Delusion 1

The first topic is about Delusion.

The Thesaurus Dictionary defines as follows:

• A false belief or opinion
• Psychiatry: a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact: a paranoid delusion

You may ask,  what in the world is he talking about. Uhm, yes, you are right to be suspicious. Well, I had to  deal a lot with religious delusions (as I would call them) during my lifetime. The reasons are manifold.

Born and raised in a not so religiously interested family, and due to my own troublesome childhood and adolescent experiences, I had a vacuum to fill and to ‘becalm my inner demons’ – however, with much limited success – actually with none  ... and fell prone to some powerful religious delusions. And they were many of them.

For starters, I would like to describe a prominent example  and then deal more seriously with the problem of religious delusions  - and how to get (hopefully) untangled.

The Four Horsemen  - depicted on the Midnight Call magazine June 1983. No copyright information was provided.

In the 1970s and 80s, the Dutch end-of-times preacher Wim Malgo (1922 – 1992) promoted the impending coming of Christ and thus the end of the world. He was a missionary and leader of a worldwide active organization named Midnight Call (Mitternachtsruf). You can find more information about him and his successor on the internet.

Malgo was extraordinarily prolific as he would write dozens of books, hundredths of articles and little pamphlets and give thousands of talks that were at that time widely disseminated by audio cassettes and radio broadcasting.

His most favorite topics focused on apocalyptical prophesies, the antichrist (666), the struggle of Israel, and most predominantly on the imminent coming of the Lord accompanied by the rupture of all believers. He would speak in mighty words filled with zeal and prophetic flare – all signs that he was endowed with clearly seeing and understanding the signs of the end-of-times.

Title Page of the German edition of the Midnight Call – November 1983. It is a picture of a graffiti on a prison wall in Pfäffikon, Switzerland. The Sign of the Antichrist. No copyright information was provided.

He was a master of conviction. In hundreds (if not thousands) of grim photos about wartime, starving people, volcano eruptions, Islamic aggression, Russia as bulwark of antichristian communism, dangerous constellations of planets that could destroy (at least heavily shake) the earth (1982) and the like – was diligently used to prepare the believers for the (sudden) coming of the Lord.

Mount Vesuvius 1944 – Title page on the Midnight Call magazine January 1986. No copyright information was provided.

Malgo received an honorary  Doctor title for Literature from the American Christian College in Tulsa (AZ) und this title was used in his publications, of course without giving the reader full information about the background of this title - thus leading the reader to the assumption that this was a full-blown academic degree. 

Well, hubris and deception often go together.

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