"Have you heard The Secret? It is the most important secret for human beings to hear. It holds the keys to human success and understanding why you are here. It is the secret of the most powerful force in the universe. It is the basis for what has been, what is and what will be."

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Statements like these from the "law of attraction" marketing campaign are exploding through American and global media. In only a few months it has already become a hugely successful effort, selling millions of tapes, books and DVDs.

It's a promoter's dream come true. Almost out of nowhere, the strange and powerfully seductive teachings of the DVD movie and book The Secret, and the book The Law of Attraction (promoted by psychics Esther and Jerry Hicks), are appearing everywhere. They've been seen worldwide on Oprah Winfrey's hugely popular TV talk show and on Larry King's CNN show. They've been featured in a myriad of other TV and radio programs, and in magazines and newspapers.

Many millions have been swayed by the seductive philosophy that you will achieve wealth, greatness or health simply by wishing it so.

That's right. All the hype is based on the teaching that there is a secret basic law in the universe that says you can have anything you want by wanting it badly enough. Through total and focused desire on what you want, you will automatically attract it to you. That's the law of attraction, the secret that is "the greatest power in the universe."

Demons in Hollywood's Garden of Eden

Advocates claim that the law of attraction has the absolute scientific validity of any physical law, as real and unchangeable as gravity. "These Laws are absolute, they are Eternal, and they are omnipresent (or everywhere)" (Esther and Jerry Hicks, The Law of Attraction, 2006, p. 20).

Oprah Winfrey said on her program that she has always believed and practiced The Secret. But only in the fantasy world of Hollywood-influenced media can this old New Age idea be taken as scientific truth—that your personal thoughts, positive or negative, are the ultimate reality behind the universe.

Real life has never worked that way and never will. In religious terms, self-absorption with money and power is all about loving self above God or neighbor. This psychology is directly contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ and the law of God (Matthew 22:37-39; Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18) and, in fact, is a never-ending source of evil.

Single-minded pursuit of one's selfish desires leads a person to damaging outcomes—distorted values, antisocial behavior, self-will, arrogance and often isolation, loneliness and self-destruction. These destructive values lie at the core of the dangerous "law of attraction" fad.

Medical science finds the claims of the movement ridiculous. Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist who operates Quackwatch.com, a Web site devoted to exposing quackery and health fraud, says: "There is no evidence that thinking can modify disease other than occasional relaxation exercises. Thoughts have nothing to do with physics. They are talking about a concept of energy that cannot be measured.

"The energy involved in physics can be measured in a number of different ways," Dr. Barrett notes. "There is nothing real about what they are talking about. They are talking about imaginary energy. The idea of a secret remedy is a classic quack claim."

This is not merely harmless quackery, however. The impacts of The Secret on mental health can be seriously damaging.

It can foster abnormal and obsessive thinking. These can generate destructive emotional responses as life inevitably has its sustained trials and drawbacks. Taken to its logical conclusions, a person can develop a profound disconnect with reality.

The most prominent book in this marketing blitz, The Law of Attraction, explains that every negative experience, accident, mishap and influence in a person's world are the product of his own thinking.

"Nothing merely shows up in your experience. You attract it—all of it. No exceptions . . . We must still explain that only you could have caused it, for no one else has the power to attract what comes to you but you. By focusing upon this unwanted thing, or the essence of it, you have created it by default" (p. 30).

Where do you think this most unscientific—some would say crazy—idea came from? Esther and Jerry Hicks, the authors of The Law of Attraction, have convinced their believers that their ideas came from a cluster of supernatural spirits collectively calling themselves "Abraham."

The Hicks claim these spirits communicated the law of attraction to them through channeling—an abnormal or alternate state of mind by which some communicate with evil spirits. (This practice, incidentally, is condemned in the Bible in the strongest terms—see Deuteronomy 18:10-12 and Leviticus 20:27.)

In The Law of Attraction, these spirits have done a job worthy of the devil's deceptions in the Garden of Eden.

Jews caused their own Holocaust and blacks their own slavery?

Let's consider the claim that your thoughts cause all the good and all the evil in your life. If this idea is wrong even once, the entire idea unravels. It would show the law of attraction to be nothing more than a dangerous falsehood that lays the foundation to rationalize, and even justify, evil.

Consider. Following the logic of this idea, 6 million Jews would have brought extermination on themselves in the Holocaust because they attracted their own annihilation by their negative thoughts.

According to this idea, a four-year-old rape victim attracted lifelong trauma through wrong thinking.

According to this idea, the hospital patient given HIV-contaminated blood attracted AIDS by bad thoughts.

By the law of attraction, these people are the ultimate evildoers because they caused their own suffering through negative thoughts—even if they didn't consciously think they had them.

In reality, all of these situations are not caused by negative thinking, but by external evil or chance events unrelated to the thinking of the victim.

If you apply this mode of analyzing human experience to history, you come to more ludicrous conclusions. The Romans must have thought better thoughts than all the nations they brutally murdered, pillaged and enslaved. For centuries each of the millions of black slaves must have deserved their bondage because of their negative thoughts. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. must have deserved to be assassinated and the American colonists must have deserved "taxation without representation" because of their negative thinking.

The Secret turns social justice into an absurdity. Worse, the law of attraction reverses many of the great spiritual truths of the Bible: Abel deserved to be murdered by Cain for his bad thoughts; the Israelites deserved to be subject to slavery and the genocide of their newborn sons in Pharaoh's Egypt; Jesus deserved His own crucifixion and His followers deserved to be murdered for believing in God's forgiveness through Jesus Christ.

