IRS is very poorly equipped to make a distinction between what is a religion and what is not.

I grew up in the American South, the segregated South. Now we have a black man who is president. It was an age of apartheid, and now that's over. It was an age of two superpowers frozen in a cold war, and now that's resolved. So history marches on, except for this Arab-Israel conflict, which seems to have a claim on being eternal.

Look at what Jimmy Carter did. Look at the risks he took for a country that wasn't his. Israel has benefited unbelievably from that. To fail to give him credit seems unfair.

Churches are tax exempt because they are supposed to provide a public good. To prove that good to the IRS, churches arent supposed to hoard their money. They are supposed to spend it on goods and services for the faithful. Under this pretense, the church has made massive investments in tax free real estate all over the world. And when it comes to labor costs, they are almost free.

There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism.

When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word 'I' carried a lot of fright for me.

People often pulled into Scientology want to address personal problems in their life, and Scientology says we have technology that addresses these kinds of problems. Just focusing on the problems and trying to remedy them can be helpful.