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Post by nana on Mar 2, 2005 6:16:06 GMT -5
This piece is wordy but worth wading through a very long posting and since it would probably take 4 or more separate postings here to get it all in, here's the start of it followed by a link to the original: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- January 8 / 9, 2005 Bible Says: The Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism By WALTER A. DAVIS "I know you're a Christian, but who are you a Christian against." - - - - Kenneth Burke In Apocalypse, a patient study of Christian fundamentalism based on extensive interviews over a five year period with members of apocalyptic communities Charles Strozier identifies four basic beliefs as fundamental to Christian fundamentalism. (1) Inerrancy or biblical literalism, the belief that every word of the Bible is to be taken literally as the word of God; (2) conversion or the experience of being reborn in Christ; (3) evangelicalism or the duty of the saved to spread the gospel; and (4) Apocalypticism or Endism, the belief that The Book of Revelations describes the events that must come to pass for God's plan to be fulfilled. [1] Revelations thus becomes an object of longing as well as the key to understanding contemporary history, to reading the news of the day and keeping a handle on an otherwise overwhelming world. Each of these categories, Strozier adds, must be understood not doctrinally but psychologically. What follows attempts to constitute such an understanding by analyzing each category as the progression of a disorder that finds the end it seeks in Apocalyptic destructiveness. Before undertaking that examination a note on method. My goal is not to number the streaks of the tulip with respect to Christian fundamentalism but to get to the essence of the thing by offering a psychoanalytic version of the method Hegel formulated in the Phenomenology of Mind. My effort will be to describe the inner structure of the psyche implied by fundamentalist beliefs by examining those beliefs in terms of the psychological needs they fulfill. The examination of each belief will reveal its function in an evolving "logic" that traces the sequence of internal operations required for the fundamentalist psyche to achieve the form required to resolve the conflicts that define its inner world. The difference between my method and Hegel's is this: Hegel's effort was to describe the sequence of rational self-mediations required for the attainment of absolute knowledge. Mine is to record the sequence of psychological transformations that must take place for another kind of certainty to be achieved: one in which, as we'll see, thanatos and not reason attains an absolute status, freed of anything within that would oppose it. In effect, my goal is to offer fundamentalists a self-knowledge they cannot have since it is precisely the function of the belief structure we shall examine to render it unconscious and all the more powerful and certain of itself by virtue of that fact. What after all is religion but a desire displacing itself into dogmas all the better to assure the flock that what they desire is writ into the nature of things? Who does the structure we'll examine describe? George W. Bush and some of those closest to him? The 42% or 51% of those Americans who now call themselves fundamentalists? The 80 or 90% of practicing Christians, the over 1 billion viewers worldwide, who found Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ a singularly compelling expression of their faith and who are thus already far more fundamentalist in their hearts than they realize? The power of any religious belief system derives from how deeply it taps into collective needs and discontents. In this regard we may already be living in a fundamentalist Zeitgeist with the collective Amerikan psyche now defined, even among those who have never (or seldom) seen the inside of a church, by the emotional needs and principles of operation that find their most seductive realization in fundamentalism. We may in fact find the same "faith" informing a project that initially appears to have nothing to do with fundamentalism--global capitalism. www.counterpunch.org/davis01082005.html |
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Post by camaxtle on Mar 3, 2005 0:19:25 GMT -5
An excellent piece. I read through the whole thing and was happy to find the author shared my own previous realization about Fundamentalists:
A subject finds itself lost in a world of sin, prey to all the evils that have taken control of one's life. A despair seizes the soul. One is powerless to deal with one's problems or heal oneself because there is nothing within the self that one can draw on to make that project possible. The inner world is a foul and pestilent congregation of sin and sinfulness. And there's no way out. One has hit rock bottom and (so the story goes when it's told best) teeters on the brink of suicide. And then in darkest night one lets Him into one's life. And all is transformed. Changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Before one was a sinner doing the bidding of Satan. Now one is saved and does the work of the Lord. The old self is extinguished. Utterly. One has achieved a new identity, a oneness with Christ that persists as long as one follows one condition: one must let him take over one's life. Totally. All decisions are now in Jesus' hands. He tells one what to do and one's fealty to his plan must be absolute. There can be no questioning, no doubt. For that would be the sign of only one thing-the voice of Satan and with it the danger of slipping back into those ways of being that one has, through one's conversion, put an end to forever. The person or self one once was is no more so complete is the power of conversion. A psyche has been delivered from itself. And it's all so simple finally, a matter of delivering oneself into His will, of following His plan as set forth in the Book and of letting nothing be within oneself but the voice of Jesus spreading peace and love throughout one's being.
I realized this from just observing some friends who were fundamentalists. I dont associate with them anymore. This piece has really helped put me at peace. It's like "See I was right all along."
