| 13 December 2009
By Sister Salma
O ye who believe! take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: they are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily Allah guideth not a people unjust. (51) Those in whose heart is a disease? thou seest how eagerly they run about amongst them, saying: "We do fear lest a change of fortune bring us disaster." Ah! perhaps Allah will give (thee) victory, or a decision according to His Will. Then will they repent of the thoughts which they secretly harbored in their hearts. [Quran 5:51-52]
“Religion, Freud believed, was an expression of underlying psychological neuroses and distress. At various points in his writings, he suggested that religion was an attempt to control the Oedipal complex, a means of giving structure to social groups, wish fulfillment, an infantile delusion, and an attempt to control the outside world.” -http://psychology.about.com/od/sigmundfreud/p/freud_religion.htm
I was in college between the years 1977 and 1982. Along with thousands of other students from fair-to-middling to pretty good high schools, I attended a large state university on the east coast.
A good percentage of my freshman class were the first generation in our families to attend college at all—this is what we were told by the administrators at orientation.
Needless to say, we were all pretty impressed with ourselves.
Equally needlessly, I'll say that we put our unqualified trust in our university.
After all, so many of us came from immigrant families... blue collar, I've Been Working On the Railroad families. And for some of our grandparents, 'blue collar' was a step UP.
So there we were, the class of 1981, with lots of vowels at the ends of our names, names which indicated a heritage from the not so very aristocratic southern parts of Europe, and with nothing better than a 19th century American pedigree, we were about to partake of The American Dream: a college education and a professional future.
We sat there self-consciously blushing next to parents who were gleaming with pride and happiness (“My child is a college student!”).
We were the bright and shining hopes of the American dream, a dream that had pushed our grandparents and great-grandparents into sweaty, smelly, unhealthy steerage compartments for weeks of confinement at sea and an long, long assault on the senses and immune system...only to come to a cold new land with a strange angular language, strange light-haired people, strange customs, and even stranger value systems...
Our grandparents were were called wops and dagos and expected to pick the berries and build the bridges and railroads.
They did all that, you see, so their grandchildren and great-grandchildren could sit scrubbed and shining in an auditorium...hmm, roughly 80 or 90 years later, and be congratulated for being the first generation of college students in their families.
Later, we'd become teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers. A few of us would even come to sit on the Supreme Court, terminal vowels and all.
So in early September, 1977, we sat there, the great olive-skinned hopes of a hard-striving 19th century immigrant wave from southern Europe, the products of blood, sweat, lots of toil, fervent prayers and many tears and hopes and dreams. I think we just assumed that we were in a place where our minds and perhaps our characters would be trained; where we'd acquire professional skills that would empower us to achieve that cherished 'American Dream': a white-collar job, two-car garage attached to the house in the suburbs, and the 1.59 children.
That was not my dream, however. I was one of the oddballs who was always looking for that 'something more.' Something More took the shape of a spiritual quest for me. I knew a few fellow travelers, but not many. The majority of the people I knew were chasing that material dream.
One thing we all shared was trust in our rarefied slice of society, the intelligentsia, and by extension, our university. It never occurred to us to question the academy and the values of the academic system—we never questioned the entire theoretical framework upon which it was based. I don't recall that ever being challenged.
The government was questioned, definitely. We were just barely out of Vietnam in 1977, and the memory of Watergate, Kent State, Lieutenant Calley, the Tet Offensive and the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia... all very fresh in the collective memory. No, there was no love lost or trust wasted between our generation and our government. As I recall, things were a sort of quiet, resigned modus vivendi: you leave us alone, we leave you alone. The spirit and fire had gone out of the protest movement by 1977. The war, and thus, the draft, were over with by then. Mission accomplished.
By '77, things had quieted down. We still didn't trust the government, but we had set our sights on that all-important middle or upper-middle class lifestyle. Most of us, that is. The spirit of protest had gone underground...and into the universities where it took the form of arcane academic articles published in journals that hardly anybody read.
It amazes me now to think of it.
