My army of leprechauns is deadly. Watch out.

I don’t see it as a recruiting moment per se - more of a tribalist identity thing.  Erick is loudly proclaiming that he belongs to the tribe that beats people with religious moralism.  He’ll have a number of followers cluck along with him and that’s that.  He’s ‘preaching to the choir’ to get his ‘attaboys’, not trying to make some kind of real case for anything.

He may believe that he’s making a real case for something, but that’s because he’s also loudly proclaiming that he belongs to the tribe that rewards members for displaying their idiocy in public.

Erick Erickson wants to be a Mover and Shaker in the pantheon of right-wing demagogues, so he’s pushing the hate-porn speech as hard as he knows how. Nice analysis, and lots of useful links.

When Christian blowhards say things like “Atheists are upset with me, but God is upset with them,” my immediate mental response is, “OH NOES!!!” That’s how scary it is.

There may not be much causation between criminality and religion, but I´m not so sure. What I´m sure about is that you´ll find it between violence/warfare and religion. Deeply religious groups are far easier to control and manipulate by would be tyrants or territory hungry kings.

I wonder how many people are both goat-fuckers and child molestors?  I never heard of anyone being charged with both.  I bet it’s pretty rare.  Though maybe more common in Erickson’s circle of acquaintances.

For the record, it actually seems like atheists are underrepresented in prison populations.

Though surely some of that has to be because finding Jesus in prison is a time-honored way of appearing to be more rehabilitated.

@Daisy:

There’s a “kids” joke in there somewhere, but damned if I can find it right now.

Maybe, Nony, but the actual words he used were recruitment words.  So, I’m not going to split hairs.  He was so over the top that I think he may actually think he can bully some folks into becoming Christians.

Maria, that’s why I said I think religion is good social control, but going to war for your king =/ criminality.  They’re both violent, but it’s facetious to suggest they’re understood as exactly the same.  On the contrary, we tend to valorize soldiers while, of course, punishing criminals. 

The point was that I don’t think personal faith influences morality one way or another.  Morality comes from somewhere else.

Does “Apathetic agnostics don’t care whether I live or die” fit within Twitter constraints?

Maybe, mr., but I think it’s probably just not a causal relationship.

I’ve long felt that there are a lot of Christians who should be praying that the atheists are right. ‘Cause if they’re not, they’re gonna spend eternity roasting in lakes of fire.

I mean, it’s not like Erickson is going to ask for forgiveness for past sins, right? Admitting fault or guilt isn’t conservative. So there’s a long, long list of Erickson’s sins just sitting on St. Peter’s ledger, waiting for him to show up at the Pearly Gates…

If he’s gotta pick between Hell and oblivion, maybe he’d better keep his fingers crossed for oblivion…

My new answer to these “dire” threats from Xtianists:

“Oh yeah? You and what army of leprechauns?”

“I mean, it’s not like Erickson is going to ask for forgiveness for past sins, right? Admitting fault or guilt isn’t conservative. So there’s a long, long list of Erickson’s sins just sitting on St. Peter’s ledger, waiting for him to show up at the Pearly Gates…”

People who have been “saved” by Jesus don’t have to ask for forgiveness. They’re ALREADY forgiven, so its all good. Its a pretty sweet deal really.

Erickson is such a goddamn child. “People are being mean to me, but GOD WILL SHOW THEM. So nyah!” Seriously, see if you can imagine that line of thought being a comfort to anyone with a mental age greater than 12. I know I can’t.

He’s ‘preaching to the choir’ to get his ‘attaboys’, not trying to make some kind of real case for anything.

While I agree, I also think, as an extension of what I said above, that it’s largely about validation for Erickson. God seems like a big daddy substitute in his mind.

I’m reasonably certain that if, having been convicted (no doubt unfairly, since I tend to keep to the straight and narrow) of some crime, and having appeared before the parole board and been denied because I wasn’t spending enough time praising Jebus in the prison chapel, my atheist self would be mouthing the words to whatever nonsense the parole board was unconstitutionally insisting that I believe.  Wouldn’t make it true, but it might get my ass out of prison.

