Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 22 April 2002
Wednesday, 25 October 2006

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Cult to Religion

Rodney Stark and W S Bainbridge (Theory of Religion) realized that religions often began as cults, but once they were accepted widely, they became respectable and are called religions. A cult is a group of believers gathered together by someone with authority and charisma. Often the founders of cults are psychopaths, and the religion being part of their delusion, but, by acting as a sublimation for the psychosis, it can keep them from total mania.

Others, and often the successors of a founder, are entrepreneurs who see the potential in it for making money out of gullible people. Such people have often been “joiners”, those who try successive cults or philosophies before settling on one that suits their ambitions. Having gathered a group, they persuade them that the rest of the human race are too sinful, and must not be mixed with for fear of corruption, so, they spend less time with people outside the cult, and more time with cult members, becoming more extreme. The in-group are us, the godly, while the outsiders are the children of the Devil.

Many religions, like Christianity, began as cults sprung as a heresy from some current religion, or brought in from an alien one. Even so, in large measure, when “respectable”, the religion operates using cult techniques—psychological mind control and deception to brainwash new recruits and members. Many Christian sects and churches are cults. The purpose of the leaders is often personal gain, either of wealth or simply of power over people, but it is expressed in altruistic terms.

So, professional religionists also use mind control, and, naturally, the victims do not know, and think they act entirely freely. It is comical that Christian parents object to the methods of the Moonies when their own religion would never have gotten going without the same methods. They are deliberately kept ignorant of Christian history, of course, and do not realize, but ignorance is a poor excuse. They ought to want to find out, but one of the taboos of cult membership is questioning the cult—its leader or its principles.

Distinguishing Cults and Religions

Cults are supposedly distinguished from respectable religions by being focussed inwards while religions focus outwards (Singer, 1995). It is special pleading. Successful cults do focus outwards. Their purpose is to grow, but in growing they have to preserve their central beliefs, or they will not stay the same. So they have an inward focus too. Succesful religions are no different.

Hassan (1990) claimed religions do not have an authoritarian figure at the center. It would be hard to say that of the Catholic Church whose pope is the very embodiment of central authority. The Moslem religion has no central authority, but it depends on the authority of a system of imams each of whom leads his own mini-cult within the umbrella of Islam. Hassan added that religions do not recruit using deception, and do not use psychological techniques of persuasion.

It is hard to believe that anyone could be so naïve as to make any such assertion. The whole of the assured descriptions that Christian preachers give of heaven, hell and the afterlife are plainly deception since no one has or could have experience of them and tell the tale, and much of Christian recruiting makes blatant usage of psychological methods, and none are so blatant as the revivalist preachers. Surveys show 20% in the UK and 65% in the US believe in hell, but none, despite the guilt driving conversion, thought they would end up in this hotter place. All believers accept the priests’ assurances that, just by believing, their deckchair in the balmy place is reserved. No one thinks they will end up in hell, despite its much wider gate and easier path.

Someone with low self-esteem will be more easily persuaded than someone with high self-esteem, but only when the beliefs offered are unreasonable, incredible or otherwise unbelievable. In such a case, anyone with even moderate confidence will reject what is offered. Only those least confident and with the poorest self-esteem will be willing to yield to someone’s authority and accept it. That is why the religious leaders like to get at children who have yet to develop their critical faculties, and self-confidence. Keeping member’s esteem low is also necessary to keep them attached to the cult. Christianity does it by its constant emphasis on sin, something that even the best people cannot escape, they are told, because they have it at birth.

Methods Used

The methods used are most extreme and unsubtle in some cults or sectarian churches, but most Christian groups are more subtle, using some methods at some time. The degree to which they use them measures how far they have moved from free will to mental manipulation, or from God to the Devil, should we say? The professionals begin by showing their church in the most positive light. Then they increase the pressure so gradually the subjects do not realise what is going on. They are trapped! Much then is demanded of the congregations, who are expected to be utterly obedient. Leaving is deliberately made difficult—apostasy from Islam is punished by death! A website no longer extant (Jade’s) listed some of the methods:

