What Is The 'Law of Attraction'?

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Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, we’re glad you could join us. Coming up in today’s broadcast in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Book of Acts, and “What is the inheritance of God’s grace?” In Religion in the News, “A new Brazilian saint.” We’ll take a look at that story and address the question: “Why mercy for Manasseh?” We hope you can stay with us. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program.

Now, this week’s Cover Article. Tom and Dave continue their new series of programs addressing the popular spiritual phenomenon known as “The Secret.” This week we focus on the question, “What is the law of attraction?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.

Tom:

Thanks, Gary . You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. In this first segment of our program we’re addressing “The Secret” which is the latest promotion of the religious science, positive mental attitude, and prosperity and healing techniques, only now in a secular presentation. It’s been packaged and marketed in the vain of the popular “DaVinci Code” movie, emulating the belief that information valuable to mankind has been hidden from the masses and is only recently been revealed to “The Secret” which is making it available to all, that is all who purchase the DVD and the book based upon the DVD. Now, so far, The Secret has been atop the New York Times Best Seller List for nearly two dozen weeks and the DVD has sold more than 2 million copies. Now, Dave, in our analysis of “The Secret,” let’s pick up with the methods that are being promoted that the practitioners claim are universal laws. Remember last week we talked about the law of attraction which is foundational, and for those who maybe missed our program last week, here is what the book, The Secret , claims. I’m quoting, “Everything that’s coming into your life you are attracting into your life and it’s attracted to you by virtue of the images you’re holding in your mind. It’s what you’re thinking. Whatever is going on in your mind, you are attracting to you.” Now, first of all, Dave, where do they get these ideas?

Dave:

Well, I would say it goes back to the Garden of Eden. The serpent was the first one. So, you can have whatever you want, you can do whatever you want, be whatever you want. Of course, it doesn’t work. But, it has terrible moral implications. It’s amoral. So, if we followed that everything that happens to me I’m attracting in my life. I go down the freeway and then suddenly there’s an earthquake and the overpass collapses right on top of my car and kills me. I guess I was attracting it into my life. Somehow I was thinking those thoughts. We had a terrible earthquake in San Francisco , you know, a few years ago. All these people somehow were attracting it. They were thinking earthquake. Now, you had a huge earthquake in Mexico City , jolted, people woke up. I guess they’d all been dreaming about an earthquake and that was all their fault. It gets worse, Tom. Hitler is not the only one responsible for the Holocaust, but the Jews are responsible. Those six million people that he killed. They must have been thinking Holocaust. Somehow, simultaneously, they all brought this disaster upon themselves. Tom, this is one of the most wicked doctrines that you could imagine.

Tom:

Yeah, Dave, the emphasis for those who promote this, just the things that you mentioned, they wouldn’t go there. They would just say, well, if you’re having problems it’s your negative thinking. But they would say your positive thoughts, these are more powerful. So this is what they are selling.

Dave:

Tom, they say it has been scientifically proved that positive thoughts are what? A hundred thousand times more powerful?

Tom:

Definitely more powerful, right.

Dave:

Tom, I would like to know where, when and how they measure thoughts, and the power of thoughts and prove that positive thoughts are more powerful than negative thoughts. It simply is a lie! It’s a fraud! It’s not true!

Tom:

But you know if you repeat something often enough, especially if it appeals to our base nature to greed, to averist, to getting what we want, you’re going to find, not just a prospect out there, you’re going to find somebody who is going to buy into it.

Dave:

Tom, anybody with any intelligence at that point ought to say, thanks, but No thanks. But look, if positive thoughts are so much more powerful than negative thoughts why should I ever worry about negative thoughts. I mean if I just had a fraction of the positive thoughts that I have of negative thoughts that would overwhelm these negative thoughts.

Tom:

Dave, let me give you some quotes from the book. I know you’ve been through the book, “The law of attraction is always present and always listening to everything you think, speak and act. It assumes that everything you think about, you speak about, everything you act upon is what you want. Again, where do they get these ideas? Let me keep going here.

