"What I'm going to teach you is how the tax system entrapped you and why it entrapped you."

It's the gospel according to self-proclaimed minister, Reverend Alex Muljiani. But his congregation doesn't come to listen to lessons from the good book; they come to hear about tax evangelism.

Muljiani is a leader in a growing movement of renegades who call themselves 'detaxers'.

"I'll show you how to get out of the tax system today."

The pitch is that you don't have to pay one dime to the taxman. But they're not teaching lessons in legitimate loopholes. Disgruntled taxpayers are dishing out hundreds, even thousands of dollars, to learn how to get away with tax evasion.

Muljiani goes even further in his sermon, by warning the government to get out of the way.

"Just give us our space, stop trying to control us. We want more of our own freedom back to make our own decisions, still following the law as much as it's stated, but allowing us to take more control over our lives again."

Leaders of the detax movement go back a long way to justify their position, 800 years in fact, to the Magna Carta. They claim the ancient charter exempts citizens from paying taxes or carrying a driver's licence.

Muljiani has been preaching the detax gospel for two years and says he's reached 30,000 people. He insists he's governed by God and not by the government.

His method for getting rid of the tax burden is amazingly simple - you simply opt out of the income tax system.

"You send a notice saying that you are misinformed. You were actually signed up in a contract without full knowledge, without full awareness of what was involved, and that was that you actually signed off to create a corporation. And so this notice basically says that this is an invalid contract."

Muljiani says he's never paid income tax and he's never been thrown in jail for failing to do so. He also claims his method is legal and foolproof.

"I haven't had anybody show up on my door... And I'm not worried about it."

On promotional videos, other detax salesmen insist their method is the one that works. For a fee they'll tell you things, such as: Fill in your income tax form in lower case letters and the government can't collect; use "truth language," a baffling code of words and numbers used to tie up tax cases in court; or claim diplomatic immunity by declaring to be a citizen of heaven.

Detaxers claim, these are the magic bullets to get out of paying tax. But there are other messages, such as conspiracy theories about the government and the banks.

"Did you know that a driver is an artificial person? Now let me ask you something else. If you are an artificial person who were you created by? The government.

"Our government are puppets. They are totally 100 per cent controlled by the international banks. If you economically dominate a country, you economically dominate its people and you economically dominate its government," says Muljiani.

Muljiani is a disciple of Albertan, Eldon Warman, one of the founders of the detax movement. Warman insists we were tricked into paying income tax because tax forms aren't valid.

"A voidable contract is where one party has committed fraud against the other in some way or another. And fraud is doing something deviously to take the other man's rights or property by deception," says Warman.

He also has suggestions for keeping money out of government hands. Warman says you should avoid keeping anything in the bank and should instead buy one-ounce gold coins.

"It would be recommended to go to the hardware store and buy some plastic pipe and put [the coins] in there. And then you can bury it in the yard. Bury it in your mother's basement or whatever."

Setting the record straight

But Toronto lawyer David Sherman, one of Canada's foremost authorities on income tax, says the law is very clear. You have to pay tax.

"I don't know how many people they're getting to their seminars and how many people are actually paying the money for this nonsense information. It's completely bogus."

Not just bogus, says the tax department, it can land you in jail. Revenue Canada is now called the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.

"We do take appropriate action... And every month, 10 to 20 cases are published on our website. So people can see we've won in court and these are what the rules are and we want them fairly applied to everyone," according to CCRA Minister, Elinor Caplan.

She says paying income tax is not voluntary and writing your name in lower case on an income tax return does not mean you're opting out, because everyone benefits from tax revenue.

"In Canada we believe in sharing and caring for each other and the way we do that is through our tax system. We all pay our fair share and then we receive the benefits, whether it's health care or education or national security defense."

But detaxers say those rules don't apply to them. Consider the high profile case of detax darlings, Denis and Richard Rosenberg of Winnipeg.

Back in 1999, they were charged with failing to file income tax returns, owing more than two-million dollars. Forced to court, the Rosenbergs used an arsenal of detax techniques.

They insisted their trial be translated from English to the baffling so-called "truth language." They dredged up the Magna Carta, to no avail. They also called themselves sovereign citizens. The judge didn't buy it and sent Denis Rosenberg for psychological testing.

The Rosenbergs insisted the courts just don't understand the detax arguments.

In the end, Rosenbergs lost at a huge cost. Their million dollar home was seized and their belongings and family cottage were sold to the highest bidder.

When anti-tax becomes anti-government

It takes a lot to make Manitoba Justice Jeffery Oliphant speak out publicly. But he says he's sick of wasting his time and taxpayers' money on detax crusaders, causing havoc in the courtroom.

