CISNEO February, 2007 Newsletter
06: April/May  |  June  |  October  |  November
 

PROGRAM/MEETING 

Tuesday, February 13,  at Christ United Methodist Church. Regular Meeting begins at 7:30pm.  Board Meeting at 6:30pm. Our program will be a video on the recent re-creation of the famous Stanley Milgram obedience experiment where subjects are tested to see how far they will cross ethical boundaries in order to please authority figures. 

Dues for 2007 

Our Dues for the year 2007 are now due.  Cost is $20 for an individual, $30 for families.  Please bring to the meeting or send to the address above.  Please make checks payable to CISNEO.

 SAVE ACME RECEIPTS 

Dorothy Jemson is again collecting Acme receipts which we use a fund raiser for CISNEO.  Please forward them to Dorothy at 1461 Westvale Ave., Akron, Ohio  44313.

Taking Back Islam
The U.S. Has Little to Contribute to the Theological Struggle

Sunday, September 18, 2005 - By David Ignatius

Rarely has a big idea gotten more lip service and less real substance than the argument that there is a war of ideas underway for the soul of the Muslim world. Do a Google search on war of ideas and Muslim, and you get more than 11 million hits. Yet, four years after Sept. 11, 2001, the real battle is only now beginning.

The Bush administration's response has been to throw former White House spinmeister Karen Hughes into the fray. The implication is that Muslims will stop hating America if we can just improve our "public diplomacy" through Hughes's new office at the State Department. Forgive me, but that idea strikes me as dangerously naive. This is not a propaganda problem, nor is it one that the United States can solve.

The war within Islam takes place every day in mosques, study groups and televised sermons. And although it's about ideas, it has deadly consequences, with hundreds dying from suicide car bombings this week in Iraq alone. It's hard for a non-Muslim such as me to fully understand this struggle, but after years of reporting on the Middle East, reading and talking to Muslim friends, I'm beginning to see some connections.

Traditional Islam is under assault from a puritanical fringe group known as the Salafists. The name is drawn from an Arabic word that refers to the seventh-century ancestors who walked with the Prophet Muhammad. For a Christian analogy to the Salafist extremists, think of the fanatical monk Savonarola, who in the 15th century burned the books of Florence in his rage at the corruption of the Medicis. The difference is that the Salafists have access to the Internet and car bombs -- and perhaps far more dangerous weapons.

 An important new book by Quintan Wiktorowicz, titled "Radical Islam Rising," makes clear that the Salafists operate like a cult. They draw in vulnerable young people, fill them with ideas that give their lives a fiery new meaning, and send them into battle against the unbelievers. Combating this seductive Salafist preaching requires the same kind of intense "deprogramming" used to wean away converts from other modern cults.

Wiktorowicz researched his book by embedding himself with al-Muhajiroun, an extremist Salafist group based in London. He found that the group preyed on disoriented young Muslims -- not poor or oppressed themselves but confused and looking for meaning. Recruitment often involved a personal crisis that provided the Muslim cultists with a "cognitive opening."

"To many young Muslims, their parents' version of Islam seems archaic, backward and ill-informed," Wiktorowicz explains. Into this spiritual void march the Salafists. They provide a structured life, through a mandatory study session every week in the halaqah , or prayer circle, and a new set of life rules. Among the prohibited activities Wiktorowicz discovered in his research were "playing games," "watching TV," "sleeping a lot and chilling out," and "hanging out with friends."

Frankly, Hughes and her public diplomats aren't going to be much help in deprogramming a young Salafist. Governments can contain the violent cults by making it riskier to join -- so that the confused young Muslim must weigh the danger of deportation or even arrest before joining an extremist group. But the real battle of ideas requires theological ammunition, and that's where there are some interesting new developments.