Dave:

Let me just deal with that first, “The law of attraction” it is listening—wow! Laws are listening—who made this law up? You can’t have a law without a lawgiver, and “it” what’s “it”? Now “it” is impersonal, there is a difference between personal beings and impersonal things, and this is an “it”. They wouldn’t dare say, he, or she, they don’t believe in God, not the God of the Bible, but there’s some kind of a power out there, in fact there’s a number of them: The Law of Attraction, The Law of Reciprocity, I mean there all kinds of them. Tom, it’s nonsense, but people love it because it’s telling them what they want to believe.

Tom:

Well, listen to this, this is page 46 of The Secret editor Ronda Burn, “You are the master of the universe, and the law is there to serve you, it never questions your commands. You remember this, the look at Napoleon Hill, you’re the captain of your ship. The master of your fate.

Dave:

Tom, isn’t that wonderful if that could only be it. However, now we’ve got another problem. See, anybody with any common sense, a little bit of logic, now who is “you”? You are the master of the universe. Wait a minute! You’re the master of the universe, yet I’m the master of the universe, so is Joe, so everybody is the master of the universe if they follow this. See, there’s not enough in this law to go around. So, I think we mentioned it last time, Tom, if this is really true, it’s like the human potential movement. Ninety percent of the brain you haven’t used, this nonsense psychology, and you’ve an infinite potential. Really? Infinite? Well, if you’re infinite potential then you’re really god, that’s what the serpent said to Eve. Okay. Now, it’s going to bring peace. Oh, we’ll all have enough, and so forth and so on. Yeah, but I want more than you’ve got. Well, we’ll just have a bunch of Obie Wan Kanobies and Darth Vaders zapping one another with psychic power. That’s frightening, Tom, that would be frightening world if everybody had all these powers and they could get the universe, or whatever it is, law of attraction, doesn’t care what you want—you want to murder somebody? go ahead. It’s totally amoral.

Tom:

Well, Dave, there’s another problem here. This is really witchcraft, right? This is magic.

Dave:

Thankfully it doesn’t work.

Tom:

Right, but there are a lot of people attempting to apply it their lives. Okay. Learn laws, learn how to use incantations and manipulations, all of these.

Dave:

Millions of people.

Tom:

Right, Now, Dave, you know, as you’ve studied witchcraft, isn’t it true that they will tell you that if you mess up in some way this thing can blow up in your face. I mean I’ve heard that through the writers of this way of going about things.

Dave:

Well, Tom, it always does, let’s put it that way. It always turns on whoever uses it, and ultimately destroys them.

Tom:

But I guess what I am getting at is they are thinking you have to apply this correctly, and this is, in a sense, what The Secret is about. Now, here’s the problem. If these are laws, Dave, where does grace fit in, where does mercy fit in, I mean, if this is an impersonal force, you said it would be amoral, but obviously, there is more to it than that. There’s no grace, there’s no mercy, you mess up, you know, you’re dead meat.

Dave:

Well, Tom, it tells you in the book, you’ve got to love money, you’ve got to love money, you’ve got to say, Money, I love you. Well, the Bible says the love of money is the root of all evil. It doesn’t say money is the root of all evil, the love of money. This is training people to be avaricious, self centered, want to get for themselves. Now you say, Where does kindness and love and so forth come in? That would ruin the whole thing, Tom. If I’m going to be—Look, I’ve got to love money, I’ve got to attract this to myself. Now, how can I, at the same time, hold thoughts of generosity and sharing with others? Tom, we’ve got a problem.

Tom:

I know, Dave, the other problem with that is, as we get to this going through their methods and so on, you’re going to see some of the things that you just mentioned, being generous, all these things, being kind treating others and so on. They try to insert this into their system, and again, it’s just illogical, it’s irrational. Now, there’s another problem. You mentioned the Bible a minute ago. Well, Dave, they tell us in the book The Secret this stuff comes out of the Bible. I’m quoting: “The creative process used in The Secret which was taken from the New Testament in the Bible is an easy guideline for you to create what you want in three simple steps.” And before I get to the steps, Dave, many Christians are being drawn to this. We mentioned in The Seduction of Christianity , we’ve dealt with this whole issue with regard to positive confession, the word faith teaching within the church, and here are the three steps that we pointed out that they were promoting and calling it biblical. The three steps are: Ask, believe and receive, and of course, the scripture they give is Matthew 21:22 —“whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” And then, Mark 11:24 —“What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.”

