On the news this morning was a story about how the Church of Scientology is now sponsoring a NASCAR vehicle painted with its “Dianetics” logo.

Lately whenever I pass through Times Square here in Manhattan, there always seems to be at least one person wanting to hand me this same little glossy Scientology postcard that promises “Dianetics” will rid the mind of “fears, insecurities, pains and nightmares.”

What Scientology is banking on—literally—is that the more our culture experiences an uneasy feeling about impending crisis, the more people will seek out spiritual and psychological security and they’ll just love the “Dianetics” message that reality is relative and God’s really just about how you feel about yourself.

“We think the appeal of the mind sciences has to do with how they make people feel,” explains a good overall primer I have on cults, called, “Bruce & Stan’s Guide to Cults, Religions and Spiritual Beliefs.” “The reality of our world is that there is sickness and suffering, but the mind-science religions say this is an illusion and merely the result of bad thinking. We have to eliminate the ‘old thinking’ that dwells on the negative and convert to the ‘new thinking’ that leads to the mastery of disease and death. . . Trained Scientologists called auditors help participants to release the ‘thetan’ in them from the negative mental images associated with past pain. This is accomplished when members confront their ‘engrams’ consciously. In order for this process to happen, members are expected to make donations in an amount determined by the church.”

The more confusion that abounds in a society, the more people want to latch onto some system, book, guru, etc., to guide them into a restored state of well-being and control, and this is where there’s always an inherent indifference to suffering and chaos by those who derive a profit from it.

Also, the more people deceive themselves, the more they generate in themselves a certain energy and vitality that wants to impose their deception on others. It’s an interacting process of self-deception.

As the Apostle Paul puts it in Rom. 1:32, they “not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.” He says in II Tim. 3:13, “But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.”

My pastor, Richard Jordan (Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill.), gave a sermon recently on how, with the level of spiritual deception away from biblical truth being what it is now in America, “We’re back in almost a 1^st Century kind of situation.”

He said, “I think it’s a wonderful day to be preaching the gospel, you just got to understand the world you’re preaching it in. . . I look at Paul and I say, ‘Whoa, what he’s doing is what I’m doing!’ ”

Jordan made the point that if you went to a White Sox game 50-75 years ago, you’d find 75 percent of the people in attendance would tell you they believed the Bible was the Word of God, but today that number would be less than 20 percent.

“We live in an age where unless you go out of your way for your children to learn the Word of God, they’re not going to be exposed to it,” says Jordan. “When I was growing up, we learned it in school. We didn’t study the Bible as a textbook, but we studied it from a perspective that taught us the stories of the Bible, and when I was a young man 40 years ago, if you’d talked to me about David and Goliath or Noah in the Ark, I’d know who you were talking about because I’d heard the stories.

“Kids today don’t know the stories; they’re completely detached from the heritage that we have as part of Western civilization and that’s part of the undercutting and destroying of our culture.

“The institutions of a culture that are assigned the responsibility of passing on the values of a culture—the home, the churches and the schools—have all abandoned their jobs. Homes let the school do it, and schools are now socialistic conclaves trying just to socialize people and homogenize them.

“As for the churches, why it’s been so long since you could find a church that had enough spiritual power—if spiritual power were gunpowder they couldn’t blow the wax out of their ears. That’s why they’re all in politics because the only choice they have is to go to the political realm to have some power and influence in the culture and the community they live in.

“And you’re noticing it’s all smoke and mirrors. It isn’t real and it’s kind of coming home to roost for people right now as the pendulum swings back and forth.”

Jordan says you don’t meet people who’ve actually studied the Bible for what it is, and looked at it for what it is, who don’t believe it. It’s always the people who haven’t studied it for what it really is who don’t believe it.

“I flew on airplane from Chicago to San Diego one time and I was sitting next to a professor from Stanford University who told me how he didn’t believe the Bible—it was full of fairy tales,” says Jordan. “And I said, ‘Wow, a guy like you with a research degree, a PhD.—you must have read the Bible a lot to come to that conclusion?’ But I came to find out he’d never read the Bible. Well, no wonder he thought it was all fairy tales. If that’s all you ever got, you would too.

“If all you’ve ever heard about the Bible is what you read in books like ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ well, no wonder.”

The bottom line, says Jordan, is you can’t be a product of Western civilization without understanding the fundamental foundation upon which it was founded, namely the Bible.

“And whether you’re a Believer or not, the principles, the ethics, the thinking pattern that come out of the Word of God is still the foundation of our culture,” he says. “It’s where the value system comes from. And it has its social impact. Well, if your children have never been taught just that. . .”