1. Hypnotic techniques—extended audio, visual, verbal or tactile fixation drills to increase suggestibility, excessive exact repitition of routine activities, sleep restrictions, nutritional restrictions
2. Environment control—controlling time use and social and physical environment, by rewards and punishments, contact with family and outsiders discouraged, economic and other dependancy on the group reinforced
3. Information control—communication controlled, doubting or discomfirming information in group communications prohibited, rules for permissible topics to discuss with outsiders, and an “in-group” language often used to force members to think uncritically, within the narrow black and white parameters of the group’s doctrine
4. Personality change—causing the victim to evaluate central aspects of self and prior conduct negatively, efforts to destabilize and undermine the convert’s basic consciousness, reality awareness, world view, emotional control and defence mechanisms, victim guided to re-interpret his life’s history and to adopt a new version of causality
5. Confidence removal—creating a sense of powerlessness, by subjecting the victim to intense and frequent actions and situations which undermine their confidence in themself, their judgement, and their ability to make effective decisions
6. Emotional control—strong aversive emotional arousals using non-physical punishments such as loss of priviledge, humiliation, social isolation, social status changes, intense guilt, anxiety, manipulation and other such techniques, hyper emotionalism and the manipulation of feelings, such as inducing alternating emotional highs and lows
7. Intimidation—psychological threats such as physical or mental illness, reappearance of a prior physical illness, drug dependence, economic loss, social failure, divorce, disintergration or failure to find a mate
8. Mystic manipulation—persuasion of the higher purpose and special calling of the group through a profound encounter or mystical experience, using narcotics, a staged prophecy or staged “miracles”
9. Greed and vanity—induce change, whether on a global, social or personal level, appeal to vanity and elitism in being given a chance to become one of the elect, elite, chosen ones, promises of power over others
10. No more secrets—self-disclosure to the other members, often in the context of a public gathering in the group, admitting past sins and imperfections, even doubts about the group and critical thoughts about the integrity of its leaders.

Dr Singer, a psychologist and expert on cults, thinks that people can be over confident in their ability to withstand cult propaganda, and that actually leaves them vulnerable. The basis of this is the so-called “Self-serving Bias”. It is the confidence people often have that “such and such does not apply to me”. You can say that most Americans are self deluded, are bad drivers, or believe everything they read, and many of them will agree because they will not include themselves among those who are. Everyone thinks they are free of the characteristics the rest have. Acceptance that psychological programming can affect you just as much as anyone else is the best defence against it. Then you are really on your guard, and not in a state of false security.

Nine Signs of Cult Recruitment

Dr Brad Sagarin on the Working Psychology Website has listed nine signs of cult recruitment. Not all of them need be present, but if several of them are, then baneful influences might have been at work.

1. Personality changes—Do you find yourself saying, “He’s a different person” or, “I don’t know her anymore”? Cult membership often requires and enforces a change of personality
2. Sudden shifts in values or beliefs—psychology shows that beliefs and values resist sudden change. A sudden change might show that the person has joined a cult.
3. Changes in diet or sleep patterns—Cults and religions often impose a required diet, pork is forbidden, or all meats, and practices that might interfere with sleep such as programmed praying. The aim is indeed programming, and also cost—spare money is meant for the cult.
4. Refusal to attend important family events—religions often assert their authority over the individual by requiring them to cut down family involvement until they eventually leave them.
5. Loss of personal autonomy—refusal to decide anything without advice from the cult.
6. Sudden use of a new ideology—the cult ideology or theology is presented as the answer to everything.
7. Simplistic, black and white reasoning—the world of the cult is simplified into those who are for us and those against, good and evil, black and white. All colour and even shades of grey do not matter.
8. New vocabulary—religions and cults have their own set books couched in their own vocabulary and use of it is a likely marker.
9. Missionizing—recruitment is necessary to cults. New recruits are encouraged to bring in their friends and relatives. It gives kudos to the individuals and money and members to the cult.

Christian converts meet every one of these criteria.

Annex 1—Psychic Power

So called psychics seem to know all about their customers, and say it is because spirits or some fortune telling device like tarot cards or a crystal ball tell them. It is trickery, albeit skilful, called “cold reading”. It works particularly well on the gullible! A common trick is simply to make general statements most of which applies to almost everyone, the method used in the newspaper sun sign horoscopes:

Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety, and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions.

On a scale of 0 to 5, people give this an average of 4.2, so it is a close fit to almost anyone’s self view. On top of this, most people have the same sort of problems at some stage in their lives. So vague mentions of health, work and relationships strike a chord for everyone, especially as no timescale is usually mentioned, so that people will hark back to the last serious instance of a health or relationship worry. Moreover, gullible and suggestible subjects will imagine later that very general comments were specific. A mention of ill-health in the family will be narrowed to a mother’s cancer, or a child’s measles. Cold readers can even use apparently specific statements such as:

I sense you have a scar on your left knee.