Dave:

Well, Tom, let me explain from Mark:11:24Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.. That begins with Jesus curses the fig tree and the disciples say, Wow! I mean, then Jesus says, Well, this is nothing. If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed you can say to this mountain, Be thou removed. You can cast a tree into the ocean, and so forth. Now again, when we read the Bible, we use some common sense. The Bible is not telling us God has turned over His universe to everybody out there and they can just do whatever they want with it. No, there are certain laws that bind this universe together. Secondly, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed. What is faith? Well, Tom, I wouldn’t dare command the mountain to move unless I knew it was God’s will, where He wanted to move it, when He wanted to move it, and so forth. I wouldn’t dare to command in the name of Jesus, I command this mountain to move. It’s the problem we have in the charismatic movement commanding all kinds of things in the name of Jesus that Jesus never wanted to happen. Okay. So, now if I don’t understand what faith is, well then what is faith? Well, faith puts me in touch with God. It tells me His mind, I’m asking according to His will. Tom, I’ve used the illustration, maybe it was years ago nobody would remember, when I was in the business world I was the alter ego for a very wealthy man in Beverly Hills . I had documents, power of attorney, that were registered, were recorded in various counties and various states. I could sign my name, I could write out a check to myself for a million dollars, sign my name on it. I could sign my name to anything that he had power over, and you couldn’t accuse me of anything. Now, how does this work? Well, he could take me to a court of equity. He gave me the power of attorney, not to use to my enrichment or my benefits, but for his benefit. Okay. Now, Christ, in a sense, has given us the power of attorney, whatsoever you ask in my name I will do it. The Father will do it. Now, what does that mean? That I can ask and I can get what I want—that’s what The Secret is all about, getting for myself, No, this is to His glory. So, faith is something that is given to me by God. I am in touch with Him. I’m praying according to His will, not my will but thine be done. You don’t find that in “The Secret” it’s all about my will, getting what I want. So Tom, as you were pointing out, to use the Bible as a cover for this evil, self-centered, amoral system is absolutely—it’s just another part of their own dishonesty.

Tom:

Well, Dave, as we’ve pointed out, not just recently, but continually point out is a concern that we have with regard to people who call themselves Christians, professing Christians and even true believers. They’re the functionally illiteracy. All you have to do is say, Well, it’s in the Bible, and give them a proof text, and they don’t think it through. We’ve lost critical thinking for the most part in the church. All we would have to do is say, Okay, “The Secret” talks about Mark:11:24Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.. If they go two verses above that, Mark:11:22And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God., it says, Have faith in God. So there’s the personal object of our faith in which “The Secret” dismisses.

Dave:

Tom, I often put it like this: A lot of people think that faith is, if I can just believe that what I’m praying for will happen, that’s faith, so they try to believe somehow that this thing they want is going to happen. No, that’s mind power. If things happen because you believe they will happen, this is what “The Secret” is talking about. No, faith is believing that God will make it happen. That’s why Jesus said, Have faith in God. Now that changes the whole thing. Maybe it’s not God’s will, it’s not God’s time, it’s not God’s way.

Tom:

Let me give you another verse, and I would like you to supply what I’ve left out here because “The Secret” left it out. “And this is the confidence that we have in Him that if we ask anything He hears us, and if we know He hears us whatsoever we ask we know that we have the petitions that we desire of Him.

Dave:

What he really left out were very important words, “according to His will.” Now they tell you that this universe has no will of its own. It’s like Religious Science, Church of Religious Science , it’s a universal mind out there, but it doesn’t have a mind of its own, so we can use it. Okay. So, Tom, it’s dishonest.

Tom:

Well, that’s the death nail to “The Secret” right there, that one verse.

Dave:

According to His will.

Tom:

Right.

