Search the Scriptures Daily Program #2001b:
Gary :
Tom will wrap up this three part series with the Bobgans next week. Please make plans to be here. This is Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. Still ahead, answers to your questions in Contending for the Faith. And in Understanding the Scriptures, Dave and Tom will resume their conversation on God’s salvation. And now to tell you more about our ministry, here’s TBC executive director, Tom McMahon:
Tom:
The name, The Berean Call, is taken from the Book of Acts:17:10And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night unto Berea: who coming thither went into the synagogue of the Jews.,11 where we find the apostle Paul entering the synagogue in the Greek city of Berea after he had just come from Thessalonica. To these Bereans he preached that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah sent from God. They were commended for being noble, or fair minded, not only for their willingness to hear what Paul had to say about the matter, but more specifically, because they searched the scripture daily to find out whether or not what the apostle was saying was found in God’s Word. That’s what we hope to encourage through this ministry. Our mission is to alert believers in Christ to unbiblical teachings and practices impacting the church. We want to exhort believers to give greater heed to biblical discernment and truth regarding what they are accepting as spiritual. We hope to supply those who profess to be biblical Christians with information and materials that will encourage the love of God’s truth. Hopefully, we can help mobilize believers in Christ to action in obedience to the scriptural command to earnestly content for the faith, found in Jude 3. And finally, our prayer is that we can be used of God to stimulate Christians to look to the Bible alone as their rule of faith, authority, and practice in living lives pleasing to our Lord and Savior.
Gary :
I’d like to remind you that in addition to this radio program we also publish a monthly newsletter which we make available free of charge. We also produce and distribute a wide variety of teaching materials including books, video and audio tapes and other items to encourage the serious study of God’s Word. For a complete list of materials or to get a copy of today’s broadcast, contact us at PO Box 7019 , Bend , Oregon 97708 . Call us at 800-937-6638, or visit our website at www.thebereancall.org , ask for Program #0541 and be sure to mention the call letters of this station. We will repeat this information at the end of the program. Now:
RELIGION IN THE NEWS
A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s item focuses on psychology and is from the Associated Press, date line: San Francisco with a headline “Psychologist says new evidence shows Sybil’s story bogus.” A psychologist says that tape recordings that lay forgotten in his desk for 25 years show that the popular story of Sybil, the woman with 16 personalities, is bogus. In a best selling 1973 book, later made into a movie, Sybil was portrayed as developing alternate personalities who did things without her knowledge. The account blames the problem on abuse Sybil suffered as a child and says she overcame it with therapy. The new found tapes suggest these personalities were actually created during therapy through suggestions to a highly pliable young woman says psychologist Robert Reiber of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York . Reiber said that tapes between Sybil’s psychiatrist and the book’s author show they were not totally unaware that the story they told was wrong.
Tom:
Now Martin and Deidre what do you think about this. Many of our listeners, I am sure have seen the film or films that also dealt with multiple personality disorder. What do you guys think?
Martin:
Well there are a variety of factors involved in this. First factor, MPD was almost non-existent, let’s say 20 years ago and then all of a sudden there’s a whole proliferation of MPDs around. In fact, they have changed the MPD to DID which is Dissociative Identity Disorder and that’s one facet of it. How come all of a sudden we’re having so many of these when in the past we didn’t have hardly any or any at all. Another factor has to do with this whole area of suggestibility in therapy. Suggestibility is a very, very powerful ingredient in a relationship. In fact, one of the key ingredients in hypnosis is the suggestibility of the person doing it and the person that’s receiving it, how highly suggestible that person is. So when you get into a therapeutic setting and you have a therapist who is suggesting things and a person who’s hearing these suggestions and being suggestible in following them, you can end up with not only a multiple personality, you can find out inside of you is another person or persons, but you can also conjure up false memories. So you can conjure up false persons, identities, false memories and particularly when you get back to early life when the suggestion is made something must have happened to you. So this whole area of MPD is rife with all kinds of problems and it’s actually severely criticized by those people who are the professionals in the field.
Deidre:
Yes, some people can go into therapy, they are having problems, they are looking for the source of their problems, they go into the past and if the therapist believes that there are alters there, the suggestions, the leading questions will be the “say the name of the person” and so forth. And the best way to create multiple personality disorders is through therapy and the best way to get rid of them is suggested by one researcher who says, “Ignore the alters, stop talking to them, taking notes on them and discussing them at staff conferences, pay attention to the real present problems and conflicts rather than fantasy. If these few simple familiar rules are followed multiple personalities will soon wither away.
Tom:
We were talking earlier about Christian psychology. They’ve gotten into this big time and some of the documentation is incredible to me, because some are recommending that these individual personalities be led to Christ and be converted to resolve the problem. What do you think of that?
Deidre:
Well this is all fantasy, but people believe this fantasy. The therapists, who do this, really believe this. They believe that they are by their questions, bringing this out and I must say that this of course is connected a lot with the false memory syndrome as well. Sad to say Christians have been involved in this big time.
Tom:
To the destruction of many lives and families.
Deidre:
It is the destruction of lie upon lie, upon lie, upon lie. In therapy by the way, in psych therapy they don’t consider what would be factual, they don’t try to corroborate things outside of therapy because what is true as far as facts, as far as history, is not as important as what is psychically true for the person. So you aren’t dealing with truth any more, you are dealing with fantasy.
