LAWSUIT THAT PROVED THE ERROR The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader

THE PLAINTIFF: Robert Kropinski, a 36 year old Philadelphia real estate manager.

THE DEFENDANT: The Transcendental Meditation Society and the guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

THE LAWSUIT: Kropinski worked with TM groups for 11 years, but he finally sued them because "he was never able to achieve the 'perfect state of life' they promised, and suffered psychological disorders as a result. One broken agreement: he had been told he would be taught to 'fly' through self-levitation, but he learned only to 'hop with the legs folded in the lotus position.'"

THE VERDICT: A U.S. district court jury in Washington D.C. awarded him nearly $138,000 in damages.

Maybe the most recognizable celebrity in the world today isn't as recognizable as everyone first imagined. A Sacramento man was convicted of using Tiger Wood's identity to defraud credit card companies of $17,000.

According to prosecutors, Anthony Taylor used Tiger's real name, Eldrick T. Woods, to apply for credit cards which he used to buy televisions, stereos, luxury car rentals and other services.
Taylor's defense attorney, James Greiner, told the jury that it is ridiculous to believe that anyone would confuse his client for one of the world's most famous golfer. Yet people did not confuse Anthony with Tiger.

They believed him to be Eldrick T. Woods. By not making the connection between the name and the identity, they were fooled. In the same way, many people come and claim to speak for the one true God. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and many other groups try to fit under the label of Christian in order to gain an audience. Yet when their message is compared to the message of the Bible, they are found to be as Christian as Anthony Taylor is Tiger.
Matthew 24:11 KJV "And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many."
http://sports.yahoo.com/pga/news/ap/20010105/ap_tigersidentity.html

QUOTE: My dad believes in reincarnation. So in his will he left everything to himself

• Jackie Graziano quoted by Barry Goldsmith in New York Times

MORMON ERROR ON REPENTANCE Alex V. Wilson

The following quotations make their view clear and enable us to understand their basic legalisms:

"We believe that through the atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel" (Articles of Faith). "The gospel is a code of laws and ordinances given to men to enable them to assimilate themselves to those who are in heaven" (Joseph Smith). "The gospel is a system or plan of laws and ordinances by strict obedience to which people are assured they may return again into the presence of the Father" (Brigham Young). "Some of our old traditions [meaning their pre-Mormon beliefs] teach us that a man guilty of atrocious and murderous acts may savingly repent on the scaffold. Upon his execution you will hear the expression, ‘Bless God, he has gone to heaven… through the all redeeming merits of Christ the Lord!’ This is all nonsense. Such a character will never see Heaven" (Brigham Young).

They do believe in immersion, but obviously it is a work of merit rather than an act of faith. There is all the difference in the world between the two. These statements are not simply saying, "Faith without works is dead." They don’t even mention faith – or grace. And Young won’t allow the dying thief into Paradise, but Jesus did. ‘Nuf said.

Out of fascination with nature’s deadly arsenal, answers have been sought through religion, mythology, and science. Mythological gods were assigned to every weather phenomenon. The ancient Greeks, for example, had a god for every kind of wind from A (Aeolus, general wind god) to Z (Zephuros, god of the west wind), from which we get our word zephyr. There still stands at Thyia an altar where the Greeks worshiped the wind and made sacrifices to it.

A woman went to the local psychic in hopes of contacting her dearly departed grandmother.
The psychic's eyelids begin fluttering and she begins moaning.
Eventually, a voice comes, saying, "Granddaughter? Are you there?"
The granddaughter, wide-eyed responds, "Grandma? Is that you?"
"Yes granddaughter, it's me."
"It's really you, Grandma?" the woman repeats.
"Yes, it's really me, granddaughter."
The woman pauses a moment, "Grandma, I have just one question for you."
"Anything, my child."
"When did you learn to speak English?"

QUOTE: Reincarnation: That is the myth that says, "If at first you don't succeed, die, die again!"

QUOTE: I like to wait a day before reading my horoscope. That way I can find out what kind of day I had.

THE HEART OF CULTS Christian Reader Nov/Dec 99 – Kevin Johnson & James White in What’s with the Dudes at the Door?

Here’s the heart of why cults exist: They each claim to possess a new truth no one has ever spotted before, a whopper insight that the rest of Christendom somehow missed for 2000 years.

Beware of folks who try to sell you "new" ideas. All that God wants you to know is contained in "the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints" (Jude 1:3). The Gospel needs to be relearned by every generation. But it doesn’t need to be reinvented by every generation.

