WPC 2BVVZZ#|ile)8wC;,[hXw P7XP"m'^;C]ddCCCdCCCCddddddddddCCȲY~~wCN~sk~CCCddCYdYdYCdd88d8ddddJN8ddddYYdYCdddddCCCCddddddddd8YYYYYY~Y~Y~Y~YC8C8C8C8ddddddddddYdddddsdYYYYYYYd~Y~Y~Y~YddddddddC8C8C8C8oNd~8~8~8~8~8dvddddJJJkNkNkNkN~8~8~8dddddddYYYd~8dJkN~8dddddCddCCC/NdddCYQQddddddFddddFCChhd44ddzzdddwooChdF"Ȑdhd岲dCCȐzȲxCddodȐȅdCdYdsȐ]ȐȐȧzȐUwŐdȐYYCCCCѐz~ozoY~NYdYC8YooYdYzsdzdd~YYzozzzzNd88YYYzYzzzzCCdddddddzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzNNNNNNNdddddddddddddddddddd888888888888YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCs~CzCddYCxHP LaserJet IIIHPLASIII.PRSXw P7,\,NXP2% '  Z #Xw P7[hXP##|i"m'^4;RXX;;;X;;;;XXXXXXXXXX;;Ooyoi;E|oev_os;;;XX;OXOXO;XX11X1XXXXAE1XXXXOOXO;XXXXX;;;;XXXXXXXXX1OOOOOvyOoOoOoOoO;1;1;1;1XXXXXXXXXXOXXXXXeXOOOyOyOyOyOXoOoOoOoOXXXXXXXX;1;1;1;1bE|Xo1o1o1o1o1XiXXXXvAvAvA_E_E_E_Eo1o1o1XXXXXXXsOsOsOXo1XvA_Eo1XXXXX;XX;;;/NXXX;OHHXXXXXX>XXXX>;;\\X..XXllXXXibb;\X>"X\X坝X;;lx;XXbXvX;XOXesRvlKiŀXOO;;;;рloblbvOoEsOXO;1|OvbbOvXOleXlXXoOOvlbllllEX11OOOlOllll;;XXXXXXXlllllllllllllllllllEEEEEEEXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX111111111111OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOllllllllllllllllllll;eo;l;XXO;xHP LaserJet IIIHPLASIII.PRSi P7,\,NP2 W /a  X>CG Times (Scalable)CG Times Italic (Scalable)"m'^4;UXX;;;X;;;;XXXXXXXXXX;;Xllvle;OvbvllXbllbb;;;XX;XXOXO1XX11O1XXXXEE1XOvOOEOXO;XXXXX;;;;XXXXXXXXX1lXlXlXlXlXvvOlOlOlOlO;1;1;1;1vXXXXXXXXXbOlXXXXbOXlXlXlXlXvOvOvOvOXlOlOlOlOXXXXXXXX;1;1;1;1XOvOb1b1b1b1b1vXvlvXvXXXvlElElEXEXEXEXEb1b1b1XXXXXXvbObEbEbEXb1vXlEXEb1bObOXXX;XX;;;/NXXX;XRRXXXXXX>XXXX>;;XXX11XXllXXX_XX;XX>"XXX坝X;;lx;XlXbXvX;XOXesRvlKiŀXOO;;;;lllblbvOlEbOXO;1vOvbbvOvXOllXlXXbObOvllbllllEX11OOOlOllll;;XXXXXXXlllllllllllllllllllEEEEEEEXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX111111111111OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOllllllllllllllllllll;ell;bl;bXXO;x2i;4,ti P7P60g;4,)g&_ x$&7XYzozzzzNd88YYYzYzzzzCCdddddddzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzNNNNNNNdddddddddddddddd888888888888YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCs~CzCd2       Q #g&_ x$&7)X# Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1993, page Պ  spiritual director, the moral guide who has the responsibility to tell people what their moral responsibility is. That's part of our system, and it isn't the same in your system; but let me see if I can talk your language by getting into 12step programs. I hope the two meet there in terms of step 4 or 5 or whatever it is  ,   where the person takes an inventory of all the people he or she offended and begins some kind of constructive restitution as part of the therapeutic process. I think that's from a therapeutic model, and it converges with a pastoral model, which helps somebody spell out a moral responsibility to make restitution.  S4 Langone: I don't think the 12step is truly a therapeutic model.  S Clark: I was afraid you were going to say that \ .  S Langone: I think the model you're using   may   have much less potential for harm if you're using it because of the collar  ,   so to speak, because of the expectations of the person you're talking to will be different than if a therapist were to use it. I think the ethics are different for the two professions for the reason you stated. Part of your role is the teaching function about morals. The therapeutic role is not to teach morality.) John you might add in here.) As I see the therapeutic role, it is to facilitate informed choosing. That doesn't mean we don't have to let i  t come up   if the person is saying, well, I feel terrible about having brought this about  . The basic difference between the therapeutic and the pastoral is that the therapeutic is more longwinded because it's more Socratic. The Socratic method uses questions to elicit responses from the person, and in so doing you have a greater assurance that it's the identity of that person coming out and not the identity of the therapist.  S Eckstein: I'm getting confused because I fail to see really that there's a distinction. It sounds like what you're saying is that your goal is the same and you actually do make a decision to try to get the person you're counseling to adopt a particular moral stance, but you do it in a way that preserves the autonomy of the patient and in effect allows the patient to come around to the position that you're suggesting without your coming right out and saying that it's his responsibility.  Sb Hochman: The point you're raising is that the therapist is introducing a bias just on the basis of the questions they ask, is this the point?68" Ԍ S ԙEckstein: Well, that's what it sounded like. I mean, the Socratic method is designed in effect to bring about a specific goal.  Sx Langone: You're partially right, but it isn't a goal, so it isn't truly Socratic method and I probably shouldn't have called it Socratic method. It's a potential goal. It's a desideratum, if you will, in the abstract sense in which I can agree that this is where it would be nice if we landed, but there's that constant respect for the identity of this person you're interacting with. Therefore, you do not translate that desideratum into a goal that implies action to bring the goal about, unless your assessment indicates that you will not be imposing beyond that comfortable boundary that you define personally as your ethical boundary.  S Eckstein: But is your respect for the limitations, if I can put it that way, of your patient in this situation based on a medical judgment regarding where that person is or is it based on your understanding that everyone somehow has the right to make their own decisions and therefore you don't push your position? If it's the former, I understand it; if it's the latter, I'm still confused.  Sn Langone: I'm not sure I understand you, but to the extent I do, there's a judgment about how well the person can handle the pressure you're going to put on him, however tactfully you may do it. There's a psychological judgment there, and that psychological judgment in large part determines whether or not you make the decision to transfer your desideratum into a goal, which the client shares or comes to share without feeling pressured.  S Eckstein: Okay, fair enough. But if that's all that's going on ... if, in other words, you're making a medical decision, then, it seems to me a respectable limitation and there's no disagreement here. Rather the issue is over whether you're saying that if the person is judged as medically fit but for some reason or other has chosen not to take the responsibility that you believe he has a duty to take, it is therefore your responsibility to take a handsoff attitude because everyone is entitled to make his or her own decisions.  Sd Langone: Some therapists would say that you never let a value judgment enter in.88" Ԍ S ԙEckstein: But that goes back to precisely the issue we addressed before. Entitlement is a bogus issue here: No one is questioning whether the patient is entitled to make his own decisions. But given that entitlement, one can dispute what decision he should make; and if the decision should be based on a sense of duty, then, it seems to me that you certainly are within your rights to argue for an ethical perspective.  S Langone: Yes, provided you first weigh the psychological consequences of raising the ethical issue.  S8 Eckstein: Sure. But most of what you usually hear"and you suggested that this was kind of a psychological paradigm as opposed to a pastoral one"out of the psychological paradigm is the idea that somehow you should not be imposing one value system on another. When that becomes the basis for the intervention, then, no wonder nobody wants to attack the creeds.  S Langone: A good example is, you're working with a fellow who's depressed. He's cheating on his wife. And your clinical judgment is that part of his depression is a result of guilt from cheating on his wife. But he's really ambivalent about that guilt and there is a moral dimension there. Now some therapists will just badger the patient, saying, You know, you shouldn't cheat on your wife. Others, especially those coming from this New Age kind of nonjudgmental point of view, are essentially going to communicate, Why are you guilty? Why are you letting these shoulds dictate to you? You have a need to make it with other women. And it's going to be a whole different approach. Then, there are those who try to remain completely neutral and nonjudgmental, like the pure clientcentered approach of Carl Rogers. While I don't think it actually happens in practice, the theory is that the therapist is just the facilitator with minimal intrusion of his personal opinions. Now, I kind of come out in that direction, though I don't go so far. I think it's an illusion to think that there is no moral dimension.  S Eckstein: So, let's take you out of the picture. According to the Rogerian perspective, if in fact the outcome of the treatment was that the patient was now guiltfree in his fornication, even though you as a therapist might not particularly agree with the value system he's chosen"but more power to him?68" Ԍ S ԙLangone: Right. If it gets him through the day, it's okay. I think that's a whole school of thought; but on the other extreme, you have the therapists who, in a sense, are in an extreme pastoral mode, where what they want to do is create clones of themselves. I got into a big battle with a colleague once about this. She was working with a young lady who didn't really have big problems: She was living with a guy, had normal sex with the guy, but it came out in the course of the discussion that the girl didn't masturbate. And it didn't bother her that she didn't, she didn't want to masturbate. But the female therapist was of the view that masturbation is healthy and if you don't masturbate, something is wrong with you. She felt a moral obligation to persuade her client to masturbate! And she had a knockdown, dragout fight with the young woman. They were screaming at each other! In my view, it was a healthy sign that the client was able to stand up to this pushy therapist. But at the end of the discussion, the therapist in a very cultic kind of way yielded by saying, Well, okay, when you're ready to masturbate, we'll discuss this. The therapist was not giving up.  S Aagaard: All this is an illustration of what shadowboxing is. Those two persons were shadowboxing. They were not talking about the real issue, which is religious, of course. Behind such a standpoint is some sort of religious code which dictates this sort of attitude, and it's all right to have a religious code as long as you confess it.  S Langone: That's true, but you wouldn't get to first base if you use that language with these people because the codes are such that the very  SZ word religious means something different. That's what happened in Paris when you were saying these are pseudoreligions and everyone is religious. The way you're meaning religious is not how it's understood. As we say in the trade, the message intended is not the message received. What it means to you is not what it means when it gets processed in the brains of all the hearers. That's where the mixup comes in.  S Aagaard: Again, the solution is not to keep quiet about it. Explain or communicate that they have a wrong notion of religion. There's a lot of  S religious dyslexia where they misread a term like religion. What are we going to do about it? Does it mean that we cannot change it? This theological or religious dyslexia is not so serious as the other one88"  because it can be corrected. You can hear that God is not the same as dog, even if a lot of people mishear and misunderstand God as if He were a dog.  SH Langone: This is interesting because you can have that debate with someone else whose paradigm is sufficiently close to yours that the words You have the wrong idea of religion express a meaningful concept to them. But I think with a lot of the New Agers and the kind of relativism that's permeated American culture, the whole notion that you have the wrong idea about religion is a vacuous notion. In other words, if you're really listening to the person whom you're trying to communicate with, you will realize that if you use those words, you will not be understood and you will actually be impeding the process of dialogue.  SP Clark: It can become a barrier. I know in exit counseling if I use the  S$ word religious, it's a deadly term because in the groups members are literally emotionally programmed and emotionally polarized against that.  S So if I say spiritual instead, that's a nonthreatening term. But it's dealing with a religious issue all the same, and they can hear that. But  Sp if you use religious, you're courting a breakdown in communication and an alienating and emotional hostility will result.  S Aagaard: There's a difference between pedagogy"of course, I have a lot of experience, too"and evasion. You shouldn't drop the issue of concern just because there is a misunderstanding lurking there. You can evade it for a time, but you cannot really evade it. You must go back and make a saner use of those words because those words are part of our tradition. We cannot just drop them. I think fundamentally you're right when you say I don't believe that there is that sharp conflict between us. In our theological faculty we have seven theological  Sz institutes and one institute for Religionswissenschaft, religious science or religious studies. If a student of religious studies writes a thesis in which he takes a stand, then he fails. If a theological student writes a thesis without taking a stand, he fails. Even if both are qualified.  