What is the state of religion today?
In an American town, senior citizens were told they could not sing Gospel songs or pray over their meals in their community center because it was a public building. Only after an extensive lawsuit were their rights vindicated.
A child was told she could not give pencils to her school friends that had the word “Jesus” printed on them. Crying, she asked her mom, “Why does the school hate Jesus?” Mr. Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel for the Liberty Legal Institute, testified before the US Congress hearing on religious expression in 2004, “These young kids get the message. Their religion is treated the same as a curse word. These children are being taught at an early age, ‘keep your religion to yourself’, ‘it’s dirty’, ‘it’s bad.’”
In March 2004, the French Parliament enacted a law against schoolchildren wearing religious symbols in public schools, including the headscarves and veils worn by many Muslim girls, crosses that are too large, and Jewish yarmulkes.
Obviously, attacks on religion are alive and well, but then they are also as old as religion itself. However, reports of sexual perversion among clergy that have stained the headlines of almost every country in the world, with multimillion-dollar lawsuits filed and won against the churches involved, are something entirely new. Here, churches face an insidious assault that is not only sapping their spiritual and material strength, but in some cases threatens their very survival.
While this type of deadly affront is new, its origins date back to the late 1800s. It was then that psychiatrists first sought to replace religion with their “soulless science.” In 1940, psychiatry openly declared its plans when British psychiatrist John Rawlings Rees, a cofounder of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), addressed a National Council of Mental Hygiene stating: “[S]ince the last world war we have done much to infiltrate the various social organizations throughout the country…we have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church.…”
Another cofounder of the WFMH, Canadian psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, reinforced this master plan in 1945 by targeting religious values and calling for psychiatrists to free “the race…from its crippling burden of good and evil.” Viciously usurping age-old religious principles, psychiatrists have sanitized criminal conduct and defined sin and evil as “mental disorders.”
In his book The Death of Satan, author Andrew Delbanco refers to the disappearing “language of evil” and the process of “unnaming evil.” Until psychiatry’s emergence, societies had operated with very clear ideas on “moral evil.” Today, however, we hear euphemisms like “behavioral problem” or “personality disorder.” Delbanco describes these as notions “…in which the concept of responsibility has disappeared and the human being is reconceived as a component with a stipulated function. If it fails to perform properly, it is subject to repair or disposal; but there is no real sense of blame involved.…We think in terms of adjusting the faulty part or, if it is too far gone, of putting it away.”
As a result of psychiatrists’ subversive plan for religion, the concepts of good and bad behavior, right and wrong conduct and personal responsibility have taken such a beating that people today have few or no guidelines for checking, judging or directing their behavior. Words like ethics, morals, sin and evil have almost disappeared from everyday usage.
Delbanco further states: “The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak.…[W]e cannot readily see the perpetrator.…[The] malefactors are harder to spot.…So the work of the devil is everywhere, but no one knows where to find him.…[E]vil tends to recede into the background hum of modern life.…[W]e feel something that our culture no longer gives us the vocabulary to express.”
The consequences have been devastating for both society and religion. It is not that evil itself has disappeared—evidence abounds of evil or destructive behavior running unchecked in society—and it is as difficult to confront as it has always been. Yet everyone wants to live in a society in which evil can be defined and defeated.
Or do they?
For more than a century, Mankind has been the unwitting guinea pig of psychiatry’s deliberate “social engineering” experiment that was conceived in hell. This experiment included an assault on the essential religious and moral strongholds of society. It could not proceed while Man could clearly conceive of, express and deal with evil. It lies insidiously behind our current social disintegration. And it is the epitome of evil, masked by the most social of outward appearances.
Until recently, it was religion that provided Man with the moral and spiritual markers necessary for him to create and maintain civilizations of which he could be proud. Religion provides the inspiration needed for a life of higher meaning and purpose. In this crisis, it falls upon religious leaders to take the decisive steps.
Men of the cloth need to shake off the yoke of soulless materialism spawned by psychology and psychiatry and put religion back into the hands of the religious.
Indeed, religious leaders must take this responsibility, not only for the sake of religion’s survival but also for the survival of Mankind.
Sincerely,
Jan Eastgate
President
Citizens Commission
on Human Rights International