STATISTIC: There are approximately 3,500 astronomers in the U.S… but over 15,000 astrologers. Uncle John’s Great Big Bathroom Reader (11^th edition) p. 178

SIGN HERE… - Quoted by James Dent in Charleston, W. Va. Gazette

A human resource manager was going over one candidate’s application. At the line saying, "Sign Here," the woman had written, "Pisces."

THE ETERNAL QUEST FOR A NEW AGE US NEWS 4/7/97 p.32ff

According to the American Booksellers Association, the sale of New Age books jumped from 5.6 million copies in 1992 to 9.7 million in 1995. close to $2 billion, according to Forbes magazine, is spent each year in the US on aromatherapists, channelers, macrobiotic food vendors, and other aids to spiritual and physical well being. And in a 1994 Roper poll, 45 percent of those who responded agreed that meditation had given them a "strong sense of being in the presence of something sacred."

..The New Age offers a menu of spiritual choices. "What a lot of people will do," says a San Francisco man who combines Hindu mysticism and Tibetan Buddhism in his religious life, "is to take al little from each [New Age theme] and combine them.... It's like making soup."

...Astrological events are often seen as having significance for human destiny, as are important dates in the New Testament. Excitement over the "Harmonic Convergence" in 1987 brought New Age thinking into the media spotlight. The conjunction of Neptune and Uranus in the early 1990s was considered by many to augur the end of one existence and the beginning of another. "After all," says Richard Smoley, editor of Gnosis, "the whole idea of the New Age is that some kind of new age is going to dawn."

...Yet what many new Age cultivars have in common with each other may be best summarized by the name of Smoley's magazine, Gnosis, the ancient Greek word for knowledge. Ancient Gnosticism coexisted with and influenced Christianity in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D., but was smothered as heretical soon after. Its central tenet, outlined in 2nd century texts that were rediscovered in 1945, is that self knowledge is knowledge of God: The self and God are one and the same. This precept links Gnosticism - and its many derivatives - more closely with Eastern metaphysical systems and paganism than with mainstream Christianity.

WITCHES, MAGIC, ORDINARY FOLKS by Tanja Luhrmann US NEWS 4/7/97 p.35

(Writing about her involvement with covens as an anthropologists) To begin with, joining a marginal group can be fun. To explain unusual religious groups, sociologists argue that before joining, members felt relatively deprived of wealth or power and that identifying with the group compensated for that lack. This probably isn't wrong, but it misses the point. People I met who became witches derived pleasure from mastering the arcane intricacies of astrology, cabala, mythology, and the lore of herbal medicine. They pored over books and charts. They became experts, just as Jehovah's Witnesses become experts, in their religious symbology and relish the chance to talk about it with you when you'd rather do almost anything else. Many cultlike groups practice techniques of spiritual ecstasy - meditation, visualization, trance - that are used the world over and are very compelling. Someone who spent years with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh told me she thought that people got addicted to his meditations. They didn't of course, but it's a mistake to underestimate how vivid it feels to learn to be possessed by, say, the Egyptian cat goddess Bast.

New Age: "evidence that more and more people are turning to the occult is the proliferation of TV shows and movies that deal with the occult. It's seen in the blatant advertising for witchcraft lessons and fortune telling. It's seen in the increasing number of occult supplies being offered in catalogs and New Age shops. It's also seen in libraries that devote entire sections to the occult, covering every subject; and it is seen in financially successful psychic fairs and New Age conventions.

There are New Age restaurants, churches, travel companies, doctors and healthcare facilities for dogs and cats. There are New Age grocery stores, drug stores, counselors, public relations firms, and money managers. It has its own music, magazines and tours to sacred sites. And there are radio shows with phone in channeling (consulting with spirits).

Channelers are getting rich. Weekend seminars cost for $150 to up to $1500 per person, with 600 to 800 people willing to pay this per session Private consultations generally cost up to $250 per hour. By the time people become disillusioned and quit consulting channelers, they've spent thousands and thousands of dollars.

Publishers are also profiting greatly from the New Age movement. Shirley MacLaine's book "Out on a Limb" sold 4 million copies before it was televised in Movie form in 1987. In 1987, there were 2500 New Age bookshops in the U.S., a number that has doubled in five years.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN TELEKINESIS? R.Digest 12/96 p.133 (Madrina Denig)

My friend's son, Ryan, frequently plays devil's advocate when his buddies discuss otherworldly phenomena. One evening the topic turned to telekinesis - the ability to move objects with the mind.

Ryan was growing tired of trying to rebut the arguments presented. Finally he had an idea.

"Okay," he said, "everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise your hand." All hands but his own shot up. "Now," he said, "all of you who really believe in telekinesis, raise my hand."

