What Scary University & Military Experiments Prove About Obedience To Authority Figures

BLOOD ON THE ALTAR
The Coming War Between Christian vs. Christian
Posted: May 25, 2014
8:00 am Eastern
by Thomas Horn
Reblogged from Raiders News Update

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Similar to the findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment but in many ways more disturbing was the 1961 “Milgram Experiment” that has since been repeated on numerous occasions with consistent results.

The Milgram test measured the willingness of participants to obey authority figures who ordered them to go against expected restrictions of human conscience in performing acts of cruelty against other study participants.

The original tests began at Yale University in the early 1960s under psychologist Stanley Milgram. At the time, it was just three months into the trial of Nazi war criminal Otto Adolf Eichmann, a German Nazi colonel deemed highly responsible for organizing the Holocaust, and Milgram had designed his test to try to answer the burning question on people’s minds then: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?”^[i] 

 Milgram came to believe that much of that sentiment was true, and that “the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.”^[ii] 

 Milgram first described his research in 1963 in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, then later in greater detail in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Milgram explained how participants were taken into a laboratory and, in the context of a learning experiment, were told to give increasingly severe electrical shocks to another person (who was actually an actor). The purpose of the assessment was to see how far a subject would proceed before refusing to comply with the experimenter’s instructions.

The test used three individuals: #1 was THE EXPERIMENTER—the authority figure running the trial; #2 was THE LEARNER—an actor pretending to be a test subject; and #3 was THE TEACHER—a volunteer who believed he or she was actually to administer voltage to THE LEARNER whenever he or she failed to answer a question correctly. The wiki on the way this test proceeded says the TEACHER and the LEARNER (actor) both drew slips of paper to determine their roles, but unknown to the TEACHER, both slips said “teacher.” The actor would always claim to have drawn the slip that read “learner,” thus guaranteeing that the unwitting volunteer would always be the “teacher.” 

At this point, the “teacher” and “learner” were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition.

 The “teacher” was given an electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the “learner” would supposedly receive during the experiment. The “teacher” was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.

At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

Please continue.

The experiment requires that you continue.

It is absolutely essential that you continue.

You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

The experimenter also gave special prods if the teacher made specific comments. If the teacher asked whether the learner might suffer permanent physical harm, the experimenter replied, “Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.” If the teacher said that the learner clearly wants to stop, the experimenter replied, “Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on.”^[iii]

The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the latter believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subject believes that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.[iv]

The amazing findings from this experiment tallied 65 percent of the volunteers (including women) administering the final, massive, 450-volt shock even though they exhibited signs that they were uncomfortable doing so (pausing, questioning, sweating, trembling, biting their lips, digging their fingernails into their skin, and/or laughing nervously), but in the end they did it anyway on the advice of the authority figure (the experimenter). When some ethical criticisms were made in opposition to Milgram following his original study and conclusions (which have since been repeated around the world in different social settings with similar results), he said he believed the arguments developed because his research revealed something disturbing and unwelcome about human nature. He then summarized his findings and warned in his 1974 article, “The Perils of Obedience”:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.^[v]

Besides similarities between the Milgram and Stanford experiments, Philip Zimbardo reveals that none of the few participants who refused to administer the final shocks in the Milgram test insisted that the experiment itself be shut down. And when they were finished with their participation, none bothered to check the health of the victim they believed was potentially severely traumatized and/or physically harmed.^[vi] Years later, when researchers Charles Sheridan and Richard King speculated that some of the Milgram Experiment volunteers in the role of TEACHER may have suspected their victims were faking the trauma, they set up a similar trial using a “cute, fluffy puppy,” which obviously would not know how to “fake it.” In this case, the electrical shocks were real—albeit, unknown to the participants, harmless. 

Their findings—published as “Obedience to Authority with an Authentic Victim”—were reported during the proceedings of the eightieth annual convention of the American Psychological Association and surprisingly verified Milgram’s conclusion. As in the Yale University experimentation, most subjects in the Sheridan-King research illustrated high levels of distress during the ordeal, yet 50 percent of the male subjects and 100 percent of the females obeyed the authority figure and continued to “electrocute” the puppy until the end.^[vii]

Not to be redundant, but again, what could this research suggest the majority of people might be willing to do when the utmost fearsome “authority figure” ever to walk planet earth arrives (a time when Jesus said people’s hearts will fail them for fear [see Luke 21:26]) and begins ordering his followers to kill all who will not accept his leadership?
  
