TITLE:
Christian Inversion of Jewish Nationalist Monotheism, and Its Romantic, Revolutionary and Narcissist Corruptions
AUTHORS:
Patrick Madigan
KEYWORDS:
Judaism, Christianity, Monotheism, Secularism, Romanticism, Narcissism, Serial Killing
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Applied Sociology,
Vol.14 No.3,
March
13,
2024
ABSTRACT: It is
important to see Christianity as an internal reform of Judaism that
surprisingly came to overtake its parent and attain independent existence. With
the attack on all expressions of transcendence during the Enlightenment, this
reform flipped into the enemy that, if it could not be expunged, at least
should be flattened and institutionalized, along with its antiquated parent,
if society is to free itself from unpredictable and scurrilous outbreaks of
this nefarious if apparently inveterate tendency and tropism within human
nature, to soar instead into the sunny uplands of a neutralized social reality
liberated from superstition and a consequently calmer public space. It is
therefore disappointing to discover that, when spurs to internal conflict
emanating from rival religious world views or mythic traditions have been
eliminated, the human psyche is not finally set free from internal turmoil and
incitement to external violence, but depressingly discovers itself at the mercy
of a heightened internal sensitivity to accusations of irremedial reproach and
eternal inadequacy, an awareness of social barriers that appear impossible to
cross, of “prizes” that cannot be captured, which replace the earlier confessional
denunciations and expulsions. This heightened
social sensitivity, highlighted by Rousseau and recently expanded and richly
developed by René Girard, suggests that unless disciplined and corrected—that
is, not “left alone”—the human psyche does not return to “psychic
health” and attain “secular bliss”, but rather becomes vulnerable to lower sources of intimidation and
inadequacy; it can even become traumatized, psychotic or beastial from
awareness of ordinary social differences. Otherwise, such developments as “serial
killing”— puzzling and yet distinctive of our era—become difficult to account for. The U.S. has ten times as many
homicides a year as Canada, over one hundred times as many as the U.K. Also,
the U.S. has more serial killings per year than the next six countries
combined.