Amanda, yes, and no, what you say about morality precisely is what makes me doubt there is no causation: If your morality comes from inside, as is the case with most religious people and obviously every non believer, it is harder to justify some things to yourself. If it comes from outside (I´m thinking about the fundamentalist mindset: God told you it´s right, so it is), you can always tell yourself god is with you (Killing abortion providers would be the rarest, but the easiest example, as would be honor killings; things that the wider community would consider criminal but “your” community would consider righteous), or less obvious examples as stealing from a “sinner”, or murdering sex workers….or politicians whose opinions you dislike.

You are right though in saying religious violence is usually a group phenomenon (social control), and individual criminality helped by religious ideas is probably minor in numbers, but I think there is a kind of individual that appreciates religion due to it´s giving excuse to otherwise inexcusable behaviour, and even if excuse and social sanction from the wider community, as you say, are far more powerful than excuse is alone, both have some influence by themselves.

Scott, that´s why I think Erickson is convinced St. Peter has him in his favourite list. That´s what’s most horryfing, he says all that with a “clean” conscience.

Ok, I’m gonna go off on a tangent about threat of punishment in general.

One thing I’ve noticed about conservatives is that they think punishment, or threat of it, is the most effective way of influencing behavior.  You see it in everything from being “tough on crime” to spanking children, to their worship of the free market.  They think that if you hit a kid, that kid will rationally decide next time to weigh the punishment of being hit with the benefit of doing whatever bad thing they’re doing, but it just don’t work that way in reality.  It actually teaches kids (and adults in other context) to become better at not getting caught.

And they also have this delusion that in a perfectly free market, the super-duper-rational business owners will weigh the risk of losing customers and they’ll screen their produce for Hep B or make sure that their cars don’t explode on impact, and that the perfectly rational customer will never take the risk of getting the contaminated vegetables for a cheaper price.  They also think the the death penalty must be a good deterrent, because criminals won’t commit the crime and risk the punishment.  I have a coworker who thinks the minimal social safety net that we have in the U.S. makes kids lazy.  He thinks we need to let poor people die of starvation, because he thinks that will motivate kids to do well in school to avoid such a fate.  Nevermind that providing social services makes kids to better in school; reality won’t get in the way of his ideology.  And of course, many people believe that a fear of Hell will make people behave better.  Some frame it as doing the right thing for the reward of Heaven, but it’s two sides of the same coin. 

They dislike birth control, sex ed, and abortion because they think the punishment of having a baby will convince people to just stop having sex (which they have decided is immoral for some reason).  The Pope thinks that giving out condoms will make people have sex 100,000 times more often so that the spread of HIV will actually increase because the reduction in spread caused by the condoms will not make up for the extra sex that people have.  And of course there are all the zero-tolerance policies and Scared Straight programs that rarely actually help teenagers.  I could go on and on with endless examples.

Their fundamental misunderstanding of how people make decisions leads them into this warped thinking.  And it spreads to nearly every single issue that they have.

So I’m actually getting to a point here.  The reality is that people generally don’t base their behaviors on the risk of punishment.  I’m not saying that punishment has no effect; it clearly does.  But most of use avoid bad behaviors because we actually believe they are bad and want to avoid them.

I’ve never murdered anyone, just like probably everyone else here.  And there has never been a time in my entire life that risk of punishment has prevented me from murdering.  There was never an instance where I said to myself, “Gee, I’d really like to murder that person, but I don’t want to go to jail so I won’t do it”.  The vast majority of people would never commit murder even if there was a 100% guarantee that they would get away with it and never face any punishment, either during this life or after death.  There are a few people out there who would, and that’s where punishment has some effect, but it reaches saturation pretty fast.  So if threat of jail doesn’t stop them, threat of Hell probably won’t either.  For the vast majority of people, you could remove punishment altogether and they still wouldn’t murder.  For the tiny minority, adding extra threat of punishment won’t be enough to stop them.

I’m just appalled at the right’s reaction.  So many have doubled-down and continue to scream not that their political opponents’ policy ideas are wrong, but they are unAmerican traitors who want the downfall of the country; I.e., repeating the same rhetoric that created the “uncivility"in the first place.

