The Tools of Integrated Apologetics Course 1.7.8
Analysis of Mind Manipulation- Legends
By Bob Passantino
The People
Keep in mind the reasons people fall for fantasies. Keep in mind the logical fallacies I’ve mentioned, and others you may be familiar with already, as we look at just two of the people whose legends have fooled a great many people — sometimes even cult apologists — at least some of the time. The legend people are the Joe Isuzus of religious research. Let me first make an important distinction here. Although I shall be referring to people whose stories have been shown to be false, there are actually two kinds of legends. The first is what we commonly think of as legend, that is, a story that purports to represent personal experience but doesn’t. It’s "made up." Obviously, this kind of legend should never be trusted as part of cult apologetics research.
The second kind of legend is a story that really is someone’s personal experience, but which cannot be verified or shown to be false. For example, one of my first encounters with witches happened almost twenty years ago, before I began in cult apologetics. I was backpacking on Mt. San Gorgonio, near Palm Springs, and night had fallen. As I crested a ridge, I saw robed figures with candles moving through the trees toward a ritual site.
The witches never saw me as I hid and watched. That’s my personal experience that really happened to me. But if there hadn’t been two people with me to confirm my experience, it would have been this second kind of legend, true, but not verifiable or falsifiable and therefore not trustworthy as research. So, there are two kinds of legends, neither of which is trustworthy as research: people’s stories that never happened, and people’s stories that (may) have happened, but which are unverifiable and unfalsifiable. For stories to be useful for research, they must have some verifiability and falsifiability. In other words, research stories at least must have explanatory power and empirical adequacy.
John Todd
How many of you remember John Todd, who claimed to have been a "Grand Druid" of witchcraft and a member of the secret high council of the "Illuminati"? Todd claimed that there was a secret conspiracy to take over the world and destroy Christianity. He had his time in the limelight as a traveling speaker in churches and as one of the people promoted through Jack Chick Publications. Todd implicated Christian leaders such as Walter Martin and Pastor Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel. For example, he claimed that, as a courier he delivered $8 million worth of checks to Chuck Smith to start Maranatha! Music as a satanic plot to deceive Christians. He made outrageous claims based on what he claimed was his "personal experience," but could provide no objective or empirical documentation for his claims. In fact he said any evidence that was adduced to disprove his claims, had been manufactured by the conspiracy. His story was neither verifiable nor falsifiable, and was thus untrustworthy for research.
In fact, his story fit the first kind of legend: Investigation showed that the story was false. Listen, for example, to the contrast between Todd’s unprovable allegations and Pastor Chuck Smith’s response: Maranatha Music was actually started with my own personal investment of $3,000.00. The first album was made on a 4-trac[k] tape recorder. The first distribution was out of the trunk of the car to local bookstores. If we had had a $1 million budget, or $4 million, or $8 million budget, you can believe we would have started out fancier than we did . . . . . . Even to the present date [October 5, 1978], Maranatha Music has not transacted a total of $8 million in business, and this also can be easily verified and confirmed and any reputable person is welcome to look at the books of both Calvary Chapel and Maranatha Music in order to prove the statements I make are correct.Pastor Smith’s "story" can be checked out — it has both explanatory power and empirical adequacy, and is therefore trustworthy for research.
Carlos Castaneda
Christians aren’t the only ones who accept legends substituted for real research. Those of you who are around my age and who remember (or were even part of) the 1960s age of "drug enlightenment" probably remember Carlos Castaneda as the anthropologist who discovered that hallucinatory drugs bring spiritual enlightenment. He didn’t do it the way many of my generation did, by dropping acid, staring into a flower and suddenly realizing that everything is "God." He did it by spending portions of several years in the
American Southwest and Mexican deserts as apprentice to an Indian shaman. UCLA awarded Castaneda a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1973 for his field work and ethnography dissertation on Native American shamanism.
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yacqi Way of Knowledge represents that work and is known worldwide for its vivid portrayal of Castaneda’s apprenticeship to the shaman, Don Juan. However, practically nothing about Castaneda, including his name, birth date and original nationality is what it appears to be. In fact, careful investigation and analysis shows that his books represent more of the Castaneda his college friend described as "witty, imaginative, cheerful — a big liar and a real friend" than they do Castaneda as the serious anthropologist and reporter who sacrifices himself for scientific ethnographic research.
Like most legends, the Castaneda legend is missing dates, times, people, places and documents. Careful research and investigation uncovered gaping holes, inconsistencies and outright fabrications in the convoluted stories Castaneda told in his four books. But the reason I mention the Castaneda legend particularly is that I never would have expected the professional reaction to the exposures. Rather than relegating his books to the legend shelf, some professionals still depend on them for ethnographic information, and still herald him as the father of the ethnographic "revolution" in anthropology!What is most interesting is the response that has greeted the revelation that Castaneda’s works are fictional. First, there has been no real attempt to revoke his Ph.D., based as it is on fraudulent "research". Secondly, as de Mille . . . documents, the response among many anthropologists and others who share the Don Juan type of philosophical outlook has been neutral. In other words, it doesn’t matter if the works are fictional because the underlying philosophy is, in some vague sense, true. An excellent example of this approach is Shelburne’s (1987) article titled "Carlos Castaneda: If It Didn’t Happen, What Does It Matter?" Shelburne argues that "the issue of whether it [Castaneda’s experience] literally happened or not makes no fundamental difference to the truth of the account" (p. 217). Such excuses are little more than intellectual used-car salesmanship.