A survey of 6000 people showed that one third agreed with the statement, “I have a scar on my left knee”, and over a quarter with, “Someone in my family is called Jack”. Human beings tend to think remarkably similarly, another banker for tricksters. Two thirds of people asked to think of a vegetable will think of a carrot, and asked to think of a number from one to nine will think of seven. The cold reader is playing the odds, knowing they are in his favour, and occasional mistakes are excused, precisely as the religious person excuses God of the horrible things in life. As the supposed psychic pretends to be having the information from the spirit of someone dead, the gullible subject will make allowances for misses. Communicating with the dead is so remarkable, it must be a bit hazy! Errors are shrugged off as a noisy or fuzzy connexion! Other educated guesses are tried and the cold reader will be unlucky not to get a hit among them to play on and leave the subject with a favourable impression, since subjects tend to remember the hits and forget the misses.

Cold readers also train themselves to read subtle clues such as body language, and can see the spark of recognition, even when a subject might be trying to be difficult to read. Subjects usually, though, help by acknowledging a correct guess, and often offer additional details that the reader will later play back, perhaps at another sitting if there are several. In cases like this, when the subject is attending a series of sittings, the supposed psychic has plenty of time actually to research the sitter, finding out publicly known things such as deaths in the family, relatives names and so on. Of course, the effort is proportional to the fee!

Some might still refuse to believe that these people are tricksters, but when all possibility of cheating is prevented, they always fail. In a study of mediums, who supposedly had information about their subjects from spirits, by Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, he tested five mediums giving readings for five sitters. All feedback was prevented, and the 25 readings were shown to the five sitters for them to guess which was their own. No reading was judged as at all accurate.

Stage magicians also use psychological techniques to fool their subjects and the audience. They guide people’s attention away from whatever the magician is doing. The human brain is remarkably prone to such manipulation. The performer needs to control the audience’s expectations throughout, using the art of misdirection, maximizing the spectators’ concentration on some effect while minimising their attention where the trick is being performed. Physical misdirection can be crude such as a sound offstage or a kerfuffle in the audience, but can be subtle, a well-timed gesture, comment or glance. Psychological misdirection influences what the spectators think about what they are witnessing. The magician might draw attention to “an ordinary brown paper bag”, making the audience wonder what could be extra-ordinary about it, but meanwhile the trick is being performed elsewhere unnoticed.

Psychologically we do not experience a continuum of stimuli, because we concentrate on one cue after another, and the brain makes up the differences. Psychologists realise it can make us miss what seems obvious. It is called inattention blindness. Harvard psychologist Daniel Simons made a short film of students, half in white T-shirts, the rest in black, passing basketballs among themselves. The watchers were asked to count the number of passes made by the white-shirted players only. At the end of the film, the volunteers were asked whether they had spotted anything unusual in the film. About half said no, and when told that someone dressed as a gorilla had crossed the scene in full view of the cammera, they refused to believe it until the film was replayed. They had concentrated on the task in hand and so had not noticed something irrelevant to it.

Richard Wiseman has shown that, by filming a spoon bending trick in which the magician ends by putting the bent spoon on the table in full view of the camera and declaring that the spoon was still bending, 40% of an audience who have seen the film will later report that they did see the spoon bending on the table at the end of the film. 95% of people who saw the film without the suggestion, did not imagine the spoon still bending.

Annex 2—Sleep Paralysis

Thousands of people are convinced they have been abducted by aliens from another planet, taken onto their spacecraft, subjected to distressing physical examinations and put back to bed or into their cars. Susan Clancy, a psychologist at Harvard, thinks no one should pooh-pooh the experiences of those who say they have been abducted by aliens. Most are sane and intelligent people perplexed by their experience. There is no evidence that these people are really being taken from their cars or beds, but their experience is real. Their claims tell of some psychological phenomenon which they really experience. Such unconfirmed experiences are classified as anomalous psychology, the psychology of extraordinary experiences. Since such experiences did and still do cover feelings attributed to ghosts and spirits as well as, nowadays, aliens, they fall into the grouping popularly called paranormal.

Memories of alien abduction are an attempt to make sense of a baffling experience. One such is sleep paralysis, a state between sleep and wakefulness when deep, dreaming sleep intrudes into the shallower first stage of sleep, and people, being physically asleep, find they cannot move, while dreaming they are still awake. The effect is of feeling awake, but being paralyzed, and sensing a malevolent presence causing it. Although common and normal—it is usually passed through on the way to sleep with no knowledge of it—but about one in six people become aware of it strongly enough to be frightened:

I felt some presence trying to get inside my brain. I couldn’t open my eyes or move. I wanted to escape. I couldn’t open my mouth to scream. I’m sure I was wide awake, but I was entirely paralysed.

