OK, I’d like a show of hands - how many of you folks have ever heard of the Milgram Experiment? Freshman year, Psych 101? Anybody?
For those who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, Stanley Milgram was a Yale psychologist back in the 1960’s who was interested in how the phenomenon of group evil could come to be. To test his theories, Milgram created a simple series of social experiments designed to answer these questions: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”
To understand the mechanics of what he did, follow the link above. To grasp the significance of what he discovered, try this on for size: “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.1” That, my friends, means any one of us can become an active participant in evil so long as there is an authority we are willing to follow. Let that sit with you for just a moment.
Three different news sites, CNN and MSNBC (Reuters wrote the article carried on MSNBC, and the block quoted text below came from Reuters site as well) carried essentially the same story today about how Milgram’s work has been replicated with essentially the same results - the experimental conditions were modified in ways that would not cause a difference in outcome but would be considered ethical - by Jerry Burger, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California.
Burger said the experiment, published in the American Psychologist, can only partly explain the widely reported prisoner abuse at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or events during World War Two.
“Although one must be cautious when making the leap from laboratory studies to complex social behaviors such as genocide, understanding the social psychological factors that contribute to people acting in unexpected and unsettling ways is important,” he wrote.
“It is not that there is something wrong with the people,” Burger said. “The idea has been somehow there was this characteristic that people had back in the early 1960s that they were somehow more prone to obedience.”
I respectfully disagree with the professor about a few of his statements and beliefs. Fallen man can do horrible things; Milgram’s work pointed out what has been known (and forgotten) since Biblical times. We would all like to believe we are not capable of these things - the words of Christ do not allow us the comfort of that delusion. People have been giving and taking orders from one another for millenia, and I have a hard time buying into the idea that “this characteristic that people had back in the 1960’s” only dates back that far.
I bring all this to your attention with this in mind: many, like myself, believe we are now living in the End Times. Given that many of the prophecies concerning these times have to do with the rise of a “new” authority figure, do you think it is possible that people faced with a collapsing world as they’ve known it would cling to every word out of the mouth of one who would offer hope, and might they then be persuaded to help by hurting those who could be seen as standing in the way of progress?
- Stanley Milgram, The Perils of Obedience, 1974 ↩
Tags: Culture, Evil, Faith, Prophecy, Psychology
Before anyone calls me a Grinch (which designation I’d happily accept, given the outcome of the tale), I’m going on record as not having been fond of a lot of what we now call holidays - holy days - since I started reading and researching them. If you are caught up in the cultural thing, that’s fine - I’m not aware of many others who, like me, think that raising kids without Santa and all the other nonsense is a better way. I do believe that there is much more wrong with the celebration of Christmas as a cultural event than the crass commercialism, and I never have cared for the fact that early church leaders freely edited our calendars by co-opting the sacred days of pagans and turned them into high holy days.
Regardless of the date of Christ’s birth, the shadow of the cross was there all along. If that day was, in fact, May 23rd (to choose a date off the top of my head), it would be no less holy than we try to make December 25th; perhaps that is the nature of one aspect of the difficulty I have with how we celebrate Christmas, in that we try to make something holy when we don’t feel God’s agreement. I suspect that holds true for a lot more people than me on a far greater number of issues related to their faith (which might go a ways toward explaining the statistic generated in the Pew Forum survey) - but that is for another post.
The material below is from USA Today:
“The focus on peace and giving gifts allows you to safely focus on nice things instead of the idea that God sent his son Jesus to be Christ, who dies on a cross. It’s human nature to want to take the ‘nice’ without the ‘truth,’ ” says Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research in Nashville
It’s not that Christmas partying is wrong: There just has to be a larger purpose for it, says pastor and author Rick Warren. His newest book, The Purpose of Christmas, cites celebration as one of the three things announced by the angels at Christ’s birth, along with salvation and reconciliation to God.
But social scientists say several trends work against the push to focus on doctrine:
•The percentage of U.S. adults who say they have no religious identity has more than doubled, from 7% in 1990 to 15.2% in 2008, says sociologist Barry Kosmin, principal investigator of the American Religious Identification Survey and a research professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.
•Data from Christian trends researcher Barna Research in Oxnard, Calif., finds the long-familiar bump in Christmas church attendance is mostly somewhat-regular attendees coming in from the cold more often.
