Wikipedia doesn't make them sound so bad - "three central tenets of the belief are Truthfulness (真, Zhēn), Compassion (善, Shàn), and Forbearance"

The troubles seem to stem from "April 1999, when over 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered peacefully near the central government compound in Beijing to request legal recognition and freedom from state interference."

I guess peaceful demonstrations against the state are going to get you tiananmen squared over there.

I would not rely on wikipedia for politically controversial information.

And I would not rely on the Chinese state to be a neutral source of information on anything at all.

Ah, yes, but cultnews.com is the bastion of truth

> Their teachings are racing, homophobic, sexist and misogynistic

I could think of several large sects of the big three montothiestic religions that preach most of the above. Apart from racing. Racism perhaps, but not racing.

Does that make it right to persecute and torture them?

Only if you subscribe to the "evil deeds done against bigots are not really evil" doctrine.

What's interesting to me about the Falun Gong is the relation I draw between the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (THK) movement and the Falun Gong. In the 1800s, the THK lead the Taiping Rebellion, a massive civil war in which the THK took over Nanjing and large amounts of Chinese Territory. I believe that the Communist Party of China's arguably overly-egressive response against the Falun Gong, which yes is rightfully an unscrupulous cult, is indicative of their own insecurities about how they maintain power. There are many people in China that commit all manner of scams, being that it is a country with a wide variety of income classes - America, for one, is the same in that regard. There are many racist, homophobic, sexist and misogynistic, wild cults in other societies - but that is what comes with pluralistic societies, which China is not being that they are one-party ruled. The key question is - why does the Communist Party of China attack the Falun Gong so disproportionately aggressively over how it does to other organizations and forces within its own country who perpetrate similar ills? One is tempted to think that the answer lies within the size, strength and power of what the Falun Gong had attained in the 1990s, coupled with the historical allegory of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. I believe that more than anything, the Communist Party is trying to protect its rule of the country, as well as the general order and progression of society, as is their philosophy as a vanguard socialist movement, rather than a pluralistic movement.

regardless we are not in the business of killing scientologists just for being scientologists. From your description of them I would assume that the communist party in China dislikes them because they want to be the only party in town when it comes to enriching the leaders at the cost of everyone else.

They may be cult-ish, but they don't seem nearly as bad as Scientology. If anything, they're a little more like Catholicism. They preach against homosexuality and deny evolution, but they aren't violent at all, or have beliefs that anyone would consider crazier than what fundamentalist Christians or Muslims believe.

They may not be the paragons of virtue they claim to be, but they definitely have done nothing to deserve mass torture and murder. Real cults like Scientology and Aum Shinrikyo have killed their own members, and non-members. Falun Gong hasn't.

Your source makes the supports the claims you make, but it itself does not source (some of it more grievous) claims.

I'm willing to accept that the claims of them suing various people. But I wouldn't call these cases frivolous per se: They could very well believe that they were denied participation in a parade on a discriminatory basis. I wouldn't necessarily say I think it is the right approach to take but the examples they give are not that absurd in today's world. (And could also be the work of but a small subsection of the group).