And Erickson’s place is a cesspool of religious idiots telling him how saintly he is while calling for harm on those unAmerican leftists who are politicizing the assassination attempt of a politician.  They seriously don’t understand how or why anyone would be offended by claiming there’s not enough Jesus worship being discussed in reference to violence directed toward a Jewish person.  Cause that’s never led to bad things in the past, certainly not blood libel.

Ugh.  I’d never been there before, and I’m not going back.

Not without an army of leprechauns, at least.

I realize that my previous post was TL;DR as I was waxing philosophical.  Shorter version: conservatives don’t understand what motivates people to behave the way they do, and threat of punishment is far less effective than most people would expect.  Most people would never murder even if there were no punishment for it.

My army’s leprechauns ride unicorns!

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: since religion is made up, it’s endlessly malleable.”

This is 100% correct.  The first thing Christians do when one of theirs commits a crime is to say “they weren’t really Christian.”  But religion itself is itself (ironically) evolving.  Even if Jared was an atheist, the dude held anti-choice beliefs and we’ve seen with the “Raving (A)theist” (BTW, what the fuck happened to him and did he ever reveal his real name?) that an anti-choice atheist will evolve into a full-blown Christian when they are pushed in the right direction. 

Also as a personal belief I think by default that anybody who commits a crime is not thinking rationally and violates reason which is more associated with secularism and science than religion, so I don’t know how ardent of an atheist Jared really was.  And yes, I’m using the “no true atheist” argument Vox Day loves to complain about.

People who have been “saved” by Jesus don’t have to ask for forgiveness. They’re ALREADY forgiven, so its all good. Its a pretty sweet deal really.

Yep, a “ticket to heaven” allows for a lot of crappy behaviour here on Earth, especially against those who don’t believe in one’s flavour of Invisible Bearded Sky Man™. As a result, I’m always extra wary when doing business with someone makes a big deal about his religious faith.

I don’t disagree, Maria, that religion has often traditionally been used to override someone’s internal morality.  But that’s why I indicated that it’s a form of social control.  In other cases, it’s used to reinforce it. I’m just not seeing the evidence that religion is all one way or all the other.  It mostly seems like a mish-mash. 

I think religion is bad because it’s an affront to rationality, not morality. I think morality is just too complex to be boiled down that way.

conservatives don’t understand what motivates people to behave the way they do, and threat of punishment is far less effective than most people would expect.  Most people would never murder even if there were no punishment for it.

It’s as much about projection as it as about daddy-worship—many of them just don’t trust themselves not to do the wrong thing.

“Erick Erickson wants to be a Mover and Shaker in the pantheon of right-wing demagogues, so he’s pushing the hate-porn speech as hard as he knows how.”

He’s got recent examples in people who made it without any obvious talent except a loud mouth (Beck, Palin) so he’s trying to get himself a ticket on the gravy train.  Like them, he’s making himself into a political entertainer, while at the same time he’s raising his profile.

It worked for countless other Reichwing hacks like Phyllis Schlafly, Limbaugh, Coulter, Malkin, O’Reilly, Hannity, etc.  Ronald Reagan turned it into a whole political career.  I’m sure Erickson’s doing it for mercenary reasons — I can’t imagine that he’s dumb and naive enough to really believe he’s somehow god’s instrument of redemption via the mass media.  I’m sure he just sees it as better than getting a real job…

“...what a simple-minded coward he seems to be.  “

Sums up my overriding reaction to all the defensive rightwing blather in the wake of Tucson.

Their cowardice is on display for all to see in their universal inability to take responsibility for and ownership of the consequences of their words.

Catgirl, I think authoritarians think that way because THEY think that way.  And since they’re not good at placing themselves mentally in another person’s shoes, they can’t see that not everybody thinks the way they do.

People who have been “saved” by Jesus don’t have to ask for forgiveness. They’re ALREADY forgiven, so its all good. Its a pretty sweet deal really.

that’s common among the fundys, but not so much among non-fundy Christians.  I suspect many non-fundy’s consider that idea somewhat blasphemous.

