A view from the streets

As a Christian minister, it is disturbing to see what I view as an  attack on God. The cross being removed from the Los Angeles County seal,  the attempts to legalize gay marriages, and prayer being taken out of  schools and city council meetings. In addition, it was reported that in  one American town, senior citizens were told that they could not pray  over their food or sing gospel songs in their community center because  it was a public building.
More astonishing is the story of the young  girl who was told that she could not give a pencil to a classmate  because the pencil had the word Jesus printed on it. The disgruntled  young girl, upon arriving home, asked her mother Why does the school  hate Jesus?
One might wonder, what is the state of religion in  todays society?
In March of 2004, the French Parliament enacted a  law against school children wearing religious symbols in public schools,  including those worn as part of their traditional garb by Muslim girls,  such as scarves and veils. Christian crosses that were considered too  large and yarmulkes of the Jewish faith were also forbidden.
It is  well documented that the deterioration of the American school systems  and its declining morality can be traced back to the mid 1960s. It was  at this point when prayer was taken out of schools and mental health  counselors were placed into schools. Since then, test scores and moral  behavior, and a sense of what is right and wrong has declined. Many  point to this moment as the time that religion came under attack.
However,  the attack on religion or the plot to kill God has its origin much  earlier than the 1960s. In 1940, British psychiatrist John Rawling Rees,  co-founder of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), at the  National Council of Mental Hygiene, acknowledged that the two easiest  professions for Mental Health to infiltrate were the teaching profession  and the church.
But even more astonishing was the reinforcement of  this idea by Canadian psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, another co-founder  the WFMH, who in 1945, targeted religious values and called on  psychiatrists to free the race from the crippling burden of good and  evil, attacking the very core of many of the worlds religions, including  that of the Christian faith.
What gave a non-religious entity the  right to challenge the validity of God, or become expert in handling  matters of the spirit?
When inspecting the words psychology and  psychiatry we see a very interesting thing. The word psychology derives  from psyche (soul) and ology (study of) so psychology means the study of  the soul. Psychiatry is soul plus iatry which means doctoring or  treating, which is the doctoring of the soul.
When considering the  above derivations of psychology and psychiatry, the field on mental  health fits the criteria for being called a religion. But psychiatry  took a non religious path and instead of acknowledging the spiritual  nature of man, labeled man an animal.
However, Franz G. Alexander  and Shelton T. Selesnick, the authors of The History of Psychiatry  indicated there was a problem. As long as psychiatric problems were  those of the soul, only the clergy and philosophers could be  professionally concerned with such problems. This excluded psychiatry  and again pitted the profession against religion. This rekindled an old  feud, that began in the 1800s, and lead to the modern era assault of  killing God.
Psychiatry, according to its own profession experts,  was faced with an interesting dilemma. It either had to become a  religion, which became difficult after labeling man an animal and  disregarding his spiritual nature, or find a way to usurp the power of  religion.
– Reverend Frederick D. Shaw Jr., is a former Los Angeles  County Deputy Sheriff and co-founder and president of Basic Life  Institute. He served two terms as president of the National Association  for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Compton Branch. He is an  international speaker having lectured in South Africa, Germany, England,  China, Mexico and throughout the United States. He can be reached by  e-mail: fshawjr@yahoo.com.