The death of Reverend Sun Myung Moon hopefully ends one of the strangest chapters in U.S. security industrial complex history.

Heavenly Mountain Tract To Be Sold
Developers Earl and David Kaplan later disavowed transcendental meditation, angering some who said they had invested with the understanding that transcendental meditation would be the basis of the community.
France steps up struggle against religious radicals
Reuters Tom Heneghan December 12, 2012 France will deport foreign-born imams and disband radical faith-based groups, including hardline traditionalist Catholics, if a new surveillance policy signals they suffer a “religious pathology” and could become violent. A French Islamist shooting spree last March that killed three soldiers and four Jews showed how…
Maharishi free school fails to enter pupils for Sats
Hannah Richardson December 13, 2012 A flagship new free school where pupils practise transcendental meditation twice daily has been reprimanded by the government after it failed to put any of its pupils into compulsory national curriculum tests. Pupils at Lancashire’s Maharishi Free School receive what is described as a “consciousness-based”…
The Psychology of Cults
Radio National – All in the Mind If you sign up to a weekend personal development workshop, you don’t really expect to emerge 10 years later a shadow of your former emotional self. What sets many groups apart from what we regard as cults is a range of powerful psychological…
Yet Another Look At The Transcendental Meditation Paper
Forbes Larry Husten November 25, 2012 Editor’s note: Below are two responses to Robert Schneider’s defense of his Transcendental Meditation paper, which Schneider wrote in response to my earlier article about the publication of his paper. In the first part I respond to some of the general issues raised by Schneider. The second part,…
Unification Church Leader Outs Ex-Gay Guru Richard Cohen as Moonie?
Ex-gay maverick Richard Cohen is a member of the Unification Church, according to the leader of the religious group better known as the Moonies.
Evil, part 4: the social dimension
GuardianClare Carlisle Does contemporary society give rise to conditions more conducive to evil than in the past? November 5, 2012 So far in this series I’ve considered evil as if it were an individual matter – a question of personal virtue, or the lack of it. In emphasising the relationship between sin…
Ethical Standards for Thought Reform Consultants
Cult Intervention, deprogramming, exit counseling RATIONALE (History of cult interventions, deprogramming, exit counseling) Thought reform includes the use of highly manipulative methods and processes such as undue social and psychological influence, behavioral modification techniques, disguised hypnosis and trance induction, and other physiological and psychological influence techniques. These techniques are used in…
Ayn Rand on Human Nature
Scientific American Eric Michael Johnson October 5, 2012 “Every political philosophy has to begin with a theory of human nature,” wrote Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin in his book Biology as Ideology. Thomas Hobbes, for example, believed that humans in a “state of nature,” or what today we would call hunter-gatherer…