For a generation raised on skepticism, for whom the phrase “Question Authority” was a byword, not once do I ever recall anyone questioning the theoretical underpinnings and ideological assumptions of the academy itself. That framework was decidedly secular and atheistic. But it was the default value, the given, the transcendental signifier of our lives. And we never questioned it. Not that I recall, anyway.
Question anything, challenge anything, but never dare to question the invisible secular assumptions that were the gods of academic discourse. Do so at your peril.
Believing in God, or in any organized religion was something of a dirty secret best kept to oneself. Not something you'd admit in polite company among the university intelligentsia. Not if you wanted to be taken at all seriously.
I started out in the department of history. One of our professors was known as a Catholic. This information was passed around from student to student, sotto voce. It was not something people understood, accepted, or admired. But generally we students were fond of this man, so we tried not to talk about it too much. It was like having a loveable but crazy uncle whose oddities were something you tried to cover up, so as not to embarrass him.
This professor's religiosity was spoken of in quiet tones that seemed to acknowledge that all of us were in on something that should not be generally spoken of, not if you liked and respected the person. It was seen as an incomprehensible eccentricity of his. He was forgiven for it by the students, but not by his peers. He never rose too far in the academic hierarchy, if I recall correctly.
Into this decidedly secular cultural milieu, the late 70s was also known as the heyday of the various social “reforms” or “revolutions” as we called them then. The one with the most validity was surely the civil rights movement, the time of Martin Luther King and Brother Malcolm X. But there were other movements whose zealots and partisans attempted, somewhat successfully, to hitch their wagon to the civil rights train.
The various movements for social change which gained momentum during and as a result of the Vietnam War piggybacked onto the civil rights movement, as they still attempt to do today. The gay rights movement had just begun to surface during that era (see “Milk” for the story of Harvey Milk and the famous Castro neighborhood in San Francisco). This particular social movement, whose influence today in 2009 has by now reached into nearly every last corner of society, right down to the high school textbooks published by very reputable, mainstream publishing houses, was still on the fringes in the 1970s. The Women's Movement, aka “Women's Liberation” was one of these. The Black Power movement (aka Civil Rights, e.g.). And finally the “Sexual Revolution.” That's the one I am going to focus on here. Part memoir, part cultural critique, I want to examine one woman's journey through the cultural and moral wilderness that was the 20th century.
One branch of the “Sexual Revolution” was the Gay Rights movement. It's still going strong, and today in 2009, many of its objectives have been realized. The gay rights cause has become so mainstream that in 2004, one openly partnered, openly gay man was raised to the office of bishop of the Episcopal church, that storied, hallowed institution that is the closest thing we've ever had to a national church. The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., the church of most of our presidents until very recently, is Episcopal. The influence in culture and politics of the Episcopal church far outweighed their membership numbers. It's not how many you have, you see; it's who they are.
In American culture, traditionally, it just doesn't get any more mainstream than the Episcopal church. Or that's how it used to be. Perhaps things are realigning now. I'm not sure where the “center” is, anymore. I'm not sure there was a “center” back in the 1970s, either. It felt like there was very distinctly an “us”... and a “them.”
“We” were the enlightened people. “We” were the ones who knew better than our parents, grandparents, and certainly better than the religious people. The primitive forces of religion belonged to the Dark Ages, to subhumans of a much earlier psychological evolution. People who were believers—which generally meant some brand of Christianity—were not even tolerated. They were openly held in contempt, as if they had some sort of mental defect or serious mental illness, or were lepers who should be made to carry bells and call out “Unclean, unclean!” as soon as someone approached.
Yeah, it really WAS that bad, especially in the departments formerly known as 'humanities.” English. History. Philosophy. All the social sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and of course, the Department of Psychology.
My university was famous for being a Behaviorist school. Jungians would not have felt very much at home. There was always something suspicious about Jung; all that attention to the rootstock of mythology... Jung's problem was that he skated too close to a religious sensibility, which was considered primitive, superstitious nonsense.
