"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
27 January 2008To ward off that L. Ron hubbubClayton Jones proposes a new statute:
I've been playing around for a long while with an idea, what to do about Scientology, and especially what to do about the kind of crap it tries pulling in courts to prevent its exposure, and I've come to the conclusion, just a small tweak to Federal law would put a really big dent in it, which tweak would be, that no person or organization claiming exemption from the operation of any Federal law (income tax, e.g.) on religious grounds would be permitted to hold or claim, directly or indirectly, any copyright, patent, trademark, or trade secret. Either you're a religion, or you're a business; you cannot be both.
It occurs to me that if we had reasonable copyright laws — which would require, among other things, getting rid of the DMCA, a task at least as difficult as dislodging Xenu — we wouldn't have to care about how the Thetans operate. Besides, I'd expect even some of your non-insane religions to object to this proposal, and I have some serious qualms about the whole idea of empowering a government body to declare who is and who isn't a religion. (I won't mention any names, but its initials are I.R.S.) Still, I admit to a certain amount of nostalgia for the time when Tom Cruise was just an actor with very white teeth. Posted at 9:55 AM to Immaterial Witness |