COMING UP IN NEXT ENTRY: How Technology Will Provide Conditions for a Global "Lucifer Effect"

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[i] Harold M. Schulweis, Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010) Google eBook, 106 (retrieved February 6, 2014).

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_
experiment#cite_note-7.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Stanley Milgram, The Perils of Obedience,” http://www.physics.utah.edu/~detar/phys4910/
readings/ethics/PerilsofObedience.html.

[vi] “The Milgram Experiment,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#cite_ref-11.

[vii] Charles L. Sheridan and Richard King Jr., “Obedience to Authority with an Authentic Victim,” http://www.holah.co.uk/files/sheridan_king_1972.pdf.

Homosexual Ideology in the US - Michael Brown

Lessons from the Thief on the Cross

Reblogged from the-end-time.blogspot.com

Posted: 20 May 2014 03:12 PM PDT

Jesus was crucified between two criminals, one to His right and another to His left. (Luke 23:33). They were thieves. (Matthew 27:44).

“One of the criminals who was hanged railed at him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:39-43)

What was the forgiven thief’s name?

[crickets]

We don’t know, do we? When we look at the passage, often what is looked at, rightly, is the Lord’s compassion for man that He would ignore His own pain and minister to the sinners. Also, people use the text as proof that one can be justified without having done works such as baptism or partaken of the Lord’s Supper.

But what I’d like to look at is the man’s anonymity. All we know of him is that he is called The Thief on the Cross.

How would you like to be forever known by your sin? A thief. Forever.

There were others known by their sin, forever nameless in the bible. For example, there was--
--The Adulteress (John 8:3)
--The Serial Co-Habitating Woman at the Well (John 4:18)

What we know is that in the last moments of His incarnation, the last sinner whom Jesus justified was a thief. That's what makes the thief special. He is forever identified with his sin. Not his name, not His socio-economic status (Rich Young Ruler, The Rich Man and Lazarus) not his race (Syrophoenician Woman). He was a thief, a criminal, and unnamed.

What makes the thief not-special is that you or I could have been that person on the cross next to Jesus just as easily. Having broken some Jewish Law or a Roman civil law, you or I could be executed for our crimes too. All crimes are sins against God. You could be --

--The Lustful Woman on the Cross
--The Liar on the Cross
--The Greedy Defrauder on the Cross
--The Hypocrite on the Cross
--The Embezzler on the Cross
--The Porn Addicted Man on the Cross

Forever identified not as a person by your sin. Indeed, the other thief is forever identified by his sin at this moment, he died not believing.

However, the thief's notability is that he was the LAST person to be identified by His sin. Why? Colossians 2:13-14 says

And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

The thievery is nailed to the cross, but the thief is alive! He is restored! He has a name! We will know him in heaven!

The atoning work of Jesus Christ is full of mercy, grace, and compassion, of which we startlingly see demonstrated by the conversation between the thief and the Messiah. Our sins are forgiven, and we are no longer known as sinners with names such as The Thief, the Adulterer, The Liar. We are known to Jesus as children of God, washed in His blood, made alive via the cross, where our sins are still nailed. The anonymous now have a name, and the dead shall live.

Hallelujah!

Arab Winter in America

Our World: Letting go of Abbas

Rebbloged from carolineglick.com
Monday, May 19th, 2014
 
What makes PLO chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas tick?
In 2008, when Abbas rejected then prime minister Ehud Olmert’s expansive offer of Palestinian statehood, he did so for the same reason that Yassir Arafat rejected then prime minister Ehud Barak’s expansive offer of Palestinian statehood at Camp David in 2000.
In both cases, the PLO chiefs believed that if they waited, they could get everything they demanded from Israel – and more – without giving anything away.

