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Dialogue at Salon.com, February 9th 2015

  • Tigriel Many atheists are people who stopped believing in God because they felt hostility toward their fathers, and toward other father figures or authority figures because of that; and they especially disliked the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing authority figure who would punish them for their sins. So they had a psychological motivation for pretending that God does not exist.

    Most atheists have less authoritative parents, and thus the idea of an all-powerful God has no emotional appeal. If you mutilate yourself before Him, you can't imagine your own parents thereby being appeased. You just bleed, pointlessly, which ranks rather far behind being a party animal in terms of fun.

    An all-powerful male God, however, comes in handy when you're really concerned about the enormity of your early experiences with your all-powerful mother, who you spent most of your time with in your first years of your life. Then it's a phantasm you cling to pretend that true Titanness had met her match! 

    If you've come out of that environment, where Mother loomed large and shamed and humiliated you because she needed to gobble you up to make up for the fact that she emerged out of female-hating culture, you become repellant of anything that smacks of your once compromised state. You come to hate homosexuals for their ostensibly effeminate, their ostensibly compromised, nature. 
    Tigriel Benthead Taylor isn't all about the pursuit of pleasure. Read his piece, he's admonishing everyone who isn't willing to show guts and stop capitulating to evil ... all those like Obama who kind of want to step to the side. You read what he's expecting of us, all the vigilance and stridence, and you infer as well that he hardly wants us to be party animals, who danced -- I'm sure he would accuse us -- while "freedom" was lost.

    I'm glad though that we're still thought of as party animals. When people are in the mood to feel pure, everything they see as vile actually represents human fulfillment. How this can remain so with the U.S., given its culture of work-hard and its depraved social stratification, is beyond me ... but it's encouraging that somehow this far from our heydey we're still redolent of it. 

    Keyboarder I should have qualified this.  I meant if you broaden the awareness of people who've emerged out of unloving environments, where they were bad every time they didn't do exactly as their parents willed, it'll eventually lead them to feel abandoned by their parents, as having lost their respect and love, and they won't be able to take it. They'll regress. If you broaden the awareness of people outside of these environments, it's all good, of course. 
    Brighid of the Forge Tigriel But if this stuff was everywhere, it'd be silencing, would it not?
    Keyboarder It is fear of difference, and the punishments for harmless acts like these aren't some kind of fake Islamophobia. 

    Fear of difference suggests that if somehow everyone could lose their ignorance, we'd live in a peaceful world. Attend to the tone in someone like Taylor ... does he really seems like someone who could possibly want to dissuaded from going on a crusade? 

    If the removal of ignorance leads to greater opportunity, new ways of understanding your world, which might make you happier, it gets nullified, just like Western "spoils" eventually get rejected by affluent Muslims who'd in their youth indulged. Greater opportunity leads to greater guilt, a greater sense that you are bad/spoiled, which must be projected onto other people for you to feel pure again, for you to feel once again worthy of being loved. 

    People feeling this need can't be shown how dispossessed of vile properties other people actually are, for these other people have become full of their own projections, which they know are very, very bad! 
    ConradSpoke KatLib49 Liam Bently It's not just giving us courage, it's chastising us if we don't "speak up". Your bit -- "have allowed themselves to be cowed into silence" -- is implicating, is chastising us too. We didn't allow ourselves to be cowed; we just didn't take the war bait. 

    Lending us ... well, maybe not courage but encouragement, would be to let us know that we can acknowledge that compared to the most progressive people out there -- whether they are actually found in Sweden, as some of us are supposing, or not -- everyone is regressive, and it doesn't hurt us to point this out rather than fear our current world necessarily must crumble the very moment we overtly acknowledge this fact. If we feel in our hearts that everyone deserves to be equal, we're not shaming anybody if we notice inadequacies; if we see, squarely, who'll be driven to try and kill the kind of provisioning world we want to enjoy that ostensibly makes people selfish and spoiled-rotten ... and doesn't Tayler himself sound like someone who'd like to take a swipe at our ostensibly conflict-averting, soft-hearted, defeat-deserving effeminate world?

    The world is built out of a lot of people who for awhile -- good for them! -- were going progressive. As many of them do the inevitable and slip away, our thoughts shouldn't be on how to punish them but how to reconstitute so the next time we allow ourselves to move beyond conservative norms, we're ready to take advantage and help.  
    Aunt Messy Patrick McEvoy-Halston I thought it was pretty good. Did you hear about the evil nun mentioned elsewhere ... "evil wimmins" can be pretty scary!