No, cat girl, not TL.  I’m interested in the fundamentalist childrearing theory, with emphasis on punishment to enforce obedience, which they consider the absolute most important trait in a child.  As a parent, I’m always confounded by this.  The most important thing is that your kid instantly, unquestioningly does exactly what you tell them?  And what are they supposed to do when you’re not around to tell them what to do every moment any more?  I suppose they’ll be ok if they receive daily instructional emails from God like E. Erikson seems to do, but the rest will be out of luck.  My parents spent a lot of time helping me figure out what to do, and if they didn’t want me to do something, they’d explain why, and help me weigh why it was a bad idea, rather than just saying “no you can’t, and if you do it anyway you’ll be punished”.  It seems so short-sighted to emphasize obedience and punishment, when neither of those is operative once the kid is grown.

@Woodrowfan:

Actually, my fundy family considers “once-saved, always-saved” (OSAS) . . . maybe not blasphemous, but certainly in error. My understanding growing up was that one pretty much had to be asking forgiveness constantly, because if Jesus came back while you still had an unforgiven sin on your record, then to Hell with you, no chance of appeal, and of course there was no way to know when Jesus was going to come back. You didn’t necessarily have to ask for forgiveness that sincerely, but you still had to occasionally think the magic words in a Goddish direction.

That might not still be the case: I was a kid, so I could have misunderstood, and even if I understood it correctly, fundamentalist theology moves pretty fast and may have changed on this point by now. But, growing up, OSAS was understood to be a non-Biblical idea found among certain species of Baptist, which was wrong.

Woodrowfan, you’re right.  The Catholic view is that you have to sincerely repent to be forgiven, or else you’re on the hook for whatever you’ve done.  I’m not as familiar with evangelical theology, but if once you’re “saved” you can do whatever you want and still be “saved”, that is indeed a sweet deal.

Personally, if this dude’s god does exist, I hope he is upset with me.  He’s a sick, perverted, bully and a bigot and I don’t truck with such people.  I hope this dude’s imaginary friend hates me as much as I don’t give a crap about him.

@catgirl:

Have you ever looked into Kohlberg’s stages of moral development? You’re pretty much hitting it on the nose here - authoritarian viewpoints like Christianity tend to operate at the lowest common denominator (hey just like politics!), which is avoidance of punishment or reward-seeking, which are in fact two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately most people over the age of six don’t operate there anymore, so it’s less effective.

A lot of the people I know who are religious are religious because they don’t know how to be otherwise - the third stage, or “social norms”. Others like having the external morality handed down to them as their fourth stage reasoning (law and order). Most atheists I know - at least the ones who were raised religious and rejected religion - operate at more of a social contract level, where they don’t go on murdering sprees because they enjoy not living in a society ruled by chaos and paranoia (or at least strive for that), or because of a specific internalized morality system where they’ve weighed the possibilities and decided that murder is not the just act (or whichever guiding principle they value most).

End of story, though, is that most people are so far beyond the punishment/reward stages of reasoning that it just seems silly to even mention them as real motivators.

Re: prisoners, I don’t think you get paroled faster so much any more by claiming religio-rehab, but it probably does happen.  You do have a shot at better food and other perks when your sky fairy demands them.  So yeah, self-declared atheists will be underrepresented in prison for material reasons.

that’s common among the fundys, but not so much among non-fundy Christians.  I suspect many non-fundy’s consider that idea somewhat blasphemous.

Pretty much, Aquinas (which is the backbone of modern leftist Christianity) dictated we lead good lives on earth in order to acquire a good life in heaven.  Most fundamentalists are Justinian followers who take this predisposed approach to being saved because it is a convenient cult-like act.  “If you’re part of X group you’re already saved and god loves you, if you’re not then nothing you do will save you, ever.”  It’s a ludicrous argument to make if one chooses to believe in a higher power or otherwise. 

I don’t feel like turning this whole reply into an argument of why anybody disbelieves or not, but the people who use these tragedies to force their religion on others aren’t really following the ideology that Jesus laid down for us.  So when folks do horrible things and get denounced as not true followers, well that is because they aren’t.  But on the same token neither are the conservative hate mongers.  They use the religion as a cover for their own selfish ends to try and build an image and preserve their tribe in the face of the reality that they’re stealing from them at the same time.

@ Mr. - “OSAS was understood to be a non-Biblical idea found among certain species of Baptist”

Southern Baptist to be exact.

