Steven Hassan - Criticism

Criticism

In a research paper presented at the 2000 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion conference, Anson Shupe, professor of Sociology at Indiana/Purdue University, and Susan E. Darnell, manager of a credit union, state Hassan had participated two involuntary deprogrammings in 1976 and 1977. One involving Arthur Roselle who claims that Hassan kidnapped, hit, and forcibly detained him. Hassan acknowledges that he "was involved with the Roselle deprogramming attempt in 1976. But...was never involved in violence of any kind."

Hassan states that he spent one year assisting with deprogrammings before turning to less controversial methods (see exit counseling). Hassan has spoken out against involuntary deprogramming since 1980, stating, "I did not and do not like the deprogramming method and stopped doing them in 1977!” However, in Combatting Cult Mind Control, he stated that "the non-coercive approach will not work in every case, it has proved to be the option most families prefer. Forcible intervention can be kept as a last resort if all other attempts fail." Concerned that ministers in Japan encouraged to perform forcible deprogramming because of first book," Hassan wrote a letter to Reverend Seishi Kojima stating, "I oppose aggressive, illegal methods."

Read more about this topic:  Steven Hassan

Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.
    Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

    Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.
    Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)