  • Original Article: It’s time to fight religion: Toxic drivel, useful media idiots, and the real story about faith and violence
  • SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2015 7:27 PM 
Benthead Good post. What I noticed is how he is ready to humiliate us for our cowardice ... if we are brave, we'll spill our guts and fight; if we "stand to the sides," we're opting for capitulation, and jettisoning our precious patrimony, and don't deserve to be free. This is a scolding he's hearing in his own ears -- "to come back with his shield or on it" -- and its won him over. 

What troubles about religion isn't religion per se, but the unstable mindset that leads one to be emotionally attracted to belief systems that encourage scary ideas concerning purity and sacrifice. He's advertising a path towards our being pure, worthy of praise and love, and it doesn't involve any of the manners we normally assume appropriate to our cosmopolitan society. We don't stand vigilant, we discourse. If things get heated, we do step aside ... and begin again, respectfully, when this tide has subsided. 
le vieux renard When I asked the punishing  nun in fourth grade about, "Thou Shalt not kill", during WW11 and soldiers she looked at me with that haughty look of holiness and said simply soldiers go straight to heaven.

That's what soldiers believe. Which is why the point isn't just to kill but for grand suicide. Why else would Germany wage war against all the world?

I hope you do very little in your life where you could imagine that nun approving of you ... it'd mean you were living an actualized life. 

lets have the talk and avoid a generation of death where the bottom 1% of us die to protect the hegemony of the top 1%

The "generation of death" isn't where you see this 99% vs. 1% split ... Hitler's Germany was one where being more German added more to your status than being rich -- any ignorant ass could daunt the professor, if his/her bloodline was more pure. To add to the prowess of the Volk, you couldn't be starving. 

We're seeing healthcare reforms and some move to living wage reforms, all while under the blanket of 99-vs-1 rhetoric. It could be that at some level we need to believe our age is fundamentally denying, in order to okay reforms that will eventually lead us out. 
Andy W Patrick McEvoy-Halston Registered Citizen LARMARCH5

Getting in just before people were in the mood "to be lead" by Hitler, would've been possible if we were all more cognizant on how little those of punitive childhoods can handle progressive periods like the Weimar. 

Yes, abusive parenting leads one to project one's "badness" into others -- see them as the vile "other". And eliminating them means in effect eliminating all one's own "badness" out of the world, leaving you completely "pure". 

The enemy is also made to represent all the split-off elements of one's parents -- you bond with a father-mother country which is all virtue, and their "nation" is made possessed of all things prowling, mean and cruel ... of everything that lead to terribly abusive things being done to you. 


Andy W Patrick McEvoy-Halston Registered Citizen LARMARCH5 I addressed it. Getting in before, while they hadn't developed into a massed army, would have been better. 
Daniel Thron Too add: the two most powerful things that move people to violence are suffering, like poverty (a form of violence in itself), or fear of violence.

Suffering can actually calm people down -- if they're suffering, they're not spoiling themselves, not being bad ... no need to project one's "badness" onto others and obliterate. 

Ongoing societal growth draws people to remember their own childhood suffering ...  they do in a sense begin to cling to it, out of fear of being abandoned. They do get in mind to want to revenge themselves for it. 

The fear of violence owes to childhood memories as well. Paranoia arises not from the world as it exists today, but out of well-founded knowledge/awareness that in your childhood there were things there to sting you, to scare you, to shame and humiliate you. This is the world that is now perennially before you. Phantoms, ghosts, madness. 
Daniel Thron Americans were simply too happy and fat, and no amount of preaching from the good book about the enemies of God would get them off the couch.

How much do you want to bet that the next president wins because s/he tells Americans that they'd become "too happy, too fat, too lazy to get off the couch." Then, in conjunction with austerity and most of them counting amongst the 99 % struggling to survive, they'll see that yet more will be offered to show how deprived and repentant they'd become ... like perhaps in mass submitting themselves to a traumatic war environment -- PTSD as an acquisition, to shame those still just shopping and Burger Kinging.  