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Post by Moses on Mar 3, 2005 9:00:03 GMT -5
I haven't finished reading the entire piece yet but find it very very interesting. After the bit that Car posted above, he goes into "the split/splitting": the division that this type of "born again" makes of themselves-- the old self and the new self, which is extended to everything:
The most striking thing about this narrative is the transparent nature of the psychological defense mechanism from which it derives and the rigidity with which it employs that mechanism. Splitting. Which as Freud and Klein show is the most primitive mechanism of defense employed by a psyche terrified of its inner world. The conversion story raises that mechanism to the status of a theological pathos. Though the story depends on recounting how sinful one's life once was(often in great even "loving" detail) the psychological meaning of conversion lies in its power to wipe all of that away. Magically one attains a totally new psyche, cleansed, pristine, and impermeable. One has, in fact, attained a totally new self-reference. The self is a function of one's total identification with Jesus. Consciousness is bathed in his presence. It has become the scene in which his love expresses itself in the beatific smile that fills ones face whenever one thinks of one's redemption, the tears that flood one's blessed cheeks, the saccharine tone that raises the voice to an eerie self-hypnotizing pitch whenever one finds another opportunity to express the joyous emotions that one must pump up at every opportunity in order to keep up the hyperconsciousness required to sustain the assurance of one's redemption.
....One's life is divided in half. Split between B.C. and A.D. Everything one once was is washed away. Everything one now is is its antithesis. Such was the miracle that came upon Dubya ... The man George W. Bush was is no more. It was merely the stuff the dream of conversion was built on and now has vanished leaving not a rack behind. ...everything that follows becomes a pure expression of the new self he now has. Thanks to Jesus. For that's the key both to conversion and its aftermath. One has finally little or nothing to do with the transformation. Agency is the Lord's. He enters one's psyche and performs precisely what the psyche could not do for itself. Moreover, the new agency that results from conversion is also his. All that one now does derives from his Will. One has become the medium through which the Diety achieves its purpose. One's own will finally has nothing to do with it. One is but the servant of his Will, doing what he tells one to do as He makes that purpose known. That's also why errror is inconceivable, when when asked Dubya is unable to discover any mistake he's made as President....
Such for the fundamentalist is what it means to have a self. To live an abstract allegory. Devil before, god after. With the self dissolved under the force of the one agent or the other. And never the twain shall meet. Except as absolute antagonists. One could say that conversion transforms the self, but it would be more appropriate to say that it annihilates it. That is in fact its function. For salvation to occur the self is precisely that which must be rendered powerless then transcended through a transformation that can only come from without. That transformation accordingly produces a split that is absolute and must be maintained at all costs. For it is what the psyche depends on to deliver it from everything disruptive and unstable in itself. Even if at times one finds oneself again a sinner, that sinfulness is all the work of the Big Other, Satan. Salvation is deliverance and such is the fundamentalist despair over the self that deliverance must be total.
....Psychoanalysis delivers the subject over to itself as the one relationship that cannot be transcended. Conversion delivers the subject from itself. What one was is not the depth of a disorder one must plumb concretely in the full horror of all one must come to know about oneself as author. It is rather all that one can blow away through one's conversion! Such is the power and pleasure of splitting as a mechanism of defense. In the absolute reliance on that mechanism fundamentalism renders up its secret.
....Evangelicalism is the manic activity whereby the split in the psyche that conversion creates is projected onto the world. Thereby one confirms the identity one has attained through a fresh exorcism of the one that conversion vanquished. Evangelicism offers the fundamentalist the only way to sustain the reborn self: by trying to recreate the experience of one's conversion in others in order to reenact an unending exorcism. In the other one locates the split off self one once was now placed totally outside oneself. It becomes the fantasm of what must be the condition of one's auditors, of those who, whether they know it or not, are lost, wallowing in error and sin, their minds awash in the torrents of secularism, dumb to the clarity that comes from the Words one now speaks to bring them enlightenment, could they but hear. This is the root cause of the frustration that quickly comes if we make the mistake of bidding entry when the fundamentalist knocks on the door. We offer discourse in vain to those who are seized by a necessity. It's not just the repeated literal citation of the Bible as absolute truth ("do you know that satan was once an angel close to God; that's why he's so powerful") or the repeated refrain that puts an end to all discussion ("well I believe the Bible and the Bible says"); or the inability to hear anything we say except as a sign that we've not yet grasped the truth that's galling. It's the recognition that despite the charitable demeanor, evangelical activity is based on a total lack of respect for the minds of those they are trying to convert.
That lack of respect is, however, necessary. Anything less would be a confession of doubt. Which would make the other a threat when they can only be one thing: an image of what one was prior to conversion, of what the world in its unregenerate condition represents. Namely, the place where one projects all that conversion supposedly removed from the psyche. Through evangelicalism one engages in the repetition compulsion that has become one's innermost necessity. The only way to prevent a return of the projections is through their continued projection. By locating them outside oneself and waging an "attack" on that externalization one is delivered from the fear of what can no longer be within. Everything bad is now outside oneself and one must do everything to keep it there. One can share with one's auditor the confession in the abstract that one is a "sinner" too but the discussion better shift quickly to the evils of the world: to homosexuals and abortion.... Evangelicalism offers the psyche a chance to be cleansed again of everything that may still fester deep within somewhere, longing to break out. This is an operation fundamentalism shares with its most famous offshoot-Alcoholics Anonymous. Though splitting and projection produce denial, one is always in danger of slipping. One needs a ritual to reestablish who one is by again exorcising what one was. What the meeting does for the alcoholic proselytizing does for the fundamentalist.
