Psychopathic Christian Beliefs (part ii)

I wish to adopt the phrase pathos of distance from Friedrich Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of Morals. The concept Nietzsche had in mind is not important for my purpose and my use of it bears no actual relation to his notion. For those who have never heard the term used before, pathos/πάθος is an old Greek word meaning "suffering". It carries the connotation of an emotional empathy. It specifically refers to the suffering one feels when s/he internalizes the pain of another being.

Since in the pervious post, I have already said that I believe Christians who hold these psychopathic beliefs are generally decent peoples, the most plausible explanation for the existence of psychopathic Christian beliefs in the modern world appears to be that there a pathos of distance at work.

I am not sure this jaguar is displaying the right sort of apathy — it seems more like s/he is just lazy — but it is quite adorable, and I simply had to add it to this blog post.

Let me provide a few example to explain what is meant by pathos of distance in this context. I was on a train today with a professor I knew from my undergraduate days, and he told me that people are not as kind and considerate online as they generally are in person. He said that people hide behind a computer screen and say things they would never say to another human being, face-to-face. The youth in our culture intuitively understand this. It is common knowledge. Some people are "trolls" online, and merely use the internet to prank and aggravate others. There is an emotional-empathetic distance within an online interaction. It is not an immediate human interaction, but that interaction is mediated by the computer technology. There is a distance of emotion between sender and receiver.

Another example comes from recent news in which a new book claims President Obama repomarked in the context of drone strikes that he is really good at killing people. I am not sure if the story is true or erroneous, but that is besides the point. It is so effortless for President Obama to give the order for soldiers sitting in flight-control simulators in the United States to pull a trigger and blow apart a Pakistani or Afghan village. How different such a situation is from taking a firearm or a broadsword and slaughtering every human being in the village. Squeezing a red trigger from a comfy seat staring at monitor is comparable to hearing the cries of frightened men, women and children, having the stench of corpses flood your sense of smell, and witnessing the sight of blood scattered everywhere as you fire bullets into and hack apart other human beings.

It is my thesis that in much the same way that Americans can gleefully support drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan and consign to death unknown men, women and children without being terrible human beings in their daily lives, Christians are able to faithfully justify the "historical" genocides and executions recorded in the Jewish Tenakh. The Christian does not need to actually throw the first stone to execute the poor girl who is considered a criminal and reprobate for engaging in premarital sex. S/he does not have to look into the frightened face of some young teenager and brutally kill her.

The idea of hell does not have to be intimately experienced by the Christian. The Christian does not need to experience a πάθος of their non-Christian friends and family being tortured under Dante's Inferno. There exists a pathos of distance between the belief in hell and the human experiences of the common Christian believer. It is a distant phantasy, not an experienced reality. It is through this pathos of distance that human beings are able to maintain a schizophrenic psychology. President Obama can glibly remark that he is effective at killing people and Christians can justify genocide, abhorrent legal systems and the inhumanity of hell.

The last part to this three part post looks at psychopathic Christian beliefs will seek to answer why these monstrous beliefs remain a part of contemporary religious thought, if they no longer stem from conscious, aggressive wishes. 

Psychopathic Christian Beliefs (part i)

It has become self-evident that Christians historically and contemporarily have belief-sets that are blatantly psychopathic. And by this word I do not intend a slur, but rather the technical sense of the word, in which one does not demonstrate the proper human emotions, but rather remains cold and apathetic, inhuman.

It becomes necessary to define exactly what I am not including under my label of psychopathic. I do not mean to refer to a sense of exuberance the believer feels at something like the fate of the wicked, burning for all eternity in hellfire. Such joy and happiness felt at the sufferings of others is deeply human — history stands a testament to that. Norbert Elias recounts that during the Middle Ages, townsfolk would often take great pleasure in the torture of cats, as public amusement. We are a people given over to violence, hatred and death. There is no doubt that such beliefs are monstrous, but humanity itself is monstrous.

