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South Bay SDA Church

Phil Mills

How We Are Manipulated

Flattery is lies confirming what you desire to be true, but it also may be truth with an ulterior motive.

The most effective lie I can tell you is confirmation of a lie you want to believe.

And the most enticing lie I can tell you is the lie you want to believe is true.

Letter 2, 1861, writing to a young person, Ellen White said, Vanity is 1 of the strongest principles of our depraved natures, and Satan will constantly and successfully appeal to it.

Individuals will not be wanting or lacking to carry out Satan's plans to flatter you.

They will respect your person, that is the word respect here means extol, the word person means our appearance, our dress, our hairstyle, our beauty, our looks.

Flattery is appealing to our vanity by calling attention to such things as our attractive appearance, our choices of dress.

Don't misunderstand, for Jesus' sake, we want to have a good appearance by modesty, simplicity, cleanness, proper choices of colors in our clothing, our hairstyles.

But we don't do these things to attract attention to ourselves, we do these to honor God's principles and increase our access to people.

Flattery is appealing to our vanity by calling attention to our charm, our wit, our personality.

For Jesus' sake, We want to be pleasant and courteous.

We want to cultivate a gentle way, but we don't do this to attract attention to ourselves.

We do this to increase our access to people's hearts and to honor God's principles.

Flattery is appealing to our vanity by calling attention to such things as our intelligence, our musical gifts, our inability.

For Jesus' sake, we want to use our talents and abilities.

But we don't use them to attract attention to ourselves.

We use every ounce of our poor and limited abilities to honor God's principles and increase our ability to gain access to people for Jesus.

They will respect your person, your manners, your abilities.

We need to stay constantly alert because vanity is built into the fiber of our fallen human natures.

We love flattery because it feeds the insatiable appetite of pride.

We should study Satan's approach so that we will not be ignorant of his devices.

Volume 1 of Spirit of Prophecy, page 36, with soft and pleasant words and with musical voice he, that is Satan, addressed the wandering Eve.

Is there anything wrong with soft and pleasant words?

Is there anything wrong with a musical voice?

We should attempt to have a musical, pleasant sound.

In this, Satan was copying Jesus, who has a soft, pleasant voice, musical.

And this is how Satan will deceive the world at the very end.

And the multitudes will listen, and they'll think they are hearing Jesus.

She was startled to hear a serpent speak, the quotation continues.

They didn't talk in the Garden of Eden either.

Eve was surprised and for a moment, even in the Garden of Eden, even though she'd never heard of danger, she was frightened.

But this built-in protection was to keep her at a high alert, but she turned it off.

He extolled her beauty and exceeding loveliness, which was not displeasing to Eve.

Was Satan telling the truth to Eve when he subtly flattered her beauty?

Why was Satan extolling Eve's exceeding loveliness?

Was there something he was trying to get by praising her beauty?

He was seeking to get her guard down for the net he was spreading to ensnare her.

In school entrances all across the lands are signs, Through these doors walk the world's greatest students.

It's what I put on the title page of the study.

Of course we want to see promise and cast a vision of success for our children.

But this is not done by empty flattery, but by vision casting.

The school could have some of the world's greatest students, but only if the students and teachers could decide this, it's not going to happen without blood, sweat, toil, and tears on the part of teacher and student.

God saying it so makes it so, but man saying it so doesn't make it so.

Flattery will not help our youth or anyone.

The late Anton LaVey, author of the Satanic Bible and founder of the Church of Satan, openly mocked man's gullibility through the vice of flattering his book, Satan Speaks.

I would have made a good PR man because my most flagrant lies are to other people about themselves.

I'm an unwilling habitual practitioner of what gypsies call Levengro.

It is the art of telling people what they most want to hear in the fortune teller's stock and trade, a therapist would call it supportive and note that it reinforces another's self-esteem.

The lower one's self-esteem, the more valuable and effective it is.

If a fellow be a churlish lout, I tell him how sensitive and discriminating he is.

If a girl is so ugly that she must sneak up on a glass of water, I allude to her great beauty.

If one's performance is mediocre at best, I applaud his great talent.

I praise the skinflint on his generosity and the hysteric on his level-headed judiciousness.

In the May-June 1997 issue of Military Review, an article entitled, The Age of the New Persuaders, detailed the geopolitical uses of persuasion techniques.

Whether it's called psychological operations or perception management, it ultimately, It aims to modify the thinking of the intended target by influencing emotions, motives, and objective reasoning.

Speaking specifically of these psych tools, the author of the Military review article, Timothy Thomas, explained that this type of mind game exploitation seeks to turn, quote, and I'm quoting, "'personality weaknesses' to one's advantage.

And flattery as a manipulative tool was recognized as an effective technique.

According to Thomas in this article, quote, 1 can use an object's vanity and conceit to advantage.

This can be done by flattery, end of quote.

The New Age movement too uses a form of flattery as a tool for mind manipulation.

Unlike the typically understood idea of flattery, which usually emphasizes someone's outer qualities, talents, and expertise, this particular type of flattery reaches deep into the soul and works to rearrange the foundational basis of what we perceive as reality.

Its flattery betrays the serpent from the garden as the source of its flattery because it says, you are really God.

You are a God in the making becomes the ultimate form of subtle flattery manipulation within the teachings of the New Age movement and is actually the foundational principle of the Mormon Church.

These are all variants of this theme and the basic tenets of spiritualism.

Eternity magazine once told of a sidewalk flower vendor who was doing very little business.

Suddenly a happy thought struck him And he put up this sign, buy a gardenia, it will make you feel important all day long.

Almost immediately his sales began to increase.

People love to be inflated, for their innermost nature thrives on any attention that caters to their pride.

John Smith is the most common name in this country.

The latest statistics, I looked them up on Google, say that there are actually 45, 614 John Smiths in the United States.

It was the most common name in Mark Twain's day.

It was for that reason that Mark Twain dedicated his story of the celebrated jumping frog to John Smith, who, and this is the dedication, who I have known in diverse and sundry places and whose many and manifold virtues did always command my esteem.

Flane figured that anyone to whom a book is dedicated would be sure to buy at least 1 copy, and since there were thousands of John Smiths, his book would be assured of at least a modest sale.

At a reception in Washington, a young man was asked by a widow to guess her age.

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How We Are Manipulated

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