Here is a new book that I am sure will have a lot of insights into how we as members of the Church of God were manipulated by the Armstrongs and the ministry.
Many still in the clutches of Armstrongism claim they have never been deceived or fooled. Yet they allow their marriages to be broken up, refuse to see children , grandchildren or parents because they are no longer COG members, and that they send in every last dollar when the head honcho starts begging. They never realize that when they start having thoughts of leaving the church that the foolish teachings of "losing ones salvation" or that "bad things will soon happen" to those who apostatize are the manipulative tapes that the church has programed into them.
Book Description
In EASILY FOOLED, Bob Fellows reveals through magic and "mind reading" methods that we can all be manipulated no matter how intelligent we are. He also shows how we can resist manipulation and take charge of our lives. Explore the "power of the mind," cultism, and healthy choices. Learn about deception and how it works. EASILY FOOLED has been featured on numerous national television shows and has been quoted in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today.
There's a number of interesting books out there that tackle this subject of how easily the human brain can be mislead into believing things that have absolutely no basis in reality. Slight-of-hand "magic" tricks are just one aspect of this having mainly to do with the brain's visual processing system.
ReplyDeleteI remember many years ago in the '80's how a WCG minister once during a Bible study actually used a videotape of a professional stage magician revealing how certain tricks were performed in order to delude and amaze an audience. It was a very impressive video. In actuality these astonishing tricks had very simple explanations behind them, most of them basically having to do with the brain's weakness toward optical illusion. The minister's overall point was how easily Satan can deceive humans by means of our physical senses.
But perceptive members in critical thought mode could have understood that this interesting videotape also demonstrated how easy it is for religious gurus to delude folks into believing all sorts of things that are also illusions not grounded in reality. Perhaps we could refer to such as verbal or philosophical or epistemological illusions.
(And yes, I know, probably not too many of us fit into the precious category of "perceptive critical thinkers" during our period of hard-core belief!)
This is something I'm dealing with now in my life - how easy we human beings can be totally bamboozled. It's happened to all of us in many different ways throughout our lives, our experiences in the various COG's just being only one of them.
Human gullibility is essentially the foundation of today's marketing and advertising professions. One of the biggest gaps in modern education is the dreadful lack of teaching students the basic skills of critical thinking. I'm always interested in increasing my ability to think better so as to avoid common delusions - like COG religious belief. I just bought this book used for only one cent out on Amazon. Wish I had access to books like this during my teen years, as I could have saved myself a lot of time and money lost!
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