S Langone: Now, try to get a degree in both at the same time! That's the dilemma we have. <8" Ԍ S Aagaard: There must be some sort of standpoint which you admit, which you confess, and which you put on the table, and then you are entitled to take a stand.  SJ Langone: I agree with you and I think that is the fault line, as I called it, in American pluralism. We do not acknowledge that. We have this pretension, this tacit agreement not to talk about the most important things. Those are private.  Sf Aagaard: Therefore, theology here is really depressed. It doesn't dare to take a stand. It's so interesting that in coming over here this is the first man I've met from my own church who knows anything about this whole dilemma. I've been running here from church to church and they are all scared to death or, if not that, then they are ignorant. There's no one who has really taken a stand and put his life on it. It's such a large and important church, the Lutheran Church, and it's being totally  S& passive. Paulette Cooper [author of The Scandal of Scientology], whom I consider, with all her frailty and weaknesses, a real saint"I'm sure that if I come to heaven one of the first I'll meet is Paulette, and I'll not be surprised, though she may be surprised to be there"she said to me in one of my very first experiences in the States that my first enemy in the fight against Scientology would be the churches. Theologians can sometimes be the most evasive, passive, and treacherous people.  S Rosedale: I don't find them treacherous. I find them impotent and irrelevant. We compared notes at lunch break and we certainly find each other as longlost brothers in a lonely quest. I remember the day I was with a former Hare Krishna who is now a poetess. We were sitting and talking, and she said to me, You know, once after I was in the Krishnas for about three or four years, I felt so terrible I wanted to talk to somebody. So I went and I found a priest, and I told the priest I was involved with the Krishnas and I was having real problems and I didn't know just what to do and I wanted to leave. And she said the priest looked at her and said, I guess you made a mistake. You'll have to learn to live with it. And she said that she was so crushed, it just devastated her. She hadn't even been able to tell that story for three or four years because she had had that level of expectation in terms of how much energy and effort it took to get her to go and have that encounterd8"  and to tell him this, to share this. And to be told that she made a mistake!  Sv Langone: I think part of it is that in American religious circles, and you can correct me, Dick, if I'm wrong about this, they have been tremendously affected by psychotherapy, but they're usually about 30 years behind the field. It's like this early Rogerian handsoff kind of approach"superrelativism"which is pretty much but not totally defunct. It's a minor theme in psychology today, but it still has a lot of influence in the churches and workshops and retreats and so on, so that it undermines the very pastoral model you're talking about.  S Dowhower: Yes, it leaves the pastoral office in a quandary.  S Rosedale: You know, if we end up so uniformly beating up on the pastoral ministry because of its abuse by indecision and excessive tolerance, we are not taking into account the abuse in the therapeutic relationship by excessive dominance, manipulation, and abuse of the patient. What about the other side? The counselor who has given up all pretense of modesty and has taken on the role of follow me?  S@ Langone: Well, I think they're both betraying their duties in their respective helping professions. The psychotherapist is actually going beyond the pastoral model and getting into more of a cultic kind of model by inducing dependency in the patient rather than enhancing autonomy and individual development.  S. Dowhower: Let me say that one of the things I've done in participating in exit counseling in a number of cases where people like David and Kevin Garvey have brought me excult members was to, at their request, sort out healthy and sick forms of spirituality or religion. We spent half a dozen sessions identifying, from a JudeoChristian perspective, both credally and in praxis, the marks of healthy religions. So, I found myself doing both those things, but they came to me to approach it as a pastor.  S Langone: It's much more of a teaching function, of their coming for information. I worked with a young man who joined the Krishnas in college at age 18. He had a promising artistic career which he gave up88"   S and spent the next 10 years studying the Gita, listening to the same lectures, and fundraising. He stumbled out after 10 years. He was sick of being bossed and sick of listening to the same lectures. He still considered himself a Krishna"he just disapproved of the organization. He equated being a Krishna with being a Hindu, so he said he was a Hindu and the Hindus worship God by chanting the Hare Krishna chant. This is what he'd been taught for 10 years. After he left the Krishnas, he married a Hindu girl who hated the Krishnas, and they came to me for marriage counseling. When he was about to finish a twoyear program and had to go look for a job, he was getting nervous, so he started chanting, which troubled his wife. One of the things I worked with them on was getting some clarification about what Hinduism is. The question was, is what the Krishnas told him really what Hinduism is? His wife said it wasn't, but she wasn't an authority obviously. And because I didn't have a person to refer them to, I loaned them some books on Hinduism, which I had gotten at the library. These texts showed very clearly that Krishna is like a strand of a strand, like the Holy Rollers of Hinduism. As a result, the young man was able to, in a sense, broaden his horizons so that he practiced Hinduism in a more mainstream kind of way. Now, I'm not a Hindu"he was raised Jewish, and I'm not even Jewish"and I can't say that I think its great that he's a Hindu, but I made a judgment that what he considered Hinduism, however imperfect his formulation might have been, had sufficiently penetrated his identity and was sufficiently tied into his life, especially now that he was married to a Hindu girl, that it would have been arrogant of me to try to change that. If at some point he had questions about it, then, that's fine, but it was not my job to convert him from what he thought was Hinduism to Christianity or Judaism or whatever. It was my job to make sure that the choices he made were informed choices, and that's where the education component comes in.  S Hochman: How much information do you give to a person? And you're right, it isn't your job. From a Jewish standpoint, he's Jewish. Maybe he doesn't know what Judaism has to offer, where Judaism's at? Of course, I don't know his background, and from a religious standpoint there is precedent. If you didn't know you were Jewish, or you knew you were Jewish but you forgot about it because you didn't know what08"  was going on in the Jewish religion, find out what's happening! If you've married somebody who's a Hindu, either get her converted or divorce her! So this doesn't fit into the psychological model. This is not something a rabbi would do either because this is a very radical kind of surgery. It really comes down to what you were saying, that there is some sort of a goal that you can have to help somebody have a better marriage because he's got more in common with his wife.  S Langone: Well, yes, except that I didn't ignore the issue of Judaism because Judaism is also rooted in his identity. In the process I did raise the question, do you want to find out more about Judaism, is there any inclination to explore that?  AR I AR f I remember correctly AR , AR  I think he may have even gone to talk with a rabbi, so that I wasn't discouraging him from reconnecting to Judaism and I wasn't ignoring it. It was kind of like the correlation of forces was such that he was a Hindu, he was a Jew who had converted to Hinduism, and he had a distorted view of Hinduism as a result of the Krishnas. Now AR , AR  ironically, he had become a Hindu as a result of the Krishnas, too. ButAR it was like it had been so thick and,  AR then, AR  with the marriage strengthening it, I did not feel it was my task to try to take him out of Hinduism. Now as a Jewish therapist AR , AR  how would you have reacted to it?  S Hochman: I would have referred him to you.  S Dowhower AR : I think I would have wanted to take him back into his Jewish roots and help him examine how m AR any AR  of those roots he needed to affirm and revisit.  S Eckstein: And I thought all of this was about the question of moral autonomy.  Sv Langone: Well, that's why I didn't push,  AR I  AR respected the identity that is, even if I disapproved of it.  S Eckstein: But in this particular case, you're not dealing with a crisis that revolves around an issue of moral autonomy. There's not some duty that he's failing to perform in a moral sense. In the way you describe the case, there's a conflict, he's chanting, she thinks he's off the deep end, and they're having marital problems. So, they come to see you, and you8 8"  in effect point out what you consider to be the facts. The facts are that he's mistaken about what Hinduism isAR all about and that his chanting stuff is sort of at the far distant end of AR  it AR , but there's no reason for you to attempt some kind of spiritual conversion because there isn't any serious moral issue involved there.  S Langone: My job is not personality reconstruction until the client decides that he wants that.  Sd Eckstein: Bu AR t AR  let me take this one step further. Suppose as a Hindu he has decided that he wants to have his wife agree that on his death she is going to throw herself on the funeral pyre. Even though she is a Hindu, she's not so interested in this particular aspect of the religion, so he begins a campaign of psychological manipulation designed to get her to agree to it, and the way he does that is by threatening the marriage and that sort of thing. Then, don't you see your task as being somehow radically different?  S Langone: It would change.  Sn Hochman: Let me give you an example of an experience I had. There was a New Age cult in Los Angeles. The group was going on for a couple of years and the leader had about 20 or 30 patients following him, doing whatever people do in these cults. The guy running this cult was Jewish, AR  though AR  he was not observant. Then AR" , AR"  something happened and he started really getting interested in traditional Judaism. He started studying with an orthodox rabbi, and  AR* he started doing things that real traditional Jews do, like not working on the Sabbath and eating Kosher food.  AR4 But, AR4  of course, since it's a cult, he can't go off into orbit, he's got a vested interest in his following, so he said  AR6 to his followers, AR6  this is where it's at, and he gave them some reasons, and I guess he started teaching them AR: .  AR: I think half the group was Jewish to start with and half weren't, so they were really confused. Then AR? , AR?  things got to a point where he got hold of an orthodox rabbi who didn't know too much about cults, and he came and told him ARR  that he was ARR  a penitent, someone who wasn't observant, who didn't know  ARV but who ARV  now knows what you have to do with all the Commandments, and he expresses his desire to get on board. He tells him that he has all these people and he wound up converting his nonJewish followers to Judaism. Now you're all Jews,4 8"  too, he tells them, even those who weren't originally Jewish.  ARp He tells them, We have to be together and have our own community. It'sARu you your typical cult story. They move into some neighborhood where there are hardly any Jews, they buy a bunch of houses near each other, and they're living there celebrating all the Jewish holidays and the Sabbath. Then, as AR{  these AR{  things tend to progress AR| , AR|  the leader started to go off the deep end from the Jewish standpoint because he decided that these Commandments were very nice but don't necessarily apply to him!  AR T AR here was a cruise they took during which there was  AR a AR  particular Jewish fast day, and he says, Well, we're not fasting today. So he started having his revisionist ideas, and it was just back to being a cult. I guess it never stopped being a cult. It became abusive  AR and started breaking up, and this one particular woman came to my attention. She was Jewish and grew up in an assimilated kind of home, not 100% assimilated, but  AR there AR  wasn't too much Jewish going on. The father changed their name and they lived in a community where there were hardly any Jews and she never had any Jewish education.  AR S AR he was referred to me for medication purposes. She was depressed, there were financial problems, and she was pushed into marrying a fellow cult member"the usual kind of cult problems AR,  people get depressed about. Now, they're out of the cult and what do they do? It had been such an intense group. She moves to Los Angeles, to a neighborhood that is  AR about AR  60% Jewish, though they're not all observant; the AR y're AR  Jews at different levels.  AR I AR t comes around to Yom Kippur, a very major holiday, a heavy time spiritually, and she says, Well AR , AR  I'm going to go to the movies tonight. This is a special thing"she has to go to the movies on Yom Kippur. So she goes to the movie theater in this Jewish neighborhood; even the people who aren't that religious are either in synagogue AR  or at home AR . They're not going to go to the movies. So here's this movie theater and it's empty, and she's looking around and she suddenly gets this insight! She starts  AR telling me that AR  with all the stupidity of this group, there were some things that were very meaningful for her, specifically referring to some of the ort AR hodox AR  things that the leader borrowed and brought into the group.  