Freedom of Religion or Belief · Spiritual Minorities · Global Advocacy
14 stories
André Tarassi takes the ADFI's own bulletin editorial of late 2003 line by line: the follower who says he is free proves he is not, the brainwashing that is selective enough to leave him absolutely normal before a judge, the cult compared to a drug dealer and a pimp so that no mediation need ever be attempted - and the Camus quotation on true dialogue with which the editorial closes.
André Tarassi on the MIVILUDES 2005 report, which abandoned the pledge not to name groups and became an inventory of spiritual minorities and their "dangers".
André Tarassi on the MIVILUDES 2004 report: professional secrecy urged towards denunciation, the About-Picard law's nil record, and doctrine equated with danger.
Two CICNS commentaries on the MIVILUDES 2006 annual report: André Tarassi on the mission's academic screen, Éric Bouzou on its psychology of "mental hold".
André Tarassi's line-by-line CICNS commentary on the first MIVILUDES annual report, from the "consensus" not to be broken to the criteria of dangerousness.
Asked what spirituality means, the French answer moral values, love, the inner life and the beauty of nature; ninety per cent say they still feel wonder. André Tarassi sets those survey findings beside a public conversation in which the places where enchantment is sought are described as dangerous, and beside the record mistrust the same public reports towards those doing the describing.
1 July 2013
André Tarassi's Reflets article: an exclusive laïcité, a mission run like a militant grouplet, figures that swing from 8 children a year to 80,000 in danger, and the case for a neutral observatory instead.
1 April 2012
André Tarassi's March 2011 stocktaking of the association's first seven years, and the strategic turn it announces: dialogue with the authorities having gone unanswered, 'stop complaining, file complaints' becomes the new direction.
1 March 2011
André Tarassi reads Sarah Chiche's novel L'emprise as a safe bet on the anti-cult literary wave, then turns to the phrase that leapt out at him, a victim 'emptied of her me', and asks what the modern self being protected from the cults actually is.
1 August 2010
André Tarassi dismantles the anti-cult movement's proudest claim, 'we judge acts, not beliefs': beliefs determine acts, rituals are unreadable without the inner experience that founded them, and the belief/act division is a discrediting device.
1 December 2009
André Tarassi traces French anti-cultism to 1981 and the Vivien mission, names its most committed actors on the left, surveys the 'without-religion' half of France, and reads the 1999 party-funding proposals as anti-democratic.
1 February 2007
The full January 2007 exchange between Michel Thys, Belgian free thinker and Grand Orient mason, and André Tarassi of the CICNS: twenty questions on belief and choice, the suicide and child-protection figures, the iceberg argument, and two spiritualities talking across the divide.
1 January 2007
The companion essay to Tarassi's abuse dossier: why French media consign politicians' escapades to oblivion while blowing up the gurus', and what a taboo domain offers a society in search of scapegoats.
1 January 2006
André Tarassi's 2006 dossier on the great sexual-abuse affairs involving spiritual leaders, from Chopra's ten-minute acquittal to the Mandarom defamation rulings: what survived the courts, what remained rumour, and the invisible abuse of score-settling behind the stigmatisation campaign.
1 January 2006