"At that greatest of all spectacles, that last and eternal judgment how shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates liquefying in fiercer flames than they ever kindled against the Christians; so many sages philosophers blushing in red-hot fires with their deluded pupils; so many tragedians more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; so many dancers tripping more nimbly from anguish then ever before from applause." — Tertullian

"However there are other spectacles—that last eternal day of judgment, ignored by nations, derided by them, when the accumulation of the years and all the many things which they produced will be burned in a single fire. What a broad spectacle then appears! How I will be lost in admiration! How I will laugh! How I will rejoice! I will be full of exaltation then as I see so many great kings who by public report were accepted into heaven groaning in the deepest darkness with Jove himself and alongside those very men who testified on their behalf!" — Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

I do not want to discuss the demonic Christian portrayed above (quite the oxymoron), but rather the well-meaning Christian who remains apathetic to the horror and suffering espoused by these monstrous theologies.

The first case I want to draw attention to is the Christian justification of genocide in the Old Testament. The classic passage is I Samuel XV:ii-iii: "Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish what Am′alek did to Israel in opposing them on the way, when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and smite Am′alek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’” Contemporary Christians will balk at the idea of slaughtering civilian populations, and castigate Muslims for suicide bombings and the like. Yet, Christians will justify the past-historic genocide of innocent, men, women and children. Platitudes will be given about how all human beings are deserving of death, and such; none of which are very convincing.

This wicked sketch belongs to Pechan at DeviantArt.

The second case I want to bring under our gaze is constituted by the barbaric laws of the Old Covenant for the ancient Hebrews. So for example we find the words written in the Tanach: "But if the thing is true, that the tokens of virginity were not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has wrought folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house; so you shall purge the evil from the midst of you." Once again, Christians balk at the monstrosity of Muslims in the Middle East administering such "justice" on women, but adamantly defend the righteousness of the Laws of Moses. No Christian in their right mind, living in the Western world, would think it just for the Government to kill females who have had pre-marital sex. A great discrepancy exists as in the previous example.

The last case is the nonchalance with which Christians condemn non-Christians to hell and declare it an act of justice. Many honest, well-meaning people, actually believe that well-meaning non-Christians deserve to burn in hell for all eternity, merely because they did not believe the same things about God. These Christians walk amongst the hell-bound every day, give them a warm "hello" and call many of these people their friends. As in the previous two instances, something appears to be amiss here. The theology does not appear to match behavior or (moral) emotions.

This post merely intended to lay the groundwork. The next post will flesh out the notion of psychopathic theology, which has become the hallmark of contemporary Christianity.

The Apocalypse of Esther

So, I have recently finished reading the Book of Esther in my Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition of the biblical books — a translation I highly commend. The narrative has a similarity to both the Book of Judith which precedes it and to the Book of Nehemiah in both of which the Jewish people are on the precipice of genocidal ethnical cleansing by their adversaries. The Book of Judith is very similar in that it also features a brave, female heroine who prevents the apocalyptic destruction of the Hebrew people.

I want to draw the readers attention to the apocalyptic imagery contained in the deuterocanonical parts of the Book of Esther — included in the Roman Catholic canon, but not in the Protestant or Judaic canons. For Roman Catholics, the book opens with the apocalyptic-divine Dream of Mor'decai, the guardian of the young Esther, that reads:

"And this was his dream: Behold, noise and confusion, thunders and earthquake, tumult upon the earth! And behold, two great dragons came forward, both ready to fight, and they roared terribly. And at their roaring every nation prepared for war, to fight against the nation of the righteous. And behold, a day of darkness and gloom, tribulation and distress, affliction and great tumult upon the earth! And the whole righteous nation was troubled; they feared the evils that threatened them, and were ready to perish. Then they cried to God; and from their cry, as though from a tiny spring there came a great river, with abundant water; light came, and the sun rose, and the lowly were exalted and consumed those held in honor." (Esther XI:iv-xi RSV:CE).

I could not find a Christian painting of Mor'decai's Dream, so I chose this image to set the mood. I think it fits, as the dragon-imagery was the most striking feature of the dream that also creates a welcome parallel with the Book of Revelation. 

