False Prophets: Those Who Would Deceive Us

The great mystery of life is bigger than a single person can handle by themselves.  Everyone needs a little help on occasion as they sort through all the details trying to get a handle on their particular great mystery.  They seek counsel from family, friends, teachers, doctors, and clergy to name but a few.  We even have institutions such as science and religion that are venerated for the integrity and knowledge that they are assumed to represent.  

Most of these counseling resources are struggling with the great mystery themselves so there is only so much help they can provide.  This abundance of difficult things to understand and the shortage of counselors with a comprehensive understanding creates a gap in everyone's reality that needs to filled.  

Some well meaning souls try to step up and address this gap as honestly as they can, but many of them are simply not as informed as they would like to think.  They are well intentioned and believe the things they are promoting.  Many of them are unconsciously motivated to promote certain of their beliefs because if others believes these same things that reinforces their commitment to the belief.  Frequently, this need for external validation of their beliefs is indicative of a weakness in those beliefs.  As well intentioned as they are on the surface, these ill informed helpers are really only contributing to the confusion.

From a darker perspective, there are many others who see this information gap as an incredible opportunity for themselves.  These other helpers are not motivated by the purest of intentions.  Rather, their motivation is purely personal gain by way of some sort  of deception and ultimately manipulation.  They are the frauds, cheats, con-men, and charlatans that are so common in our world. They not only contribute to the confusion, they actually profit from it.

Both the ill informed and deceptive/manipulative helpers want to seduce others for a variety of their own selfish reasons.  The ill informed are trying to find support for their own weak beliefs, and the deceptive/manipulative are more interested in personal gain in the form of money, power, or prestige.  In western religions, both these types of opportunists are called out as false prophets (those who would lead you astray) and those who choose to follow them are told to beware.  The details in those warnings on how to spot and avoid the false prophets are sparse to nonexistent.

Western religion has a prominent, central placement in society where its organizations have garnered much power, wealth, and influence in the name of their god. These resources could be used to do their god’s work like administering to the poor and down trodden in our midst, but all too frequently, these resources are used instead to provide lavish lifestyles for the persons administering those resources or promote some political agenda that is favorable to them. 

Instead of their god, these organizations are managed by very mortal men with all the frailties and vulnerabilities of mortal men (though most of them would never admit it) while the god remains invisibly in the background.  Many of these mortal managers succumb to their human frailties and vulnerabilities and become these false prophets. Most are so self-absorbed they don’t even recognize themselves as false prophets.

In established religious institutions, there are varying degrees of vetting required before someone can be trusted into the clergy. In less structured situations, some can be self-ordained on the Internet, but all too frequently, there are no certifications or tests required before someone can independently declare themselves the voice of god. 

Anyone can stand-up and declare themselves to be ordained by god without a shred of qualification or ability, and if they have sufficient charisma with an aptitude for public speaking, they will gather some followers. Since these self-ordained religious spokesmen represent a god who is conspicuously not around, they in many cases have near absolute power over their followers, and as is widely known, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Common to most western religions is some sense of good versus evil with an associated reward versus punishment. A loving god rewards good behavior while punishing the evil, but since the loving god isn’t obviously available, there is considerable wiggle room for the religious spokesman to interject some of the own feelings into their particular message. This mortal meddling in the religious message has been going on for a very long time. As a result, much of this meddling is very established in western religious thought, but it can be identified by careful examination and analysis by looking for mortal fingerprints.

As with so many things, the industrial age has greatly extended the reach of the false prophets. Once constrained to the small communities in their immediate reach, these manipulators could only impact small groups of people, but mass media outlets like radio, television, movies, and now the Internet have enabled them to extend their influence in the form of political propaganda, market manipulation, and religious opinion into mass markets that are national and even global in scale.

The eastern religions approach is less inclined to the false prophet’s tools of manipulation because it is less based on faith and more on personal spiritual growth by way of study and experience on the path to ultimate enlightenment.  Eastern religion scriptures are very cryptic, but since they are more knowledge than faith based, they do not appear to be as contaminated by human intervention like western scripture.  In spite of this better foundation, there are some false prophet issues even here.

There is an old saying in the eastern traditions that ‘The well doesn’t go to the thirsty man. The thirsty man comes to the well.’ The problem with this notion is that there are lot of thirsty men of varying degrees of thirst and not nearly enough wells (i.e. well versed and good intentioned god men). 

False prophets in the eastern traditions are generally charismatic leaders who pass themselves off as more evolved than they actually are to take advantage of the spiritual yearnings of common people for personal gain and enrichment. The advantage they have is that the path to enlightenment described in their scriptures are not that easy to understand. The cryptic nature of the teachings is the opening that clever, unscrupulous conmen exploit.

Though not originally as well organized for fraud as the west, these eastern false prophets have taken to the Internet and television emulating the western industrialized flock fleecing approach to enrich themselves from larger, international audiences. This difficulty in understanding eastern thought makes it easy for charlatans to perform their magic that works particularly well on naïve western paying audiences.

By far, the most common false prophet targets are those persons who are passive in their approach to belief.  Passive believers are those persons who just adopt notions as beliefs without adequate questioning or verification.  These people are basically inclined to believe things they are told by persons they regard trustworthy, and their threshold for trustworthy can in some cases be quite low. Lower thresholds of trustworthiness tend to create a much greater risk of vulnerability.

There are two huge problems with this passive approach.  First, manipulation of passive belief is their primary (perhaps only) mode of operation of the false prophets.  Passive belief can render someone utterly defenseless against their assault.  Secondly, it is also by far the least useful (as in not useful at all) in the process of evolving your understanding of anything.

Intellectual evolution requires the thinking and critical analysis that are not being used in passive belief.  Thinking and critical analysis are critical steps in believing effectively, and believing effectively is required to ultimately discover the core truth of existence. 

There is no shortage of those willing, many even yearning, to provide spiritual assistance, but not all of these would-be prophets are reliable sources.  Many of these are the false prophets who try to exploit others to their advantage by manipulating this very human tendency to believe.  That certainly includes the traditional notion of religious false prophets, but it is extended here to include all manners of individuals who try to exploit human belief to their personal advantage because they all contribute to humanity’s suffering and bondage.