CULTIC PRACTICE Charles Swindoll "Improving Your Serve"

Jack Sparks calls these cultic leaders "mindbenders," an appropriate title. In his book he describes the common method of mind control as a three-step program-not three steps in sequence, but three steps that occur simultaneously.

Step 1 is "deprogramming" . . . convincing you that your past is all wrong. What you always thought was right is wrong, wrong, wrong!

Step 2 calls for the complete subjugation of the will. This takes time. During the process a cult member learns the technique of putting the mind into neutral, sort of a "freewheeling" experience-perfect preparation for the third step.

Step 3 is the "reprogramming" phase. It is concentrated, intensive teaching (indoctrination is a better word) designed to replace old concepts with new ones.

A number of years ago I read of a tragic bus wreck in which a school bus returning on a foggy night from a ball game plunged over a cliff at a turn in the road, killing all passengers in the bus. The article reported that the accident was caused by some "pranksters" painting out the center line in the road, and replacing it with a white stripe which directed drivers in the opposite direction of the curve, and causing them to drive off into the ravine which dropped more than a hundred feet below the road level.

If you always thought the Book of Mormon read like poor plagiarism of the Bible, you are now being joined by increasing numbers of Mormons who doubt it is what their church leaders told them it was. It is supposed to be a translation of some golden plates Joseph Smith found in New York in the last century. But Stan Larson, a New Testament scholar with the Mormon Church, now disbelieves that story because of his study. Larson resigned his position rather than be fired. B.H. Roberts, an earlier apologist for the church and the Book of Mormon (1920's), apparently came to the same conclusion, but his doubts were never published, though they will be next month under the title. "Studies in the Book of Mormon" (University of Illinois Press). Good News, Oct. 1985

NOSTRADAMUS - Prophet of God's? George Faull

Nostradamus was a French Jew. He was born on December 14, 1503, and became a

Doctor of medicine. He developed a reputation for healing people of the plague. He refused to bleed patients, and preferred his own "home-made remedies" to the medical practices of his day. However, his own wife and child died of the plague. He published an Almanac each year which became famous, even in his life time - above average accuracy. What do I think of the man and his works?

First, I think him foolish for giving horoscopes to Queen Catherine de Medici, though she considered him a wise man. Since horoscopes are forbidden in Scripture, his participation in this marks him as disobedient to God.

Second, he had an extreme interest in the occult, magic and alchemy, all of which was forbidden by God.

Third, he claimed (to his son) to be inspired by the divine Essence by astronomical volutions, and to have passed this gift of occult predictions on to him.

Fourth. his prophecies state that the world will last to 3797. Since "no man knoweth", I doubt if he does.

Fifth, in a letter to his son, he predicts another world flood, and then a great drought. Followed by a storm of burning stones falling from Heaven. This was to take place before (?)7 years, three months, and eleven days had transpired. The population of the world was to be almost diminished several times before this event was to transpire. Obviously. he erred.

Sixth, his method of gaining his knowledge for his prophecies were astrology and a divining rod. This is witchcraft and was punished by death in the Old Testament.

Seventh, most of his prophecies are so general that they are but worthless guesses. The interpretations of their fulfillment are as speculative as his prophecies, and borders on the ridiculous.

Eighth, a reading of two hundred of his prophecies convinced me that he was a man before his time in foresight (much like Leonardo de Vinci), but an opportunist in a rank with the King and Duke on Huckleberry Finn's raft on the Mississippi River.

Ninth, some of his prophecies were to be fulfilled from 1585 to l606. Since nothing of this nature transpired, we must say that he has not spoken by the Lord. To be a prophet of God's he must be correct in every instance.

Conclusion: The man was a fraud with vision, but no visions. Profiteer, but no prophet. Seer with a seared conscience.

UNITED STATES LAMA - R.Digest "Notes from All Over" 4/94 p. 32

Simon Heh was just a precocious five-year-old living with his family in Southern California in late 1992. Then a Tibetan Buddhist monk discovered the boy and became convinced that Heh had a clear past-life connection with Lobsang Phakpa, a lama who disappeared in China 30 years ago and was presumed dead.

Since then, the worlds of religion and media have arrived on Simon Heh's doorstep. It's not unusual for Tibetan Buddhists to find five- and six-year-old (or even younger) reincarnations of respected holy men-but not in America.