I do not wish to ramble on and on in analyzing the Dream of Mor'decai, but the crucial point I want to draw from this narrative is its similarity to the apocalyptic imagery found in the Gospels. A futurist interpretation of the apocalypse runs into a great number of absurdities and inconsistencies with the character of God revealed in the person of Christ. So I read Mor'decai's Dream as the perfect allusion for preterist/idealists to draw.

Futurists interpret the sayings of apocalyptic destruction in the Gospels and the Book of Revelation quite literally. So for instance, in Matthew XIV:vii-viii we find the passage, "For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of sufferings." I was listening to John MacArthur preach about the apocalypse on the radio the other day, and he definitely understands these words of Christ in a literal fashion. There will be earthquakes literatim, letter-for-letter.

The Dream of Mor'decai provides us with a biblical map for reading apocalyptic literature, and gives us a biblical justification for deciphering apocalyptic passages from a non-futurist perspective. In the Book of Esther we find a prophecy of dragons, earthquakes and war of the whole earth against the Hebrew people. It is the equivalent of the devastating, End of Days passages we find in the Gospels and the Book of Revelation. Towards the very end of the book, Mor'decai acts as his own cipher and tells us, in hindsight, that the apocalyptic dream was the truth of all the events that unfolded in the whole of the book:

"For I remember the dream that I had concerning these matters, and none of them has failed to be fulfilled. The tiny spring which became a river, and there was light and the sun and abundant water — the river is Esther, whom the king married and made queen. The two dragons are Haman and myself. The nations are those that gathered to destroy the name of the Jews. And my nation, this is Israel, who cried out to God and were saved" (Esther X:v-ix).

There were no actual earthquakes to be found in the narrative of Esther, there were no mythical dragons and there was no world war. The Dream of Mor'decai was a hyperbolic-imaginative allegory of material-human events. The earthquakes do not represent the vibration of tectonic plates, but rather the fear, danger and disorder that the Israelites faced under the genocidal machinations of Haman. The dragons are not winged-beasts, but the titanic personalities of Mor'decai and Haman. The world is deployed as a metonymy for the nations of the Persian empire.

If nothing else, the apocalyptic elements of the Book of Esther should give us pause when reading the Book of Revelation and the End of Days portions of the Gospels. We should not be so swift to interpret their words in a literal manner. St. John's visions of dragons, earthquakes and a world war against Zion might very well be imaginative, hyperbolic descriptions of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD. When viewed in light of Mor'decai's apocalypse, it no longer appears unlikely.

Aristotle's Critique of Common Property

Within the circle of political philosophy, the Aristotelian critique of common property is well-known. It is not all that different from the modern, commonsense criticism of socialism today. What Aristotle said in Book II of his Politics (πολιτικά) is that, "If they do not share equally enjoyments and toils, those who labor much and get little will necessarily complain of those who labor little and receive or consume much." Aristotle continued in the next paragraph, "[W]hen everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because everyone will be attending to his own business." Translating this in the contemporary vernacular, Aristotle was writing about the problems of collective action — he merely did so in an ancient, non-quantitative sort of manner.

This photograph is credited to xuniap Aristotle from DeviantArt.

Yet, I do not want to discuss the problems of collective action here. I want to zero in on another critique of common property, within the Politics, that has fallen by the wayside in recent times. And this was Aristotle's criticism from the vantage point of virtue ethics. In my humble opinion, this is probably the better argument — coming from someone who holds high regard for the virtue ethics tradition. Aristotle stated:

"And further, there is the greatest pleasure in doing a kindness or service to friends or guests or companions, which can only be rendered when a man has private property... No one, when men have all things in common, will any longer set an example of liberality or do any liberal action; for liberality consists in the use of which is made of property." (Politics, Bk. II).

It should be noted that Aristotle drew a distinction between three forms of ancient communism — I ask you to forgive my anachronistic, Marxian-flavored language in advance. In the first, the means of production are commonly owned, but the products themselves are apportioned for private use. In the second, the means of production are privately owned, but the appropriation of those products is common. The last possibility is an economic system wherein both the production and appropriation of the products is common, from beginning to end. It appears that Aristotle's virtue-ethics criticism only applies to the last two forms of common ownership.