....The necessity of Apocalypticism is a direct outgrowth of the psychological mechanism on which fundamentalist relies to structure the world. .... Apocalypticism thus brings to completion the psychological operation that has been employed repeatedly from the beginning. First, one cleanses oneself by projecting one's disowned desires unto the world. The resulting split must then be maintained rigorously with nothing allowed to fall outside its scope. The psyche must be voided of everything save the serenities of the saved. For that to happen, however, the world must become the object of an unstinting attack on all that one has externalized there. This act must be endless lest the projections return. By its internal logic fundamentalism is thus driven ineluctably to a need for quantitative expansion through the discovery of greater, more insidious forms of evil.....The world becomes the polluted chamber of one's foulest imaginings with no way to check the demands of that vision. Within the psyche an even greater transformation occurs..... One hates, that is, everything that resists surrender and absolute obedience to the system of literalism and literal commands to which one has committed oneself. As the scope of what one hates grows apace it finds fruition in the binary opposition that is essential to it. Good and Evil divide the world in two, giving ontological form to the rigidity of the split that defines the fundamentalist psyche. All differences, all particularities, all complexities must give way to the demands of a comprehensive abstraction. .... Done with embodiment itself- and all the unwelcome desires it imposes on us. Done with the very sources of all that one hates and fears. To locate it all ontologically in a single principle-evil-and then be rid of it all once and for all through the triumph of that force that has the power to extinguish it all.
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Post by Moses on Mar 3, 2005 10:07:11 GMT -5
The psychopathology of Dubya:
It should now be evident that what looks at first like the least important of the four characteristics of fundamentalism fulfills perhaps the deepest psychological necessity. Without this activity the fundamentalist psyche would implode. The obsessional need to preach the gospel, to find a way as soon as possible to let every stranger one meets know that one is a Christian, born again, are practices that derive not from a lack of social skills but from a manic necessity. For the saved there is and can be nothing but the story of their salvation. It is the master narrative to which all lives must conform, the tale one must tell as often and ardently as the Ancient Mariner tells his. Though for antithetical reasons. The Mariner tells his tale to relieve an inner pain by injecting it into the consciousness of listeners who will be existentially individuated by the tale. Evangelists tell theirs to reassure themselves about their "identity" by trying to compel others to participate in it. Structurally and psychologically, however, both tellers labor under the same necessity. Repetition as the attempt to retain an identity in order to flee something else-in the Mariner's case a suicidal depression; in the fundamentalist perhaps the same thing -- that is of necessity buried deep in the unconscious. One piece of evidence in support of this hypothesis: without the chance to engage in evangelical activity the fundamentalist psyche sinks into a state of empty boredom.
Thus the lassitude of Dubya before 9-11 and the hectic messianic energy that has defined him since. 9-11 gave him what he needed-the chance to transform a stalled Presidency by adopting an evangelical stance toward the entire world. Preemptive unilateralism is not just a political credo. It's an evangelical article of faith. The world must of necessity be divided into Good and Evil. And one must bring that message to the world in the same way the fundamentalist visits the doorstep of the unconverted. If those one addresses-the United Nations, other countries, members of the Republican party-aren't converted to the Word that can only be a sign of their error. Or worse. As Ashcroft never lost an opportunity to remind us, their complicity with the enemy. The whole world is either with us or against us. And nothing anyone says can have any other meaning. We cannot let our message be altered by doubts or fears. The fundamentalist mind, closed off from discourse by its own certitude can only project itself upon the global stage in the way demanded by inner psychological necessity. Manic activity under the guise of certainty as the proof that one has triumphed over all inner conflicts. And thus the beckoning of a new necessity. The need to extend the opposition between Good and Evil as far as possible-from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Axis of Evil to the 60 nations identified as supporters of terror-in the assurance that God has chosen one for a mission not just to convert the World but to wage war on whatever one labels evil, the only certainty being that one will always find fresh targets because doing so has now become the projective necessity of a mania that drives toward the omnipotence it seeks by pushing the war on terror toward an ultimate realization. Moreover, whatever one must do in waging this war is justified without the possibility of any appeal to conscience. Thus another doctrinal innovation that distinguishes Dubya from all previous Presidents: the assertion of the right for a first strike use of nuclear weapons and with it the developments now under way to create a host of new "tactical" nuclear weapons. To deliver the world from the spectre of nuclear war we must ready ourselves to wage a nuclear war on the world. (Paranoia thus projects the possibility of an omnipotence beyond MAD as policy.) And so we should all indeed be trembling in our boots to know the mind-set that now has its finger on the nuclear trigger. Happiness is a warm gun.