Heh has been given a new name - Sangyal Dorje-a new future and a media handle: boy lama. Soon he will leave for two or three decades of study in an Indian monastery. Raised a Buddhist, the boy prays, but knows little of the Buddhist belief that all minds are continually reborn as other minds. He doesn't comprehend karma. When asked if he knows what a lama does, he replies, "Not really." - Carla Hall in Washington Post

2ND CENTURY HUCKSTERS Pulpit Helps 2/94 p. 7

Misusing the gospel for financial gain is by no means the invention of 20th century religious hucksters. One of the earliest Christian documents after the New Testament, "The Didache," a kind of manual on church practice, warns about traveling preachers who come and ask for money. The satirist Lucian in the second century ridiculed Christians for being so easily taken in by charlatans, often giving them money. Lucian recorded the notorious case of the philosopher Peregrinus, who attracted a devoted following among Christians (and a lot of money) before he was found out. The showman instincts of Peregrinus reached their climax when he died by publicly cremating himself at the close of the Olympic games in 165.

THE RELIGION OF POSITIVISM -- Billy Graham

In my book "World Aflame," I told the story about Auguste Comte, the French philosopher, and Thomas Caryle, the Scottish essayist. Comte said he was going to start a new religion that would supplant the religion of Christ. It was to have no mysteries and was to be as plain as the multiplication table; its name was to be positivism. "Very good, Mr. Comte," Carlyle replied, "very good. All you will need to do will be to speak as never a man spake, and live as never a man lived, and be crucified, and rise again the third day, and get the world to believe that you are still alive. Then your religion will have a chance to get on."

SCIENTOLOGY/ DIANETICS Time May 6. 1991, pp 50-57

Exhaustive expose' of L. Ron Hubbard's cult and its manipulation of law, members, and truth.

FAKER'S REVELATIONS R.Digest 10/85 p.84

Fortunetellers know neither what is going to happen to you in the future nor what has happened to you in the past. But they can guess and that is where their skill lies.

I closely observed the way people entered the tent, their clothes, their manner, the initial remarks, the texture of their hands (whether or not they had known manual work). Faces were most revealing. There were sulky, bad-tempered faces and faces that reflected a happy disposition. A mother's face had qualities not present in the face of a childless woman. Eyes indicated assent or denial, expressed fear and concealment.

As far as I was concerned, the method of telling a fortune didn't matter. I could read a foot as well as a hand, but, all in all, palmistry was the best. It paid to tell every third person that his hand was unique. It softened him up, and he told me more about himself. I then repeated it back in different words.

Professional fortunetellers all learn the "law-of-average incidents". For instance, practically everyone falls in love, has quarrels and reconciliations, spends unwisely and meets dark, attractive strangers. Nearly every teenager has had a disagreement with a sweetheart and longs to travel. To them any of these things and you will be right by the law of average incidents.

Fortunetellers also use a technique called "strong-pointing, making a statement and elaborating on it or contradicting it according to the expression it brings to the face of the client. For example, if I wanted to know whether a girl was going with a fair or a dark boy I would say, looking steadily at her, "You are going with a dark -" If her expression registered a denial, I switched quickly: "No- a fair boy. A friend of yours is going with a dark boy." If she now looked pleased, I worked from the fair-boy angle.

An old pro once told me he had a small hole in the side of his tent thru which he could see if the client entering had anyone waiting outside. Some of his other tricks of the trade: tell young men they are attractive to girls; tell small-town girls they will eventually work in the city; tell an aged woman she has a wonderful son; tell all discontented women that they will shortly have fights with their husbands.

Standing near this old pro's tent once, I heard a woman who had just had her fortune told say to her companion, "He's uncanny, really. He told me about an argument I had with George last week. Now how did he know that?"

I caught a glimpse of her petulant face, and I knew.

BLESSING CARS IN JAPAN R/Digest 2/92 p.91

A high percentage of new cars sold in Japan have their 1st "service" at a temple or shrine rather than at a garage. In a form of religious insurance taken out by an increasing number of Japanese motorists, drivers take their new vehicles to the temple gate for a blessing ceremony. A Buddhist or Shinto priest is summoned, and the doors, hood, and trunk are opened. Hundreds of thousands of new cars are given this special benediction annually.

ASTROLOGY (Joke) - R.Digest 9/92 p.10

In a university classroom: "I don't believe in astrology. We Scorpios aren't taken in by those things."

DANGER OF PSYCHIC INVOLVEMENT Bill Gothard at Seminar

Gothard noticed a young couple having trouble with their youngest of 3 daughters. The child had an eerie habit of screaming horrendously and then smiling in a deathly calm way, scream and then smile - but only when they entered a church building. He says he wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it himself. They approached him because they had heard him in one of his seminars and hoped that he could help. Asking if there had been any involvement with fortune telling or other items of that sort, the wife related that before she was married, her mother had taken her to a restaurant where an old woman asked if her mother would like the daughter's fortune read for a dollar.