Behaviorism was a psychological school of thought extended and further developed by B. F. Skinner in the mid-twentieth century. Simply put, behaviorism holds that a person or animal will behave in a certain way if they are subjected to reward, called “reinforcement.” You put a hamster in a box with a lever; each time the hamster pushes the lever, a treat comes out: and voila, we have a very happy hamster who's learned how to reward himself.
A much stronger 'schedule of reinforcement' would be to arrange things so that Mr. Hamster did NOT get a treat EVERY time he pushed the lever, but only got a treat sometimes. Varying the 'schedule' of reward is called an “irregular schedule of reinforcement.” Randomly, the hamster would be rewarded some of the time, but not each time.
Based on this knowledge, it's easy to see why gambling can be so addictive: it operates on an irregular schedule of reinforcement. You don't win every time. But the fact that you, or someone, does win some of the time... that's what keeps people going back, and why it can be such a trap and a horrible addiction.
The casinos know this, of course. They make use of this knowledge.
After all, “knowledge is power.”
That's a truism that we hear all the time. “Knowledge is power.”
My challenge to that cliched “wisdom” is:
WHERE does this knowledge come from?
and
HOW is it being USED?
Of course 'knowledge is power.” Everyone knows that. Once you have this power, what are you doing with it?
If we have special “knowledge” of the human psyche and motivational landscape, we have a bit more power than others, don't we. And how do we make use of that knowledge?
I know how Knowledge-as-Power was used by the psychology department at my university in 1977: it was used dishonestly and immorally to exert POWER over students to push a diabolical ideology of atheistic hedonism.
And because we were not the most sophisticated students on the planet, most of us coming from backgrounds which were not, let's say, WASP and upper-middle class, we tended to buy into what was being fed to us. After all—this was college. The first step in achieving the nirvana of the Great American Dream. They knew better than we did, right? The people in charge at the college. The professors and people running things.
* * *
Knowledge is indeed power. But sometimes those who have the knowledge do not use the knowledge for good. And that's not surprising, because they cannot KNOW what is “the good” unless they submit to the authority of divine revelation.
The Psychology Department knew very well how gambling addictions worked. They understood the mechanism of irregular schedules of reinforcement extremely well.
They did not, however, make any attempts at alleviating the problem, even though they understood it extremely well. I don't recall them exerting any pressure in the political sphere when the referendum was being discussed.
Knowledge is power. But if those who HAVE the knowledge do not use that knowledge for good, then it's worse than useless.
You're gonna have to serve somebody, as Dylan sang. And as Jesus said, “No man can serve two masters.”
You're either serving the devil or you're serving the Lord.
The university identified gambling as an example of how 'irregular schedules of reinforcement” might function on human subjects, but of course made no “value judgment” on whether or not legalizing gambling was such a great idea. That would have been a “value judgment.” Can't have THAT, oh noooooo... not that, anything but that.
It so happens that the state in which this university resides is one of the states where gambling was legalized in the mid-70s. But no “value judgments” could be made. A big no-no, “value judgments.”
What good was the knowledge, then? Who was that knowledge serving?
I can tell you one thing; it sure as hell wasn't serving the Lord.
Any human endeavor that divorces itself from divine revelation is not only doomed to fail, but, given enough time , it will go so far astray that it will inevitably end in the satanic.
Left to our own devices, in the absence of guidance that only divine revelation can provide, we destroy ourselves morally, emotionally, and even physically.
As a freshman from a small town and a very small Catholic school, I was eager to experience everything the great big state uni had to offer. At some point during the fall semester of freshman year, I attended a weekend-long conference being run by the Department of Psychology. Perhaps the conference was being advertised and promoted in my introductory psych classes, which were required for teacher certification. In any case, I signed up for it and attended.
To this day, I'm really not sure what the point of this seminar was, from a purely academic point of view. The conference's stated purpose was education in the area of human sexuality. That in itself isn't a matter of concern, but the way in which it was handled was unusual, to say the least. The format was a combination of whole-group lecture and then we were broken out into much smaller discussion groups. One of the first whole-group presentations was designed, we were told, to “desensitize us.”
Desensitize us from what?
