Lacewing wrote: ↑Mon Nov 13, 2023 9:37 pm"Fanaticism as individual pathology: It is based upon a constellation of psychological traits including personal fragility, a belief in the precariousness of certain values, and a form of group orientation. The fanatic is distinguished by four features: the adoption of one or more sacred values; the need to treat these values as unconditional in order to preserve identity; the sense that the status of these values is threatened by lack of widespread acceptance; and the identification with a group, where the group is defined by shared commitment to the sacred value. These features are mutually reinforcing, and dispose the agent towards the types of violent intolerance that we typically associate with fanaticism."
All this seems true, if indeed our own Immanuel can fairly be categorized as a fanatic.
Yet what concerns me is something that extends well beyond Immanuel Can. With that said we have to linger a bit over what IC
is. Briefly, he is an evangelical Christian, a branch of Protestantism, and in addition he is a *zealous* Christian Zionist. Within traditional Christianity (European Catholicism) these are heresies. But to assign the title *heresy* one must be operating ideologically within that system. To define a heretic is to define simultaneously an orthodoxy. But let us leave this entire question aside for a moment.
I do not wish in any ultimate sense to undermine Immanuel's 'belief system' and that has not been my object. In the game that is played here, among those who do not and cannot define themselves as Christian, that is the form the game takes. As if Immanuel will all on the sudden have some sort of epiphany and realize [this-and-such] and then ask us all for forgiveness.
[And pay me an indemnification for the terrible insults he leveled against my
style!].
Because my own ideology is essentially Platonic I opt to see things in terms of *levels*. Therefore I would ask what is the essential core imperative that moves in the Christian worldview and ethic? It is, I think, to *be good* despite the enormous temptations, in this mutable world of woe, to behave very differently. I grant you that *being good* is up for definition, but I also assert that the general Christian ethic, which in my own view is best expressed in
Catholic social doctrine, is quite sound. When there is no imperative, defined socially and understood metaphysically, it seems that people can sink into lower levels of striving and rank materialism.
Therefore what preserves the ideal realm, which I maintain is metaphysical to this life, is really what we should be concerned with. To maintain therefore *a conceptual pathway* to what we define as god and godly is not at all a wasted effort.
My critique of IC is not so much that he attempts to hold to a high ethical standards while sunk within a lower-level identification with all sorts of condemnatory features, but that he has real difficulty in understanding that varying religious structures attempt the same thing. Judaism and Christianity are
contemptuously condemning of other moralities and it is this willful blindness that I object to. The
asshole Yahweh best epitomizes this trait.
The idea of revelation that comes from *on high* is in my view a metaphysical
picture that should be respected and understood as such.
The *fanatic* that your paragraph defines (psycho-socially) is not
absolutely wrong but is rather
substantially misdirected.
I am reminded of what Glouchester said after he lost his terrestrial eyesight:
I stumbled when I saw. His seeing, he realized, was defective because it lacked some important, perhaps indescribable element. It is when he lost his eyes that another level of revelation opened up.