AR S AR o what I said to her was, Look, this is not  AR a psychiatric matter!  AR I almost wanted to move into another chair, you know, gestalt therapy! I told her that I knew she came  AR to me AR  for psychiatric treatment, but that I was going to talk to  AR her AR  as one Jew to, 8"  another Jew: My opinion  AR wa AR s that there were things of value that were brought into this group that she experienced AR  and AR  that she might want to reintegrate these things into  AR her AR  life and check it out and see how it feels. I suggested that maybe  AR she AR  would want to have Shabat dinner Friday night with a family"they're not a cult, just a traditional Jewish family, and they like having people and just sharing the experience. She was sort of interested, so I dug somebody up, and then she decided that she didn't really want to go. So, AR  when you ask me what would I do with this, I don't know because this is much more complicated.  S4 Langone: Your example is apt. I mean, you didn't betray your professional ethics in that AR  you said I'm not going to talk to you as a psychiatrist now. I'm giving you fair warning that I'm changing roles, so don't interpret what I say with the same expectations. Secondly, you said things like You might want to consider this, You might want to check it out. You were holding yourself back, saying that you were giving  AR% her AR%  some options to consider and think about. You were not imposing AR(  on her by saying you ought to do this, you should do this AR* , AR*  this is the right thing to do. You wanted to do it,  AR. but AR.  you didn't say it as a psychiatrist AR0 , AR0  an authority who's peering into her mind and helping her get her head straight. AR4   AR4 I have no problem with that at all. And I've done similar things, myself, where you step out of the chair, as you say AR6 , AR6  and you're in a different role. I think as long as the helper, whatever the profession, keeps those ethical issues in mind so that he is aware of not only what  AR? he is AR?  saying but also the impact of what he is saying on the person he is talking to, how the person will interpret what he is say ARL ing ARL , then I think you can keep your ethical bearings.  S Eckstein: The thing I don't understand though, and maybe you could just clear it up ARM , ARM  is why you couldn't have done that as a psychiatrist? Why  ARO did you have ARO  to step out of that role in order to suggest that maybe that would have been something good for her?  S Hochman: That's a very good question. The reason is that I've been professionally indoctrinated. For example, I could ARW  have saidARX say to her, Now, you know what, you made a mistake, you should have gone to the movies in Pasadena. There ARZ  are ARZ  no Jewish people there. You could have gone to the ball game. AR[ But if I,I might be a psychiatrist and say that, but then one could take the devil's advocate position and say, look, here's2 8"  this woman who  ARf is not really suffering from ARf  depression, she's talking about a spiritual problem"and, first of all, what do psychiatrists know about spirituality? Second, you can say, well, you're really ARnyou know itstrivializing her dilemma, you're not really addressing where she's at. There was aARu there was a couple in Los Angeles, they were in one of these groups, TM, DLM, whatever, ARw  and they got out of the group and they said, Well ARz , ARz  what are we going to do for Passover? And there was a rabbi who says AR| , AR|  Well, you know what? I'm a vegetarian. Why don't you come over to my house and we'll have a seder together?  AR  AR The rabbi was very upbeat, saying AR , AR  Well, I have this couple, and they might have stayed home, but they came to my seder. Not only did they come to my seder, but)AR they came there and you know) we were vegetarians and they were vegetarians, so it was comfortable for them.  AR S AR o there was a sort of meeting of the minds AR . What bothers me about this"though I don't know if it bothered the rabbi"is that he didn't address their whole vegetarianism. Why are they vegetarians and why is he a vegetarian? He just said, We're all vegetarians, and isn't it nice? You can have more vegetables. But the AR y're AR  really hanging on to something, so as a rabbi, I would say, well AR , AR  wait a minute, where are these people spiritually? AndAR he, I don't think he was interested in that part.  Sh Rosedale: It was a meatless seder.  S Hochman: Yes, a meatless seder. A meeting of the meatless minds.  S Rosedale: If they had been prohibitionists, it would have been a wineless, a grapejuice seder.  S, Aagaard: I have a question. Normally, back home when I try to enlighten myself and others, sometimes I AR  say AR  that a pastor in pastoral counseling deals with problems that are normal and healthy. As soon as a pastor finds out that these problems are not normal, that they are sick  AR problems,  AR then he must refer to a specialist in dealing with sick problems. That's a psychiatrist. Vice  AR v AR ersa, a psychiatrist is not meant to deal with normal problems, with religious problems, which are normal AR  problems. Of course, religious problems can also be sick problems. AR.   Sb Caslin: Religious meaning spiritual AR ? AR  6 8" Ԍ S Aagaard: Spiritual, yes. Now, what is an exit counselor? Are you dealing with normal problems or are you dealing with sick problems? Insofar as you are dealing with normal problems, I would say that it's totally  AR mis AR taken to abstain from having your own viewpoint made explicit.  S Clark: Generally, we deal with  AR those AR  we consider to be normal people who are under mind control. Generally AR , AR  if you are dealing with disturbed persons, then you want to work with the appropriate professional. We're information specialists, basically, in a AR  family intervention context. In fact AR , AR  right now we're working through ethical guidelines of how we approach these issues. For example, if we have a specific orientation AR , AR  we do notify the family of our own background; AR  but in approaching a cult person, we aren't ethically allowed to push our personal agenda onto the person we're talking to.  AR W AR hat we have to do is to allow them the room for selfexploration and selfdetermination. Our purpose is to stimulate critical thinking AR  and AR  also  AR to AR  inform them about options and alternatives that can be available versus what has been taken away from them in the controlling, constrictive  AR environment AR .  Sl Aagaard: But can you develop critical thinking without you yourself representing a standpoint against which the critical thinking can take place?  S Clark: It depends on how you relate to that critical standpoint. Michael was saying AR , AR  or the way John just described it, he notified the person of his personal views, and I have done that on occasion. But respecti AR ng, AR  for example, this whole issue of taking responsibility for someone else, it's one thing to notify the person that that's a factor  AR for consideration, and it AR ' AR s another thing to allow the person to make the determination whether he or she is going to pick up that responsibility.  AR Q AR uite a few of them do that; but others, they don't take that responsibility. As exit counselors, we cannot determine for them what they're going to do in that area.  S Aagaard: My point is only insofar as you're dealing with normal, healthy problems, you must be the man you are. You cannot withdraw into a sort of neutral objective stance without spoiling the whole dialogue, the whole meaning of the dialogue.68" Ԍ S ԙClark: In terms of the dialogue,  AR we feel a commitment that the information has to do the talking itself. In other words, ARwhen they're presented with that information, and they have a relationship to that information, and we can point out the moral and ethical issues involved with that information; but again, it AR ' AR s an issue of whether they want to take the responsibility for that or not. We're not to determine  AR that. That's their responsibility.  S Aagaard: That's not my point.  S8 Langone: I would distinguish between dialogue and counseling AR  and  AR psychiatric treatment. You make a distinction between the sick and the healthy, which is a somewhat artificial distinction.  AR When dealing with the sick, the truly psychiatrically sick, it AR  ' AR  s a question of treatment. The treatment may vary from prescribing drugs, to hospitalization on occasion, to talk therapy. That is psychiatric. You also have a range of, if not formal disorders, then, types AR   of AR   distress that may occur in people who are not psychiatrically ill but are distressed. I think, much more so than in Europe, we have a whole industry of counseling, which will usually be done by counseling psychologists like myself, clinical psychologists, AR  and AR  sometimes psychiatrists. AR   AR This is a kind of therapy or counseling for people who are sometimes called the walking well. The people who have the money to pay for it, butAR you know who could do without it if they had to in a pinch. The type of communication is different in counseling than in dialogue AR .  AR I think what you're talking about is dialogue. We say, you're a normal human being a AR! nd AR!  I'm a normal human being and we're interacting and we're going to have a dialogue. AR"  This means that I'm not going to stand outside of myself and watch the process AR$ .  AR$ I'm going to share myself with you and let you know what I feel because I'm assuming that you will respect me enough and respect yourself enough to disagree with me. That's dialogue and I think that has a proper place. Counseling is a special kind of relationship; for example, you don't counsel your own family. You may, however, have dialogue with your family.  S Hochman: I don't think he's talking about that. What you're saying is that if you're talking with somebody, for example, a guy who came from Russia,  AR5 and  AR5 you feel you have a position of expertise in a moral48"  problem  AR: and he doesn't know about it, you're going to inform him. You say, Look, this is the problem. This is what you  AR< have AR<  to do. You're taking the stance of an expert AR= , AR=  at least an expert in certain areas, aren't you?  S Aagaard: My point is that%AR> you must never, you see,% to treat a person means that you take the standpoint of an expert AR? , AR?  a sound and normal expert who is treating a sick person who's in trouble. Then, it is all right to treat. But in all other cases, it's a very bad and dishonest thing to treat other people. You should never treat a person who is in disagreement with you. If you look upon his disagreement as a sort of abnormal variation, then you are not really showing respect for him. If you respect a person, then you must put forward your own standpoint, be the person you are, and  ARA engage in ARA  the dialogue.  SP Langone: Counseling is not treatment ARC . ARC   S Aagaard: But it is also not dialogue, ARI  so ARI  what is it?  S Langone: No, no. Counseling is a contractual relationship where a person  ARJ who  ARJ seeks out counseling says essentially I want a sounding board ARM. ...  S Aagaard: Exactly.  S Langone: ...that will help me get clarity about what I think, what I value, what I feel. I don't want to be told what I ought to think, what I ought to feel. I want to get clarity about what I feel, think, and do. The counseling relationship is a special kind of relationship where there is a conscious attempt on the part of the counselor to get some distance and to remove himself from the relationship to a degree in order to facilitate the selfexploration of the person who has come to him.  S Aagaard: Socrates was not neutral. He knew exactly what he wanted.  S Langone: Socrates wasn't a counselor. He was manipulating, which is why it wasn't accurate for me to compare therapeutic or counseling interactions to Socratic dialogue. <8" Ԍ S Aagaard: So ma ARR n ARR y of the excult people go to a psychiatrist and get the diagnosis schizophrenic. They're not schizophrenic. They are living the split world and they have multiple personality problems, but that's not schizophrenia. I don't even think they should be treated. I think they should be approached, challenged ARS , ARS  inspired to find themselves and find which person is me. A medical man, a psychiatrist, ARUhemakes it absolutely impossible because he won't provoke them. He's just a sounding board. They're not looking for a sounding board. gARVI have experienced that some of them have got so angry and started shouting at the man, youg  Sd Langone: Psychiatrists are not functioning as sounding boards. as you describe it. They're functioning as diagnosticians, as doctors. Here is a person who comes to me with distress. My job is to diagnose what disease he has and to prescribe treatment. They diagnose schizophrenia, or mis ARY  ARY diagnose schizophrenia, and then prescribe treatment, which in many cases would probably be drugs, which, in some cult cases, may make a person worse rather than better. It ARZ ' ARZ s poor treatment. I mean, we've had that problem in this country. You send excult members to mental health professionals, particularly psychiatrists, who know nothing about cults and they totally botch it because they mis AR^ diagnose. Because the tendency in psychiatry is to diagnose. Counseling professionals work more with what you would call normal people making choices, struggling with issues, and it ARa ' ARa s a different approach. You can shift approaches as well.!ARg I mean I will shift,! If I've got someone who is actively suicidal, ARh  for example, ARh  I'm not going to sit and play Carl Rogers with that person. I'm not going to sit and play the counselor, and say, Okay, well, let's discuss it. You say you would like a knife? Have you considered other options? ARj  I'm not going to do that.  