We were told we were going to be desensitized from the sight of the male reproductive organ.
We were never given an explanation of WHY we needed to be 'desensitized' from this particular aspect of human nature. But the entire group of several hundred college students, men and women together, of course, sat there for nearly an hour and watched the big screen, as penis after penis after penis after penis after penis was shown.
We saw hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
By the end of the film, I think we were mostly desensitized. Nobody giggled or chuckled or even commented. No responses at all. I think we were numb. Which was somehow the point. The desensitization seems to have worked. We had no reaction at all.
To this day I am not sure what the educational or scientific purpose of that presentation may have been, but I did learn that while most men are endowed with basically the same equipment, there is still a lot of variety. I think that most doctors haven't seen as many penises as I have, thanks to that conference.
What I still don't know is why I needed to learn that, or how it enriched my life in any way.
One of the female professors from the Psychology Department explained that they'd wanted to include a complementary segment showing female genitalia for similar purposes of desensitization, but they were unable to produce that film owing to a lack of female volunteers who were willing to be filmed.
So the attractive, 40ish, blonde female psychologist tried to rally the troops, as it were, and encouraged us to participate. I recall her saying in a cheerleaderish fashion,
“Ladies, if you want to help your university's Psychology Department, come in and 'Spread 'em for Science!'”
When the female psychology professor said “Spread 'em for science,” the audience roared and cheered. I'm not sure if she got any volunteers. I certainly didn't sign up.
We students in the audience, the women who refused to have their genitalia filmed "for science," were clearly defective in some way, possibly the products of a religious upbringing, and we needed to be set straight. Desensitization was step one.
I'm still not clear on the goal or goals of this desensitization or of the conference in general. What was its purpose? We didn't hear too much about STDs, if they were mentioned at all. This was long before the HIV virus became known in the United States. In those days, the worst you could catch was syphilis, gonorrhea or herpes. And of those three, herpes was considered the worst, because you could never get rid of it. The others could be handled with good old penicillin.
So if the objective of this conference was not to protect us from sexually-transmitted diseases, what was its purpose?
Good question.
When we broke into small discussion groups, things got even more interesting.
Each discussion group consisted of about five or 6 people. Males and females were mixed together—a point I have to keep reminding myself to make because of my current audience, where that factor may not be taken for granted. Everything in the west is “mixed.” Single-sex discussion situations do occur, but they are very much the exception to the rule.
So there we were, in our discussion groups. Each group had a sort of proctor who was a psychology graduate student placed there by the department to keep things on track.
The track they were there to keep us on had been predetermined by the Psychology Department. It was strongly ideological in nature and “value judgments” were definitely being made. The values were simply those of the Psychology Department instead of the values of the Lord Jesus Christ, or the Holy Qu'ran, or the Roman Catholic Church.
No discourse is ever value-free. It's impossible. There is always an ideological agenda being sold. It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you know you're gonna have to serve somebody by implicit or explicit adherence to a particular ideology. What are your set of assumptions? The most pernicious and dangerous situation is where the CLAIM of "value-free" and "objective" is being made.
There is no such thing.
Whatever you do, whatever you say, whatever you are selling, there is an ideology beneath it. Theistic or atheistic; Christian or Buddhist or Muslim, there IS a set of assumptions behind what you are doing.
Count on it.
The sex ed conference was in no way “value free.” It's just that nobody would admit to that. At one point in our small discussion group, homosexuality was mentioned. One of the young male students began to snicker and make disparaging comments.
The graduate student assigned to us jumped to attention.
With all the fervor and earnestness of a true believer, she carefully but strenuously corrected him. 'Oh, no... We do not look at it that way.”
(“We”? Who's “We”??)
“There is absolutely NOTHING WRONG with that... about ten percent or more of the population is homosexual or lesbian, and it is a viable, legitimate mode of sexual expression. It is no longer listed as pathology by the American Psychological Association.”
The undergraduates who had dared to indicate otherwise had gotten the official smackdown from the Psychology Department. And how.
