For 34 years, thousands of Scientologists traveled to Clearwater and stayed in hotels owned by their church, enjoying a free ride from the 5 percent tourist tax that other visitors pay at Pinellas’ commercial hotels.

But that quietly changed earlier this year.

Pressed by the staff of Pinellas Tax Collector Diane Nelson, the Church of Scientology agreed to start collecting the tourist tax a few months ago and pay it monthly to Nelson’s office, the St. Petersburg Times has learned.

It’s a surprising reversal that will generate significant new revenue for Pinellas’ tourist promotion efforts.

But the change raises questions about another tax that Pinellas hotel guests pay – the 7 percent sales tax. Does the church now collect that tax from its guests too?

The Florida Department of Revenue, which separately administers the sales tax, wouldn’t say, citing state laws that make confidential almost all information about sales-tax payers.

The church, meanwhile, suggested it doesn’t collect sales tax on hotel stays. Read the full story here.

Then, if you haven’t already done so, inoculate yourself against the Scientology cult — which we consider to be a commercial enterprise masquerading as a religion, and acting like a destructive cult.

Vanity Fair asked Scientologist Juliette Lewis whether she celebrates Christmas.

“I’m a Christian! I think there’s so much confusion because people don’t understand a religion where you can be another religion but you can still practice Scientology,” the actress replied.

That’s a standard Scientology claim — and like so many other things that religious cult teaches — total nonsense.

Scientology is incompatible with Christianity because its teachings (not to mention a good many of its practices) violate the essential doctrines of the Christian faith.

The Church of Scientology has been offering alcohol-dependent Aborigines a drug bomb therapy, which it has been told could kill people with kidney problems.

The Scientologists this week responded to a warning by the Northern Territory Health Department and stopped distributing literature which promotes a dangerous drug detoxification therapy.

“This was not an easy book to write. For three years following my departure from the Church of Scientology, I was not able to write anything sensible about my experience. Then gradually, the onion layers of indoctrination started to peel off, one by one, and I began to get some distance and perspective.”

“I knew that I could never tell part of the story; it had to be the whole story or nothing. When I would try to tell people about the abuses I experienced within the Church of Scientology, they would ask me one thing: why had I stayed so long? And understanding that meant telling the whole thing.”

“Once my blog account was completed, my readers and friends encouraged me to expand Counterfeit Dreams to book-length and publish it.”- Jefferson Hawkins

A father claims Narconon International and the Association for Living and Education International are fronts for Scientology, and that he paid them $35,500 for “essentially worthless treatment” for his drug-addicted son.

He says the groups run rehab programs “to enrich themselves and to provide a recruit base for the Church of Scientology rather than to provide competent treatment for chemical dependency.”

The government is urging councils across the country to stop giving hundreds of thousands of pounds in tax breaks to the Church of Scientology.

The communities secretary, Eric Pickles, said a majority of the public did not want the “controversial organisation” to be given the kind of favourable treatment usually reserved for charities and questioned this use of public money.

Initially, fire officials attributed the blaze to an electrical short circuit, but once the identity of the owners became clear, investigators began to suspect arson.

Arab and Jewish residents of Jaffa have mounted protests in the hope of denying the Scientologists a foothold in the city and launched a petition on Facebook calling on the authorities to keep the organization away

Nine construction workers were saved from a burning building in Tel Aviv. The building, which is undergoing renovations, belongs to the Scientology cult.

Arson is suspected as the cause of the fire.

In a rare clash between courts, a federal judge today said he will order a state judge not to interfere with a lawyer’s handling of a federal case involving the Church of Scientology.

A visibly irritated U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday granted a motion by lawyer Kennan Dandar, who is representing the estate of Kyle Thomas Brennan in a wrongful death suit against the church.

[Note: due to Scientology's behavior we file news items like these under the heading of 'hate groups.']

In 2007, while investigating the Church of Scientology for Panorama, reporter John Sweeney had a dramatic on-camera confrontation with a church spokesman named Tommy Davis.

The church was accusing the reporter of bias and it attempted to stop the documentary from being broadcast – a campaign backed by Scientology A-lister John Travolta. Sweeney has returned to investigate the church again.

Among the countless negative things the Church of Scientology is known for is the cult’s on-going abuse of the legal system in its never-ending dirty-tricks campaigns against opponents.

Want a current example? The Tampa Tribune reports how the cult “is practicing its aggressive form of litigation management against a longtime legal protagonist who has twice represented clients whose relatives died while in the care of church members.

Lawyers for the church are using a secret settlement agreement in a state case to try to remove Tampa lawyer Ken Dandar from a federal case they claim has no merit.”

One of the Scientology cult’s most vocal critics, Tampa lawyer Ken Dandar, is in a pickle.

Six years ago, he settled a wrongful death case against the church on behalf of the family of Lisa McPherson, who died in 1995 after 17 days in the care of cult members in Clearwater.

Part of the settlement agreement, approved by a judge in state court, required Dandar to never again represent anyone suing the Scientology cult.

But last year, Dandar took on another wrongful death case against the church’s Flag Service Organization — in federal court.

Subsequently Senior Circuit Judge Robert Beach in June 2009 ordered Dandar to withdraw from the new case.

But on April 12, U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday told him he cannot get out of it. The reason: No other attorney wants to take on Scientology. It is, after all, a cult known for its hate- and harassment campaigns against critics.

So Dandar is stuck between a state judge telling him to leave Scientology alone and a federal judge telling him he can’t.

Australian of the Year Prof Patrick McGorry is among a number of top psychiatrists who have been targeted by the Church of Scientology after they spoke out against the religion.

The University of Melbourne professor, with Monash University’s Prof Louise Newman and Prof Ian Hickie, director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute at the University of Sydney, publicly backed calls by South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon in March for a senate inquiry into Scientology.

Claire and Marc Headley, who left Scientology in 2005, said the church controlled them with threats of harsh punishment and other tactics that prevented them from leaving the Sea Organization, Scientology’s religious order.

But U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer ruled that the Sea Org is protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise of religion.

Prominent members of the Church of Scientology of Amsterdam have dived into a niche in the market: launching economic doomsday scenarios in conjunction with selling gold.

Two senior Scientology officials, Manuel Nugteren en Joop van der Linde, operate within an opaque organization that — via the internet — attempts to interest individuals in investing in gold. These potential investors are told that economic collapse is imminent, and that gold is the only safe investment.

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