ATHEISM IS NOT A NEW RELIGION

Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Daniel Dennett

On Martin Marty’s “Sightings” Sightings@uchicago.edu;  was a discussion of the phrase the “Church Militant,” that connects the historical phrase to the contemporary and IMHO demonic bargain between neoatheists and anti-Islamists.  I had not understood this before.

The same story was also blogged here:

http://religiondispatches.org/atheisms-dark-side-aiding-the-trump-agenda/?utm_source=Religion+Dispatches+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c06b342515-RD_Daily_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_742d86f519-c06b342515-42405913

“Freedman [a NYTimes reporter] quotes White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who in a speech at the Vatican in 2014 “called on the ‘church militant’ to fight a global war against… ‘Islamic fascism’ and international financial elites,” etc. Freedman condenses the “Church Militant” agenda to stances against—surprise, surprise!—“globalism, immigration, social-welfare programs and abortion,” and for “an existential war against radical Islam.”

The media, with their usual obtuse need for headlines, created a category for certain social thinkers.  According to Wikipedia, always avid to “know better,” says “New Atheism is a term coined by journalists to describe the positions promoted by atheists of the twenty-first century. This modern-day atheism and secularism is advanced by critics of religion,^[1] a group of modern atheist thinkers and writers who advocate the view that superstition, religion and irrationalism should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever their influence arises in government, education and politics.”

The names usually waved around are Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris.  All of them could be demolished by French-Algerian deconstructionists, who specialize in revealing the assumptions behind assertions.  The New Atheists are easily revealed as merely decapitated Christians, who wish to have all the attributions of the system but without that inconvenient Father/Boss personified by a Monotheistic God.  THEY want to be the ultmate authority themselves.  Dennett’s long white beard gives him away.  Hitchens was the most attractive figure, partly because he was funny.  Partly because he was the least overbearing about the conflation of “reason” with their own opinions based on the standing order, which has been good to them..  None of these guys were feminists, but Hitchens probably would at least admit it was reasonable.

When I was working for Multnomah County Animal Control, a “new budgeting strategy” arrived that called for a “zero base” accounting.  Before that, we just took the old one, added what we knew we needed — plus additional percentages for what we knew would be removed again by the politicians who wanted to look thrifty and called it good, though it was always a little more every year.  The idea of “zero base” was that there had to be evidence proving the amount needed.  No gauzy assumptions.  

The New Atheists were doing old-fashioned conventional thinking, accepting what had been the status quo as the context, knocking out what they didn’t like, adding in what made them look good.  “Zero-based” theology would first of all have to remove the prefix of “theo” since there are systems that have no god at all, thus no theology.  Conflating the idea of monotheism with the only definition of religion, meant that there was nothing truly new about it.  By using the term “New Atheists” the relationship of dependence on the old system remains.  

Theism is derived, the deconstructionists would point out, from the father/chieftain tribes of the Middle East, which is why their headquarters are piled up there on top of each other.  It is more properly called a “three brothers” system, since each of the big Theisms is derived from the sons of Abraham.  Therefore, it is about who is the rightful heir of the father, which persists into modern times both in military adventures and in the Roman Catholic Church, which treats the Pope as the inheritor of Peter’s Church.  (Jesus had no institution.)  Each of the three “brothers” is also prone to inheritance schisms within their movements and those wars are often the more vicious and bitter.

Bannon is quoted as calling for war against ‘Islamic fascism’ and international financial elites,” this last being transparently Anti-Semitism.  It’s still family war, in Abraham’s house where the Game of Thrones gets played out again and again, this time with predator drones and predatory governments shuttling money.  Evidently it doesn’t help to be Asian, since Kim Jung-Un and family demonstrate the same tendencies:  the young males kill the old male and ascend to his throne.  One source of democracy is the cost and pain of this rivalry making the system miserable for everyone, including the aspiring tyrants.  But democracy is a lot of work and it becomes much easier to let “Dad” do it.