You see, there is always an ideology behind whatever it is we do. Sometimes we try to claim that it's 'value free,' or it's 'nonsectarian' or it's 'neutral.' No such thing.
You either serve the devil, or you serve the Lord. There is no neutral ground.
The next “value judgment free” topic for our small group to discuss was anal sex. We had been given a list of specific sexual activities and asked to take turns in our small group and discuss our views on the things on the list. I got the anal sex question (lucky, lucky me).
I said, “Okay... this... okay, uh... okay, well...I never really could see the point of this... this doesn't seem like it would be pleasurable, because for a woman, this is not where her pleasure center is located. It certainly isn't going to produce a child. And... to be honest, it strikes me as … well....dirty... and even risky healthwise because of the possibility of the transmission of E. coli, which I understand to be very dangerous. Not to mention it could possibly be painful and humiliating for the woman—and possibly the man as well.”
Silence.
Stares.
More silence.
Oops...
And then, several people began speaking at once. The Value Judgment Police to the rescue! Suddenly I had three people glaring at me: the female graduate student proctor, an older male student, and his cohort—his wife or his girlfriend, I wasn't sure which. But before I knew it I had three people talking AT me correcting my oh-so-politically-incorrect response. Again, it was the same sort of answer: nothing wrong with it, people do it, it's fine, it's normal, what's wrong with you that you find it objectionable, and aren't you silly and primitive to ever have thought otherwise.
The male student pointedly mentioned that some women do derive pleasure from it. At that point I turned my head away because I could no longer look at his girlfriend, who'd been sitting right next to him the whole time.
The expression “TMI” had not been invented yet, but that was definitely a TMI moment. Looking back on this now, I can identify a set of prevailing assumptions that were driving this sort of project:
- human sexuality should be considered another bodily function like eating, sleeping and eliminating, with as much moral and ethical baggage as pertained to those other functions, and needed at all costs to remain independent of the dreaded “value judgments”
- engaging in random, promiscuous sexual activity was a right, guaranteed if not by the Constitution, then by some 'inalienable natural right' according to a set of vague, uncodified, yet very stringent norms of behavior defined and strictly enforced by the university culture
- homosexuality and bisexuality were normal and to be accepted as such
- 'alternative' sexual activities such as anal sex were to be considered normal and accepted; (How dare you think otherwise?)
- any person, institution or tradition who thought or taught otherwise was stupid, unenlightened, and primitive at best, and evil, damaging and out to hold your mind and body captive in an ideological prison
- often, that ideological prison had religion as its basis
Therefore, to achieve “liberation,” and reach your ultimate “human potential,” to attain “self-actualization,” or whatever term you want to use for “secular nirvana,” one had to do away with religion. Religion caused guilt. Guilt was not part of the program. And because guilt was done away with, sin was also done away with.
The only action that was inappropriate was one that impaired “function.” Function to do what?
Well, that impaired our ability to.... to work, I guess. And to feel pleasure.
(In irregular schedules of reinforcement, you mustn't reward the hamster each time for pushing the lever. What you must do is withhold the reward sometimes, and give out the reward other times. Rewards were administered randomly.)
Oh. So that means that the ultimate purpose of a human being was to work? Keep that capitalist system rolling, rolling! Neuroses hinder productivity. And we mustn't hinder productivity, must we?
Anyone who comes from a faith-based perspective recognizes exactly what just happened there, I hope.
Yes, knowledge is indeed power.
But when that knowledge seeks to divorce the human being from his connection with the sources of divine authority via revelation ... when that knowledge is put to use merely to construct a better corporate cog in the atheistic capitalist machine, then the 'knowledge that is power' is satanic.
The ultimate goals of the psychology department of my university, like the goal of all the popular pseudo-psychological and 'human potential movement' books and trainers, is essentially to deny and to actively work against any world-view that is religious and which places its trust in divine revelation.
Religion is a competing world-view, a complete system that is too often at odds with the ideology of a secular psychological ideology whose ultimate goals were to feed the insatiable maw of the capitalist system with the fuel of manufactured neuroses, “complexes” and of course, hedonism and free sex as reward system.