The logic of his thesis proceeds thusly: it is a human virtue for people to be beneficent, and therefore, it is moral for people to act with liberality. By having all the products of labor communally owned, it removes one of the virtues which is crucial for human beings to be properly moral. In other words, it is in some sense virtuous and moral for one to shower his or her friends and family with gifts and benefits, from his or her bounty. It makes one virtuous to be giving. Yet we cannot be giving if we have nothing to give. Such does not necessarily mean that one has to be wealthy in order to have this virtue. Even Christ says that the widow is virtuous beyond all the Pharisees because she gave the last two mites that she had — an ethic of proportionality. Though the point remains, she could not have done such an act, had she not had the private possession of those last two coins.

Contemporary communists tend to hold a mixed conception of the first and third kinds of communal ownership. So at least to a certain extent, I imagine that communism and the personal ownership of non-productive assets are compatible (certain products such as mass transit and parks will be consumed commonly, as is the case with public goods in capitalism). As I said above, Aristotle's critique is only applicable to the second and third forms of communism. For the sake of argument, I want to push the logic of communal ownership of finished products and reason whether there is the possibility for liberality in that schema.

This artwork is credited to ivangod from DevaintArt.

It is my proposal that liberality should still exist within the sphere of production itself. There are two ways to give charity: (i.) you donate your money and/or your resources; or, (ii.) you donate your time, your labor. The second and third kinds of common ownership would not allow us to be charitable by the first method. However, there is nothing in common appropriation preventing charity/liberality through the second method. Just as people nowadays donate their time to working in hospitals and at animals shelters, those under communism would show their liberality by the same token — and this is the crux of this post.

To show liberality towards friends, or the community as a whole, one could cook a special meal or work extra hard in constructing a desperately needed home. In truth, we tend to ascribe virtue to those who donate their labor rather than their wealth. A rich woman may donate millions of dollars to charity, and from a utilitarian perspective help many more people with her largesse, but we ascribe the greater virtue to the woman who spends a summer in Haiti reconstructing homes after a devastating earthquake. Again, the logic is comparable to Christ's parable of the widow's two mites.

I should like to conclude very briefly that Aristotle did not believe in the modern-liberal notion of inviolable, private property rights. The community always has an interest in private affairs, and must insure that the common good is being secured. Aristotle thus wrote:

"[S]ince we advocate not common ownership of land, as some have done, but community in it brought about in a friendly way by the use of it, and we hold that no citizen should be ill supplied with the means of subsistence. As to common meals, all agree that this is an institution advantageous for well-organized states to possess; our own reasons for sharing this view we will state later" (Politics, Bk. VII).

Therefore, Aristotle's critique of common appropriation should never be mistaken for a defense of the liberal notion of private property. Aristotle even declared that private property should be shared with one's friends and that travelers should have access to the use of private resources. In a word, private property is contingent on other-regarding behavior. The exclusionary-egotism of liberal private property revolts against the whole of Aristotelian philosophy.

American Political Discussion as Secular-Theological Quarrels

So, yesterday, when I happened to catch a few minutes of the Mark Levin Show and he referenced the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, the idea for this post came to me like a jolt of lightening. Reading through the writings of Èmile Durkheim and Jonathan Haidt has given me the basic framework for thinking about the notion of sacredness in a secular community, and it is from their insights that I primarily base the following upon.  

Let me give an illustration of sacredness from within my own ideological tradition, before I deploy the notion as a critique against American Sacredness. Marxist literature is a very peculiar thing to read. It is a heavily bibliocentric tradition in that much of the literature is about interpreting what it is that Karl Marx actually meant in his writings and what he believed. Marxist literature is akin to a theological discourse that focuses on accurately deciphering what the sacred text truly means. So much of the Marxist discussion revolves not around proving the veracity of the philosophy, but rather purifying the beliefs to match Marx's original philosophy — I shall probably write a whole post on this in further detail in the near future, since the idea fascinates me. 