The war on terror has many meanings, not the least of which the blank check to disseminate an Orwellian fear whenever the Adminstration desires. Perhaps its deepest meaning, however, is to mark the founding moment in which politics in Amerika becomes inseparable from the projection of a religious ideology. 9-11 told Dubya that the time was ripe for a mission that the Diety elected him to perform. A seamless transition thus offers itself to us, from an evangelical presidency to the fourth characteristic of fundamentalism, the one that, as we'll see, informs and completes the others taking us to the heart of the disorder, the innermost necessity that hallows all its dreams.....
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Post by Moses on Mar 3, 2005 10:43:50 GMT -5
Hatred & Apocalypsism:
One craves the constant exercise of an emotion that one must just as strenuously disclaim. Hatred. One needs fresh supplies of it as badly as the U.S. needs to ransack the globe for fresh supplies of oil. No matter how loudly one proclaims one's salvation, purified in the blood of the lamb, hatred has become the innermost necessity to which one is wedded. And that necessity has now broken lose of any containment. Hatred of one's former self is no longer sufficient. One now hates the world and is driven to seek out everything in it that one can claim caused or can cause an inner condition other than the purity of the saved. One hates, that is, everything that resists surrender and absolute obedience to the system of literalism and literal commands to which one has committed oneself. As the scope of what one hates grows apace it finds fruition in the binary opposition that is essential to it. Good and Evil divide the world in two, giving ontological form to the rigidity of the split that defines the fundamentalist psyche. All differences, all particularities, all complexities must give way to the demands of a comprehensive abstraction. And the fury of that abstraction can and will brook no exceptions. Everything thus resolves itself into the ultimate necessity required by the informing hatred. One longs for and demands an end to all the contingencies that have from the beginning been sources of fear and confusion. It is what one has always sought. To be done with all of it. With the contingency of the human. To be done with all ambiguity and complexity and confusion. Done with the feeling that history has no purpose other than chaos or meaningless repetition. Done with embodiment itself- and all the unwelcome desires it imposes on us. Done with the very sources of all that one hates and fears. To locate it all ontologically in a single principle-evil-and then be rid of it all once and for all through the triumph of that force that has the power to extinguish it all.
Literalism tried to keep the world at bay by reducing everything to the simplest formulas, the mind itself to the most unproblematic blink of consciousness in stupified adherence to the narrow fixations needed to banish metaphor, ambiguity, and uncertainty. But it wasn't enough. The world keeps seeping it. There must be a way to be done with it, once and for all. To find what one has craved from the beginning. The end. And a proper end-one that will give sublime expression to the desire that has fed the whole thing. Death. The longing for death transformed into a sublime celebration of death. Life in its complexity demands too much of us. That in a nutshell is the fundamentalist message. Only death can deliver one from the threat life poses. Only when life is done is one safe from a return of the projections and an eruption of the repressed. One has always longed for deliverance into a realm free of desire and all its temptations. Death alone offers the comfort one seeks. The resentment in which the psyche has centered itself demands no less. One must work one's hatred of the world into a frenzy and feed that hatred with sublime images of evil in order to bring it to a fevered pitch. Release and satisfaction then come with the delivery of that world over to the hands of an angry God expressing his wrath in an orgy of pure destructiveness. Thank God for The Book of Revelations. For the only way both to satisfy and to purge one's hatred is to express it on a massive world-shattering scale. The death one seeks projected into the death one delivers. The self is thereby done with life and freed for transport of the saved split off self to a realm of bliss freed from all cares. A psyche wedded to thanatos [Death] has found in thanatos the final solution. One's resentment against life has been turned into a righteous and of necessity cosmic attack upon it.
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Post by Moses on Mar 3, 2005 11:00:36 GMT -5
Sick Obsession w/ the book of revelations:
In Transformations Wilfred Bion tries to conceptualize a destructiveness "that goes on working after it destroys personality, time, and existence." Such is the desire that feeds the fundamentalist fixation on The Book of Revelations. A psyche wedded to thanatos seeks sublime expression of that desire. It finds it satisfied repeatedly in Revelations, as if its author, like the director of the next disaster movie, keeps seeking the perfect image to feed the underlying venom or to bring it, with each repetition, closer to that image in which destructiveness will find its objective correlative. One makes allowances of course for the author of Revelations, what with his people under genocidal persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire. But how account for the fixation on such images, as if they were the only real source of pleasure.... How account for the persistent unscratable itch for picturing the great sleeper of Bablyon and anticipate the delicious synesthesia of the golden cup "in her hand filled with abominable things and the filth of her fornications? How account for the thrill that comes as one reads again the rich description of all the plagues that will be visited upon the earth? And how else account for the necessity of the grand crescendo to which it all moves as the enraptured reader approaches Armageddon and the final battle that will put an end to that folly, human history, giving the reader the true pleasure of the text since one has known all along that history could have no purpose or meaning other than its destruction? One loves this book and longs to see the coming to pass of all it promises in fulfilling on a cosmic stage the very process that has given structure to one's psyche, as if the apocalypse one suffered on the little stage were but a prefigurement meant to whet one's appetite for the Big One.