The brain makes sense of the paralysis by imagining the strange things, including the malign presence and intense fear. Soon, the subject slips properly sleep, but dreams a rationalizstion of the last emotion of semi-wakefulness. Aliens have paralysed and abducted them. That is the mind’s modern take on it but in earlier times, it would have been witchcraft, fairies or demons that caused the fear.

What then is the difference, if any, between people who do not see aliens and UFOs and those who do? A Canadian team of psychologists tested four groups, and quizzed them about their beliefs in the paranormal and UFOs. One of the groups claimed alien contact experiences, the other UFO experiences, while the other two had no such experiences. The people who report encounters with aliens were not psychologically disturbed and were no less intelligent, no more fantasy prone and no more likely to suffer from mental disorders than the rest.

What they were was more inclined to believe in reincarnation, astrology and UFOs. They were more gullible! They interpreted events that scared them as supernatural or weird, when less gullible people shrugged it off as a bad dream. Sleep paralysis was a common phenomenon that gullibles wanted a supernatural explanation for.

Though entirely psychological, the people wake up with the memory and try to trace the cause, aliens, witches, fairies or demons, and society conspires with them. People were happy to identify witches or sorcerers or fairy children or malign people in the old days, and today aliens. Hypnotists are glad to get publicity and easy money by entertaining the fears of people who think they have been abducted, and who begin to accept under suggestion what the hypnotist implies. It produces false memories which simply confirm the belief the dreamer has. Hypnosis is ideal for forming false memories, and detailed “memories” emerge.

Such experiences, in different societies, reflect the current beliefs and fears of those societies. They therefore have had important effects in the past. Some have taken it that they imply survival after death, that the dead can contact us, that we have unconventional powers. Such a normal experience that today should offer no fears at all to anyone, have in the past triggered off religious beliefs that are still with us, even though they no longer have any basis, and the evidence is that pseudo-religions are now being set up on the basis of alien abduction. Alien abduction deserves attention for what it can tell us about human psychology and social psychology, especially in the line of religious origins.

Annex 3—The Psychology of Suicide Bombing

Christians like to label Moslem suicide bombers as evil, but they do not have to be radicalised by Islam, and blowing themselves up in a crowd is often the first evil thing they have done. Admittedly, many currently are Moslems, but suicide bombers in Lebanon in the 1980s were most often Christians, and, in Ceylon, the Tamil Tigers are atheistical Marxist-Leninists. Whether motivated by religion or not, suicide bombers believe they are giving their lives for a wholly altruistic cause. Moslems, Jews and Christians alike think there is a better life to be had than the one we live. The religious illusion of an after life obviously makes people more ready to give up the only life they are certain they have, and, in the west, we give posthumous medals to those who give their lives for their country. Noble sentiments suddenly lose their nobility when they are used in causes we are not sympathetic with.

Social and psychological studies have shown that suicide terrorists are better off and better educated than average. They are not suicidal in the pathological sense. Symptoms of mental illness or drug and alcohol abuse have been found in few of the large number of suicide bombers studied. How can comfortably off, well educated young men born and brought up in good homes end up sacrificing themselves and killing others for whatever cause? The answer is in the organisations that recruit and prepare them. From kamikaze pilots to the 9/11 hijackers, suicide attacks are conceived and managed by groups that employ the same methods. It is not difficult to persuade normal, rational people to do evil things if you apply the right conditioning.

1. Find people, usually young and male, sympathetic to the group’s cause and organise them into small units
2. exploit their motivation to fight for the cause using religious or political indoctrination, emphasising the heroic nature of their mission and the nobility of self-sacrifice
3. have all members of the unit make a pact declaring their commitment to what they are about to do—then it is psychologically hard for them to back out.

The process creates a sense of duty to their peers. The crucial factor is not the psychology of the group, but that the people involved are committed to communities that are under violent occupation or suffering great social injustice. Many young Moslems feel ideologically closer to their family’s land of origin or to the worldwide Moslem community than to the country they grew up in. In them is grown a culture of martyrdom. They feel estranged from the general population. Young men empathise with Moslems abroad suffering injustices at the hands of the west. Thus they see their own country as being the enemy of the group with whom they identify, a group that celebrates bombers as heroes and martyrs on posters and in songs. They think they will have all that tenfold in heaven, to use the Christian way of putting it. It is a sign of the cynicism or idiocy of western Christian leaders that they thought bombing innocent Moslems in their own land would be welcomed by them. What is the greater evil, bombing people by order from aeroplanes six miles high, or blowing yourself up in a tube train?

