Law,social science and the “brainwashing” exception to the first amendment

Litigation in the “cult wars” has shifted from “deprograming” cases to civil suits by ex-converts based on “brainwashing” claims, and to criminal defenses claiming incapacity due to cultic brainwashing. Early cases were decided on the basis of first amendment derivations barring judicial inquiries into conversion processes and religious authenticity. In 1988 the California Supreme Court carved out a narrow exception to this doctrine to be applied to circumstances where “coercive persuasion” is combined with concealment of a group's identity. The Court's opinion entailed characterizations of the process and consequences of brainwashing which are problematic from the standpoint of social science. Several key questions must be resolved before brainwashing theories can make a constructive contribution to litigation involving religious groups. These questions relate to broader issues involving the nature, causes and indicators of involuntariness, and the closely related problem of drawing the line or identifying the exact point on a continuum beyond which the means or intensity of indoctrination becomes incapacitating. Although the 1988 California decision did not resolve these issues, they were considered from 1988-91 by several courts making procedural rulings on the admissibility of “expert” testimony on brainwashing/psychologicd coercion. A concluding section relates this legal to the duality of ‘soft’ vs. ‘hard’ determinism in social science.     

Rosser orderings and free variables

It is shown that for arithmetical interpretations that may include free variables it is not the Guaspari-Solovay system R that is arithmetically complete, but their system R ^–. This result is then applied to obtain the nonvalidity of some rules under arithmetical interpretations including free variables, and to show that some principles concerning Rosser orderings with free variables cannot be decided, even if one restricts oneself to usual proof predicates.     

Brainwashing and the persecution of “cults”

While the presence of authoritarian cults in our midst raises a number of social control and law and order issues, current controversies over cults contain substantial elements of mystification. Brainwashing is an inherently subjective metaphor that is used as a rationale for persecuting unpopular movements and defining religious converts as nonautonomous zombies who can be coerced for therapeutic purposes. While coercive persuasion models do have some heuristic value for the analysis of indoctrination in some authoritarian groups, assumptions regarding the alleged destruction of the free will of converts and the status of authoritarian religiosity as a medical pathology are not warranted.     

Investigating Relationships Among Distress Tolerance,PTSD Symptom Severity,and Alcohol Use

Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment - Exposure to trauma (particularly interpersonal trauma), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, and low distress tolerance (DT; the...     

Philosophy by Other Means?

I attempt to show that Marx was driven by a systematic philosophical goal expressed already in his doctoral dissertation and present throughout his mature political economic theory as well as in his practical political writings. I reconstruct this systematic – and critical – philosophical adventure in order to suggest that it is as philosophy that Marx's work retains its political bite today . In the process, I propose a reinterpretation of Marx's political theory that, once again, is traced through the entirety of Marx's corpus. The young Marx criticized Hegel's separation of the political from society; he then attempted to reduce the political sphere to civil society; the theory of alienated labor was elaborated as a theory of political economy that replaced the political; but in the end, when all three volumes of Capital and the unpublished Grundrisse are considered systematically, Marx sees capitalism as threatened ultimately by its inability to reflect politically on its own presuppositions, and hence its limits.     

RAMP Findings and Making Sense of the ‘God Within Each Person,Rather than Out There’

This research note provides selected ‘belief’ data from the RAMP (Religious and Moral Pluralism) survey—data of an apparently arresting nature. The present discussion is primarily directed at offering several hypotheses to do with interpretations and explanations of the data. The overarching aim is to contribute to a research agenda which is of considerable significance for the sociological study of spirituality and religion, with profound implications for policy makers.     

The theory behind Psychoticism: a reply to Eysenck

In this reply to Eysenck, we attempt to clarify why we have criticized Eysenck's Psychoticism model and have found it necessary to introduce our own alternative model. It is concluded that the validity of the P scale as a measure of Psychoticism has not been demonstrated and that the P construct itself is untenable.