Here then a reading of the function that Revelations plays in the fundamentalist psyche. In the depths of its psyche fundamentalism is ruled by catastrophic anxiety, a self tottering on the brink of a dissolution in which it will fragment imprisoned in a world that will impose all of its terrors and evils upon it. We will fail to understand fundamentalism as long as we resist seeing how close it is to a psychosis. Fundamentalist rage is the attempt of a subject to hold itself together in the only way it can: by waging war on all that terrifies it. The psyche commits itself to destructiveness to allay a destruction that already threatens it from within. That condition results in a paradoxical situation that finds its only possible solution in Revelations. Destructiveness must be given a full, unchecked expression and the psyche must somehow survive that act. The drive toward death repeats itself in increasing magnitudes as it moves toward a final conflict that obliterates all future conflict and transports the self to a realm of unending bliss. The slight textual support (1 Thessalonians 4:17) notwithstanding, the Rapture is a psychological necessity. It embodies the magical thought that the coming of global destruction is also the coming of salvation. One has always longed for a feast of destructiveness as the signal for one's transport to a condition free of the world. That's why when that moment comes it is impossible to prevent the surfacing of a long suppressed and twisted sexual desire. As destruction approaches so too does ascent to a realm in which one is free to project a marriage consummated in the sky with Christ serving as the Bride. The delights of that image should not prevent us from seeing what has happened here. The longing for death has been turned into an ecstatic embrace of it; a rapture so complete in its jouissance that one can no longer disguise the fact that all of ones libidinal energies have gone into the quest for such a complete and final unbinding, an extinction within consciousness of all save the ecstatic recognition that one is saved and that all the connections that once bound one to the world have been severed once and for all. The psychotic attack on linking finds its apotheosis in Apocalypticism. The Rapture must be interpolated into Revelations at precisely this point because one's salvation corresponds with the arrival of something else-the dawning of the cataclysmic aggressions that must be vented in order to bring destruction upon the earth and usher in the millenium. In the clouds, safe with Jesus, one can continue to rejoice free of life or cast a cold eye upon it from time to time like one looking back on the moment just before one's conception but free now (an angelic Onan) to nip it in the bud. Or to spend the 1000 years millenium assured that though peace reigns it will come again, one last time, the dead themselves resurrected so that they can be slain again in a greater destruction than has ever been visited upon the earth ( Revs. 19-20) and then, as if that isn't enough, consigned to torment day and night forever. Only then is the rage that informs John's text discharged. And only then can love be expressed without leading to a new burst of rage. [3] Only then can a new heaven and a new earth be celebrated in language admittedly of great beauty with God himself wiping away all tears, putting an end to death, pain, and sorrow, making all things new, delivering believers from realities that they could never see as anything but arguments against life, Revelations confirming this fact long before Nietzsche conceptualized it. The great love feast--it's a pretty fantasy. As if once rage fashions its masterpiece the heart will open and what has been frozen for so long will become a warm and virgin spring.
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Post by Moses on Mar 3, 2005 11:10:31 GMT -5
How the Psychotics and “F’in Crazies” took over the USA:
Historically the great transformation in the use of Apocalypticism to incite fundamentalist believers to political action came in the 1980's, during the Reagan years, when Jerry Falwell (to cite but one example) shifted from the pre-millenarian belief that the faithful can do nothing but spread the gospel and wait as the modernist evil that will bring about the Tribulation runs its course to the activist position that fundamentalism must become a political force, indeed take over the country if possible, and make it a Christian Nation worthy of being spared as well as the one chosen to advance the movement toward that long sought, long delayed, deeply longed for and blessed Apocalyptic event. George Herbert Walker Bush was finally a man of restraint with a keen appreciation of the realities of global politics. Dubya labors under no such restraints. His is a mind unencumbered by an countervailing pressure that the world might offer to his singleness of vision. Thus there's no telling where the faith will lead now that Dubya has his mandate and must deliver to satisfy the grandiose conception of what God himself elected him to do. Even perhaps find a straight shining path from the cataclysmic future that defines that paranoic present that constantly recedes before us unless, that is, the Apocalyptic future can become the Evangelical present? Under Dubya that is now one term for reading what is going on in the Middle East.
