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| Code Red: Weird Religion Approaches |
Thus, in good times religion is composed of various instances of the more benign word generators and practices.
However, when human endeavors and/or religions cause unintended or unforeseen consequences, "regular crazy" can morph into "crazy on steroids."
In yesterday's post I provided some examples.
Such as Senator Inhofe's statement that "God's still up there", the "arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."
Let's describe it as the cultural amygdala doing what our individual amygdala does under an overdose of stress:
Chronic stress also does bad things to the nervous system. Stress kills neurons in the part of the brain called the hippocampus and weakens the cables between neurons, so they can’t talk to each other. This impairs the formation and retrieval of long-term memory. The opposite thing happens in the amygdala, which is where we see fear in a brain scanner. In the hippocampus, stress causes stuff to shrivel up. But stress feeds the amygdala. It actually gets bigger. Chronic stress creates a hyper-reactive, hysterical amygdala, and this tells us tons about what stress has to do with anxiety disorders.(Abiotic Evolution: Can It Explain An Origin For The Toxins of Power? - 3). When a doctor tells a patient that there is nothing more modern medicine can do, and that the patient is going to die, generally an overdose of stress happens.
That individual's normal amygdala becomes a "hysterical amygdala", which can also happen in many strong stressful circumstances way short of impending death.
Those who understand what the amygdala is will understand that code red is the only way to describe the situation of religion based on, or improperly reacting to, a hysterical cultural amygdala.
For example, this is what happened when an individual amygdala got a bit crowded by a tumor:
... [Whitman] killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. Then he began to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As her boyfriend knelt to help her, Whitman shot him as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and an ambulance driver who came to rescue them.(Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala). The delusions, illusions, fears, and psychotic behaviors that can ensue will inevitably lead to strange places.
The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more. The story of his rampage dominated national headlines the next day. And when police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even stranger: in the early hours of the morning on the day of the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight … I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationa[l]ly pinpoint any specific reason for doing this …Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.
For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain — because he suspected it had.I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala.
And during such times, economic strategy, military strategy, social strategy, and even religious strategy is subject to the ensuing madness:
The Church, too, had her place in the feudal system. She too was granted territorial fiefs, became a vassal, possessed immunities. It was the result of her calm, wide sympathy, turning to the new nations, away from the Roman Empire, to which many Christians thought she was irrevocably bound. By the baptism of Clovis she showed the baptism of Constantine had not tied her to the political system. So she created a new world out of chaos, created the paradox of barbarian civilization. In gratitude kings and emperors endowed her with property; and ecclesiastical property has not infrequently brought evils in its train. The result was disputed elections; younger sons of nobles were intruded into bishoprics, at times even into the papacy. Secular princes claimed lay investiture of spiritual offices. The cause of this was feudalism, for a system that had its basis on land tenure was bound at last to enslave a Church that possessed great landed possessions.(American Feudalism - 2, cf. Mass Suicide & Murder Pact). If the governments continue with their current madness (increasing nuclear weaponry & pollution of air, water, land), it is likely to become a form of unstoppable authoritarianism:
Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want -- which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal. In my day, authoritarian fascist and authoritarian communist dictatorships posed the biggest threats to democracies, and eventually lost to them in wars both hot and cold. But authoritarianism itself has not disappeared, and I'm going to present the case in this book that the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.(Authoritarianism: Past And Future Is Now). Authoritarianism can go nowhere if the masses of the citizenry maintain their cool and reject despots.
Keep an eye out, over the next decade, for religious madness of a sort never seen before.
This is the religious sentiment required of hopium based serfdom (a.k.a. "authoritarian followers"):