This is an abuser's thinking, and it is evil. By this doctrine, the victims of evil and abuse are the cause of their own abuse. The logic is that if you are victimized, brutalized or oppressed, it's your fault, not the oppressors. Two thousand years of the development of human rights are reversed by the perverse logic of the law of attraction. There is no need for legal protections against evil because evil is destined for those who end up suffering from it.

This thinking is unbalanced and narcissistic. Taken to extremes, it can be symptomatic of personality disorders if believers treat others by the logic flowing from the false premise.

It's astonishing that so many leading figures in mass media are unable to discern the distortions of reality, even the dangers to mental health, lying at the heart of this bizarre doctrine that more and more resembles a cult religion.

Imagine what happens when believers in this idea begin to have negative things happen in their lives—as we all do. Will they open themselves up to enormously neurotic and abnormal perceptions about their own thinking, saying to themselves that they are not positive enough? This process can lead to a legion of psychological and mental disorders as the individuals disconnect life's real experiences of ups and downs from objective thinking.

The ultimate bottom line in the movement is that all people should open themselves up to occult experiences like Esther and Jerry Hicks. This is a serious threat to the mental health of people.

Mainstreaming the occult

Practitioners of the New Age occult, such as Esther and Jerry Hicks and other channelers, deliberately suspend the critical thinking and judging capacity of the brain and empty their minds into a receptive trance. These psychics knowingly open themselves up to be used as mouthpieces by spirits.

Jerry Hicks said he and his wife learned to channel after being convinced of the existence of supernatural spirits through Ouija board messages.

Your Bible, however, says that such "familiar spirits" who speak through psychics are demons—fallen spirits who lie. The Bible also calls the person who channels them a witch or medium. During the Old Testament period, such a person who knowingly consorted with evil spirits was condemned to death.

The spirits calling themselves "Abraham"—actually a group of demons—want your mind to immediately absorb the point of view they express. Here is what "Abraham" says to the reader:

"It is always an interesting experience to explain to our physical friends those things that are of a Non-Physical nature, because everything that we offer to you must then be translated through the lens of your physical world. In other words, Esther receives our thoughts, like radio signals, at an unconscious level of her Being, and then translates them into physical words and concepts" (The Law of Attraction, p. 19).

The analogy of radio signals reminds many Bible students of Ephesians 2:2 where Satan is called "the prince of the power of the air." His influence goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden where the serpent told Eve, "You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it [the tree of the knowledge of good and evil] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:4-5).

She was attracted to the fruit, seduced by the original version of the demonic law of attraction. There is a twisted logic at the foundation of the law of attraction. It is contrary to actual human experience and directly contradicts the statements of God, Jesus Christ, the prophets and the apostles in the Bible.

To believe the doctrines of the demons who "revealed" the law of attraction, you have to start by leaving your brain at the door, much as Eve did as she conversed with the serpent. It was a counterfeit and a lie. Adam and Eve did die. And so do all who sin—all of us. There is only one solution, one way out of death, and that remains a mystery to the world at large even after Jesus Christ proclaimed it.

The real secret—the mystery of the Kingdom

Almost 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ brought His announcement of the Kingdom of God, creating a sensation with His ministry.

"Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel'" (Mark 1:14-15).

With spectacular miracles, He turned water to wine, fed thousands with only a few fish and loaves of bread, healed many of tragic illnesses, raised Lazarus from the dead and proclaimed that a new realm of existence is coming for humanity. If anyone in history has shown the way for people to have eternal life, it is Jesus Christ.

But He promised that the way to the Kingdom of God would be a secret, a mystery except to His disciples—and they would be very few.

He told His disciples: "It has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given . . . Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand" (Matthew 13:11, 13).

He also said there would be many counterfeits, including religious teachers claiming to act in His name.

The basic premise of The Secret and The Law of Attraction is that you already have eternal life and will have everything you desire in this life without a need for conversion or obedience to the law of God. This constitutes a counterfeit religion and faith directly contradicting biblical truth.

Jesus Christ defined the thoughts and behavior necessary to enter the Kingdom of God and taught His disciples that there are distinct differences between good and evil, negating the premise of The Secret.

He condemned materialism, saying, "You cannot serve God and mammon" (Matthew 6:24). He said following Him is the only way to eternal life (John 11:25). Furthermore, He said of the dos and don'ts of the Bible, "If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments" (Matthew 19:17).

Jesus did not say you can have anything you want if you want it badly enough since you are ultimately your own god. He did not say man automatically has eternal life.

Furthermore, the teachings and example of Jesus Christ provide the greatest possible repudiation of every idea of the law of attraction. He continuously taught against evil. He labeled evil what it was—the rotten fruit of the ways of Satan, a liar and murderer from the beginning (John 8:44).

Jesus said that we should seek first God's Kingdom and His righteous way of living and that all of our needs will then be ultimately taken care of (Matthew 6:33).

There is a reason "wishful thinking" means a focus on how we want things to be that is unrealistic. Don't be caught up in false hopes and spiritually perverted solutions that lead down hopeless paths. Serve the living and all-powerful God. Pray to Him in faith and live your life according to His will. Then He will ultimately fulfill your needs and desires—beyond your wildest wishes and imaginings. GN