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.