Christian author and and pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church, John MacArthur, recently told attendees of the “For the Valley Bible Conference” in Kingsburg, California, that mental illness is a “major noble lie” told to make “Big Pharma” richer.
MacArthur’s claim came during a panel discussion with Costi Hinn, Aaron Logan, Scott Ardavanis, and Jonny Ardavanis. Scott Ardavanis, who is Grace Church of the Valley’s lead pastor, asked MacArthur to share why he wrote his latest book, “The War on Children: Providing Refuge for Your Children in a Hostile World.”
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“It’s a combination of things,” MacArthur replied. “Simply, kids are sinful…By the time they’re three or four, their sin nature’s starting to be manifest.”
MacArthur continued, “Then you add to that that the sins of the fathers are visited on the next generation…so kids, who basically have a sin nature to start with, have an inherited sin culture that they have to navigate and deal with.”
“That oughta be enough, but this culture has taken it a step further, and they are now targeting children,” he added, telling the audience that “homosexuals” today are “coming after your kids.”
The 84-year-old pastor shared that he was reading the book “A Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry―Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment” by Bruce E. Levine.
The book claims “psychiatry and psychology is finally admitting the noble lies that [their profession] has been telling for the last 100 years,” MacArthur said.
He then said, “The major noble lie is there such a thing as mental illness.”
This type of thinking isn’t new, MacArthur further argued, sharing that author Thomas Szasz wrote a book in the 1950s, titled “The Myth of Psychotherapy: Mental Healing as Religion, Rhetoric, and Repression,” on the same topic.
“There’s no such thing as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). There’s no such thing as OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder),” MacArthur claimed. “Those are noble lies.”