Traditional Islam is finally starting to fight back against the Salafists and their self-taught, literalist interpretations of the Koran. One of the leaders in this effort is Jordan's King Abdullah, heir to a Hashemite throne that traces its lineage back to Muhammad. He convened an Islamic conference in Amman in July that concluded with a communique on "True Islam and Its Role in Modern Society." It reemphasized the traditional faith -- the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, the orthodox school of Shiite jurisprudence, the canon set forth over centuries of fatwas and other orthodox interpretations of what Islam means.

Rather than running scared, as mainstream clerics sometimes do when facing the Salafist onslaught, the Amman declaration was proud and emphatic. It drew together fatwas from the leading clerics in Islam, including the sheik of Al-Azhar in Cairo and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf. Another backer was Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, who has a weekly show on al-Jazeera and is probably the best-known television preacher in the Arab world.

These Islamic leaders sense that their religion is being kidnapped by Salafist radicals with a grab-bag theology, and they are finally beginning to push back. It's a war of ideas they should win, if they can make traditional Islam a vibrant, living faith. Young Muslims don't want to go back to the seventh century; they want to live with dignity in the 21st.

 
Scientology church makes matters worse
Boston Herald, January 25, 2007 - Editorial

No Tom Cruise in sight, but a collection of his fellow zealots, blinded by ideology, yesterday deepened the pain of every person connected to the tragic killing of a 15-year-old boy at Lincoln-Sudbury High School, disrupting a community’s grief to spread their pitiful propaganda.

Members of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a wing of the Church of Scientology, held a banner near the school to condemn the practice of psychiatry and demanded information about any medications the suspected killer - an autistic 16-year-old - might have been taking.

“These doctors shouldn’t be prescribing willy-nilly,” said Kevin Hall, the group’s New England director. Ah, yes, Mr. Hall - surely you as a total stranger know better than John Odgren’s parents and doctors how his condition was being treated. The phrase “get a life” comes to mind. 

Christian scholars decry 'Local Church' tactics
East Valley Tribune (AZ), January 10, 2007 - By Lawn Griffiths, Spiritual Life Editor

It’s been 7 /12 years since Bill and Patsy Freeman and many of their “Local Church’ followers left Scottsdale where they had established Scottsdale Church and moved to Oregon. Later, they resettled in an enclave of homes near the Whitworth College campus in Spokane, Wash., making many became worried and wary because of their reputation of drawing innocent young people into their fold for manipulation, mind control and match-matching.

The “Local Church,” a controversial evangelical Christian movement, was developed in the 1970s by a Chinese-born leader, Witness Lee, who, in turn, was a disciple of Watchman Nee. The Freemans had been involved in that movement, though they formally split from them in the mid-1980s. In 1999, another reporter and I did a news investigation of the Freemans and the impact they had made on people who had joined their church. Meddling in the lives of couples and causing divorces were key complaints reported in the story, later posted on several cult-watch web sites, including
www.rickross.com/reference/freeman_group.

On Tuesday, some 60 evangelical Christian scholars and ministry leaders in seven countries signed a letter asking all leaders of “local churches” and Living Stream Ministry “to withdraw unorthodox statements by their founder, Witness Lee” (1905-1997). Their letter asked Local Church leaders to “renounce their decades-long practice of using lawsuits and threatened litigation to respond to criticism and settle disputes with Christian organizations and individuals.”  

The letter (www.open-letter.org) contains numerous theological statements from Witness Lee’s writings. It referred to one regarding “the legitimacy of evangelical churches and denominations,” stating, “ We decry, as inconsistent and unjustifiable, the attempts by Living Stream and the ‘Local Churches’ to gain membership in associations of evangelical churches and ministries while continuing to promote Witness Lee's denigrating characterizations of such churches and ministries as follows: “The Lord is not building his church in Christendom, which is composed of the apostate Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant denominations. This prophecy is being fulfilled through the Lord's recovery, in which the building of the genuine church is being accomplished."  

