Scott Goehring

Scott Goehring started an anti-religious newsgroup, in 1991 with a forged ID from an Internet server at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Goehring said that he “forged it to make it look like it came from him [a member of the Church]. He also admitted that he is anti, meaning against the Scientology religion.

[imgleft]http://www.religiousfreedomwatch.org/extremists/images/scott-goehring-2.jpg[/imgleft]But it was quite apparent to a person who spoke to Goehring about his forged newsgroup in 1994 that Goehring had an ulterior motive as well for the forgery of the newsgroup. This person declared Goehring told him that his wife had been married to a Scientologist prior to their marriage in 1992 and he forged the newsgroup “in order to generate information on Scientology that he could use to dissuade his wife from returning to her former husband [a Scientologist].” In the end, the wife he tried to keep with the forged newsgroup left him as well.

Goehring also acknowledged that he had never been a Scientologist and had no authorization from anyone in the Church to start the newsgroup using the name of a Church member. He made it evidently clear that it was intended as forgery and a negative platform against the Scientology religion.

Thus, Goehring’s fraud is the foundation upon which anti-religious extremists assault the right of freedom of religion of Scientologists.

Anti-religious posters to the newsgroup have tried to legitimize Goehring’s fraud with a massive campaign of false reports on the newsgroup about the Scientology religion. However it appears they have only succeeded in proving to the Internet and the world at large, including law enforcement agencies, that they are anti-religious extremists with a number of them discovered to have criminal backgrounds. The recent conviction of Keith Henson, long time poster to that newsgroup, for a hate crime in Riverside County, California shows the preceding statement to be valid and that the fraud and hate are manifestly the legacy of Scott Goehring on the Internet.