It is hard to conceive the extent of the contempt for life that informs fundamentalism. As a final example, however, a testimonial to the environmental policies of the Bush Administration, consider the quaint piece of fundamentalist folklore known as "dominion theology." This tenet of the faith was openly professed by former Secretary of the Interior James Watt, the mentor of the current Secretary Gale Norton. Dominion theology holds that the Bible commands us to use up the earth's resources. We glut ourselves not just for capitalist greed but by biblical mandate. Indeed, as the end approaches it is our duty to do so globally since there's little time remaining to complete the job and thereby bring that final day ever closer. Besides, why bother preserving the planet. After the Second Coming none of it is going to matter. And so with each new success-the hole in the ozone, the melting of the ice caps, drilling in the national wildlife refuge, the Alaska pipeline - we give further proof that history is moving in the right direction. Since all is yellow to the jaundiced eye, the only thing the fundamentalist, like the capitalist, can see in Nature is that which must be conquered, used up, then subjected to disposal. The oft-chronicled battle of fundamentalists against environmentalism is dictated by the demands of the manic triad. Triumph, contempt, dismissal. Thereby destructiveness is projected onto life itself. The sublime for the fundamentalist is not found in the rain forest, but in its ravaging. Through such acts one finds another way to project one's hatred of life onto another object that has the power to deepen our entry into and love of it.
It is hard to know which is colder, crueler: the logic of fundamentalism or the logic of capitalism? But then that question assumes they are different in some fundamental way. And let's face it we want to hang on to that difference because it offers reassurance, even a guarantee,that we can play the two off against each other. Those currently in charge of our country suffer from no such illusion. Maybe that's because they know the secret we need to fathom if we're to historicize the connection that Max Weber saw between Christianity and Capitalism and thereby learn that Christian fundamentalism and Global Capitalism correspond to one another because they derive from the same seedbed and feed on the same destructive violence.
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Post by Moses on Mar 3, 2005 11:17:22 GMT -5
Sadomasicism of Dubya's "religion":
In the images of destruction that warm its heart one sees externalized the process that has ravaged the inner world. In that sense fundamentalism is the most extreme act of sado-masochism toward oneself that has yet been devised. As such it offers us perhaps the deepest insight into the super-ego as the force of death in the psyche, as an agency that is satisfied with no less than soul-murder, the bending of the entire psyche in blind service to its commands. Literal obedience to literal commands is merely the tip of that iceberg. It is within that the true process of soul-murder takes place. In a psyche that is willing to sacrifice everything in itself in order to placate an authority that is vindictively cruel in the wrath it directs on the slightest opposition to its will. In an attempt to achieve identification with that force the psyche wages war first on itself and then upon the world. The former act reveals the power of the super-ego; the latter act offers a way to confirm one's identification with it. In sacrificing everything in oneself to the super-ego one attains the right to become the walking embodiment of its wrath. The fundamentalist can loudly proclaim his or her love of God but the fact of the matter is that one fears Him because terror is the only relationship He permits. Fear-that is the thing one has never been able to overcome. That is why all transgression or the mere thought of transgression unleashes an overpowering guilt under which the psyche unravels. That guilt is the power of the super-ego to maintain control over the psyche. Super-ego guilt is thanatos in its immediacy ravaging the psyche by punishing it with the loss of a "love" that is indistinguishable from hate so absolute is the sacrifice it requires.
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Post by Moses on Mar 3, 2005 11:42:27 GMT -5
Four characteristics that Charles Strozier isolates as fundamental to fundamentalism. (1) Inerrancy as the need to reduce all complexities to the literal in order to confine the mind to its simplest operations; (2) Conversion or the use of the primitive psychological defense known as splitting to establish an absolute separation of the saved psyche from the d**ned; (3)Evangelicalism or manic activity as the way to sustain and project that split; (4) Apocalypticism or thanatos incarnate as the desire for an event that will satisfy the hatred and the death-drive that has come to define the fundamentalist psyche.
Sexual Roots of the Fundamentalist Psyche
....Fundamentalists live in a world obsessed with sexuality. ....It's the concrete referent of the fulminations against secularism, secular humanism, post-modernism, ethical relativism, feminism, deconstructionism, etc. It's also what the vaunted claim of "moral values" is all about. Morality is not about a life of charity, or the pursuit of justice, or the opening of oneself to the depth of human suffering. It's about avoiding certain sexual sins and fixating on that dimension of life to the virtual exclusion of everything else. Battling sex is apparently what life is all about as if the primary plan of the creator were to put us on earth so that we'll be tempted by that in us that we must condemn in order to win salvation. By the same token, each new scandal reveals the consequences of sexual repression: the brutal abuse of young boys by a legion of pedophile priests; the sexual license of Jim Jones and David Koresh; the sadomasochistic bondage rituals that Jimmy Swaggart significantly could only enact with prostitutes; the epidemic of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse that is the untold story of the fundamentalist family. The repression of sexuality has as a necessary consequence the brutalization of the other.
All such phenomena are variations on the same tired story. Sexual repression breeds foul imaginings. Which of necessity fixate on the sexual. What has been rendered foul within runs amuck in the world. Following the dictates of a punitive super-ego the psyche becomes obsessed with the attack on sexuality. The purpose is to render evil virtually everything connected with sex until life itself is reduced to an allegory in which the battle of good and evil is all about the temptations of the flesh, as if nothing else in life matters so complete is the vindictive fixation of the Deity on the human genitals.