The letter’s signers noted a $136 million suit brought by Living Stream and the Local Churches against Harvest House Publishers for $136 million in objection to the publishers’ description of them in their edition of “The Encyclopedia of Cults and New Religions” by John Ankerberg and John Weldon. A Texas court dismissed the suit and that was upheld on appeal. Evangelicals declare that the Local Churches have described them as “apostate” and “utilized by Satan to set up his satanic system.” They decry that the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association granted membership to Living Stream Ministry.  Witness Lee’s 1991 “The New Testament Recovery Version” asserted: "The apostate church has deviated from the Lord's word and become heretical. The reformed church, though recovered to the Lord's word to some extent, has denied the Lord's name by denominating herself, taking many other names, such as Lutherans, Wesleyan, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, etc. ... To deviate from the Lord's word is apostasy, and to denominate the church by taking any name other than the Lord's is spiritual fornication." Further, it cites a 1989 Lee book, “The Seven Spirits for the Local Churches,” in which he stated, "We do not care for Christianity, we do not care for Christendom, we do not care for the Roman Catholic Church, and we do not care for all the denominations, because in the Bible it says that the great Babylon is fallen. This is a declaration. Christianity is fallen, Christendom is fallen, Catholicism is fallen, and all the denominations are fallen. Hallelujah!"  

Witness Lee (www.witnesslee.org) would be called a bond slave of Christ. He brought Watchman Nee’s teachings from Taiwan to the U.S. in 1962 and established the Local Church philosophy arguing that Christianity should only be one church, thus names like Scottsdale Church.   One of the most bizarre aspects of the ongoing battles was the death in 2003 of Jim Moran, who had done an exhaustive scholarly research into the Local Church movement. His works were widely posted on websites and he operated “Light of Truth Ministries.” On his death, the Church of Fullerton, Calif., a Local Church, was able to obtain Moran’s considerable research, writings, web sites and copyrights and sought to remove it from the public domain over the objections of Local Church watchdogs and critics.

 
Questionable grounds for exclusion
APA Monitor on Psychology, Volume 38, No. 1, January 2007, - page 4, Letters

In their “Judicial Notebook” column (“Expert testimony in insanity cases,” November Monitor), Mercado and Bornstein, without naming me, referred to Justice David Souter’s citation of my work in his troubling Clark v. Arizona decision. Souter based his opinion partly on a mischaracterization and misapplication, in an amicus brief, of my two decades of documentation of the inadequate use of science in the creation of diagnostic categories.

How did Justice Souter hear about my work? A Church of Scientology group, calling itself the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) and not mentioning Scientology, submitted that brief, using an argument irrelevant to the case but, surprisingly, used by Justice Souter. They cited my work and claimed that disagreement about the scientific basis of diagnoses causes confusion in criminal cases. What was actually at issue was whether therapists should be allowed to testify that Mr. Clark, who had killed a policeman, was delusional. He believed that aliens disguised as police had invaded Earth and were trying to kill him. Justice Souter ruled that psychiatrists’ and psychologists’ testimony about a criminal defendant’s state of mind can be excluded because, as the CCHR said, diagnoses are unscientific. To exclude their testimony, however, is patently absurd. Furthermore, problems with validity of categories (symptom clusters) do not justify excluding testimony about individual symptoms relevant to the crime, which are easier to document and have face and content validity for this case.

The way my work was misused raises two larger questions: (1. Do Supreme Court and other appellate judges regularly investigate the identity of authors of amicus briefs they don’t recognize, like the CCHR? (2. Do they regularly investigate the validity of what is presented as “science” and whether the writer has represented and applied it responsibly? The answer to both questions, as I learned researching the article at www.counterpunch.org/caplan10022006.html, is “no.”

I hope no one will assume that anyone raising questions about the mental health system is allied with the Church of Scientology. For most of us questioners, nothing could be further from the truth.

Paula J. Caplan, PhD, APA Fellow
4246 Hudson Drive
Stow, Oh.   44224