The hamster in the cage pushing the lever...getting a treat sometimes, not other times. But the fact that he gets his treat sometimes keeps him at work pushing his lever.
The sincere religious impulse, whether stemming from Judaism, Christianity, Islam or some other tradition, challenges this capitalist, materialist, hedonist paradise and provides a conceptual framework that is very very different. The goals are different. To seek a just society and to seek the will of God... well.. those things just don't fit the program, you see.
The biggest competitor to the gods of psychology was religion, so it had to be done away with.
Or at the very least, politely tolerated but not taken at all seriously. Emasculating and trivializing religion was the first step. The gods of Pavlov, Skinner, Freud, et al made sure of that.
According to this paradigm, humans can reach their “potential” if only they buy this book, pay for that seminar, hire this corporate trainer. The entire industry is anti-religious and anti-God, because at the bottom of it is the belief that we are not in need of divine revelation, and most of all, need to bow to no authority other than the limits of our own brains. Human potential movement, indeed.
The underlying assumption of all of these psychological and pseudo-psychological trends that began to take such strong hold of the culture in the 1970s is that there are no absolute and universal moral principles; that all we need is “knowledge, all we need is the latest and greatest strategy or technique or group therapy or book or latest idea that will finally liberate us and free us from the shackles and chains under which we have been held captive. Free at last, Lord, thank God we're free at last!
But of course, it couldn't be phrased that way, because in this paradigm there is no God. There is only the pantheon of Freud, Adler, Jung, Pavlov, Skinner, et al.
The psychology industry depends for its existence on a worldview that is atheistic, and depends entirely on human reason. There is absolutely no room in this worldview for anything akin to divine revelation or guidance. Even more appalling to this sort of mindset is the idea of submission, which is the cornerstone of Islamic spirituality. Submit? Hell, NO!
But then, it's hard to submit to a God if you don't believe He exists in the first place.
Because, you see, it was the forces of religion were a big part of what was holding the human race back, according to the new gods of the new religion of Psychology. Skinner was a rabid atheist. So was Freud, for whom religion was “something to overcome.” Adler's views on the divine being were not much better; he saw the idea of God as something to explain the mechanisms of the human brain.
God, reduced to a motivational force in the human psyche.
To sound terribly old-fashioned... rather 17th century, actually..
This is the work of Satan.
Yes, Satan.
Remember him? Ah. Okay.
The “Human Potential” movement, the Biofeedback movement, EST, and all the pseudo-therapeutic strategies that were developed in the mid-twentieth century are all decidedly atheist and at their core, extremely hostile to religion. The religious worldview and mindset, particularly of the Abrahamic religions, insisted on absolute moral principles and actually asked for changes in behavior that acknowledge those universal moral principles.
In 1977, we as college students at that conference might still be carrying some nasty, pre-college vestigials from any lingering childhood religiosity (which might contain the Dreaded Value Judgments!), some of which might lead us into feeling .... oh, I don't know... maybe... guilty...(shock, horror: not that, anything but THAT!) for engaging in sexual activities. Outside of marriage of course. I didn't know any undergraduate who was actually married. If there were any, I never saw them or heard of them.
The product being sold here was sex: sex without guilt, without consequences, and even without love. So heaven forfend, we were in college now, away from home, very likely to have sex, and we might feel guilty. We might develop a NEUROSIS because of feeling guilty. That cannot be permitted!
I ask myself now: who was really running that conference and that department of psychology?
A conference like this one, ostensibly would give us the tools to have all the sex we wanted and not feel guilty. And not to be shocked, presumably, by whatever awaited us under the Levi's of our male partner, because they sure showed us every possible style of male equipment. We were the UnBlushables. It's only in recent years that I've regained the ability to blush and feel shyness again, no doubt from the effects of prayer and working on Islamic manners.
Concerned about pregnancy? The Student Health Center passed out birth control pills to students at really cheap prices. And if we got pregnant anyway? No worries: in 1973 abortion had been legalized. No worries. If we got our hearts broken from all those affairs, no worries: the Health Center had a Psychology Department where we could try to get our broken hearts mended. If we picked up a nasty disease, the Health Center was there again with the penicillin.