Annex 4—Christian Psychology

Harold D Delaney and Timothy E Goldsmith, in an article entitled Scientific Psychology and Christian Theism online, want to make psychology more Christian. Their field is dangerously replete with Christians already, mainly desperately trying to undo the findings of the objective scientists of the last century who founded the discipline. They admit no Christian thinker is important in the history of psychology. Even the great US father of psychology, William James, denied the truth of Christianity while accepting that it had some uses—the truth of a religion is simply how useful it is. Those who believe that anything important to know is contained in an ancient book, allegedly handed down by God and therefore absolutely true, will not accept anything they find that contradicts their absurd belief. To accept it would be to admit their beliefs were wrong. Christianity is incompatible with science. But now Christians such as James Dobson and Larry Crabb have infiltrated psychology, with the looming danger that it will degenerate into a form of Christian quackery. The advice to those who want Christian psychologists is to urge their churches employ them as pastoral care workers, then the rest of us will not be misled into thinking we are being tested by scientists when we are really being tested by Christian mountebanks aka wannabee saints.

Delaney and Goldsmith review the history of psychology, tendentiously trying to make it seem monstrous to Christians, which perhaps it is, but not to those who actually seek the truth, as opposed to The Truth! John B Watson (1878-1958) wrote Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It (1913) truly declaring “there is no dividing line between man and brute”, humans having evolved seamlessly from animals. Watson thought like Loyola:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief and yes even beggarman and thief, regardless of the talents, penchants, tendencies abilities, vocations, and race of this ancestors

The US particularly has shown that this is so with the phenomenon of “hothousing”—bringing up children immersed in some discipline. The chess playing women, the Polga sisters, are an excellent example. The Behaviourist, B F Skinner (1904-1990), by 1970, was the best-known scientist in the US. He wrote Walden Two (1948), a utopia, or dystopia, Christians will say, showing how society could be run on behavioural lines. Skinner was much opposed by Christians for allegedly treating people as robots, but was willingly adopted in practice by Christian industrialists and politicians who used behaviourism in their advertising, marketing and campaigning strategies, and still do. Skinner rightly said:

There is something “morally wrong” about a totalitarian state, a gambling enterprise, uncontrolled piecework wages, the sale of harmful drugs or undue personal influence, not because of any absolute set of values, but because all these things have aversive consequences.

B F Skinner

These things are not good for society, and society is made up of its people. That is why they are morally wrong. God or any other supposed absolute has nothing to do with it. Psychologists have shown that God is not necessary for people to be civilized, as the notion of absolutes claims. The most civilized societies are often the ones which are most secular. The promotion of God as the source of morality is really promoting an elite, the elite of those who know God best, the professional Christians.

Christians object that the fundamental supposition of science, and therefore of psychology, is naturalism. It is the assumption that everything has a natural cause which can be investigated and discovered. It is an assumption that all of the successes of modern science uphold. The Christian churches ran the western world unopposed for a thousand years based on the supernaturalism of the bible and Christian tradition, and in that time discoveries were few and far between, were mainly made contrary to Christian teaching and the discoverers risked humiliation and even death for their efforts. Since supernaturalism was abandoned for naturalism, science has made the most astonishing discoveries, and no one in the western world can now even imagine what the world would be like without it. If they let Christianity take control again, their children and grandchildren will fall back into the black pits of ignorance Christians are experts at digging.

If psychology is to be a science and not a variety of fortune telling or witch-doctory it has to be built on the same principles as science in general—human behaviour is caused, and the causes can be investigated and discovered. Psychology must be founded on empiricism and the scientific method. Those who want to reintroduce God and His supernatural influence are not psychologists. They are no different from astrologers or aroma therapists. Old wives’ remedies can seem to work, but inasmuch as they do, the reasons are explained by science and not by any supernatural mythology or dogma. There are no absolute values in science. It has to be corrigible to work, and absolutes are not, by definition. In science, the closest to an absolute is the method itself, proved in practice—the method of observation, hypothesis and testing, a method that has worked more miracles than any saint or saviour.