It is my contention that the Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution function as our secular saints and secular scripture, respectively — particularly within the Republican-party ideological apparatuses and with Republican-party-oriented citizens. However, it should be noted that most liberals and those who are oriented towards the Democratic-party also pay homage and deference to our secular saints and our secular scripture. In a word, the Founding Fathers and the Constitution are the center around which our deep political questions revolve.

American conservatives appeal to the words of the Second Amendment while arguing for the right to individual gun ownership. It finds its parallel in a theologian or a Priest discussing the nature of atonement, and opening the biblical literature to prove his point. Yet, American liberals also commonly appeal to the words of the secular scripture to justify their position. They note that the "real interpretation"of the text is to read it as supporting the notion of a state militia, and has nothing to do with the modern day right to bear arms. On the whole, it is a hermeneutical-exegetical debate around the same sacred text, and it is this quality that I believe defines the discussion. We have to read much of American political discussions as secular-theological quarrels. 

The reason I have chosen to call the Founding Fathers "secular saints" comes from the rôle that Saints play in Roman Catholic theology. Saints are interpreters of what the Word (sacred text) means. No text can be read in isolation. It is the early saints — the Church Fathers — who are the primary interpreters and those who have structured what became known as Christianity in the first centuries Anno Domini, creating a clear demarcation with Gnosticism and other heresies. In the same way as Roman Catholics look to our Saints for authority on the biblical literature and our own tradition, the Founding Fathers are looked upon as interpreters of the secular word. Academics on both sides scour the writings of the Founding Fathers for the true interpretation of the Constitution; whether or not they intended the Second Amendment to be a statement on the state-militia or whether it was about individual ownership.

I am not opposed to the idea of secular sacredness. I am quite fond of the sacred status that human rights occupies in our Western discourse. Yet, it appears to me that the particular sacredness of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is one that is toxic to our political discourse. I say this because: 

(i.) the ideology of the Founding Fathers was heavily flawed. The grossest human rights abuses were supported under their tenure, including but not limited to slavery and the native American genocide.

(ii.) I tend to believe Thomas Jefferson had it right when he wrote to James Madison, "No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living." A society under late capitalism might not be best governed under the same ideology as an agrarian-economic society.

(iii.) The notion of the sacredness of the Founding Fathers and Constitution is brandied about as a weapon with which to accuse those who do not follow the same secular faith as being "Un-American." Real Americanism then becomes synonymous with these "sacred notions."  

I believe we can be grateful to the historical institutions the Founding Fathers and the Constitution have bequeathed to us, without transforming that respect into worship. Instead of sacralizing their lives and their document, we might adopt a more mature attitude to what is an imperfect and flawed legacy and a deficient and outdated document. In the same way it is dangerous to sacralize the Vatican and the Papal Office in my own Roman Catholic tradition, I believe it is dangerous to do the same with American traditions.

And, I apologize for the scattered thoughts in this post. There is so much to write on this topic from the hermeneutical, historical, political and philosophic traditions, that I was a little overwhelmed in maintaining a coherent train of thought in my writing.

Word of Faith as the Psychogenesis of Anguish

It is no secret that I abhor Word of Faith theology. As a Roman Catholic I find it to be a deeply heretical perversion of the Gospel command to take up one's Cross, and a bastardization of the Gospel in general. The distinctive aspect of Word of Faith theology is its belief that those who faithfully follow Christ are promised and will receive emotional, physical and financial well-being. It is a less cloddish version of the prosperity gospel; or, it more precise to say that prosperity theology is a more boorish moment of the umbrella Word of Faith theological category. For definitions, I am using the sixth tenet of Word of Faith from the Statement of Faith at the Christian Forums:

6. We believe prosperity is always God's will for all believers; for the whole person, spirit, soul, and body. The Lord has pleasure in the prosperity of those who serve Him.