The eroticization of thanatos necessarily has a flip side: the demonization of eros. The libidinal economy on which fundamentalism rests is as simple as it is devastating. Eros must be turned into evil, sin, pollution. So that all of one's desire can go into thanatos. Or vice-versa. Once destructiveness has been eroticized all one's energies become fixated on the erotic since it poses the greatest threat to the resentment one feels toward life in general. The chicken-egg question of temporal priority misses the necessary dialectical connection. The only way to triumph over eros is by eroticizing death. And the only way to secure that eroticization is by projecting guilt, sin, resentment and punishment into every aspect of human sexuality. Such is the basic logic to which the fundamentalist project is wedded.
....Fundamentalism fixates on sex not by accident or divine decree but by the exigencies of immediate experience. Eros is that force which binds us to life as that blessing which can be lived and loved as an end in itself.
....Because it poses a comprehensive threat to the fundamentalist project eros must be poisoned at early as possible. ....The goal of fundamentalist child-rearing is to create a subject preoccupied with waging war on itself, with battling against its own desires under the gaze of a judgmental, punitive super-ego. [4]
The super-ego maintains this power because internally a fundamental transformation has occurred. All of one's desire has been channeled into one's service to the super-ego. It is thereby empowered to wage an attack on anything in the subject that would oppose or threaten its reign. The super-ego is as Freud noted harsher than the actual parents. It is so because it fuses prohibition with the quest for love. What is the first and perhaps the deepest attachment of one's life is bound to a force opposed to the very thing from which it draws its energy. Sexuality of necessity brings this conflict to a head. For in it one experiences at its greatest intensity the clash of the two principles that constitute the psyche: (1) that in us that would break free of the super-ego and constitute a desire independent of it and (2) the power of the super-ego, as a result of the love one has invested in it, to crush the opponent. This conflict is inescapable for the simplest of reasons. Operating upon sexuality was precisely how the super-ego was formed. It is in one's sexuality, accordingly, that one experiences the true virulence of a force that has the power to turn the inner world into a place of self-torture. All one has to do is desire what it forbids. One then learns the truth. That capitulation under the unrelenting pressure of that self-torture is the triumph of a fundamentalist education. In the war on sex the process of formation completes itself. Its product is a subject living a relationship to itself defined by self-contempt, self-punishment, and self-unraveling. Any attempt to break with the super-ego only serves to increase its power. Appearances to the contrary, the super-ego isn't about morality. It's about power-and the irresistible privilege that comes with power: to torture, in fact to erect torture as the relationship the subject lives to itself.
.... What else could child-rearing be for the parents but the chance to prove themselves to the Lord by taking whatever measures are required to assure that His commands assume total control over the child's psyche....Transgression, one discovers, floods the psyche with guilt, shame, and the conviction of a fundamental badness that can only be purged by an attack on oneself. That attack is the nuptial offering that seals one's marriage to the super-ego. It is the way one restores one's communion with it. In punishing oneself one experiences the joy, the libidinal pleasure, of a union that feeds on destructiveness. ....Thanatos has created a psyche dedicated to soul murder-to the murder of one's own soul. The power that death-work has assumed in the psyche now ravages the psyche. In three interconnected ways. (1) So great is the power guilt has assumed that any opposition to the super-ego unleashes an attack that threatens with psyche with self-dissolution. Such is the true power of the super-ego: unending torment with no exit save suicide or psychotic self-fragmentation.(2)Ego identity thus becomes the active, constant effort to spy out and combat everything in itself that could be labeled a source or occasion of sin. (3) In the body consequently a condition now maintains in which every desire becomes the overture to a war that must be waged until the very sources of desire have been conquered, until everything that might once have been natural has been rendered thoroughly unnatural. Sado-masochism has come to define the subject's relationship to itself. The only pleasure lies in the coldness and cruelty of an unrelenting attack upon one's sinfulness and the pleasure one gets from making oneself the abject object of that wrath. A world of perfect self-hatred has been created. A culture of pure thanatos has been installed as the unity of a psyche that must project good and evil, sin and punishment, d**nation and salvation into everything until life itself becomes the doleful and guilty passage of a shriveled and shrunken (but saved!) subjectivity toward the only thing it can desire. The End-the death of desire itself, the unending struggle against it, and the ever-present danger that one will slip and find oneself in the clutches of the d**ned. The Apocalyptic desire is born.....
