[Note that this article ends with a longish link. I've published a Kindle Reader collection of those blog posts that I consider most impactful and useful. The link leads to my "author's page" and to the book, a sample read, and other information. While it may seem a bit silly, redundant, narcissistic – whatever – to put a price ($9.99) on blog articles that have always been and remain free to read, I think a more easily accessible grouping has some value. The day may come when I can afford to make a paperback version, which will be even more "user friendly."
Professors of clinical counseling and psychotherapy: Get your students to acquire this collection. You know their thinking is generic and safe. Give them some real food for thought!]
My family is Jewish, or was Jewish, as the only ones left are my sister and I. I attended Sunday school obliviously from first grade through 10th grade Confirmation but didn’t learn a damned thing other than that the Jews are the “chosen people,” they don’t eat ham, and there are a lot of holidays. I was bar mitzvah’d and mouthed the haftorah Hebrew passage without understanding a word of it and never asking the meaning. My ceremony-culminating speech (in English) was so clichéd and fake-intent that it must have embarrassed the temple audience. In my Confirmation paper I declared my atheism and floaty ideas for my future.
I haven’t been to synagogue since around 1982 when my first wife dragged me there three or four times after she converted from Baptist to Jew. She was fanatical; I was an empty head floating in a pool of rancid memory-sensations.
I don’t have any beliefs that could be called “religious.” None, nada, nix, nihil, zero. I don’t favor Jewish people over others, though I have nothing against them. But there are millions of people – Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, neo-Nazis and probably some Christians – who think I should be dead or killed because I didn’t convert out of my family heritage.
Let us judge these pathetics in a different way than we would judge bad Israeli settlers and those wreaking over-wide retribution for Hamas’s terror attack. We are judging them for a specific psychological problem: the ego-syntonic ("I'm dysfunctional and proud of it") fusion of projection (of their individual childhood-based pain, debility and misery), delusion and destruction.
It’s not hard to be delusional. Self-esteem deficit (which is nearly ubiquitous) can require people to believe nonsense in order to maintain a feeling of identity. A person may absolutely need to believe he is smarter than he really is or that his parents had positive intent despite all the harm they did to him. A Narcissist must believe he is perfect. It is too easy to project, blaming other people, the other political party, God and “life” for our failures (when we should be assigning first cause to our parents). It may even be a second-nature state in the human psyche, based in birth trauma or an instantly repressed infliction of soul murder in childhood,* to transiently wish the extremity of death on an animal or a person. It’s when that anti-life spasm becomes ratified as a conviction, religion or policy that we should call “evil.” It’s the converting of a mental negative – a feeling – to a mental positive – a willful delusion – that best defines evil.
I doubt that more than the number of Jewish people one could see under a microscope think ordinary Palestinians and Muslims should be dead or killed on “principle.” Only the minority of a species of fanatical Jews – that’s to say, the psychological complement to Jew-haters – might wish mass death on a culture. The majority are average people with a normal conscience, many of them stoked to fury, now, by instances and centuries of crimes against their name.
Condemn them and you have the disorder of laziness and thoughtlessness. Hate them and you may have the problem of evil. There is no equivalence between normal human rage and destructive, willful delusion.
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* Leonard Shengold, M.D., Soul Murder.