I do not want to write a treatise critiquing all the horrible aspects of this theological vantagepoint: how it is exclusivist and does violence to the Other; how it interprets the Gospel from an unenlightened, materialist perspective; how it acts as the Opiate of the Masses; how it reduces God to an idol.

So what I want to discuss, then, is what happens when hard times come and prosperity runs out. Reasonable people, who are not sipping the cool-aid — an ego defense mechanism knowns as denial (of external reality) —, understand that the good suffer and the wicked prosper. The idea that the good will suffer is central to Christian history, as the first Christians were persecuted, tortured and executed.

My hypothesis is that Word of Faith theology acts as the genesis of exorbitant and unnecessary psychological anguish when bad times come upon us. In other words, it is an unhealthy defense mechanism for coping with the anxiety produced by external reality that carries with it the grave potential to engender even greater anguish than the defense mechanism was created to guard against. I envision two common events emerge when those who believe God is there to secure our prosperity face prolonged periods of dissatisfaction:

(i.) The individual experiences a flood of guilt. Since the framework ensures us that God will bless the faithful with prosperity, s/he comes to believe that s/he is the reason for the ill fate. S/he was not faithful enough, she has not been praying enough, and God is not blessing him/her, because s/he has been bad. 

(ii.) The individual experiences godforsaken-ness. S/he comes to believe that s/he has been utterly abandoned by God. The result can be a profound dearth of beauty in the World, and a loss of existential meaning. For our psychological well-being, it is vital to believe in the sacredness of the World whether we are theistic or atheistic.

Therefore, I think Word of Faith theology is a very treacherous defense mechanism/opiate of the masses. It may offer comfort for a limited period, or if your life is already fulfilled it will appear a self-fulfilling prophecy. Word of Faith theology is akin to that foolish man who builds his house upon sand in Matthew 7. The house built on the sand naturally falls apart in the face of hardship. It cannot stand up to the monstrosity of evil, because such evil exists outside its closed-system. Prolonged monstrosity exists as a profound contradiction to the very core of Word of Faith theology; therefore, "[T]he rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it."

We Have Become Alien

We Have Become Alien. The name is borrowed from the title of a song on the Cary Brother's album "Under Control." It is an absolutely lovely, graceful and moving psalm of anguish, brokenness and alienation that allows me to feel the Sacred/God suffusing through the instruments played and the words spoken. And that shall be the origin, the center that drives this blog forward — alienation; though of course the categories, topics, and issues covered will be diverse.

The idea of alienation has become central in my thinking, lately, and more and more. It all goes back to the mythology of the Garden of Eden and the narrative of Adam and Eve. The first universal human beings, male and female, are created by God and live in perfect harmony with the world around them. Crucially, there is a unity between God and Humankind — the original Oneness of human experience. And then Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, being tempted by the snake (who, if you are Christian, is the incarnation of Satan). This disobedience, the discernement of good from evil, carries with it a heavy burden, and it is through this act that Death/Θάνατος first enters the world. The result is the Fall: the break of our primordial Oneness, as a separation at the core of our being. 

We find this idea of primordial Oneness in secular philosophy as well, particularly in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the womb, we are one with (M)other — one with the Other — and it is only upon birth that a separation between I and Thou becomes. Lacan called this primordial unity between subject and object the Real, and extended it until about six months of age. Alienation is likewise present in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, in which human existence is separated from human essence; where we do not realize the unity of spirit and existence in the World, as an overflowing emanation of pure being as the endless interplay of identity and difference.

The quintessential dilemma of human existence is that we are an individual that has a desire for wholeness, for Oneness with the Other. Yet, we are alienated from the Other. And this separation causes anguish, loneliness and longing. It is for this reason that Christian Salvation is posited as the negation, or the antithesis, of the Fall. For Roman Catholics such as myself, Christ regenerates our brokenness and heals the rift separating us from God. Christ repairs the gulf of separation and reunifies us with God; returns us to the Primordial Oneness. 

So that is what this blog will be about. It will be my humanist search for meaning, closeness, community and Oneness in the World — in a word, the pursuit of the Sacred in the World. In the end, it is about finding God in the World.