S Eckstein: Is that a medical or moral judgment?  S Langone: With the suicidal person, it ARk ' ARk s both. Now I think the psychiatrist will often pretend that there isn't a moral judgment. I think Szasz ARl , ARl  who talks about the myth of mental illness, ARmI think he goes to the extreme of essentially saying if someone wants to commit suicide, he ought to have the right to kill himself and who am I as a psychiatrist to stop him? Szasz is at least, I think, being consistent in that. But most psychiatrists or most mental health professionals aren't going to sit by and let a suicidal person kill himself.  ARq I ARq f he's got a gun, you're going to try to pull it away or talk him out of using it, and you're going to get him into a48"  protected environment because the assumption is, and there is a wealth of data to back it  ARu up,  ARu that people who are about to kill themselves are disturbed and will choose not to kill themselves after a period of treatment. So, it ARv ' ARv s a different mode. The model of interaction you choose depends on the purpose of that interaction. This complicates it, and, depending on the purpose, you will play a different role. If you have a seriously disturbed person AR{ , AR{  a pure psychiatric model may be the approp AR~r riate kind. If you have someone who is looking for clarity and selfexploration and is seeking counseling AR , AR  a counseling mode would be appropriate. If you have someone who is looking for clarity and exploration but is not actively seeking counseling in a contractual way, but is talking to you as another human being, and you start playing the counselor role, puffing on your pipe and trying to maintain distance, you're violating that person in a sense because you're not giving him what he is asking for AR , AR  which is a genuine persontoperson relationship, a dialogue relationship. I will shift between these roles. AR  I can interact with an excult member in the dialogue manner. I'm not always a counselor. I will be a counselor when the person comes for that, and I suspect th AR at in exit counseling it may be very much the same"which is that you'r AR e AR  not going to interact the same way talking to people at conferences and so on as you would in the exit counseling situation.  S Clark: Not only that. It's not even just listening AR , AR  you are definitely educating. I mean AR , AR  you're taking an activist role in the information you are presenting AR . AR   S( Langone: Right, which is one of the differences  AR between AR  exit counseling  AR and AR  more traditional psychological counseling, which, though educative, does not emphasize education as much as exit counseling.  Sr Aagaard: That's a very interesting point because, of course, it would be impossible for you to operate without having it right.  S Clark: The foundation of much of what you do is the information you bring in. I think the key with exit counseling is the ethics attached to the information and how it's presented and the interaction with that information. 48" Ԍ S Langone: And in counseling there is definitely an educational component, most conspicuously in things like vocational counseling. A person comes in, he's trying to decide what  AR he  AR should do for a living, what  AR his AR  major should be in college. As a counselor you would provide information as well as...  S Clark: How about Lyndon LaRouche? The primary focus of Lyndon LaRouche is a political design as opposed to, say, a religious theme, like Scientology AR , which AR  converts people into being Buddhist and occultist. Even they call it the modern science of mental health AR  AR  in  S8 Dianetics. There's a hiddenagenda religious component to it, like Werner Erhard and est AR . AR   S Aagaard: Would your ministry have any sort of meaning unless you had a goal in your education AR ? AR   S( Clark: I think the goal in exit counseling is informed consent. That's the point where you bring a person to at least address deficiencies inherited from the cultic experience and the destructive consequences of those deficiencies.  SD Aagaard: Now, let's take a very pure case. Here is a young Westerner or Indian, for that matter, who is struggling with reincarnation. How do you deal with that AR ? AR   S Clark: I think ARthey should be the position we would take is that the person should know enough about it to make an informed decision about it, and also AR  we make an honest comparison between what the cult member knows  AR and AR  what's out there. For example, we find in many instances  AR of AR  exit counseling AR  that AR  cult members don't know enough about the very tradition that they're beginning to take on, so we have to go through a lot of research to say, well AR , AR  there's more to this than what they're telling you. I find that cults AR  are very dishonest about what they're doing. There is more to the information base than what they provide, and it AR ' AR s important at least that the person is aware that that's there, regardless of whether they want to take the responsibility and research it and do more with it. At least the resources are made available to them, the knowledge is made available to them, and this whole issue of critical thinking that we've been discussing here is a big factor in what we try:8"  to at least make them aware of. It's a starting point AR , AR  but we don't determine for them what they should do with  AR the information AR . That's personally how I deal with it.  SH Aagaard: I never have argued with that. This remains the responsibility of the person, but my responsibility is to fully play out all the potentiality I contain in order to help the man to clarify and make his choice.  S Clark: I think from a Christian perspective, there's a responsibility there, but if you're coming into exit counseling on its own terms, it's a limited scope. For example, the  AR American Family Foundation and the Cult Awareness Network take deliberate AR ly AR  defined roles and relationships in respect to the larger issues that you're addressing. Exit counseling is very similar in its scope. You AR  also AR  have those who would as Christian counselors take on the Christian ethical relationship. I&AR know with me personally I& have a Christian position in my own life AR , AR  but when I take on the exit counseling position, I'm taking on a professional role as much as a psychiatrist takes on his professional role AR  and AR  a psychologist takes on his professional role. So, it's what role  AR you are AR  entering, and a medical doctor does the same thing.  AR For example, AR  C. Everett Koop is a Christian,  AR but  AR when he became Surgeon General of the United States AR , AR  he operated within that role and within that function. He got criticized on both ends of the spectrum because of what he was doing.  S Aagaard: It may sound absurd, but I would like to press this issue. In Sweden and also to a certain degree in Denmark, but not so much as in Sweden AR , AR  very many psychiatrists have become Buddhists of necessity. I know a person who had a young boy who was being taken to the psychiatrist AR , AR  and after all the introductory formalities and all that,  AR the psychiatrist AR  said, now we can start upon the treatment AR , AR  and he opened a door to a Buddhist temple! I think in a way it is logical. But exactly at that point there must be a real problem for a psychiatrist and a counselor.  AR H AR ow could one expect that a person just by being diagnosed could be treated? Of course, it's another story when biochemistry comes in, but if you abstain from biochemistry, where is a treatment unless it is a religious alternative?/AR"To what the person has failed with./  S` Clark: Okay, it's one thing to have alternatives available, but it's another thing if you come in with a personal agenda AR$ , AR$  with an objective48"  attached to it that that's what the outcome is going to be for that individual. In other words AR) , AR)  you're determining for that other person what the outcome should be if your personal agenda becomes part of what you'r AR1 e AR1  doing. It's the issue of how people deal with their own options and their own selfdetermination versus somebody who is coming at them with a particular agenda attached to what they're doing. Does the person know ethically what's going on in that instance? It's a very crucial question.  Sb Caslin: I just wanted to add a couple of  AR8 comments AR8  to this. You go through the continuum of exit counseling and the person reaches informed consent and then chooses to go back into a cult. It's a disappointment to you, it's a disappointment to the family, but at least they've been enlightened AR9 . AR9   SP Clark: Not only enlightened AR: , AR:  but the person has to have the freedom to make that choice. One of the biggest obstacles in exit counseling AR?  is AR?  if the person smells a rat, then your agenda is interfering with his or her free choice. Literally it can become a barrier with that person because he or she is already defensive about that from the start, thinking, You AR@ 're AR@  not going to be happy with me until I agree with you.  S Langone: Because you're supposed to be liberating them from an environment in which they don't have that free choice.  S Caslin: In the last two years, how many cases  ARB have there been in which people have just gone back in?  S Clark: I would say both in terms of my personal work and in general terms, that if you work with people who ARJ  have enough time to process the information, I would say less than 5%.  SJ Langone: If you're with them long enough.  S Clark: If you're with them long enough. Now, if there is not enough time, I would say 60%.'ARKIf there's not enough time.'  Sh Caslin: And in time, the normal range is? <8" Ԍ S Clark: I would say three to five days to about a week. If it's over a week, we consider that long.  Sx Eckstein: At that point, though, when the exit counseling results in that outcome, do you regard that outcome as a manifestation of the free choice of the person whom you counseled or do you regard the outcome as a failure of the counseling?  S Clark: Well, I can only give you what I have observed.  ARR  ARR First of all, in terms of the feedback that I'm getting, I'm looking at recognition, not necessarily agreement. People can understand what you're saying, they don't necessarily agree with it. It's very important for me that there be recognition of the information they're listening to. How are they internalizing it? You can say something and then you get a cult internalized response. So, they're doing something with what they're listening to. It's very classic with cultic processes.  S Eckstein: In that case, you would regard the outcome not as a manifestation of free choice, but as a manifestation of the problem.  Sp Clark: Yes, well, first of all, the issue of recognition"do they understand, is there a mutual understanding of what we're talking about in terms of that information? Because what they do with it, in my opinion ARW , ARW  is what matters.  S Eckstein: Right.  S2 Clark: Now, you can have a mutual understanding, and I've seen it ARY , ARY  where they disagree with you and when they go back to the cult, it's like no matter what you say or do AR[ , AR[  they're not affected by it. It's again one of the things that AR] ' AR] s frustrating for me. Are they really taking responsibility for the information ARa ? ARa  Or is it going in one ear and out the other? I've had situations where's there's an agreement  ARd that they'll ARd  listen, but they don't take responsibility for the information. For me, I'm not happy with that personally ARe , ARe  but if that's what they decide to do with the information once they hear it...  Sh Eckstein: No, that's the part I don't understand. It sounds to me inconsistent. How can you say that they're making a decision freely,<8"  while at the same time you're saying  ARh that ARh  they don't have the foggiest idea what you're saying, that it's going in one ear and out the other?  Sv Clark: What he gets at is what I struggle with: Will they take responsibility for what they know? My problem is that in many cases when they go back ARi , ARi  they don't take responsibility for what they know. They don't act on it. The way I see it ARn , ARn  they're avoiding responsibility. And they're selective and they're prejudicial in the way that they judge it ARo . ARo   Sd Eckstein: And therefore unfree in their decision.  S Clark: I don't know if I would say unfree. It's one thing to have your freedom and avoid responsibility. To me, once they have the information and they understand  ARp it  ARp and they know what the ethics and morals of the information  ARs are  ARs as well ... when all that is made known to them, then I feel it's an issue of responsibility in decision making. If they avoidARt that the responsibility, I think the consequences belong with them. But you're right, in a sense, and it gets back to what you're saying: They may not be truly free at that point. What you have to determine is why aren't they free ARv ? ARv   S@ Aagaard: I fully take your viewpoint as a pragmatic standpoint as an exit counselor. It's no doubt a necessary ideology ARw , ARw  but it doesn't hold water because in that culture, which is one of his choices, there is no language for responsibility. There is no language for freedom. It is your language you're talking in, not his.  