Page 3 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

Introduction

I have been contemplating this writing for some time. I have hesitated to begin this work for it is a
daunting task to undertake. The subject to be addressed, and the conclusions set forth, will challenge
some long held beliefs that are deeply cherished and emotionally defended by a great many people.
Carl Sagan, a non-Christian scientist, science fiction writer, and host of the immensely popular PBS
series titled Cosmos, spoke truth when he stated the following.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to
reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The
bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve
been taken.

Carl Sagan may well have been making a personal confession, for he was in error about a great many
things, some of fundamental and wide reaching importance. Gustave Le Bon in his book The Crowd:
A Study of the Popular Mind, wrote:

Crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions. Whoever can supply them with illusions
is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

It is a perilous task to attempt to dispel illusions, particularly those which are widely held. The
majority of people will never admit to having been deceived. Their pride will not allow them to
admit they have been duped, especially if the deception they have embraced is a big one. In 1841 a
Scottish man named Charles Mackay wrote a history of popular folly. His book was titled
Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. One hundred-seventy years ago Mackay wrote
about economic bubbles, alchemy (the attempt to transmute base elements into gold), crusades,
witch-hunts, prophecies, fortune-telling, popular follies of great cities, and man's tendency to
romanticize thieves and criminals, among other things. Two well known quotations from this book
are as follows:

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only
recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance,
that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's
welcome.

Having been engaged in a public teaching ministry since 1999, I have experienced firsthand the
blindness of men who refuse to acknowledge the light of truth when it is shining down upon them.
The following saying is as true now as it was in the time of Christ 2,000 years ago.

John 3:19
“And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather
than the light; for their deeds were evil.”