HOW PRESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY BECAME AN ESTABLISHED RELIGION

The big difference between the Chinese Communist indoctrinators and today's practitioners of the Psychology Religion is their method of using power. The Chinese Communists were quite open, forceful and crude: if you didn't do what they wanted, then you were punished.

The Psychology Religion practitioners are more subtle and much more effective. They have exerted and grown their power softly. Instead of bullying and threatening, Psychology as Religion tells us that we are free to do what we want; yet all the time it is taking over control of values that we have to accept and obey. Let's look at the stages in the process that it uses and continues to use:

1. Destroying any belief that we have of right and wrong: by describing them as a 'social construct'. In other words, our belief in right and wrong is just something imposed on us by 'society'; and that therefore there is more than one truth.

2. Destroying belief in absolute values: so that any one set of beliefs is no more true than any other.

3. Stating that we are free to choose to do whatever gives us comfort, attracts us, or makes us feel good: without any reference to 'out-dated' or 'judgemental' standards.

4. Deceiving us that we have gained our personal freedom: from the oppression of 'social constructs' or anything that stops us accepting or doing anything we don't want to.

5. Filling the gap left by the destruction of our original sense of what is right or wrong, with the values of Psychology as Religion: which gives increasing power over ourselves and our society to its practitioners (priests?).

6. Selecting, perverting, re-presenting and imposing values that we originally thought to be true: through appeals to 'tolerance', 'love', 'inclusivity' or any description that makes us feel comfortable with conforming to the social pressures that they generate around us; through the capture of politics, the professions and the media. So in rejecting old values which are supposedly a social construct, we find ourselves accepting new ones, which come from the very same forces in our society that convinced us that absolute values are merely a social construct.

8. Under the disguise of liberating us from the supposed tyranny of traditional values we are then enslaved to new ones:

In his book The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned about this only a few years after the death of Freud in 1939. It is worth noting that Lewis did not write this as an exclusively Christian book. Indeed, the words 'Christian' or 'Christianity' hardly occur in the book at all. Instead, Lewis refers to what he calls the 'Tao': that fundamental set of values that has been the possession of all humanity across time, creeds and cultures. He also warns about something that is now happening nearly a century after he wrote: the very process described in the sequence 1-8 above.