As Abbas and Arafat both saw it, eventually either the Israeli Left would successfully erode Israel’s national will to exist, or the Europeans and the US would join forces to coerce Israel into giving up the store. Or both. So there was no reason for the PLO to give up anything.
To get everything in exchange for nothing all they had to do was continuously escalate the PLO’s political warfare against the legitimacy of Israel internationally, and escalate its subversion of Israeli society through political intrigue and terrorism.
Back then, Abbas and Arafat looked forward to the day when they could frame Israel’s unconditional surrender and nail it to their wall.

But things have changed.
The rise of the revolutionary forces in the Islamic world since December 2010 has transformed the political landscape.
The Syrian civil war, the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the resurgence of al Qaeda franchises, the US’s abandonment of its traditional Arab allies in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood and President Barack Obama’s aspiration to reach a meeting of the minds with the Iranian regime have completely upended the political calculus of all regional actors, including the PLO and Abbas.

As Palestinian affairs expert Reuven Berko wrote in an article published by the Investigative Project on Terrorism last week, if in the past Abbas wouldn’t make a deal with Israel because he could get more by saying no, today Abbas cannot make a deal with Israel.
Any deal he concludes will lead to his overthrow.

Noting that Abbas was recently threatened by al Qaeda chief Ayman Zawahiri who called him, “a traitor who is selling Palestine,” Berko explained, “The threats, veiled or not, by radical Islamists… and a quick look at [the] Arab-Muslim world, especially Syria, have made it clear to the Palestinians what the future has in store for them, and it now appears that in the meantime, they prefer the status quo to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.”

As Berko sees it, Abbas’s primary problem is the residents of the UN refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and beyond. Israel’s unwillingness to accept a so-called “right of return,” which would enable millions of foreign Arabs residing in terrorist-controlled UN-run refugee camps to immigrate to a post-peace agreement Israel, means that in an era of peace, they will move to the newly created state of Palestine.

Berko rightly notes that these immigrants will not regard Abbas as their savior, to the contrary.
“The Palestinian leadership knows that if their demand for Palestinian control of the Jordan Valley crossings were accepted, the operative result would be floods of people seeking entrance into ‘liberated Palestine.’ They know that among them would be operatives of all the Palestinian terrorist organizations, to say nothing of the armed jihadists currently active in the Arab-Muslim world, especially in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, who would stream in ‘to liberate all Palestine.’ The new Palestinian state would have no grounds to refuse entrance to the ‘jihad heroes,’ or to close its borders to all those attracted by the prosperity in Judea and Samaria, or to those who hoped to enter Israel or to those who intended [to] use ‘Palestine’ as a convenient base from which to attack Israel.”

The new immigrants would overwhelm Abbas and his comrades, making the Hamas ouster of Fatah forces from Gaza in 2007 look like a walk in the park.
Berko limited his discussion to a scenario in which these foreign Arabs are confined to “Palestine.” But if Israel were to agree to his demand that they move into its sovereign territory, Abbas’s future would be no different.

If Israel were to publicly renounce its right to exist, cancel the Declaration of Independence and adopt the PLO Charter as its new constitution, Abbas would be no better off than if he conceded Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, compromised on the so-called “right of return,” and accepted the settlements.

In both cases, he would end up like Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi.
It is because he knows this that he will do anything to prevent a peace deal with Israel.
Some Israelis are pleased with Abbas’s stand. As they see it, his position enables Israel and the Palestinians to operate under the status quo more or less unchallenged for the foreseeable future.

There are two problems with this view. First, neither the Americans nor the Israeli Left are willing to let the peace process go. US Secretary of State John Kerry’s decision to devote two hours to yet another meeting with Abbas last week, despite Abbas’s unity deal with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, shows that Kerry is constitutionally incapable of disengaging.
Likewise, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni’s wildcat diplomacy, which involved an unauthorized meeting with Abbas in London last week, demonstrates that like the Americans, Israel’s Left cannot relent.
Livni and her comrades have no issue other than the Palestinian issue. Their political survival is tied to the peace process.

The second problem is Abbas. Whereas he needs to prevent a settlement to keep the jihadists at bay, he needs to escalate the conflict to keep the local Palestinians at bay and maintain the support of the Europeans and the American Left.
Only by scapegoating and criminalizing Israel worldwide can Abbas maintain his relevance to the international Left.