•Interfaith marriages — in which couples often blur or ignore religious differences — have increased from 2.9% of U.S. adults in 1973 to 8.5% in 2006, says Tom Smith, director of the General Social Survey for the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
But ultimately, the most significant reason behind the shift away from focusing on a religious Christmas that stresses the birth of Jesus may be found in the latest survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
The survey found that more than half of U.S. Christians (52%) today do not say Christianity is the exclusive path to eternal life.
Horton blames Christians themselves for taking the Christ out of Christmas. “Secularism cannot be blamed on the secularists, many of whom were raised in the church. We are the problem,” he says.
For the record, I am not a fan of James Dobson or Rick Warren - I respect both men, but I cannot say I always agree with their rhetoric.
That being said, the statement below, from People for The American Way is far more offensive to me. What say you?
It is a grave disappointment to learn that pastor Rick Warren will give the invocation at the inauguration of Barack Obama.
Pastor Warren, while enjoying a reputation as a moderate based on his affable personality and his church’s engagement on issues like AIDS in Africa, has said that the real difference between James Dobson and himself is one of tone rather than substance. He has recently compared marriage by loving and committed same-sex couples to incest and pedophilia. He has repeated the Religious Right’s big lie that supporters of equality for gay Americans are out to silence pastors. He has called Christians who advance a social gospel Marxists. He is adamantly opposed to women having a legal right to choose an abortion.
I’m sure that Warren’s supporters will portray his selection as an appeal to unity by a president who is committed to reaching across traditional divides. Others may explain it as a response to Warren inviting then-Senator Obama to speak on AIDS and candidate Obama to appear at a forum, both at his church. But the sad truth is that this decision further elevates someone who has in recent weeks actively promoted legalized discrimination and denigrated the lives and relationships of millions of Americans.
Rick Warren gets plenty of attention through his books and media appearances. He doesn’t need or deserve this position of honor. There is no shortage of religious leaders who reflect the values on which President-elect Obama campaigned and who are working to advance the common good.
Tags: Christianity, Politics
If you are one of those folks who like to get involved in intellectual debates about whether or not Jesus was a real, flesh and blood man who walked the earth some 2,000 odd years ago, then Opposing Views has just the debate for you.
Me? The question is settled, so I have no need for the intellectual flogging of minutiae in order to prove my credentials as a master debater. If the question is not yet settled for you, follow the links.
Almost every day, I run across some great posts on the blogs I surf. With nearly the same frequency, though, I find myself a bit frustrated. Is it my imagination, or is the practice of Christianity now to be of less importance than the terminology, and the personalities more important than the principles? The inspiration behind this post is, in part, based on a great post over at Shane Vander Hart’s Caffeinated Thoughts, and the other part is from another book I’ve cracked open.
Here’s a simple question from a member of the laity - can we chuck some of the labels like missional, post-modern, attractional, emergent, etc. and simply do what we are called to do by the Great Commission? As it is, all of us are living far below our birthrights and our callings, and while we play word games with one another - who is right? Who is wrong? - we’ll end up wondering who’s left, and why were these left out?
Coming or going to church? We are the church - how about we change our use of language to reflect reality, rather than continue to repeat the mistakes of the past that confused going to a location to worship with being that which worships? It is not merely a semantic issue.
Our work here is to make disciples, not to make more bricks for an ivory tower - or am I the one who is confused about what we’re to be doing? How do these terms help us reach people? How do they help us disciple them? Sorry - I don’t want to seem like I’m a foaming at the mouth attack dog (far from it!) - I just get more than a tad concerned when I see us bogged down in what often seems to be yet another variation of the three blind men describing an elephant to one another. I, for one, have no desire to follow the leading of blind men, the leading of blinded men, or the leading blind men (and no, I will not change that to read visually impaired - blind has to do with more than just the eyes). I want to follow Jesus; it is Christ that I’m attracted to, it is by His stripes that I’m healed, and it is His teaching that I need unpacked. I need to hear less of the latest teaching from academia’s newly minted Ph.D.’s and see more of what Christ lived being taught and modeled by those who would be our pastors and teachers.
Pastors - please leave the corporate models back in the corporate boardrooms, or is it that you do not trust in the living God to further His work without a five-year master plan? We are not members of a corporation - we are members of Christ’s Church, meeting in local congregations, house churches, assemblies. How our numbers grow or shrink will depend less on programs and committees than it will on whether truth and holiness are being brought out of the storeroom. We do not need an Edifice Complex, or any other complex - should growth of the local body of Christ assembled occur organically and naturally, trust that His economy can accomplish all without going into debt.
If any of this offended, I am sorry. If it stirred a reaction, please leave a comment - whether you agree or disagree.