Her mother, thinking it to be a lark, fished out a dollar from her purse and let the old woman read tea leaves for her daughter. The fortune teller told the daughter that she would marry a tall dark man in a uniform and that they would have 3 children - all boys. Indeed, she fell in love with a tall man with a dark complexion who was in the military. They married and when she became pregnant... she thoroughly expected to give birth to a boy. She was disappointed - not once, not twice, but three times and she found herself particularly disappointed with this third child.

Gothard then explained that one of the dangers of fortune telling is that it is often 90% right - but its the 10% that Satan can use against us. Whether it was direct demonic influence or simply the result of personal disappointment, the tea reading had led to the odd behavior of this third child. That night, the couple went home and prayed over their youngest daughter as she lay in her bed and asked forgiveness for the sins of the past and thanked God for giving them this beautiful child. From that day forward, the odd screaming and weird smile never reoccurred.

THE OTHER HAND (True Story about fortuneteller) R.Digest 7/79 p. 9

In a restaurant in Austria, a gypsy fortuneteller looked at my palm and said, "I see you have only one child." I told her I had nine children.

"Oh," she huffed, "Then let me see your other hand."

TON OF MONEY PREDICTED R.Digest 8/93 p. 54

And did you read about the guy whose horoscope advised, "Be very watchful, because a ton of money is headed your way?"

He got so excited that when he drove home to tell his wife he crashed into a Brink's truck.

PROPHET AND LOSS R.Digest 6/69 p. 158

Prophets of doom might take a lesson in tenacity from Thomas Beverly, rector of Lilley, in Hertfordshire, England. In 1695, Beverly wrote a book predicting that the world would end in 1697. In 1698, he wrote a second book complaining that the world had ended in 1697 but that nobody had noticed.

"THE MASONIC BIBLE" Christian Research Journal, Winter 94

(From one of the preface articles by Joseph Fort Newton "The Great Light in Masonry" in the Masonic Bible) "For Masonry knows what so many forget, that religious are many, but religion is one... therefore, it (Masonry) invites to its altar men of all faiths, knowing that if they used different names for the nameless one of a hundred names, they are yet praying to the one God and Father of all"

In his encyclopedia on Masonry, Masonic Authority, Henry Wilson Coil refers to the Biblical God as "a partisan, tribal God" and implies that such a God concept is far inferior to the God of the Masonry, which is..

"a boundless, eternal, universal, undenominational, and international, Divine Spirit, so vastly removed from the speck called man, that He cannot be known, named, or approached. So soon as man begins to laud his God and endow him with the most perfect attributes, such as justice, mercy, beneficence, etc., the Divine essence is depreciated and despoiled... The Masonic test for membership is a Supreme Being, and any qualification added is an innovation and distortion."

Coil even admits that "monotheism... violates Masonic principles, for it requires belief in a Supreme Deity."

Masonic authority, Albert Pike also denies the biblical God. He argues that "if our conceptions of God are those of the ignorant, narrow minded, and vindictive Israelite... we feel it is an affront and an indignity to God..."

Pike also wrote that... "every religion and every conception of God is idolatrous, insofar as it is imperfect and as it substitutes a feeble and temporary idea in the shrine of the Undiscoverable Being (of Masonry)."

The major issue in determining whether Masonry is a religion is to look at its demands on the candidate. Masonry requires the candidate to believe in God, obey Him, worship Him, seed His guidance, and so forth, which qualifies it as a religion.

Albert G. Mackey: "The religion of Masonry is cosmopolitan, universal.."

Henry Wilson Coil: "Religion is espoused by the Masonic Ritual and required of the candidate;" and "Freemasonry is undoubtedly religion": and, "Many Freemasons make this flight (to heaven) with no other guarantee of a safe landing than their belief in the religion of Freemasonry"

Albert Pike: "Masonry is the universal, eternal, immutable, religion..."

1993 OBSERVATIONS OF "ONE NATION UNDER GOD" Newsweek 11/29/93

Unitarians have the most divorced members: 12% of men, 14% of women.

Most Arab-Americans are not Muslim and most American Muslims are not Arabs.

The book finds that there are more Scientologists (45,000) than self-styled fundamentalists (27,000), and it projects 8000 followers of Wicca, or witchcraft, and 20,000 for New Age devotees.

"Even if Salman Rushdie repents and becomes the most pious man of time, it is incumbent on every Moslem to employ everything he's got to send him to hell." -- Ayatollah Khomeini