Conservatives often argue that Liberals are controlled by their emotions, as if God calls humanity to improve itself by necessarily becoming as emotionless as those Christians who decided to torture and mutilate all those who disagreed with them during the middle ages, or drop atom bombs on Japan and implement the "final solution" in Germany. But according to research in the neurosciences, the very opposite is true.
Such a claim by both Conservatives and Christians are not only incredibly ironic, since both subscribe to their "beliefs" for wholly emotional reasons despite the facts and the evidence, but likewise evinces an unfounded worship of what it means to "be a man."
According to such a myopic and paradoxical perspective, men are thought to be "strong" specifically because they can be as Machiavellian as John Wayne or General Custer in massacring anyone from native Americans to Vietcong to Muslims when necessary, by elevating the cold, calculating Spock like rationalism of a computer or a serial killer, as being the mark not of Cain, but of divinity itself.
And one look at the bible, history, or even the world today, clearly supports such a view, which is why Bertrand Russell argued it made a lot more sense to conclude the world was made by the Devil when God wasn't looking.
That many of today's business leaders have been diagnosed as psychopaths who necessarily operate in the exact same way that Christian and other religious leaders have operated in the past, spilling blood in the service of God as much as gold, never leads most Christians to ever suspect that it is the operant environment of Capitalism itself, like Christianity before it, that is only conditioning people to be this way.
This is not to say that Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot were not just as willing to be just as murderous as anyone else, in the service of their own respective economic religions, but that all human systems of "faith," however well intended by those who first articulate them, eventually all devolve into similar forms of barbarisms, and for always the same reasons.
Hence the reason Hilaire Belloc described Communism and Capitalism as "hellish twins," even as he failed to understand that such secular economic religions were simply following in the footsteps of the theistic religions that had preceded them, and from which they drew all of their lessons of manipulation, marketing, and control.
Instead, the stalwart Christian only denies that Capitalism - an economic system that has changed the world the most in the shortest period of recorded history - is in anyway causing the very "changes" in society that both the Conservative and the Christian rail everywhere agaisnt as simply the result of godlessness, atheism, Liberals, feminists, socialism, and communism, and nothing more.
For them, if people would simply devote themselves to becoming just as obsessive and addicted to God and religion as they are to the drugs, violence, video games, celebrity, beauty, wealth, fashion, status, technology, war, and everything else the Capitalist religion can market to its captured audience of emotionally addicted sycophants, the world could come as close to a Christian Capitalist "utopia" (that Conservatives only ever condemn Liberals for seeking) as spiritually fallen miscreants like ourselves could ever hope to achieve.
Conservatives and Christians know this, of course, because they have as much "faith" in their "beliefs" and their "God" as the men sitting around the table in Wannsee in 1942, who all sought to preserve the superiority of their own Christian culture by planning the murder of 20 millions Jews. For such a conclusion is the natural result of the hyper rationalist, regardless of whether it is grounded in the science of Darwin or the religion of St Augustine - the latter of which believed that not only were emotions were for women, homosexuals, and the weak, but that torture was the best method for converting people into total emotional dependence upon God. In modern terms, Augustine was simply showing his awareness of the manipulative power that trauma has on the human mind, that today we refer to as "batter wife syndrome," learned helplessness, Stockholm syndrome, and PTSD, among others.
To such men, God is Mr. Spock,and the devil has the sensibilities of a poet.
Such a claim by both Conservatives and Christians are not only incredibly ironic, since both subscribe to their "beliefs" for wholly emotional reasons despite the facts and the evidence, but likewise evinces an unfounded worship of what it means to "be a man."
According to such a myopic and paradoxical perspective, men are thought to be "strong" specifically because they can be as Machiavellian as John Wayne or General Custer in massacring anyone from native Americans to Vietcong to Muslims when necessary, by elevating the cold, calculating Spock like rationalism of a computer or a serial killer, as being the mark not of Cain, but of divinity itself.
And one look at the bible, history, or even the world today, clearly supports such a view, which is why Bertrand Russell argued it made a lot more sense to conclude the world was made by the Devil when God wasn't looking.
That many of today's business leaders have been diagnosed as psychopaths who necessarily operate in the exact same way that Christian and other religious leaders have operated in the past, spilling blood in the service of God as much as gold, never leads most Christians to ever suspect that it is the operant environment of Capitalism itself, like Christianity before it, that is only conditioning people to be this way.
This is not to say that Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot were not just as willing to be just as murderous as anyone else, in the service of their own respective economic religions, but that all human systems of "faith," however well intended by those who first articulate them, eventually all devolve into similar forms of barbarisms, and for always the same reasons.
Hence the reason Hilaire Belloc described Communism and Capitalism as "hellish twins," even as he failed to understand that such secular economic religions were simply following in the footsteps of the theistic religions that had preceded them, and from which they drew all of their lessons of manipulation, marketing, and control.
Instead, the stalwart Christian only denies that Capitalism - an economic system that has changed the world the most in the shortest period of recorded history - is in anyway causing the very "changes" in society that both the Conservative and the Christian rail everywhere agaisnt as simply the result of godlessness, atheism, Liberals, feminists, socialism, and communism, and nothing more.
For them, if people would simply devote themselves to becoming just as obsessive and addicted to God and religion as they are to the drugs, violence, video games, celebrity, beauty, wealth, fashion, status, technology, war, and everything else the Capitalist religion can market to its captured audience of emotionally addicted sycophants, the world could come as close to a Christian Capitalist "utopia" (that Conservatives only ever condemn Liberals for seeking) as spiritually fallen miscreants like ourselves could ever hope to achieve.
Conservatives and Christians know this, of course, because they have as much "faith" in their "beliefs" and their "God" as the men sitting around the table in Wannsee in 1942, who all sought to preserve the superiority of their own Christian culture by planning the murder of 20 millions Jews. For such a conclusion is the natural result of the hyper rationalist, regardless of whether it is grounded in the science of Darwin or the religion of St Augustine - the latter of which believed that not only were emotions were for women, homosexuals, and the weak, but that torture was the best method for converting people into total emotional dependence upon God. In modern terms, Augustine was simply showing his awareness of the manipulative power that trauma has on the human mind, that today we refer to as "batter wife syndrome," learned helplessness, Stockholm syndrome, and PTSD, among others.
To such men, God is Mr. Spock,and the devil has the sensibilities of a poet.
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