And when later on in life our mental health began to wobble at least in part from too much sex and not enough love, and perhaps a couple divorces in the bargain, no worries....
There would never be a dearth of trainers, therapists, specialists, doctors and other head shrinkers to step in and “work with us.”
The psychology industry helped to create the problems that they would later step in to try to help solve! For a fee, of course. In fact, they can charge at BOTH ends!
Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?!
Guilt and sin: done away with. Sexual satisfaction was presumed to be an inalienable right.
Anyone who tried to interject talk of responsibility or accountability was considered to be a force of evil that was attempting to control the masses using the weapons of guilt and shame. There was no more guilt; guilt was the unpardonable sin. You were simply not allowed to feel guilty because all guilt was “toxic guilt,” and all shame, “toxic shame.”
I do not recall too many people asking the obvious, “Emperor-Has-No-Clothes” question:
Isn't it appropriate to feel guilty if you've done something worth feeling guilty ABOUT?
Isn't it right to feel shame if you have done something shameful?
Unless there IS nothing ever to feel guilty about, anymore; and certainly nothing to feel ashamed about. Remember, this was the era of “Key Parties” and Wife Swapping and “Open Marriage.” I think shame had pretty much Left The Building by then. I really don't remember anyone even using the word “shame” in those days.
* * *
There is a wonderful Arabic word called “haya.” It doesn't translate very well to a single English word, but haya means a certain reticence, a shyness of character. It's often translated as “modesty,” but it's more than that. It's modesty, a sense of propriety, a reluctance to display one's beauty, intelligence, or charm. It includes, but is not limited to, modesty about one's physical person in the way one dresses and carries oneself.
There is a well-known Islamic teaching that expresses the following thought:
“When haya is taken away from a person, faith follows.”
And when faith is taken away, destruction ensues. So there is a direct correlation between the loss of haya and the destruction of an individual—or a nation.
At best, the psychology industry is amoral. That's on a good day.
In the past, at times, and in the absence of guidance deriving from revelation, it's been nothing short of satanic. It is possible, I suppose, to take what one can from the discipline, reprocess it, refine it and censor the anti-God aspects of it... but I would imagine that to be an incredibly difficult endeavor. Given the foundations of the discipline, the “fruits of the poison tree” rule would seem to be applicable here. The entire paradigm upon which the discipline is based is deeply flawed, because it denies revelation and actively works against it. This is not to say that some good has come of the field; it certainly has. But does the good outweigh the bad? Doubtful.
What its popular and professional manifestations sought to do in the last century was to remove sin from the cultural consciousness and repackage sin as a “phobia,” or “neurosis,” or even “an issue.”
Soon, we could not even speak the word “sin” without blushing. Not if we wanted to be taken seriously in academia.
This new religion was called “psychology.” Its founders were avowed atheists openly hostile to religion. Its priests and priestesses have been selling us a program that works against any system of ethics that would be at all familiar to anyone from an Abrahamic tradition, and even to some pagan ones.
What else can you call it?
When a force arrays itself against the dictates of both conscience and revelation, what else can you call it other than what it is? The enemy of God.
And the enemy of God is called Satan.
Here's a test for you. If you run into one of these gurus or priestesses and are curious to know whether what he or she espouses really is part of the enemy camp, run a simple test. Ask him or her these questions.
1. Do you believe there is such a thing as sin?
2. How would you define it?
3. What is your opinion of guilt? What about shame?
4. What is the goal of your practice? What do you seek to help people to do?
5. Can you outline for me your own moral code?
6. What do you base this code on? Your own intellect, or do you seek to be guided by revelation?
7. From where do you get this revelation?
8. What do you believe about right and wrong? How do you know an action is wrong?
9. What do you believe about God?
10. Do you believe that humans can improve themselves independently of divine guidance?
11. To what do you submit, if anything?
12. How do you use your knowledge? Who benefits from it?
“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Matthew 6:24