Instead of pointing out all this obviousness, which no one seems able to resolve, perhaps it is time to describe the TRUE new religions, which really are “zero-based,” that is, proved out in benefit to people and the world and not anthropocentric.  Some people like to call them “spiritual.”  Others say environmental or earth-based.

The “three-brothers” Theism of Abraham is worn out.  Or maybe it’s just co-opted by greed.  Or maybe the central illusion of “family” has crashed.  I’ve been thinking about “writing” (Sacred Books) and “bookkeeping” (Venture capitalism yielding interest) and the extent to which they describe the Middle East troika, even enable it.  What if both written laws and banking practices were at least de-emphasized, replaced by new thinking that is image-based and non-scoring.  Esp. images of natural processes that are cyclical, self-sustaining, because they are as self-correcting as the cycles in the human bodies controlling homeostasis: hunger and thirst, waking and sleep.

As an example of what I mean, who could have guessed that George W. Bush would have followed Carter into a post-presidency that has stature and meaning far beyond the desk job of the president?  Who knew that this inarticulate man, dependent on his father, could create images of heroes — not just one, but a series.  And not depicted as violent superheroes but as surviving wounded, standing with comrades. 

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/george-w-bush-says-we-need-answers-about-trump-and-russia-vgtrn?utm_source=vicetwitterus

Bush’s portraits invoke the values of Jesus.  They really ARE Christian, New Testament, accepting of suffering, and entirely egalitarian.  Not about God but about humans.

George W. Bush

IS TRUMP A NUT CASE?

TRUMP, undisguised.

Dealing with Trump is at least giving us a lot to work with while considering mental health, a subject desperately in need of review for a number of reasons:  the rising tide of Alzheimer’s, recreational use of deranging drugs, interference of cultural concepts with more formal scientific concepts, competing claims about cures, and the enormous new knowledge about neurology.  Then there is the persisting phenomenon of people who protect those who think they are chickens because the protectors need the eggs.  This is sometimes called enabling, or co-dependence.

Lately the new term has been “reverse narcissism” which is feeding the narcissist a steady stream of praise and reassurance.  Characteristically, the narcissist is the one with the power, prestige, and charisma, and then the “tender” tries to appear humble or even secret, traditionally “the power behind the throne.”  In our culture they are gender-role assigned, women meant to be the co-dependent because in the past only men could earn a living — a gender assignment going back to hunting mastodons — or provide protection likewise prehistoric.  In modern times we sometimes see “folie å deux” where symbiotic, interdependent relationships share a delusion that is hard to assign to one or the other.  Which is the primary narcissist between the Duke and Duchess of Windsor?

I’ll come back to this.  First it has become clear that Trump has Alzheimers at a fairly advanced stage.  The average length of time from first diagnosis to death by brain dysfunction is about eight years.  One of the most obvious signs is disconnection and fabulizing to cover up failure to comprehend or remember.  Watching vids of Trump, even edited, shows these signs.  If you are interested in this aspect, use Google, but probably if you are interested it’s because you know someone with it or worry about yourself.  Both scientific and narrative material abounds.  Alzheimers is the 8th most prevalent cause of death in the US.

Second, what Alzheimer’s does by its destruction of the ability to reflect is remove what’s called “executive function.”  Wikipedia is handy.  “Executive functions (collectively referred to as executive function and cognitive control) are a set of cognitive processes – including attentional control, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, as well as reasoning, problem solving, and planning – that are necessary for the cognitive control.”  In short, the stuff the Executive Branch of the US government (the President) is supposed to do.  By now it’s clear that Trump is simply unable to do these things.  It’s not a matter of temperament or strategy:  he can NOT be presidential, he can NOT perform presidential duties.  He is being stage-managed into an illusion.

