Spreading Materialistic Secularism

The students of Wundt primarily responsible for spreading his teachings around the world included Russian physiologist and psychiatrist, Ivan Pavlov, arguably the most infamous �man is an animal� advocate.

But Americans also flocked to Wundt�s classroom. G. Stanley Hall, an ordained minister, studied anatomy, theology, anthropology and psychiatry in Germany. When questioned whether his studies had made him more, or less, devout, Hall replied, �Less. �� Hall became the first president of the American Psychological Association. He founded the field of �genetic psychology� and became renowned for his application of Wundt�s �experimental psychology� to child development.

William James�s studies with Wundt inspired his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. James�s biographer Clarence J. Karier tells us that with James, �[W]e pass from a culture with God at its center to a culture with man as its center. This fundamental shift in Western thought initiated a corresponding shift in the ideological structure of the social system. � [S]in became a sickness, and such religious rituals as confession, designed to alleviate guilt and atone for sin, were replaced by individual and group psychotherapeutic interventions, designed to alleviate the guilt of anxiety neurosis.�

Declaring religion the �enemy,� Sigmund Freud saw spiritual belief as superstition and the �universal obsessional neurosis.� He also envisioned the death of the church at the hands of psychiatry: �The scientific spirit brings about a particular attitude towards worldly matters; before religious matters it pauses for a little, hesitates, and finally there too crosses the threshold. In this process there is no stopping; the greater the number of men to whom the treasures of knowledge become accessible, the more widespread is the falling away from religious belief�at first only from its obsolete and objectionable trappings, but later from its fundamental postulates as well.�

Despite the fallacy of Wundt�s theory and the derivative ideas and opinions of his students� ample empirical evidence exists that man is certainly different from and infinitely more capable than an animal�these faulty theories have remained the underpinnings of all psychiatry�s efforts. Today, psychiatrists and psychologists still claim that man is an animal to be conditioned and controlled. Governments have been persuaded of this idea and are paying public funds in the billions to those who can do the conditioning and controlling. And psychiatry isn�t going to let the evidence get in its way. With religion and its core tenets under direct assault from the lofty dissemination of such diametrically opposed, materialist ideas, it was only a few decades before the social and religious consequences would become obvious.

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