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.