And only by enabling and glorifying terrorism and actively inciting for the destruction of Israel can Abbas maintain what is left of his credibility among the Palestinians – five and a half years after his term of office legally ended.

The two-state model is his life preserver. The policy paradigm is based entirely on the false claim that the cause of all the region’s ills is the absence of a Palestinian state. That state, it is believed, would exist save for Israel’s land greed.
Those who uphold Abbas and the status quo ignore the consequences of Abbas’s own imperatives. In the international arena, preserving the status quo requires Israel to maintain its allegiance to the two-state paradigm’s inherent and malicious slander of the Jewish state. This allegiance in turn makes it impossible for Israel to defend itself effectively against the Palestinian led campaign to deny its right to exist.

In its internal affairs, maintaining faith in the two-state model and in Abbas as a legitimate and moderate Palestinian leader makes it almost impossible for Israel to take effective measures to defend against the Palestinian terror infrastructure.
That infrastructure relies on the Palestinian security forces, which Abbas, our purported peace partner, controls. Israel cannot discredit its “peace partner,” without disowning the phony peace process and rejecting the two-state paradigm. Consequently, it cannot take the necessary measures – like demanding that the US military stop training the Palestinian security forces — to effectively protect its citizens.

The time has come for Israel to show Abbas the door. It would be best if we can do it quietly – offering him the opportunity to relocate to somewhere warm and retain all the loot that he and his cronies have siphoned off for their personal use.
Once Abbas is gone, Israel will have to choose between applying its laws to parts of Judea and Samaria and offering the Palestinians outside those areas a limited form of autonomy, or applying its laws to the entire region, conferring permanent residency status on the Palestinians and offering them the right to apply for Israeli citizenship.

Alarmists argue that without Abbas, Israel will go broke having to finance the Palestinian budget. But this is ridiculous. Once you subtract the hundreds of millions of dollars that go missing every year, and you take into account that Israel managed to govern the areas for 24 years, you realize that this is just one more empty threat – like the demographic threat — made by people who have no political existence without the facade of a peace process.
Abbas is not an asset. He is a liability. It is time to move past him.

Caroline B. Glick is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.

Waiting for God´s Timing

Written and posted by Jean-Louis. 2/2011
Ex 32:1-10
“Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him: “Come, make us a god who will go before us, as for this Moses, the man who brought us out of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him”.

Obedience not only involves doing the things that God commanded right away, but it also involves waiting on God and His instructions through His spokesman or the guidance of the Holy Spirit through the various means that He has chosen to reveal His will.

This is crucial because the flesh has the tendency to take over with impatience and rash decisions are made against God’s will. Of course, we deceive ourselves by choosing our own sign by which to interpret God’s will. Or we could be deceived by our enemy and falling into the trap of thinking it’s our own thought when in reality it was suggested by the enemy. We then proceed to make things happen in our own strength in order to fulfill our own wishes or desires and when they happen we are so happy and feel so blessed because we feel our prayers have been answered until God opens our eyes to the reality of our condition and the disposition of our hearts.

Of course nothing happens that is out of His sovereign rule, so He will use even our mistakes, our sins, our disobedience to teach us a lesson, discipline us so that we can learn and grow.

The children of Israel knew that it was God who performed the miracles leading them out of bondage in Egypt , but they had to blame Moses because they couldn’t wait.
Aaron had no business making a proclamation about a feast. The Lord had told them in Egypt that He would give them instructions about where, when and how they were to worship the LORD.

The irony is that while they were taking matters into their own hands, God was at work giving the instructions to Moses.

The questions to us is: “Are we going to take God at His word and believe what He says even if it means waiting for His delay in answering our prayers or are we going to act in the flesh and bring about the things that we desire thus worshiping the idols of our hearts in disobedience and rebellion against God”?

Most of the time when we are impatient we don’t realize that God in His loving kindness towards us is working on our behalf to bring things and people in our lives, ordering the circumstances to bless us and do us good because He loves us and knows what is best for us.
Jean-Louis.