S. Clark: The problem that I find with that sort of thing is once they're informed and once they're educated, they have the opportunity to make some comparisons. And in the process of making those comparisons, they make determinations or they avoid making determinations.  SJ Aagaard: Exactly, the latt AR{ er AR{ .  S Clark: Okay, but if it's an issue of negligence on their part, is it my fault that someone else is negligent once they are informed AR ? AR  8" Ԍ S Aagaard: It is your language, again, negligence. It's not his. It's not negligence, it's karma  AR f AR rom his viewpoint. There's no possibility of breaking that karma. He's there because he has to be there.  SJ Langone: You're making a dichotomy between his language and the exit counselor's language. I think what goes on in exit counseling is that you're AR  shifting languages, but you don't have full control over which language to use at which time.  Sf Clark: Yes, but what concerns me is that he's locking the cult person exclusively into the cult model. That's the way they're determining everything. The purpose of exit counseling is to give them access to things they haven't previously had access to.  S Langone: Right. So there will be times when they're talking in your language AR . AR   S Clark: Not just talking in our language. They are now getting a new information base that wasn't available to them previously, where they're able to make a comparison with what they already know and what the cult has given them and what we're providing them.  S Aagaard: But he can make all the comparisons in the world, it won't make any difference because the concept of choice, the possibility of choice is not there.  S` Clark: Then no one could come out of a cult, the way you're talking.  S Aagaard: Yes, because he changes religion.  S Clark: If he changes religion in exit counseling, if it changes AR  his religion, and in some cases maybe it does,AR ok, who is making the choice at that point about the change in religion? Is it AR  the AR  selfdetermination  AR of AR  the individual who's making that choice or is the exit counselor doing the decision making for the cultist AR ? AR  I don't think ethically the exit counselor is supposed to be doing that.  Sl Aagaard: As a theologian, of course, I know very well that that freedom which makes a choice possible iARt's a gift from God.@8" Ԍ S ԙClark: Well, theologically speaking, yes, God's grace makes it possible. I understand what you're saying, it's traditional reform theology. Okay, so there's the mystical element that you're talking about, or the theological element. Exit counseling, along the lines of the American Family F AR oundation AR 's premise, is more concrete in the sense of deeds and the ethics related to those deeds. |ARNow theologically, you can inform someone, for example, if you get into say a Christian aberational group or even an aberant Eastern group, you were talking about the concept of the traditional historical view of reincarnation, vs. the mishmash that's going on with the Western or what some people would say bastardized versions of reincarnation with Western concepts|  S Langone: Let me give you an example and see how you would interpret this.  AR T AR his is a case I had a number of years ago, another Krishna case. This young man had been in the Krishnas, was exit counseled, it might have even been a deprogramming, whatever, he came out of the Krishnas. He was out for at least three or fourth months. His parents consulted me and I worked with the kid for maybe a dozen, 15 sessions. We were exploring, essentially doing an assessment, looking at his life AR , AR  his goals AR  and AR  his values, looking at the Krishna experience. He could talk very rationally about the Krishna experience. He could describe the pressure that is put on you and so on. There were things he didn't like about the Krishnas, and he also could talk about things that he did like. It had some kind of aesthetic appeal to him, and he chose to go back to the Krishnas. Now, my interpretation as a mental health professional AR,  was that he went back to the Krishnas  AR by AR  default. He was kind of a wan, disengaged young man. Nothing could really capture his interest. I had suggested that he talk to AR  a AR  clergyman. I don't even remember if he was Jewish or Christian. I think he was Jewish, and I think he did, but it was like AR,  this kid could never get involved. If he had never encountered the Krishnas, he might have been just smoking dope and dreaming his life away, or he might have gotten a job, worked 9!5, and lived a normal, if unpassionate, life. But he went back to the Krishnas.  AR H AR e had some understanding"I can't say that he was brainwashed"that he was uninformed, but he went back to the Krishnas because he didn't have anything better out here. Now how would you interpret that AR ? AR   SD Aagaard: Again, I'm very suspicious of the term brainwashing AR . I don't believe that that's the real explanation. I really do believe, and I'm sure I'm beginning to sound monotonous by now AR , AR  that it's a matter of religious differences. Let me tell you a story that may make my point clear. There is a place in Bombay AR,  where there is a Kali temple and the guru there is a very shrewd and interesting man. I was sitting with him and talking when suddenly he said, Do you want to see my ishta28"  devata? That's  AR his AR  personal God. I said, sure I would like to, and he walked away and came back with a very, very impressive picture of Christ AR , AR  an icon really, not this sentimental nonsense they normally show you, but a real, genuine Jesus. But how is it,  AR I asked,  AR that this is your personal God, your personal Divinity? Why are you not a Christian? He had a personal piety AR , AR  a spirituality to Christ. That's the heart of the matter. Why didn't he take the consequence? His answer was very typical: Because of my samskaras. AR  Samskaras are karma in action, like concrete historical karma, karma in one's historical existence. I believe that these people who belong to the Krishnas have an understanding of the world that they are not able to make free choices. They can have the most devout spiritual relations AR hip AR  to Christ, it doesn't make a difference. They cannot change and they're on that track and they go on like that.  SN Langone: But if freedom, as you've described it AR , AR  is grace from God, then isn't God determining whether or not they have the freedom?  S Aagaard: No, not that. That's predestination, that belongs to his [Dave Clark's] shop. Grace and freedom AR , AR  Luther knew about that"you must become a Lutheran!  S Rosedale: AR Question,I'd like to come back to your comments about brainwashing. You don't give that credit?  S Aagaard: I think it's a misleading term that creates a lot of difficulties. I much prefer mind control.  S Rosedale: Oh, okay, it's simply the choice of labels.  S Aagaard: You're doing away with choices when you control the mind.1AR If you are dealing with Christians.1 In the Christian tradition, in the Jewish tradition, there is the element of choice because in relation to God, God makes it possible for you to choose God. It's a strange mystery.  S Rosedale: I needed to come back to that because we have this ongoing issue with those, many of them from the academic and religious communities AR , AR  who want to disparage and dissolve the phenomenon of coercive persuasion, or thought reform, or mind control.:8" Ԍ S ԙAagaard: But my point is really deeper. I believe that what happens is simply that they blind their minds. 1ARI do think that what happens is that 1People slip back into a situation without choices. That's easy because the status of grace where you have freedom is a gift. They slip back into the normal position where people don't have freedom. They have it too easy. We are saying again and again, why do the sects and the cults succeed where the churches fail? They don't. It's a very misleading formulation. They don't succeed where the church fails; they succeed and the church fails, but not on the same point. They're two absolutely different points.ARIf we accept a duel with the Krishnas and they choose the weapons [interruption] AAGAARD: appointment with you sweetheart, but sitting there having no impulses to do anything, you are in the fifty fifty position, that's natural, that's not why I speak about it. I speak about it as an act of decision whereby you're changing your life. is unique is a religious reality when it comes because you're not expected to and you don't make such decisions, when you're asocial. You have to follow the forms of this world. That's positive labor, your Karma, your caste, your family rules and that's where Jesus and Paul are so revolutionary because they tell you you shouldn't.  S6 Eckstein: Let me see if I understand because I find it a little confusing as well. So, Hindus have no free choice?  S Aagaard: Exactly.  ST Eckstein: Christians have free choice.  S Aagaard: Well, they don't have it, they can get it.  S Eckstein: They can get it, but Hindus can't get it.  SF Aagaard: If they get it, they become Christians.  S Eckstein: They become Christians.  S Langone: Is this orthodox Christianity? I thought that man havingAR is a free, has free will is a central tenet of Christianity.  S  Aagaard: It's directly rejected in Luther's Augsburg Confession AR .  S Clark: Calvinists take the position that you are born in a depraved condition and due to that depravity you're not truly a free person. It's like a cat is born as a cat and a dog a dog, they cannot help but be the nature of what they are. In other words, a cat cannot act other than a cat; so if you're in a fallen condition, then, you're not truly free in that sense.  Sp Dowhower: The key word is fallen AR  AR . God did not create us this way, but in the misuse of our freedom, we have cast ourselves into a bondageD8"  condition. The  AR condition of the  AR human race is that your freedom and mine are contaminated, and we can get free, but we aren't free to start with.  SH Langone: How do you misuse freedom if you're not free to start with? That seems inconsistent.  AR   S Dowhower AR : Because it's part of our inheritance.  Sf Langone: Then, we have not misused it.  S Aagaard: Oh, yes we have.  S Langone: How do you misuse what you don't have?  SX Aagaard: You inherit this misuse.  S Langone: We inherit the misuse?  S Aagaard: Yes, we participate in it.  SJ Langone: How do you inherit a misuse?  S Aagaard: Oh, you can look at TV each night and see how this evil is inherited.  Sh Eckstein: Did Adam and Eve before the Fall have free will?  S Aagaard: I don't know. Ask them.  S Langone: No, that's a good question. How did they fall if they didn't have free will?  S, Aagaard: I don't know, but as I said, I know this AR  AR AR world. I know that people act much worse than they are. Fundamentally AR , AR  they are always in the image of God and they hate this evil which they perform, but they perform it. All over the world.  AR They  AR massacre one another. They misuse one another AR , AR  they exploit one another. H8" Ԍ S Eckstein: So we misuse the potential for freedom?  S Aagaard: We misuse everything,  AR including AR  the potential for freedom. But that potentiality is so far away from us that we couldn't even say that we misuse it. But I see what you mean,  AR as AR  Paul developed in  S Romans VII, the most magnificent confess AR/ ional AR/  text which is a sort of  S preamble to St. Augustine's Confessions later on. He is pondering how can it be, I want to do the good, my will goes for the good, but I can't do it? I'm against my will, my acts are against AR0  it AR0 , I have a split personality. It's been translated as if our will is evil, it's not. It's not evil, it's a good will. But it's bound, it's taken into possession by a power which is bigger than I and therefore I cannot liberate myself because that power is bigger than I. In order to liberate myself an even bigger power must come in and kill that evil power which has possessed my will. That's the philosophy in that. Very reasonable. Very realistic.  S& Langone: Where did evil power come from? And did the evil power exercise free will?  S Aagaard: I have no duty to answer such questions.  SD Dowhower: Let's go back to the previous question AR5  regarding Adam and Eve. It seems to me that the Adam and Eve question AR8 , or AR8  the Adam and Eve parable or myth, if you put it that way...  S Aagaard: Parable, that's better AR9 . AR9   S4 Dowhower: Yes, I think so. Because of all the talk about language, the Adam and Eve parable is an expression of our collective human memory that there was a time when we somehow blew it. It's a collective human mindset that's been affirmed for centuries from those ancient parables by which AR= , AR=  from my perspective AR> , AR>  a nomadic Hebrew herdsman told his grandchildren about why the world is the way it is. Down through the centuries, Christians, as well as Jews, have affirmed that sense of corporate memory of how it once must have been. Now, AR?let me push your, let me think with you  ARE and ARE  say that simply because our wills are contaminated 99.44%, but not 100%, ARL  does not mean that I have no responsibility for the choices I make. Now I've put together a dialectic that affirms the bondage of the will as he's magnificently expressed it out of our<8"  tradition and at the same time affirmed that I am responsible for the choices and decisions in my life.  