"I known darn well that they're not really there to defend the charge of tax evasion, they're there to make life difficult and to tear away at the administration of justice... Bearing in mind that the judiciary is the third branch of government, really what they're trying to do is bring down the government in their own way."

Judge Oliphant says this is not just an anti-tax agenda, it is an anti-government movement.

"They're more than a nuisance. I think that there's something pretty sinister about this movement and why I use that term is the tactics of intimidation that are utilized to frighten people who work in the justice system."

Toronto lawyer and author, Warren Kinsella agrees. He has studied right wing extremist groups for 20 years. Kinsella believes the anti-tax movement is the first stage of a wider anti-government movement, which could get increasingly fanatical or even violent.

"What these people have done is take that theme, the notion that people don't like to pay taxes, and used it to recruit people into their movement," says Kinsella.

It's an early warning sign Canada should not ignore, says Kinsella.

"They bring them in and they radicalize them and bring them further along to the point where sometimes you see them carrying around guns to defend this notion that they shouldn't be paying taxes."

It's that potential violence that has police concerned. An internal RCMP report warns "increasing militancy by members and associates of anti-tax and other anti-government groups in Western Canada has led to a pattern of criminal activity relating to harassment of... police officers, judges and CCRA officials."

Calgary lawyer and traffic court Judge Allan Fay knows all about that kind of harassment. It started when a man showed up in his courtroom charged with driving an uninsured motor vehicle. His defence was based on that 800-year old charter.

"The gist of his argument was, once again, that the Magna Carta said that the government had no control over a free man and you could freely use the highways and he translated this to me that he didn't have to insure his motor vehicle or obtain a driver's licence or anything of this nature."

Fay dismissed the Magna Carta argument. But suddenly threats appeared and flyers were posted on the man's anti-government website and in Fay's neighbourhood.

"When the death threats started being phoned into my office, that's the point where my attention was brought to task."

Across the country in Ottawa, Betty Bannon also deals with threats to tax officials. Bannon is the National President of the Union of Tax Employees.

"An anonymous letter was sent to nine of our tax service offices in 2000. And they talked about killing GST auditors, boring out their eyes with drills, pouring acid on them, bury the bones, that kind of thing... In another case, two of our members were held at gunpoint."

The tax department says threats are turned over to the police. But so far, no charges have been laid against any authors of these threatening letters.

In the United States the anti-tax movement is more than 30 years old. It has evolved, fueled by ineffective protests and failed court challenges.

"What happens is the people who are behind the anti-tax sentiment become more radicalized, they become more frustrated, they become more angry and they see the conspiracy is at work... So that's when you see them starting to pick up arms," says Kinsella.

In the seventies, gun-toting anti-tax fundamentalists in Oregon, called the Posse Comitatus, became a problem for law enforcement. In 1983, Posse member Gordon Kahl murdered two federal marshals.

Then in the 1990s, a radical right wing group, the Montana Freemen formed. Members refused to pay tax, they threatened judges and bankers, and in 1996 they held an 81-day standoff with the FBI.

Kinsella says violent anti-government individuals commonly start as seemingly non-violent anti-taxers.

"Timothy McVeigh, the guy who planned and executed the Oklahoma City bombing in April of 1995, and that's the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the history of the United States, started as an anti-tax protester."

An anti-hate activist, who has asked that his identity not be disclosed, infiltrated the detax movement in British Columbia almost a year ago by attending seminars and befriending leaders. He worries about an e-mail from the group leader that talks about where the movement is headed.

"He said basically, 'there are four options for us in this world. One is politics and will never work. Second is the courts, we're losing everywhere. Thirdly is civil disobedience - lets start to work at it. And fourth, it's war.' And that, in my book, is where they're heading."

But high profile detaxer Muljiani scoffs at the notion that the Canadian detax movement is nurturing the next Timothy McVeigh.

"We've actually been accused in Canada of being right-wing extremist militia. And I find that quite hilarious because anyway, I'm a minister. I teach in a suit and tie and I'm totally open and I preach non-violence and yet we're being labelled that by the RCMP. I think it's more propaganda than anything else. What they're afraid of, I don't know."

But Muljiani warns if there was violence it would be because the government provoked it.

"If the government pushes things too far and more people get angrier, I think it's time for people to stop being angry and start just doing something about it. And I think the anger part is something we have to be watching out for."

It sounds like a long way off from trying to save a few bucks from the tax man. But buying into the anti-tax movement could come at a price, either jail or helping to sow the seeds of extremism.