Let’s relate this back to our legend/research paradigm. Castaneda based his "revolutionary" cultural anthropological ideas on fiction. That’s like building a house on sinking sand instead of solid rock. Now Shelburne and other professionals like him say it doesn’t matter, because the "truth" is the same. That’s like saying your sinking sand house is fine where it is — the house itself is well-built. But, no matter how well-built the house is, it will fall apart since it’s built on sand instead of solid ground. You need both a well-built house and solid ground if you expect to live in the house.
This is very different from using personal stories as illustrations or examples of what your research and evaluation have already determined. I collect stories on the cults and the occult like any other cult apologist. But I don’t base my argument on stories. I heard an excellent story during our summer speaking tour this year about the emotional bondage someone can be under after consulting a psychic and receiving a scary prediction. It makes a good illustration when I’m talking about the subject. But hypothetically one of you could come up to me today and tell me the story isn’t true. You’ve checked it out and the person who told it to me made it up. That wouldn’t change my basic talk on the power of suggestion in psychic predictions at all. I just wouldn’t use that as an example any longer.
When Christian leaders like cult apologists substitute legends for critical thinking, evidence and comprehensive evaluation, we lose the trust of those who have believed us, we participate (even unknowingly) in promoting what is not true, and we fail to give the trustworthy help those harmed by the cults and the occult really need.
The Stories
Stories that are not necessarily autobiographic can also be legends. Many of you may be familiar with the term "urban myth," which refers to stories everybody hears about and everybody believes, nobody knows the source of and nobody can prove. You’ve probably heard about the alligators in the sewers of New York. Or the young person who had been stalling about making a commitment to Christ, showed up at church one night for a service without knowing it had been canceled, assumed the empty church meant the rapture had happened but he had been left behind, and so he repented, sure he would have to suffer through the Tribulation. Or even the one about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and then confessing. Each of these are legends.
Legendary stories appeal especially to the vulnerabilities I mentioned at the beginning of my talk such as "It fits into my world view", "I accept what I’m told", or "I base my knowledge on common sense". Legendary stories impact cult apologetics, too. Four examples will illustrate what I mean. We still receive questions from people who want to know how to protest against and boycott Proctor and Gamble products because "if you buy any products with this symbol, you will be taking part in supporting the Church of Satan". The legend achieved its first popularity in 1982. It includes the story that the president of Proctor and Gamble confessed that company profits go to the Church of Satan on the Phil Donahue Show and the story that the familiar P&G symbol of the man in the crescent moon with thirteen stars was a satanic symbol. Of course, like all good myths, none of this is true, and Proctor and Gamble has spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars combatting the rumor. The story I recounted earlier in my talk about Darwin’s deathbed repentance is another legend. This legend fits especially well the ninth reason I gave for why people fall for fantasy — it confirms the world as I would like it to be rather than as it really is.
Wouldn’t it be nice if Darwin repented? Wouldn’t that strike a blow at evolution and warm our hearts? It ought to be true. There’s one short step from "it ought to be true" to a legendary story. And if Madayln Murray O’Hair isn’t given enough credit for waging battle against Christianity through her American Atheists’ Association, Christians are happy to give her more by creating their own legends about her. They spun stories about her petitioning NASA to forbid astronauts to read the Bible out loud during their space flights, about her suing to have all of the United States place names with religious elements changed, and the most popular O’Hair legend to date, that she is petitioning the FCC to ban all religious broadcasting. One typical legend- repeating petition reads, "Madalyn Murray O’Hair…has been granted a Federal hearing in Washington, D. C. on the subject (F.C.C., THE PETITION, R.M. 2493) which would ultimately pave the way to stop the reading of the Gospel on the airways of America. She took her petition with 27,000 signatures to back her stand". However, there is no truth to the legend at all. The FCC statement reads, "the Commission isn’t considering taking religious programming off the air, nor has a petition making such a suggestion ever been filed with the Agency". Propagation of such a rumour costs our tax dollars to cope with. At the end of 1985, the FCC averaged 100,000 letters per month protesting this non-existent petition.
Worst of all about this particular legend is that we are being duped by the atheists, from whose ranks this "rumor" (sic) evidently first started. Christians are called foolish for perpetuating a myth, and doubly foolish for perpetuating a myth started by atheists! Our last legend story concerns the Evangelical Ministries to New Religions (EMNR), the sponsors of this conference. Have you heard the story that EMNR banned Constance Cumbey from its last conference (in Denver in 1985) and even hired security guards to keep her out? Here’s what Cumbey said, “Walter Martin and a number of others got together and organized a conference in Denver in 1985. I was the only person in the country who was not invited. They hired security guards to keep me away.”