After some grand sacrificial war, it is true that for awhile people are hard to shove off their good times. But then they start feeling guilty and abandoned, and start chasing down people they know will put an end to it ... people who'll implement Depression-ensuring, growth-killing "hard money," and policies like that. 
LARMARCH5 Patrick McEvoy-Halston Love-deprived people, not "a-holes." 
Andy W Registered Citizen LARMARCH5 Interesting response Andy. It still remains true that if we could understand that cultures that have awful childrearing can't allow themselves progress for long before they'll feel the need for a sacrificial purge, we'll ensure we intervene before they shuck off their cosmopolitan growth for regressive provincialism. 

So if the rest of Europe, realizing their childrearing was nowhere near as abusive as Germans', stepped in as soon as Germans starting finding the idea of the "volk," the mythic collective, appealing -- that is, well before they started targeting Jews and killing "useless eaters -- this would've been a model for what we should do. 

We'd understand that the first priority of these primitive peoples was now to lose their independence and bond with a large group entity of some sort, which would be followed soon after by their waging war against all the remaining progressive peoples out there -- the educated, the liberal, the commercial and freedom-enjoying.

I'm not quite sure what we'd do with them at this point, because at some level they'd be done. Maybe just house them well, and give them -- as lovingly as possible -- whatever palliatives that'd help them imagine they were effectively cleansing the world of sin ... some kind of grand scale virtual environment, maybe. It's their children we'd need to focus our attention on ... add that much more kindness, so they'd be nothing at all like their parents. 
Ktimene Patrick McEvoy-Halston

We're not so much left open for fraudsters as we are inspired to chase them down. If you're the sort of person who not only is capable of interpreting and evaluating but freely chooses to use these skills, you're the kind of person bent on making a better life for yourself, making a better world. Too many Americans can only see this attitude as sinful, and so try and obliterate their all-too-transparent sanity -- their call for a more sane, and opportunity-permitting world -- by expanding the concussive thunder of demagogues. They're hoping to park a tank by the intellectual, to shut them the hell up!

It's not actually possible, but if somehow we could be people who were terribly poor at interpreting and evaluating but nevertheless weren't afraid of a progressing world, fraudsters would be recognized for their emotional depravity, instantly, and we'd find ourselves willy-nilly listening to those of higher-order intellectual and emotional capacities. 
We should not toss aside Ockham’s razor and concoct additional factors that supposedly commandeered their behavior. The Charlie Hebdo killers may have come from poor Parisian banlieues, they may have experienced racial discrimination, and they may have even been stung by disdain from “the dominant secular French culture,” yet they murdered not shouting about any of these things, but about “avenging the Prophet Muhammad.” They murdered for Islam.

I like this. But what drives them isn't a chance to be loved by "Islam," but by their mothers. They are committing themselves to destroying that which are avenues of progress -- Charlie Hebdo's sanctioning the importance of critiquing anything which cows. What inspires this is a knowledge that when they inhibited their own self-growth and let themselves be passive vehicles for their mothers' pleasure, they received love from their mothers. When they instead strove and enjoyed Western freedoms, they came to feel hopelessly abandoned and bad. 

Their childrearing was incredibly bad. Their mothers, abused so badly, re-inflicted the abuses upon their children, and absolutely required them to serve as stimulants/anti-depressants. When they instead focused on themselves, they were rejected ... and the children knew, then, that there was no greater evil in the world -- one cows completely before "God," and thereby, maybe, you'll be graced by that gigantic world of heaven known as your mother's approval. You resist and enter the world of freedom and balking your parent's needs for your own, and very soon you won't be able to take the feeling of absolute rejection -- the sense that your mother has absolutely had it with you! -- and you'll go Jihad to slay true "bad children" and die on a field tended by your mother's soothing balm. 

About how abused mother's raise their children, about the origins of terrorism, go here: 



But, the thing is, there are a whole lot of people who are being bypassed by the kinds of freedoms society is increasingly allowing, the kinds of prejudices that are no longer enfranchised/allowed. Denied society as sort of an exoskeleton in which to work out inner psychic troubles and thereby the living of a becalmed everyday life, they're going to go berserk -- kill-people, berserk. The only thing that will stop this is if we all commit to a war where a gigantic number of "bad boys and girls" are slaughtered, surrendered as sacrifices into the angry maw, which we don't want. 

So, we're going to have to get used to it. As much as possible, we need to maintain the temperament appropriate for progress-enjoying people, which is an advancement of the "polite and commercial" that ruled in the 18th-century, but along the same lines: it's not excited, heated, but playful, sifting, and calm. To do this while bombs are going on all around us is going to be difficult, but I understand that Jane Austen managed as much, however much some have disparaged her for it. 

