The Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong, a cult headed by Li Hongzhi, has deceived and harmed a lot of people and been involved in many illegal activities that have seriously disrupted public order, misguided people, and confused right and wrong.

Falun Gong has a set of ridiculous ideas, a basic one of which claims that doomsday is coming, that human beings will be extinct soon, that modern science can do nothing to prevent the catastrophe, that only Falun Gong can save mankind, and that Li Hongzhi is the sole "savior."

Because of this doomsday prediction, Li ordered his followers to concentrate on Falun Gong and forbid them to hold any other belief. Human civilization has experienced at least 81 periodic changes, he says, and society is now deteriorating and if this trend continues, it will be exterminated.

Anyone with any sense can find that during different periods of human history there have been certain social problems, big and small, and that civilization is still evolving in the course of the problems being solved one after another.

Government is useless is another of Li's ideas, one to make Falun Gong the ruling ideology in the world and to allow him to seize power that "overruns the government and the law." Social problems have been emerging, he said, and no government can solve them. And, because neither the government nor the law can solve social problems, he should be the rightful ruler.

He has renounced modern science and said the world should listen to him, otherwise everything will be lost. Li said that the Falun Dafa is the only grand theory that can save mankind and is the most profound and superb of all sciences and philosophies and a ladder for people to ascend to heaven.

Li has held up a banner of "Truthfulness, Benevolence and Tolerance" but can not stand any criticism or alternative views. Whenever Falun Gong is criticized, he gets his followers to create a disturbance. Their besieging of media organizations' office buildings in 1998, the headquarters of the Tianjin Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China and Zhongnanhai in Beijing, the compound of the central Party and government, in April last year can in no way be considered tolerant.

Li said that to practice Falun Gong well people must make a clean break with other ideas and can not mention what they learned before and are forbidden to use what they feel, see, or know, or the doctrines of other beliefs, otherwise, they will learn a false grand theory and damage the grand theory.

By spreading these fallacious ideas Li has actually signed a life-and-death contract with his followers, who have to obey all his instructions and depend on him for everything. He forbids them to read other books or learn other theories and deprives them of the ability to choose between right and wrong.

With these means and the tight control of the highly organized group, Li forces practitioners to follow his fallacious ideas. He has also borrowed Buddhist doctrines to deify himself and claims that he possesses the "body of law" and can install "the wheel of law" in practitioners and give them extrasensory perception.

Some followers were deceived by this and began to look for supernatural powers and many have become psychopathic. In 1997 and 1998 a fifth of the patients in the psychopath ward of a hospital were Falun Gong practitioners.

Li usually belittles great scientists like Charles Darwin and Issac Newton, although he himself is just a junior middle school graduate who doesn't know the difference between an organism and minerals. He said that he is the only person who can explain the mysteries of the universe and that the earth is nothing but a garbage dump. He also says that man was created by gods and life and death and disease are debts acquired in previous lives.

Many people have been confused by these fallacious ideas and have refused to go to hospital for medical treatment when they became ill, and a number have died as a result.

All of this reveals the preposterousness of Li's ideas, then why does he have so many followers? First, Li has taken advantage of people's desire to find a cure for illness. Second, he exaggerates the danger of some problems and social evils that bother common people. Third, he has used the cover of "Truthfulness, Benevolence and Tolerance" to encourage people who lack mental or spiritual ballast or have no beliefs to wish for things that don't exist.