Sv Langone: You seem to be talking about will as a continuum that gets tainted, gets bounded ARN .  ARN But the presumption seems to be that there is will there, however bounded it might be, there is a modicum of free will someplace. But you're saying you don't have free will, it's given to you.  Sd Aagaard: How can you call a will which is bounded free?  S Langone: We're talking about a continuum ARP . ARP   S Aagaard: Denmark was occupied by the Germans for five years. We didn't become Germans because of that, but we were bound by Germany"to live under that pressure and not be able to do what you wanted to do ARR ! ARR  The only thing that we could expect, or hope for, was that a power stronger would come and push them out. We couldn't manage.  Sp Eckstein: So that's why the continuum runs from 0 to 50%. Because the freedom is never absolute. Under any circumstances.  S Aagaard: Right ARS . ARS   ARW   S Dowhower ARW : Right.  S4 Eckstein: And it wasn't even absolute in the Garden of Eden, though you don't care to speculate.  S Aagaard: No, the legend doesn't imply that, because we're not God.  SR Eckstein: That's right,ARY so, and if they made the mistake, it couldn't have been absolute.  S Aagaard: Sure. So those old parables are very important.  Sp Eckstein: I've raised it only because, I mean, I agree it sounded weird for a while ARZ . ARZ D8" Ԍ S ԙLangone: I didn't get the flash of insight that you got. A lesser flash AR\ , perhaps. AR\   Sx Eckstein: The point is that you can lose what you don't have because we did have a version of it, however imperfect, and we've been on this sort of slide AR]  ever since. AR]   S Langone: Well, that's a parable AR^ , AR^  that's not an empirical statement. The parable may reflect merely the dim recognition of what is possible AR_ , AR_  not what was.  S Clark: I think there are two sides to this: You have the whole issue of  ARa the Fall ARa , but you also have Man. Man's part of it is not just a fallen situation all by its lonesome. Man himself by his very nature has responsibility for his actions. That's intrinsic to the concept. In other words, you're fallen, but that doesn't mean you're not responsible. We do that with criminals. Criminals do wrong things, but they are held responsible for the crimes.  S Langone: Let's back up to the Denmark and Nazi example you gave.  SD Aagaard: There was a resistance.  S Langone: Let's go through that again. The Nazis conquered Denmark. You said you were not able to do what you wanted to do because of the force of the Nazis, that you needed an outside force to get rid of them. And that is a continuum statement because you can get rid of them on a continuum, you're getting them out of Arhus but still parts of Denmark are in bondage. And the outside force is analogous to grace.  S Aagaard: Divine intervention.  SP Langone: Divine intervention. But even in the bondage you were not completely unfree.  S Aagaard: No, it was possible to form a resistance movement, which some of us did. n8" Ԍ S Langone: Okay, I think, then, what you're saying is that man is not free  S in an absolute sense of the word free, but that does not mean man is unfree. Mankind is not unfree, he's not without any freedom. Okay, now I get it.  S Aagaard: You see how relevant doctrine is? All that nonsense about the Christian doctrines that h ARe ave ARe  driven the youth out of the churchARf this is rubbish. They've never understood it. They've been too superficial to care to understand it. But such an old article really contains the seed of a whole culture. The difference between Calvinism and Lutheranism and Catholicism is in such a code ARg . ARg  Hinduism also has its doctrines.  S Langone: What is freedom, then, from your point of view?  S Aagaard: I think it was indicated here by our shrewd colleague. The end will be more than the beginning. That's the conclusion. In the beginning there was not full freedom. In the end there will be freedom.  S Langone: But what is freedom?  St Aagaard: That's exactly what eschatology is all about. And what Christian dreaming, what Christian visions, what Christian symbolism, the Eucharist, what the Liturgy is all about. A celebration of that freedom which is not yet there. But which is there as the hope that keeps things going. The big hope that is the power in history. And it's that power that has created our culture, that drive in eschatology that has pushed us forward and made us what we are for good or bad.  S Eckstein: You can show characteristics in the sense that you can describe the movement, but if you try to ask what the end result is like, it's like trying to ask for something you don't have yet.  SP Langone: Yes, but that does not muzzle you.  S Eckstein: Nobody's muzzling you.  S Langone: It doesn't mean you can't try to approximate what it is. p 8" Ԍ S Aagaard: The caricature is the pie in the sky when you die ARi . Eschatology is not a pie ARl  because some intervention has happened. That hope is connected with something that is fulfilled already. There is a not yet, but there is also an already now ARn  because of this extraordinary thing called Jesus. That's here already.  S Dowhower: Can I offer another alternative ARq  answer ARq  to your question? Paul Tillich's answer to your question would be that there are three states of human freedom. ARx  Heteronomy, which would be that state where I live under the authority of another. In the growth of the human being, the next sta AR~ g AR~ e would be autonomy, which our culture seems to be thriving upon and express AR ing AR  in many ways, including your own sixties autobiographical comments of this morning. For Tillich, t AR hough, AR  the ultimate freedom is for me as an autonomous being to voluntarily choose to give my allegiance to God.  S$ Langone: Our will is in harmony with God's will.  S Dowhower: That's right. And the only choice AR , AR  to go back to Luther's bondage of the will, the only choice I really have in life is to quit fighting God, to surrender.  S Langone: Then, the rub is selfdeception. The rub is knowing <ARwhich, the problem is selfdeception, is knowing<whether or not what you think is the will of God is the will of God or is a function of all the baggage of the bondage.  AR   S^ Dowhower AR : And that's what the scriptures in a community of believers serve to affirm or to challenge.  S Langone: And that's what some of the Bible cults exploit, the will of God is what I see...  SN Aagaard: I want to make a little modification, which is not so small really. It is not a lack of knowledge. We know very well. It's a matter of not  AR being  AR willing to follow the consequences of that knowledge.  S Langone: Of not willing? It still sounds contradictory. You're saying ARhere that here's a bound man, with all his samskaras, he's bounded. This has reduced his freedom to a tiny dot, okay, and then you say, well...>!8" Ԍ S  AR ԙDowhower AR : I need to interrupt to say that I don't share that assumption, that his will is a little tiny dot. You reduced it to an infinitesimal point and we're not saying that.  SJ Langone: So, it's not that far reduced. He has a fist full of will.  S Aagaard: We know AR  AR AR that we have lost our freedom"that's also a sort of freedom. We know what we have lost. You see, nowadays, it's always made into a matter of knowledge AR . We're AR  lacking knowledge, and we must send missionaries out to give them AR  the AR  knowledge which they're lacking, and this is not it at all, all the knowledge is there, no problem.  S Langone: On the one hand I can see AR  that AR  knowledge is there, but all of this rubbish in the human psyche obscures the knowledge. Clarity isn't there. The person doesn't see, isn't that the main problem? It's not in  AR the AR  sense that the light isn't shining, but there is a blockage of the light.  S Aagaard: That's right.  AR In AR  fact, that's pure Lutheran tradition. It's very interesting to see how it comes around. In our languages, in Danish and English AR , AR  we can express it like this: It's not a problem of God's being there because God is everywhere. The problem is God's being found because we are hiding somehow from God so that we cannot see Him AR . AR  He's not hiding, we are hiding.  S Langone: Wait, when you say we are hiding it sounds almost like in est; they say we are creating our own bondage AR . AR   S2 Eckstein: I was waiting for that.  S Langone: Is not the shade which is blocking the light in large part a function of what we inherit? So it's not we as one individual after another.  S" Aagaard: It's not an I AR , AR  it's a we, from beginning to end. We are lost as a we and we are saved as a we. We have a beautiful saying in Luther, Alone you cannot be saved, a AR lone I do not want to be saved. AR   AR   Sl Dowhower AR : But you see how that conflicts with rugged American individualism.@"8" Ԍ S ԙLangone: I was just going to say, we can go back to the exit counseling situation AR . AR   Sx Eckstein: In addition AR , AR  we're faced with another issue which is the issue we talked about this morning"namely AR , AR  how you come up with a criterion to differentiate between this and what these guys are fighting against. Because...  S Langone: This, referring to this notion of God and Freedom?  S: Eckstein: Right. Freedom is very much a value embedded in the popular culture, whether it's understood or not understood.  AR I AR f I go in front of a class of college freshmen and I ask how many people think freedom is important,AR and all the hands are going to go up. Now, at the same time though, what I'm hearing is the suggestion that in order to be truly free one has to adopt a certain religious...  S Aagaard: You (7  are not saved by knowledge. You are not saved by a perspective. You're saved by an act! A divine act which in fact does create knowledge, but that is secondary. You may well make doctrine or teaching on the basis of that act or intervention. It is, however, basically a matter of God appearing and intervening. And the churches are communicating it and remembering it. That is its only necessary  S function. Provocare means to call forth. We are called forth from our hiding. God is not hiding, we are.  S` Clark: But  (7 I have a problem with the idea that I'm not telling somebody something they don't already know, especially when I'm first beginning to counsel someone. Exit counseling, its foundation, its p (7 ivotal point, is information, getting it to people who don't have it. (7   S| Aagaard: Yes, well, that's right. Here we must make a d (7! istinction because in fact they have access to it. But they are again hiding from that knowledge.  S Clark: But what if they're ignorant (7% , though, they just don't know about it? (7'  I think there is an issue of the deprivation of freedom, which is part of what we (7) 're about. You're making a very categorical statement thatl#8"  they know  (7/ what we're already going to tell them. I'm doubtful (75  about that one.  Sv Aagaard: No, no, I'm not saying that. I'm trying to say that that knowledge is available to them. They don't know that knowledge because they're being kep (79 t away from it.  S Clark: Well, I would go a step further. They're actually indoctrinated (7? , being alienated from that knowledge.  S8 Langone: Paul just raised a good point (7C  about whether this is a manipulative dialogue because of the statement that they have the knowledge, but they don't know it. Kind of like, I see it, you really see it, but you don't see that you really see it.  ST Eckstein: I interpret your saying to me that you' (7G re not telling me anything I don't already know as the linguistic equivalent of putting your arm around me.  S Aagaard: No, it could be heard as the Platonic idea that  (7M you already know but have forgotten about it.  S Langone: Does he really know quantum physics but is (7S n't aware of it yet? The esties would say yes, if you just get in touch with quantum physics (7U , you know it.  S` Aagaard: No, no, but that would be the Platonic idea that you just remember.  (7W   S Eckstein: All knowledge is recollection.  S~ Langone: Yes, but you're not talking about knowledge in general or the knowledge that David is talking about (7[ . What exactly do you mean by know (7a ledge?  S Aagaard: You're speaking about God just now, without a doubt. The knowledge about God is in ourselves and in our world because we are part and parcel of that divine creation. We (7c 're not outside it. We are not Devils, we are not in hell, we are on Earth under God's grace, in the@$8"  presence of God.  (7e If we don't see God, that's because we are hiding, as the parable of the Fall in Genesis reads. God didn't hide himself, Adam and Eve were hiding. He calls them, he calls them, he provoked them (7i , he called them out of their hiding, and that's what the Church is doing, and that (7k 's what you're doing even if you may not call yourself a church when you're c (7m oming around. You're calling them out of their hiding. The hiding is there and that is what prevents them from seeing and understanding. Not a lack of seeing and understanding. It's such an important point for me because it's like a missionary who has a mandate to speak against all evasion.  S Clark: Okay, let me give you a case in exi (7q t counseling where a person is given the oppo (7s rtunity to hear information or be exposed to information that is very specific and relevant to their group. They don't want to look at it (7w , don't want to research it. Once it's been made  (7y available, in terms of the way I look at it, ethically I cannot impose upon them at th (7} at point. They know it's available, but they don't want it.  (7   S Aagaard: It's like a missionary.  Sl Clark: Yes, but a missionary goe (7 s further than that. A missionary feels it's his mission to go further. But the problem is that an exit counselor, morally and ethically, would have to draw the line when that person says I don't want to hear that.  S Langone: It's kind of like in Cultic Studies Journal (7 , Vol. 2, No. 2, Li (7 fton and LeBar distinguish between invitation and persuasion; the missionary should invite but not persuade.  S Aagaard: He's a peacemaker and as such persuades us all to make peace with God.  SJ Dowhower: There's a point at which you respect the decision of that  S person. (7  That it seems to me becomes the ethics of a respect (7 able position.  S Clark: But in American evangelicalism, it (7 's your mission to go out there and win people. I'm mak (7 ing a point about what they feel their moralj%8"  and ethical co (7 mmitment is really about because you care and you are your brother's keeper, you  (7 take the extra step, you walk the extra mile.  Sv Aagaard: If  (7 I may express a sort of parable which happened to me two y (7 ears ago. I had learned that a few leaders of Scientology had dropped out (7  and had escaped to N (7 orway. I found the address of one and phoned her. When she came to the telephone, I said, It's Johannes Aagaard. Oh (7 ! she said, I'm so ashamed. Ashamed? I said. But you  (7 have never met me. We never me (7 t. We don't know one another. What do you mean you're ashamed (7 ? You know, I've known it all the time, she said. I have been reading what you've been writing and I've heard about it, and I knew all the time that you were right. On (7 e thing is to know when you (7 're right and another thing is to get out of it. Get out of Scientology. I think that's a fantastic parable of the human condition. We are caught. Nothing externally is catching us. She could walk out, but she couldn't (7 . She had a bound will.  (7 Some intervention had to happen. That's where I see the real problem for our Di (7 alog Center. We are publicizing a lot of good material, but it doesn't reac (7 h, it doesn't provoke. We don't intervene. We haven't found a real method. I'm very inter (7 ested in the way you operate.  S< Clark: Well, families have  (7 the critical role in terms of intervention. I mean, I don't go in and say, Hey, my name is Dave, and just meet the cult member in that way. My way of meeting that person is through a family that comes to me with very serious needs.  SX Aagaard: There's the difference (7 , you see. There, our people have a fantastic chance to intervene directly, in the cafe, on the b (7 each, and create the provocation.  S Clark: But meeting in the cafe and on the beach, that m (7 ay just be a door opener. When you (7 're dealing with an exit counseling, we're talking about an intensive, sustained process (7  for a sustained period of time. The average social meeting doesn't work like that.  S Aaga (7 ard: You know, when our people are gone, they're out there half a year. It's a much longer period. So the comparison is  (7 favorable. d&8" Ԍ S Clark: But as an exit counselor (7 , I'm there for maybe several days to a week. Then, the person may take the option of a rehab or r (7 eentry or resource facility, a Wellspring or something like that, where there's followup and a different kind (7   of counseling going on, and my role stops. It's not a transference on me; I' (7  m not the new guru.  S Aagaard: My point is only, how is the alternative created (7 ? How does the alternative come about?  Sf Clark: It's an option.  S Aagaard: Yes,  (7 but that girl in Scientology couldn't make a choice because she had no (7  options.  S Clark: Yes, but in an exit counseling context it (7  is presented in terms of an option. There are people who opt not to go. I feel that this is one of the frustrating things for me in doing the kind of work I do: When they decide, well, I don't really need that. And the family may come to the same conclusion. We see much larger issues at that point that are important to be addressed. When people are responsive"and I don't know of anyone in my 16 years of doing this work"and decide to spend at least two weeks at a rehab, not a person has rejected that option or not seen value to it; to a person, they all felt it was worthw (7" hile to pursue that once they did it and spent  (7$ enough time at it. To a person.  S Dowhower: Welcome to what the parish ministry is all about. I refer to your comment about the people who reject (7&  the options, who reject the invitation, who say, I don't  (7( need that.  S Clark: And I've seen cases where they turn around, even if a (7, t first they didn't see it. I've worked with a Church of Christ case in Los Angeles, well, actually the San Diego area, and the gal chose not to go to rehab immediately (72 . But within two weeks her grandfather died and she fell apar (74 t. She went to rehab. Immediately after that what we had talked about clicked, con (7: nected, where before she had heard it but inside didn't see  (7< it, didn't see that she needed to follow through. But when she went through a personal crisis, it connected  (7@ at that point for her.  S: Aagaard: That created the alternative.:'8" Ԍ S ԙClark: It did,  (7B it really did. There was a catalyst to bring it about.  S Aagaard: Of course, that even happens within Hinduism. If such a traumatic experience comes, a young man may have the chance to step out and bec (7F ome a monk. That's his only freedom.  S Dowhower: Let me ad (7H d a footnote to this morning's discussion. I was really uncomfortable from my perspective in the trenches  (7N of a parish ministry when you were dist (7P inguishing between healthy problems the pastor could so (7T lve or help solve and the unhealthy problems which we needed to refer to psychiatrists and psychologists and other more specialized professionals. That's very idealistic. Where I live and sweat blood, many times they wouldn't go to the family therapist or the family systems therapist. They wouldn't have the daughter, who was really the healthiest person in the family but who  (7d was raising all kinds of hell in a sick family, they wouldn't have her tested psychologically to see whether she was a sick kid (7n  or they were a sick family"and I'm the only professional left on the scene. And, folks, it ain't much fun in the real world. They ei (7v ther deny it or cannot afford it. Some of my two previous parishe (7z s were big and wealthy enough that I had a pastor on the staff w (7 ith full credentials as a therapist, and I could go out my door and take the lady and her daughter next door to my colleague who w (7 as an inhouse, nofee therapist. But the rest of us k (7 lutzes in the trenches are left holding the bag because w (7 e can't get  (7 them to your office, or to yours. We're left with the problems that we aren't professionally capable of solving, yet we're the o (7 nly helping professional with access to the family because they won't go to the family systems therapist (7 , they won't go to the psychologist. So, we're the (7 re and we're all God's got right now, and it's scary out there and we botch a (7  lot, too.  S Aagaard: But my point is that there's a limit where a pastor will have to say, this is not my shop any longer, this belongs to the psychiatrist.  S Dowhower: You know what? There are times I can't say that because I can't get them there.  (7 Because I'm the only one left on the field.  S Langone: You can't abandon them. f(8" Ԍ S Aagaard: You may sometimes have to do it, but that' (7 s not your real job. That's not what you're trained for. In my faculty, I've  (7 learned that there is one thing that is very important for theologians, and that is to show that they have a unique training for a unique job that cannot be done by others. And that is to understand, analyz (7 e explanations, and see when people are trying to get away  (7 from the problem and when they are trying to solve the problem. This sort of discipline is a theological discipline, and that's what we should  (7 do, but also we are forced to do a lot as amateurs (7 . I'm doing a lot as an amateur, that doesn't change my honor as a th (7 eologian.  S Dowhower: No issue.  S Aagaard (7 : Okay.  ST Clark: In getting back to the issue of freedom in a mind control context and in a cultural context with civil  (7 law, how would you define freedom in the context of the civil law?  S Aagaard: Again, he hasn't read the Augsburg Confession. There (7 's a specific article about freedom in civil matters, but that's a different problem because there you have relative freedom, freedom of choice. You can choose between a beer and a soft drink, no problem. There's no determination except taste. But this is quite different. You cannot use the same cho (7 ice between Krishna and Christ as between a beer and a soft drink. But people make it like that, like it (7 's a matter of taste.  S0 Clark: You see, the atti (7 tude in this culture is that if you want to believe  (7 in a rock, you have the freedom to believe in that rock or the moon or Jesus or the Jewish tradition or whatever. That is the basic concept of what freedom means to most people in this culture. You have the freedom to choose any one of those freely. The thing that upsets people in this culture, especially those that get involved with cult awareness or the American Family Foundation, is that that freedom is interfered with. How that  (7 choice came about is the issue.  S Langone: Yes, I think the American notion of freedom (7  is the freedom  (7 to do what you want to do. I think that's the notion of freedom you're talking about.:)8" Ԍ S ԙAagaard: I think that's exactly the point. That (7 's a very good phrase because that's exactly what Luther could have said.  Sx Eckstein: But, in the American tradition, the freedom to do what you want to do is restricted by the idea that in exercising your freedom you're not supposed to break the law. Thus, the freedom to do what you want to do is also constrained by the freedom to do what you o (7 ught to do. And the real issue here isn't the distinction between what you want to do and what you ought to do, but how you draw the boundaries around those s (7 pheres of life subject to mere want and those s (7 pheres of life subject to the ought.  S Langone: That's an interesting point, and I'm incl (7 ined to disagree, respectfully (7 , because the ought implies spiritual, religious, philosophical grounding, which I don't  (7 think is really in our c (7 ulture. What you're calling an ought, a restraint on the freedom to do what you want to, is really an instrumental compr (7 omise with the fact that different people want different things, and in order to av (7 oid conflict we put restraints on what we...  Sn Eckstein: No, I don't agree. For example, the notion that it's o (7 kay to do what you want but it's not okay to kill your neighbor shows that the dichotomy between doing what you want and doing what you ought isn't the issue. There's a boundary there. The freedom to do what you want  (7 doesn't extend ac (7 ross that boundary, that ought line, regarding killing your neighbor. The fact that we don't always consciously understand the basis for that doesn't mean that the line isn't there any more than someone who doesn't go to church on Sunday (7( s...  S Langone: No, I'm not di (7* sagreeing that the ought line is there. What I'm saying is that in American culture the source of the ought...  SJ Hochman: Well, let's take a look at the  (74 Cult Awareness Network. Every meeting I've gone to, you ha (78 ve the communal meals and  (7: before each meal some clergyperson comes up and makes a three or fourminute blessing. They all get up and say, God, please help us to do this. I' (7> ve never heard anybody get up and say, What is this, a religious thing? I'm getting out of he (7D re. Nobody says it because the (7F y're hungry. I think there is a matrix and even though some of the p (7J eople who are involved8*8"  wouldn't come out and talk  (7N like this, there is something in the air that's there. I think there's an implicit feeling  (7R that what these groups are doing is wrong, bad, although it's not always artic (7T ulated.  SH Clark: There are two roles.  (7Z The credo goes like this: I don't care what you believe, but I am concerned about h (7\ ow those changes came abou (7^ t. I hear both of those messages. When I even believe what you want me to believe, that to me is not the point, but how the change came about is what's important. If it's unethical, we are very concerned about the und (7` ue influence that caused that change to take place.  S Langone: I think that what's going on here is the argument about whether or not American culture and  (7b American freedom are rooted in religion.  SR Eckstein: The answer is, of course they are.  S Langone:  (7d The regnant pluralism is denying that.  S Eckstein: Hang on a minu (7j te. If I teach a course in political values and I get assembled  (7n before me a group of college students and I ask how many people believe in equality, all the hands will go up. And then if I ask in what respect are we equal, everyone sits on their hands because no (7p body can figure it out, because obviously nobody is equal to anybody  S else.  (7r Then, we go and look at Locke's Second Treatise of Civil  S Government, (7y  and what does Locke say? Guess what, everybody, that equality comes from the fact that we are all created by one maker. When that happens, the class breaks up into t (7{ wo groups. On the one hand, for people who already consider themselves religious, it's perfect: Not only are they comfortable with it  (7 but also they feel affirmed in their religiosity. On the other hand, you have those people who, for whatever reason, have den (7 ied religion, and they're contemptuous of the whole idea. They don't understand how that could be a legitimate grounding for some (7 thing  (7 as important as equality when everybody knows that stuff's a bunch of non (7 sense. They have a problem now because they don't have a (7 n alternate means of justification that they're aware of.  