Our problem may not just be extremes. We need to remember that sometimes a whole people can decide they've had it with their progressing selves and suddenly turn provincial, crude and extreme: it's the story of what happened to the Weimar Germans, who went from participating in modernizing, cosmopolitan Germany -- however insufficiently and nervously compared with German Jews -- to eschewing it for some "truer" German folk past. 

But even if suddenly all of Islam and great swaths of Christians and, even, a discouraging number of previously level-headed liberals, start seeing "bad children" everywhere and suit up for war, progressives need to remind themselves that these are all the victims of unloved childhoods and child abuse: as much as possible they need to be stopped, but they certainly deserve no hate. What they're doing was inevitable owing to the fact of their childhoods, and the fact that there is still in this world a will to make things better. 

We need to keep up the temperament of a cosmopolitan populace, which this colourful and enjoyable article is still mostly ramped up against. 

 It has extended life and cured disease and improved agriculture, and it has brought us eugenics and the Tuskegee experiments and Hiroshima and Zyklon-B and a whole host of amazing pesticides and herbicides and preservatives and plastics that have permeated every square millimeter of the planet’s surface and the bodies of all its creatures, and whose long-term effects are not known but don’t look that great.

The book Zuckerberg picked for discussion in his book club is Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature." The book is a reminder that the number of people who have died owing to murder/slaughter has been decreasing over time -- just previously our most progressive citizens rejoiced in them, but it is nevertheless true that primitive societies, our earliest historical origins, were a nightmare of slaughter, even compared to American Civil War/WW1 levels. 

We let go magical thinking and went science in the first place because, owing to gradually improving childrearing, more children were growing up less demon-haunted: the landscape was less one where scary demons were all over the place, in every place/everything, and they could view things a bit more denatured. This meant more societal growth ... and our childrearing has not reached the level where this is something we can completely allow for ourselves. 

Societies use such things as science initially to grow and better provide and then start feeling guilty for it, hopelessly abandoned. They begin to shuck their growth, grow provincial and turn against the progressive elements in their society, and bond into some kind of regressive group -- they could become suddenly more nationalistic, for example. They then project all their negative attributes into some "other" and prepare to slaughter them -- eugenics, Hiroshima. When enough people have died, people feel the skies are cleared again and such things as science progress, much less spared accompanying evil. 

There are a good number of people alive whose childhoods were good enough that they would use science completely benevolently -- they are entirely divorced in emotional/psychic makeup from those who'd suddenly see some absolutely valid need to evaporate an enemy and cleanse ourselves of our "weakest." Earth wins when they're the majority. 


 it’s absurd to assert that questioning the Catholic Church or the National Football League is good, but questioning the name-brand institutions of the scientific world is bad.

Questioning the Catholic Church and the National Football League is done by society's more progressive people. They want to see a reduction in self-flaggelant philosophies and activities.

Questioning science is generally done by society's more regressive. Ongoing societal advancement --  which to them is a bad thing, since to them people who live healthily and enjoyable are being sinful ... i.e. are ignoring "God": their demanding, needy, love-starved parents -- means to them that more children need to be punished and hurt. 

They displace their own "badness" onto children -- so well representing their own "guilty" growing, striving selves -- and encourage their death through disease, economic deprivation and war.  This way, spurned, angry "parents in the sky" are felt to be somewhat ameliorated. 

Questioning name-brand institutions of the scientific world, done by those who can be trusted, is of course being done by progressives who also question the Catholic Church and the National Football League. The more hippieish of them realize that institutions, degrees, professionals admonishing themselves within a "guild," is still about keeping the phantasm Chaos at bay ... it's better than magic, alchemy and a projection-full world, but it's not that evolved/projection-dilluted ... we can let these "authorities" go too. 
bigguns Adventus Adding yet more weight to Hollywood impetus, is creation, or getting a gut ready to burst? Isn't it bested by the critic immediately by the sheer fact that they discern, that they can spot it out, and be angered by its stupid massing? How much is even the "creative's" own inspiration, rather than their simply laying out the next sequence in a narrative drama all the somnambulants amongst us are expecting our lives to be lived by?

Immersing yourself within that matter, distinguishing what might have worked from what should be ignored, isn't risky? isn't work? mightn't itself be potentially a bit of genius that might inspire creative efforts from someone else? 
bigguns Aren't we all just churning over what we experienced, and coming up hopefully with something novel to say?

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