Dave:

So, Tom, they are not being honest, telling us that they are scientifically proven, that positive thoughts are many, many times more powerful than negative thoughts; telling us the universe will answer and that there’s this power out there, this law, don’t know who the lawgiver is. Tom, what staggers me is that people can believe this. On the other hand you mentioned Christians, let me mention a well known Christian, Pat Robertson. Pat Robertson wrote a book at one time, The Secret Kingdom Was , they’ve got the secret, yeah. And what is The Secret Kingdom all about? Well, to find out you had to buy his book, and I think it was selling for $100 to begin with. You had to order it from him, it finally got into the book stores. Well, what was the secret? The secret was exactly what “The Secret” talking about. There are laws, 8 laws that govern this secret kingdom. One of the laws was the law of miracles, and he dared to say that even God Himself can’t do a miracle except according to the law of miracles. Now, I think that most people would realize that that’s nonsense. If it follows a law, it’s not a miracle! The whole idea of a miracle is, it overrides the laws. Otherwise, the skeptic would say, You just think that this is a miracle, you don’t know the scientific laws that govern this. This is Christian Science. Now, if this is science—when I get into an airplane, Tom, and you get into an airplane where we are going together, God willing, all the way to Hong Kong, we don’t get into the cockpit, they won’t let you in there anymore, and say, Hey guys, are you Christians? You don’t have to be a Christian, you could be a Hindu, you could even be a Muslim to fly an airplane, you just follow the laws, and that is what this teaching is. You don’t have to be godly, you don’t have to love the Lord with all your heart, you don’t have to walk with Him, you don’t have to love others, all you have to do is follow the laws. Atomic laws? Well, you can use that to murder people just as well as to provide power to a city. It’s amoral, that’s what the whole problem is.

Tom:

Yet Dave, some of the things that they introduce, again, for lack of understanding, for lack of being discerning, Christians buy into this. For example, one of the methods, one of the techniques is the gratitude, the attitude of gratitude. Let me quote you—

Dave:

Have gratitude to the universe, and to the law?

Tom:

No, that’s the question. Look, gratitude is absolutely the way to bring more into your life. Gratitude has been such a powerful exercise for me. Every morning I get up and say, Thank you. I’m feeling the feelings of gratitude. Thank who, Dave?

Dave:

I don’t know.

Tom:

But nevertheless, you say, Oh, well, it’s good to be, because the Bible talks about it and so forth, it’s good to have an attitude of gratitude. Well, it’s really true, but not to get what you want, not as a methodology or a technique.

Dave:

Absolutely. On the Larry King live show, Joe Vitelli, if I recall correctly, a caller called in and asked, Well, what about God, where does God fit into this? Logical question, of course I think the caller was probably thinking of the real God, the true God, the biblical God. And Vitalli says: Well, you’re God, everything is God, you know, we’re all God. Now we are into pantheism. If you’re God, Tom, I’m really worried about that—if I’m God I’m even more worried because I know my heart better than I know yours. But if everything is God, then nothing is God. Pantheism is just kind of another type of atheism, because if that clock is God and this book is God, this table is God, and the mike is God, what’s the significance of God? And I’m God? You couldn’t find the differentiation, I mean, what is the commonality of all of this? We just is! We’re just here!

Tom:

Well, it’s worse than that. If God is everything and in everything and we do recognize evil, we recognize disasters, we recognize all of these things, then God’s got a problem, we all have a problem.

Dave:

Yeah. I shouldn’t bring this up, Tom, but this is what Calvinism teaches, because they overdo sovereignty and God is responsible for everything. Not all Calvinists would teach this, but this is Calvinism as John Calvin taught it, because God is sovereign. If you’re going to be saved, God predestined you to it. Anything going to happen in your life, God must be behind it. That is not true! Otherwise, if that’s true, Tom, then we have to blame God for all the evil in the world, and that’s exactly what The Secret is doing, but not the true God.

Tom:

Dave, we’re out of time now, but next week we’re going to pick up on some of these other teachings from “The Secret” which they claim come from the Bible, which is, come on, that’s not just absurd, it’s an abomination.