Sh Langone: Okay, that's our discussion. Because when I say American culture, what I'm talking about is this regnant kind of relativism.<+8" Ԍ S ԙEckstein: But what I see in the c (7 ulture, what I see in my students, actually, is that underlying this sort of attitude, you know, we're not supposed to talk about religion (7 , we're not supposed to have commitments and what everybody believes is the (7 ir business and it's fine no matter what they do as long as they don't murder you. All that stuff turns out on a deeper level to reveal that everyone is conscious of the fact that it's incoherent (7  without the grounding. And the grounding is really st (7 ill there. It's just not talked about, we all are pretending that that's not how it' (7 s grounded.  S6 Langone: So, the American nation has divorced from its own grounding. That's my point.  S Aagaard: It's lost its memory. Isn't it so s (7 ymbolic (7  that in your question, how many believe in equality, you couldn't substitute (7  for belief any other word? It's a belief word, it's a religious word. (7  You can't get away from it.  S Eckstein: I think that's absolutely correct. (7   Sp Hochman: So the bi (7 g problem that psychiatrists have is that psychiatrists have sort of banished religion. (7   S Clark: We've noticed.  S Hochman: No, they used to, like CAN, have invocations. The psychiat (7 rists at their meetings started out having a clergyman who got up there for five minutes and said something and then he'd go home  (7 and that would be it. But they got rid of that two years a (7 go. I think their rationale was that it was bothering people, it ma (7  de people uncomfortable. So he's gone (7 . You have people like the late Karl Menninger, famous psych (7 iatrist, who, though I didn't agree with everything he said, talked from a religious standpoint. He talk (7 ed about responsibility. This is all gone now. No one can get up and do this anymore.  S Aagaard: It is coming back because, ob (7 viously, how could you have psychol (7  ogy when you don't believe in the soul? What's the meaning? It would be like the theologian who doesn't (7"  believe in God. <,8" Ԍ S Clark: Yes, it's a contradi (7& ction in terms. I hear what you're saying.  S Langone: The problem with the mental health profession is that we have a bag of interpersonal and, in the case of psych (7, iatrists, biological tricks, but we really don't have any philo (7. sophical ground. We (70 're just technicians. It's a deficiency in the field; and, in a sense, the members (72  of the field, as in the whole culture,  (74 are so philosophically, religiously ignorant that when it dawns on us that we're missing something, we don't  (7> even have the capacity to make a good choice. This is why we have so (7B  many psychotherapists getting involved with so much New Age baloney. It's like the blind leading the blind.  S Aagaard: You either have your presuppositions (7H  in order or you don't. You have them anyhow. You can only choose between disorder or order in your presuppos (7N itions. On (7P e very important key"I'm sure you also use it for your students"is to show them the story or the history of words, that words aren't coming down from heaven. Responsibility was created by the theologi (7T ans in the high medieval period as an eschatolo S gical concept because we ha (7X d to respondere to Christ in his parousia, when he ask (7\ s where were you in the present and you are to give a  Sp response"from th (7^ ere responsibility comes. Without such an appeal, so to speak, that you have to respond to someone, there's no responsibility, just se (7` ntimentality. It has nothing to do with the word, and the words become prostitutes when you use them like that.  S  Personal. This is a very personal matter, Mrs. Peters. Person"this has quite a distinct meaning. It was invented by the t (7f heologians in the  S2 fourth century as a concept of God speaking to us through the  S Ԛmask"personam"and it just meant a mask, but now it has come to mean, theologically speaking, acting and speaking subject. It entered into our civilization and created what it mentioned. The concept of a person created the reality of persons (7l ; it never happened in Sanskrit or Hindi, there are no persons there. If there are, they are sort of a  (7n Western concept, which is now creating some sort of result. Words creating in lang (7z uage ideas that can help persons suddenly see. We've not started just yesterday! The whole meaning of our whole personal life, of our culture, comes out of theology. h-8" Ԍ S Hochman: The rationale a lot of psychiatrists give for being concerned about suicide"that it's not a moral issue, it's another cause of dea (7~ th, like people die from cancer"we're doctors, doctors cure cancer, we'l (7 l cure suicide. And, of course, this is good, right? I mean, you shouldn't have suicide, but the rationale for it, the mission that a psychiatrist has, is in a different perspective (7 .  S Langone: All they've done is postpone confrontation with the question, why worry about death (7 ?  S8 Hochman: Well, there's no question. You know.  S Langone: So what if someone dies?  S Hochman: I went to  (7 medical school down the street at Bellevue Hospital. In the third year, when you go on the wards and people are dying and the (7 y're real sick and, wow, it really hits you"usually most people stay busy reading books and take the attitude, well, let's read about the next disease. One of the girls raised her hand in surgery and said, These people are really sick and they're dying, and some people really are interested in death. The chairman of the  (7 surgery department responded by saying, Well, you'll learn about that in psychiatry. And guess what happened when we got to psychiatry? I won't tell you.  S Dowhower: Of  (7 course, you see, for me to look at suicide is to take a look at the creatorcreature issue (7 s that are coming to the fore when a creature den (7 ies his creatureliness or ends it. In essence, he give (7 s the finger to the creator. You see, there are all kinds of ultimate theological issues in any kind of volitional selfdestruct (7 ion or even selfdestruction by default. For example, the (7  nurse in my first parish who carried this lump on her breast  (7 until two weeks before she died, before she ever had medical attention. You know, denial, again (7 , the great human propensity to hide from the truth.  S Langone: In the contemporary culture, w (7 here the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure, suicide becomes a very logical choice when life becomes so painful or so hopeless that pleasure's impossible and all you have is pain. Suicide is logical. Where (7 as in the theological view, the purpose of life is the pursuit of meaning, in a sense, I mean...:.8" Ԍ S ԙDowhower: And obedien (7 t creatureliness.  S Langone: Which is the source of meaning.  SL Hochman: Pain can have a meaning, not that you shouldn't treat it.  S Langone: Yes, but without God, you lose all of that. And suicide (7 , well,  S that's Camus' Myth of Sisyphus.  (7 The fundamental question of philosophy is suicide: Is life w (7 orth living?  S> Hochman: Yes, so it comes down to that, you know. If you're going to say, why not commit suicide, w (7 ell, you certainly could say, why not be in a cult? Isn't being in a cult be (7 tter than commit (7 ting suicide? The whole foundation of an anticult movement or whatever you want to call it cannot be rooted in philosophical liberalism.  S, Langone: That raises an interesting point because what you're getting at here is a certain hypocrisy in that  (7 those who defend the cults in the name of religious freedom are demeaning religion.  Sv Hochman: But they're not interested in religion. The (7 y're interested in liberalism.  S Aagaard: That's right.  S Eckstein: And  (7 it's the split between creed and deed that is the source of that perspective. I thi (7 nk I've got it half formulated. But it seems to me that the idea that people can in fact say or believe whatever they want  (7 as long as they don't overstep certain bounds of action is to take the w (7 ant/ought boundary and move it in such a way that the sphere of ought is compressed and the sp (7 here of want made very large. I associate that with a liberal pers (7 pective. The problem is that if you move that line far enough, you then put yoursel (7 f in a position of  (7 not being able to justify not taking that line and moving it all the way to the  (7 end.  S Aagaard: Exactly. I believe that primarily it (7  's a consequence of the liberal separation between the private sphere and the communal sphere. Opinions belong to the private s (7  phere; only when it comes to action, then you step over into the communal sphere. But of course, if youB/8"  speak as a theologi (7 an, that is comparable to hypocrisy"that you are allowed to say one thing and do another.  Sv Langone: And psychologically speaking, it's nonsensical because it's an artificial division.  S Clark: A question for both you and Johannes, are you comfortable with the concept of restoring one to personal autonomy?  S8 Dowhower: Oh, I am. (7  Remember Tillich's trilogy of growth: You're moving from heterono (7 my to autonomy. Now, that's not the end of the line in gr (7 owth and development.  S Clark: Okay, I understand what you're saying. But in (7  terms of that word, do you feel comfortable with autonomy, and do you fee (7 l that we're really communicating when we use that term?  S Aagaard: I don't like it because it stinks of liberal thinking, individualism, and all that. Authentici (7 ty, if you want that auto, but it's not that re (7 ally. It's a matter of identity really. When it comes to it, identity also goes backward, it includes your memory. You see (7 , every important thought was thought in the medieval period; and since then, nobody really has thought anything. A (7  t that time, memory was one of the senses. It was the sixth sense, so to speak, but not really organized like that. You can't take memory out of our psychol (7  ogy. I think that has contributed to creating this sort of memorylessness, or what  (7 is that called in English (7 ?  S Hochman: Amnesia.  Sz Aagaard: Yes, amnesia. We live in a cultural amnesia and also in a personal one. If we do  (7 remember, it's so traumatic; and since people  (7 are giving up personal forgiveness for all the traumas they have caused, they do (7  n't know what to do about it, so they run around like chickens without any sort  (7" of guidance. You can only have memory if you also have reconciliation as  (7& a possibility. If not, you must forget. h08" Ԍ S Hochman: How about these people w (7F ho were commanders in the Nazi death camps who ran away to Argentina or wer (7J e living in New Jersey, and then somebody discovers them 20 years later and they're brought to trial? The  (7L defense is, well, all right, that was terrible and everything, but look what the guy did since then: He's a solid citizen, he has three kids, he has a good job, he didn't go to jail. So, if you (7P  become average, that's okay, you never hear about it. I never heard a story about one of these p (7R eople that when they have a trial, his lawyer says he was so guiltridden that he cou (7V ldn't say he was a Nazi, but he gave to cha (7X rity, he became a monk or whatever, he tried to do something,  (7Z to repair something. So, it's an issue worth discussing anyway.  S Aagaard: But th (7\ ere are better ways of penitentia. First of all, to help others to get out.  SR Hochman: That's what they  (7b have a special skill in doing because they were there.  S Dowhower: And  (7d yet haven't we seen excult members all needing to do some transitional phase in which they either  (7j wrote books or were out on the speaking trail or were  (7p deprogrammers and rescuers and  (7r exit counselors. I can remember the first excult people I met in Pittsburgh in 1974; after  (7z a couple of years, the young lad (7| y who'd been in the Moonies just moved on with her life. Some of this stuff,  (7 I think, is kind of the therapy of exiting,  (7 isn't it?  S\ Clark:  (7 Yes, and then you get certain people, like you have with other profession (7 als, that stick with it in the long haul. I'm one of them. Kevin Garvey is another. There are certain people who have a longterm relationship to this. Most of (7  the exit counselors are former members, the long ones and the short ones.  SJ Langone: I  (7 think that what goes on is that the process of writing or recapitu (7 lating is not just p (7 laying the tape again, but it's rather a reorganizing of the experience (7 . It's an attempt to understand it and integrate it with the rest of the person's life, whi (7 ch is a healthy thing as  (7 opposed to what some advise, which is to bottle up the cult experience as bad and now come back to the world and be what you were (7 . 818" Ԍ S Clark: There are two ways of moving on with your life, dealing (7  with it in terms of its full scope, and then there are those who have to deal with it at a much deeper level. And, as you suggest, most of them do it maybe for several years and then move on with their lives,  (7 where the cult experience is part of their past versus an on (7 ԩgoing active phenomenon in their life. I would say the majority of them do what you're saying. (7