded as left behind anti-communist force by the CIA. Moonies in Korea, Falun Gong in China, Aum Shinrikyo in Japan. They take millions in donations and smartly reinvest in media and lobbying, including overseas. Doubt Japan can do it, suspect this story will just quietly go away

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As I understood it, the Unification Church has historical ties with the Korean CIA. But I haven't heard about US CIA support for them, Falun Going, or Aum. Would love to learn more about it if you could point me to sources!

Falun Gong is staunchly anti-communist but I wouldn't call it a Christian cult. I got quite interested in them ~20 years ago and obtained their books to see what they were about. From what I recall it was almost all watered-down Tai Chi mixed in with constant emphasis on the founder's supremacy. Whereas Tai Chi regards the navel/core as the center of the body from which all bodily processes and martial art energy originates, and which can be trained through exercise, Falun Gong asserts that a symbiotic being called a 'Falun' is inserted in disciples by Li Hongzhi or his delegates, and practitioners are then taught exercises to 'maintain' it. Tai Chi practitioners I've met regard this as a perverse grift. Their literature had a lot of sci-elements reminiscent of scientology; perhaps the founder recognized a winning formula and adapted it to the Chinese market. I think he fled China and lives in NYC now.

Not really NYC but close: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Springs

The Wikipedia page on Falun Gong is an interesting read.

AFAIK Aum Shikrikyo anf Fulsn Gong are a Buddhidt cults,.

Yeah, Aum borrowed a tiny (tiny) bit from Revelations, but it was overwhelmingly Buddhist rather than Christian. Their killing was initially justified through a corruption of the concept of phowa. "You will become enlightened through death."

Falun Gong and Aum Shinrikyo are not compatible with Christianity.

You think Moonies are?

I don't know much about them, certainly not enough compared to what I know about the other two.

that can be said about a lot of claimed-Christian sects around the world.

Aum cannot be called Christian without truly tortured reasoning. However this is the internet so I'm not surprised.

Here is the wikipedia page on their term (poa) for killing people.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9D%E3%82%A2_(%E3%82%AA%...

They weren't relying on anything related to Christianity for any important justification.

(Not Christian.)

I'm not sure what your argument is. At some point, you have to draw a line between a group claiming to be Christian and actually being Christian, and a group claiming to be Christian while not being so. Otherwise the descriptor "Christian" is not useful for categorisation purposes.

You should see the Ammosexual cults in Texas

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