In addition, his baseline personality is released from restraint by the Alzheimers.  Persons with benign and friendly personalities remain that way.  This is where the narcissism diagnosis comes in.  Narcissism is a personality syndrome badly named, since it is NOT about being in love with oneself because one is beautiful.  It is rather being totally absorbed in oneself but needing constant reassurance from outside oneself, completely unaware of the reality of others.  The result is lashing out, vindictive revenge, rewards and punishments meant to control, and other refusals to face reality.  This is not cruelty, enjoying the pain of others, but rather amorality, inability to realize that others can be in pain and mocking them when they are.  (Sorry, Sen. Schumer.  If you can’t cry for the debasement of America at this point, what CAN a person cry for?)

So, psychotic, amoral, sociopathic — who approves?  Bannon.  Does he have Alzheimer’s?  No sign that he does except that he’s a slob.  He declares himself to be Leninist, a revolutionary who wants to smash government, which is conceived as like the dictatorship of the Russian Tsar.  Lenin (which is an alias) was from a gifted, privileged, educated family that became revolutionary because of resisting Tsarist control.  This has to do with the struggle of an emerging middle class or proletariat.  I don’t know what Bannon’s personal story is.  In this relationship with Trump he stands somewhere between co-dependent and manipulator.  There’s enough evidence to describe him as a sociopath (one who doesn’t care for society) but also a psychopath (one who injures himself or others without regard for the consequences because of delusion).

We have assigned roles to deal with such people: psychiatrists, who are medical doctors authorized to prescribe meds, and psychologists, who use the research in the field of psychology.  There are also psychoanalysts, who try to understand a person’s thinking in order to find mistaken ideas, unhelpful beliefs, and the like.  (They might be either psychiatrists or psychologists.  The first would treat Alzheimer’s patients.  The second might more likely support and comfort the families of the patients.)  Over the years these functions have become rather gender-assigned in the same way that doctors and nurses are.  MD psychiatrists tend to be men and clinical psychologists are often women.

A curious criteria for psychosis that I ran across was that the client must be in distress himself.  Trump doesn’t seem to be suffering overtly, though many feel he is insecure and grasping at straws.

Because there was an attempt to impeach or otherwise remove Goldwater from the presidential race an ethical rule was devised.  (From ever-useful Wikipedia.) “The Goldwater rule is the informal name given to of Section 7.3 in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) code of ethics^[1] which states it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures they have not examined in person and obtained consent from to discuss their mental health in public statements.^[2] It is named after presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.^[3]

“The issue arose in 1964 when Fact published the article "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater."^[3][4] The magazine polled psychiatrists about American Senator Barry Goldwater and whether he was fit to be president.^[5][6] In Goldwater v. Ginzburg Goldwater filed a libel suit in response to the article, and he won $75,000 in damages.”

This is what is putting the brakes on the 25th Amendment, which was also a 1964 response to a problem, specifically the death, resignation, impeachment, or otherwise removal of a president.  In a society of laws, it’s ambiguous but useful.  In a sub-society of lawyers (the US Congress) it is a recipe for paralysis.  I don’t know what $75,000 would be in equivalent 2017 dollars.

When one googles these issues, it gradually becomes clear that the medical doctors are more willing to say that Trump is demented and unable to perform his duties.  Partly they are helped by video evidence which demonstrates his behavior.  Partly they are helped by our consciousness of genetics, and the fact that his father had Alzheimers.  But they have to consider their code, though many doctors these days brush codes aside; for instance, when they help torture.

But the clinical psychologists, who tend to be women whose practices are consoling, supporting, and guiding people in distress, trying to understand how they see the world, seem to want to believe that Trump is “crazy like a fox,” merely pretending to be Mortimer Snerd in order to cover his real motives and abilities.  Of course, if one is conscious of his close relationship with Bannon, this is not reassuring because those motives might not be benign.  Bannon has said he is out to destroy the standing order (he seems to ee the small percentage of rich folks controlling the world at the expense of the middle class as a modern version of the Tsar) and it appears that Trump is his instrument, lacking both conscience and awareness.

One suspects that the American subconscious so involved in “Game of Thrones” is particularly susceptible to all this melodrama, especially if they think it is aimed out outsiders.  It may be approaching spring, but winter is coming in the minds of many.