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Post by Moses on Mar 3, 2005 11:48:33 GMT -5
The common psychosis of Roman Catholicism and the Political Fundamentalists: The process I've just described is not a disorder restricted to the reddest neck in the reddest state. It is a portrait drawn from what also typified a Roman Catholic childhood in the late fifties and early sixties. What Freud struggled to comprehend Roman Catholicism throughout its history has known instinctively and with a thoroughness that enabled it to raise the whole thing to the level of a system based on the most fundamental of recognitions: that working upon human sexuality is the way to attain complete dominance over the psyche. The systematic perfection of that labor depends on a single insight : wounding someone in their "soul" is the way one gains the greatest power over them; and one does it best when one takes what is most open, vulnerable, and loving in a child and exploits it to forge the bonds that will enslave that psyche, perhaps forever. The super-ego draws its force from that desperate love it has solicited so that it can appropriate the energies invested in that love in order to wage an attack upon the psyche and thereby eventually on life itself.
Given the genius of Catholicism it should come as no surprise that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most popular fundamentalist work of our time, hailed and promoted by fundamentalist preachers. What seems odd at first given the fact that Gibson is not strictly speaking a fundamentalist but a reactionary Catholic on the warpath against Vatican II makes perfect sense when seen in terms of the libidinal structure of Gibson's film and the psychological needs it fuels. The long standing fundamentalist hatred of Catholicism is misplaced. Equally misplaced is the attempt to confine fundamentalism to preachers in the Bible-belt.
Fundamentalism is on the rise today and takes many forms because it speaks to something that has long been active in Christianity, something that the old Church exemplified and that we may find impossible to expunge from Judeo-Christianity in general because the truth of the matter is the existence of a contiuum that finds fundamentalism in the position of the Hegelian Notion, the telos and immanent logos that develops through the course of Judeo-Christianity until it achieves in fundamentalism its proper and final form. Orwell offers the following definition of liberty: "Liberty is telling people what they don't want to hear." Is it time to extend that principle to religious belief in all its forms? A New Year's Resolution.
Walter A. Davis is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of Deracination: Historiocity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative. Hecan be reached at: davis.65@osu.edu. <br>
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Post by nana on Mar 3, 2005 23:01:15 GMT -5
I thought I might share with you one person's experience of being on the receiving end of this kind of mind-set and belief system.
The following is the story of something that happened to a friend of
mine in 1991. When she shared this with a few friends in an on-line
pagan chat room when it was invaded by a gang of fundy
"churchians" for the umpteenth time, looking for converts to save,
my friend 'lost it' and posted the following ----
---I thought it was worth saving and with her permission,
I made a copy of it as it appeared on screen:
"i am personally fed up to here with being told that the
ONLY truth is someone else's truth and having people try to
force their beliefs .. usually, but not always, Christian beliefs,
on others and of course you have to belong to the right branch of
Christianity and everyone's idea about that is different too ..
they seem to be the most judgemental group i've ever encountered ...
i've lost track of the number of times i've been told that i'm
condemned to hell by these 'loving' people and even had them do the fundy
version of castings spells by "binding their spirit" or with the
"blood of Jesus"... let me tell you about some of His followers.
Two very dear friends (at the time), devout Christians,
who seemed to be very accepting of my beliefs
(I was a member of the Baha'i Faith at that time)
invited me to attend their church for a special pre-Christmas
service a few years ago --- and I happily said yes.
After the service, which had been focused a lot on healing for members
of the congregation, we were suddenly surrounded by 10 lay preachers
who looked at me and one of them said 'you're a healer, please come with us' ..
my friends smiled and nodded to me and said that we'd all go together
and it was ok.
.. so the three of us went with them to this small back room where
suddenly and without warning, they put their hands on me pushed me down into
a chair at a table and held me down, ignored my objections and questions
and the harder I struggled against being held down, the worse it got ..
they spent the next 30 minutes praying over me, in tongues, to
'drive out the demons' since as a Baha'i, in their eyes,
I was a devil worshipper ..
After about 15 or 20 minutes, (it seemed like I had been held down for
hours and their hold on me was NOT gentle) I overheard one of my 'friends'
ask how they'd know when the demons were gone, and he was told that they'd
know the demons were gone when I started 'speaking in tongues'.
I realized they were not going to let me go until I spoke in
tongues so I decided to fake it and began speaking a mixture of Baha'i
blessings in Farsi (Persian), and various phrases and greetings in both Farsi
and Hawaiian from the chants I'd been learning, until they were
convinced they'd driven out the demons and had saved me.
--- this was NOT some small off the wall church ..
it has thousands of members, all 'pillars of the community'! ..
these people absolutely believed they are doing the 'right thing'
by forcing their beliefs onto me. I don't even believe in a devil
or in hell, so the evil they saw in me was their own creation ...
and then they 'saved me from it'
And i'd thought that the forced conversions mounted against native people's
in the past were a thing of the past --- it seems not.
i felt dirty and violated ... almost as if i'd been raped ....
to this day I wish I'd called the police and had them charged."
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Post by Moses on Mar 4, 2005 0:00:51 GMT -5
I wish she had called the police, and filed a civil suit.
I really think it is time to end the tax exemptions for these so-called "religions". The government should not be funding these cults.
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Post by REW on Feb 26, 2007 3:40:55 GMT -5
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Post by REWR on Mar 2, 2007 7:31:29 GMT -5
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