[ 16 March 2006: Message edited by: Hephaestion ]

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According to what I've heard, falun gong is pretty homophobic in and of itself...

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Unfortunately true, according to this Report

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Nonetheless, despite his insistence on tolerance, some of his views, on homosexuality, for instance, are decidedly unforgiving.

'The disgusting homosexuality shows the dirty abnormal psychology of the gay who has lost his ability of reasoning at the present time8.'
In a 1998 talk in Switzerland, Li said gay people would be 'eliminated' by 'the gods'. Asked in Frankfurt, Germany, that year whether gays could practice Falun Gong, Li answered, to a round of applause, 'You can cultivate, but you must give up the bad conduct'.

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On mixed-race marriage his views are similarly intolerant, as he sees such deviance as evidence of alien interference. Li also regards mixed-race or 'cross-bred' people as rootless and deviant, a sign of morally bankrupt times. Mixed-race people are a plot by the evil extraterrestrials who populate his cosmology, which spills over with accounts of lost civilisations, higher realms and mysteries that science cannot grasp.

'By mixing the races of humans, the aliens make humans cast off gods,' he is quoted as saying in a lecture in Switzerland.

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Having read their literature, in which there is described the wheel that each and everyone of us has in their stomach, and a variety of other nonsense, I really can't take them seriously.

I believe they are some sort of weird conglomeration of Moonism, Christianity, occult, you name it. There only purpose seems to be to increase their numbers, they don't really have any program, except to lie like mad and see who gets interested.

That doesn't mean I think they should be badly treated. After all, we got our own nutcases and I think they deserve to be treated as normal citizens 'til they commit some offense.

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Originally posted by Jacob Two-Two:
I can't see the harm if lots of people went to them. In fact, I think it would be great. As to the organisation, it does seem a bit culty, but that makes up only a small portion of the people practicing the exercises. We can distinguish between the practice and the organisation, kind of like people who find the scientology workbooks useful but aren't part of the church.

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It is easy to ridicule Falun Gong on the basis of some of Master Li Hongzhi's wilder claims and bizarre beliefs. However, overall, the emphasis for the practitioners is on cultivating virtue. Whether they hope to levitate, become gods, or merely take care of their personal health, they are told, again and again, that the way up to higher development is by means of practising truth, compassion and forebearance. Far from being evil, these are qualities that are all too rare in our self-centred consumer culture, rarer still in Communist China.

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[ 17 March 2006: Message edited by: Makwa ]

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that the way up to higher development is by means of practising truth, compassion and forebearance. Far from being evil, these are qualities that are all too rare in our self-centred consumer culture, rarer still in Communist China.

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I don't think these qualities are so rare. It would be more accurate to say they are not encouraged (or even actively discouraged) by our respective social constructs. This is why it is important to create socially mainstream ways in which such qualities can be cultivated. The Falun Dafa movement is attempting to do just that, and having great success in China, despite harsh government repression.

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why not practice yoga if its simply that the exercises are good.

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Originally posted by maestro:
Falun Gong and Falun Dafa are utterly unbelieveable sources of anything, I'm sorry to say.

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