Torture | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff

All around us, we see the ripening fruit of seven decades of increasingly psychologized education. Tolerance of evil and "group thinking" are closing minds to God-given wisdom. And since today's collective "holism" is incompatible with God's holiness, few dare take a contrary stand on truth. Such courage might even be viewed as intolerance. Neither individualism nor God's grace has any place in this horrendous system of mind control. Yet, Hitler's pragmatic concept of "mental health" -- equating "health" with collective thinking and conformity to the "right" kind of group -- is transforming churches as well as cultures around the world.

[At Abu Ghraib prison], [1] most people condoned, concealed or carried out the abusive tactics. But we shouldn't be surprised. "Thirty years before the sadistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, the same behavior was exhibited at Stanford University," according to Pat Nolan, President of Justice Fellowship.[3] In his article, "Iraqi Prisoner Abuse and the Importance of Self-Restraint," he compares the brutal images from the Abu Ghraib prison with similar sadism among graduate students during a notorious 1971 research project. In this experiment, the participating Stanford students were divided into two groups: prisoners and guards. Nolan begins with a quote from the New York Times by John Schwartz: ….

"Within days the 'guards' had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners' heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform sexual acts.' Their professor was so profoundly shocked by this behavior that he stopped the study after six days, rather than two weeks [as] he had planned.

"None of us should feel smug. While we all hope we would not have taken part in such abasement of our fellow human beings, we are all stained with original sin. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that 'the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.' It is only by restraining these base impulses that we can be civilized."[3]

1.Kate Zernike, "Handful of soldiers spoke out, as many kept quiet on abuse," New York Times, May 22, 2004.

2. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (Burlington, VT: Fraser Publishing Co., 1982 -- almost a century after Le Bon wrote the book), xvi, xx, 9.

3. Pat Nolan, "Iraqi Prisoner Abuse and the Importance of Self-Restraint," Justice Report, Vol. 3, No. 18, May 12, 2004.

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/04/crowds.htm