Delaney and Goldsmith show their utter unsuitability as scientists by claiming that man is unique among the animals because he was created in the image of God, and therefore is partially divine! Needless to say, anyone who begins a scientific study with any such statement would have it thrown out immediately, and ought to be sacked. You simply cannot preface scientific work with mythological assumptions, yet that of course, is what these Christians are trying to do. None of them should be accepted as scientists, and their work should always be scrutinized with rigor, and rigorously tested, because Christians are unscrupulous in defending their faith through dishonesty. They seem not even to realize that they are being dishonest because the supernatural power, to whom they owe their allegiance, can make anything they say in His defence be true even though it is false!

People do not love someone because they are made in the image of God, as these shysters claim, they do it for the entirely naturalistic reason that it causes them to protect the object of love. In this respect, animals and humans are no different, so we are displaying animal characteristics, and if God has them too, then He has animal characteristics, and, if He exists at all, must have evolved from an animal. The same authors say that man has an immortal and living soul, yet again that is not a scientific statement, and, as no one, after hundreds of years of trying, has ever produced any replicable evidence for a soul, it just cannot be admitted into science by the rules it works by. If it were then where is the insistence on including mythological statements into science going to end. If the rules of science were changed then what emerged would not be science! We would return to the dark ages, and, frankly, that seems to be what many of these nut-case Christians hanker after.

Though people like these two have chosen science as a career, they want to undermine its basic principles, the very principles that took it away from the dogmata that had led to misery for centuries, and allowed us for the first time to begin to understand the world. For Christians, scientific principles have to be rejected when they conflict with religious principles, a belief of such profound idiocy that it scarcely needs rebutting. Needless to say, had it not been defeated as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment progressed and showed that Christianity had been a shackle on humanity for two thousand years, there could have been no science, and we should all have been still wallowing in the dark ages, filthy, diseased, poor and ignorant.

Other non-scientific “knowledge” should be admitted into science, these loonies tell us. They think there is something valuable called “traditional knowledge”, by which, centrally, they mean Christian mythology, but which, put as broadly as this, must include every other form of lunacy that there is from Mu to magic, from demonic possession to avenging angels, if they are not the same thing. The point is that these non-scientific types of so-called knowledge are not knowledge at all because they are not known! What is known is what is true, what has been verified, not just once but enough times to allow us to make deductions from it, and find that they are also true. Nothing other than science has any way of affirming the truth of its supposed knowledge.

This “traditional” sort of “knowledge” is precisely what Christianity is—belief based on tradition and nothing better. Christian believers claim that their tradition is absolute, God-given, but even these absolute traditions eventually change or disappear all together in the fullness of time, as history, another discipline that Christians do not like, shows. The belief that they are absolute revelations is demonstrably false in every instance except the one that any particular believer accepts. Christians like Delaney and Goldsmith might accept that “there are knowable truths available through God’s special revelation” but they are no more knowable than that Scorpios are vicious, spilling salt is unlucky, or that the Roswell crash was an alien spacecraft.

Yet these two want Christianity to be introduced into empirical psychology. They know that there are clinical psychologists who already use Christianity, in itself a fall away from clinical practice being science based, into a modern form of black magic. So what do they really want? Objective psychology and neuroscience is just too embarrassing for Christianity. It demonstrates too well that the supernatural is delusion, that mysticism is natural in its common form and abnormal psychosis in its religious form, that the church uses psychological methods to win converts and promote the Christian scam. So, they want to start a Christian psychology movement:

Christians have just as much right and perhaps more of a duty than non-Christians to pursue research within a framework that explicitly flows from their world view.

Nothing stops them from doing it, in a free society, except the laws of fraud. They have no right to fool people by calling it science, or by taking up positions in psychology departments that ought to be filled by professional scientists, not by amateur vicars. They can practise their Christian psychology from within the many well funded departments of theology that most universities still have. Then they can formulate their medicines in terms of the four elements instead of the 92 of science, and the four humours instead of the hormones, neuroses and psychoses that scientists have discovered, and they can drive out demons to cure disease instead of killing off bacteria and viruses.

Needless to say, they say they do not want to go so far. They think they can take science and Christianize it, showing that they know nothing about science despite their degrees. And they must be lying about Christianity being absolutely true, if it can be denied in parts in favour of science. Make science subject to the terms and conditions of special revelation and the infallible Christian bible, and it will not make many more discoveries like those it has already made. This pair wear their delusions with pride in public, so their university president ought to fire them as anti-scientific fraudsters.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History