We carefully investigated Cumbey’s charges. We talked independently to several of the people who organized the conference, and to several people who attended. No one with direct knowledge backed up Cumbey’s claims. Dr. Gordon Lewis, who hosted the conference at Denver Seminary, confirmed that Cumbey was not asked to be a speaker or make a presentation at the conference, but that she was welcome to attend like anyone else. There were many professional cult apologists who attended without being speakers. They didn’t feel discriminated against. It was not a closed meeting, and those who attended without receiving personal invitations didn’t feel slighted, either. Elliot Miller of the Christian Research Institute noted, “Dr. Martin was a speaker there, but . . . he was not involved in the conference’s (sic) planning and organization . . . . It’s true that Mrs. Cumbey was not invited to speak (which is no more strange than Walter Martin’s not being invited to speak at certain end-time prophecy conferences where Cumbey is a featured attraction). However, she was more than welcome to attend. The claim that there were security guards hired to keep her out is both false (this writer was there) and preposterous”.
Legendary stories may intrigue and entertain, but they do not educate and protect people from the real dangers of the world. Characteristics of a Legend Now, think about some stories you know. Could any of them be legendary stories? Be extra cautious if the story fits any of the following characteristics.
1. There’s no evidence to back it up.
Sometimes there is no evidence because of the very nature of the story, like if I had been alone when I saw the witches while I was backpacking. That doesn’t mean such a story can’t be true, it just means that it’s not a story that can be considered trustworthy research. At most it’s an illustration or example.
2. Its strongest commendation is that it ought to be true.
Be careful that you are not persuaded to believe a particular story simply because you wish it to be true. This can be a strong temptation, but don’t give in to it. God won’t excuse us for supporting made-up stories because they serve a useful purpose. 3. It’s so detailed or bizarre that we can’t believe someone could make it up. When I was in the National Guard (like my buddy Dan Quayle) I sold a car stereo to another guardsman. He still owed me ten dollars. At every monthly drill I would remind him about the ten dollars. Each time he had a different elaborate story about how he had saved the money for me, but somehow something always happened and he didn’t have it with him. Finally, after months, I told him to forget the money. It wasn’t worth having to put up with all of his stories. "Wait," he said, "I can’t let you do that! Tell you what I’m gonna do. I raise and breed champion dogs and I’ll give you a puppy for free instead". I was skeptical at first, until he told me all about his house, his dogs, his kennels, his horses, his tenants’ quarters, and his machine shop. What a spread! He couldn’t make up something like this!
Well, the months went by and he always had some reason why a puppy wasn’t available that month, but would for sure be the following month. Finally I wormed his address out of him and told him I would come to his house the next evening to pick up my dog. By this time I didn’t really believe his story, but he would never admit he was lying. If he had told me the truth, I would have said, "forget it". But when he gave me his address and agreed to meet me there to give me the puppy, I had second thoughts. Maybe he was telling the truth. Who would make all that up and then give me his address? The next night I showed up at the address the guardsman had given me. No mansion, no kennel, no stable, no tenants’ quarters, no dogs. Just a run down little California bungalow with some tools in the garage. Of course, no one was home. But I couldn’t resist going next door and asking the neighbour who lived there. The name and description matched the guardsman, but the neighbor said he was a backyard mechanic with no steady employment.
At the next Guard drill, I walked up to the guardsman. "What happened to you? I went to your house, but you weren’t there." "Yeah, one of my dogs got sick and I had to go to this special vet across town. He only treats show dogs." "But what happened to your other dogs? There weren’t any dogs there at all." "Oh, I forgot to tell you. They’re at my parents’ house while I’m getting the kennel remodeled."
"But there wasn’t any kennel. There wasn’t any mansion or stable, either." "Oh, you must have gone to my tenants’ quarters instead. You got it mixed up. My house is way in the back of the lot. You can hardly see it from the street. You must have been confused."
I never told him I had talked to his neighbour. But I figure I had my ten dollars’ worth anyway. The story makes a great illustration! Be skeptical of a story that seems too detailed or too bizarre to be made up.
Summary
Legends are poor substitutes for adequately researched evaluations. "Novel people" do not make trustworthy experts, and legendary stories don’t equip us to deal with the real threats of the cults and the occult. Whether or not the people of legends know their stories aren’t true, are simply delusional, or even if their stories are true but unverifiable and unfalsifiable, they should never be used as the basis for research evaluation. Bad testimonies hurt real victims and hurt our credibility, too. When we trust people who aren’t telling the truth we trust a lie. When we trust people who are delusional we exploit people who need Christian counseling and discipleship. When we trust people whose stories can be neither proved nor disproved we are substituting vicarious experience for evidence.(This article is used with permission)
Analysis of Mind Manipulation- Legends
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