Sometime lurker from BoingBoing here - wonderful post and comments. Especially “catgirl” - I love the careful deconstruction of the fallacy on display here as it permeates into all aspects of conservative thinking. Someone should write a thesis on that…

I’m always quite startled at the people who claim that without fear of karmic punishment or universal judgment, then we’d all be murdering each other left and right. I can’t really think of anyone right now that I would even *want* to murder, but even with the knowledge that I’d get away with it, I still wouldn’t do it because I don’t want to be the sort of person who murders people. I can’t imagine my point of view is somehow unique. It vaguely puts me in mind of some male authors who seem to think their male characters are heroes because they don’t abuse women 24-7 - being a decent human being doesn’t make you a “hero” automatically, as the bar is set a bit higher than that, I think.

Continuing my disjointed musings, I recently started a Twilight deconstruction on my blog (a la Slactivist’s Left Behind series, if anyone has ever heard of it - and if you haven’t, I completely recommend it because it is the best thing on the internet ever - it’s a deconstruction of the crazy conservative ideas in the Tim LaHaye “Left Behind” books), and I’ve been thinking a lot about how conservative ideology influenced the books. There’s a scene where Bella asks why Edward fights his “nature” and why he goes to such effort to not murder people, and it boggled my mind while simultaneously reminding me of this common “atheist fallacy” because how hard is it to understand that just because you contracted a very…odd…blood illness, you don’t want to become a murderer or even a best case woobie destroyer of worlds?

I don’t know if it’s a “conservative” mindset or an “immature” mindset or what, but it’s just odd to me that some parts of our culture have this strange mindset that, if freed from the threat of societal punishment, they’d suddenly take that opportunity to lash out at everything. Hmm, isn’t that very Hobbsian philosophy, now that I think of it? It’s been awhile since Basic Phil 101…

Always, lurking again, but also, this:

<quote>It’s like telling someone that they have to do what you say, or you will launch your army of leprechauns on them. </quote>

Awesome. :D

So yeah, self-declared atheists will be underrepresented in prison for material reasons.

Self-declared atheists will also be underrepresented in prison because of demographic reasons (there aren’t many of us to start with, and we’re disproportionately from highly-educated, middle-to-upper-middle class backgrounds compared with the rest of the country.  Prison populations skew exactly the opposite of that.)

I’d be curious to see what happens if you control for background and education level though.  I wonder how the atheists fare if you restricted your population to just white collar financial criminals.  (Probably still not so good if you’re just going by self-professed membership in a religion rather than having some way of controlling for “actual belief” - it’s easier to run a con if you are a member of the group you’re conning, and religious folks have historically been gullible for the kind of Madoff-style con that white collar financial types run.)

Heh. The very first thing I noticed about Palin’s ghost-written blabberings this morning was her nod to Holy Mother Church.

“Like millions of Americans I learned of the tragic events in Arizona on Saturday, and my heart broke for the innocent victims. I agree with the sentiments shared yesterday at the beautiful Catholic mass held in honor of the victims. The mass will hopefully help begin a healing process for the families touched by this tragedy and for our country.”—I have real feelings, just like you. And I also believe and trust in our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. -Check.

“Our exceptional nation, so vibrant with ideas and the passionate exchange and debate of ideas, is a light to the rest of the world.”—We have unlimited Freedom of Speech and the rest of the free world is green with envy that we handle that so well. -Check.

“Congresswoman Giffords and her constituents were exercising their right to exchange ideas that day, to celebrate our Republic’s core values and peacefully assemble to petition our government. It’s inexcusable and incomprehensible why a single evil man took the lives of peaceful citizens that day.”—All evil exists in a vacuum & has nothing whatsoever to do with how media & society conducts itself. -Check.

“After this shocking tragedy, I listened at first puzzled, then with concern, and now with sadness, to the irresponsible statements from people attempting to apportion blame for this terrible event.”—Holy shit! My career is in deep fucking trouble!! -Check.

“President Reagan said, “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state”. –- Quoting Ronald Reagan AND ducking any responsibility towards contributing to the current decay of empathy & rational discourse in our society. -Check.

“…especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.”—Comparing liberals to Hitler and/or The Third Reich (especially and darkly hilarious in this instance, seeing as how Rep. Giffords is Jewish). -Check.

“There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols?”—The past was WAY worse than it is right now, and they didn’t even have cable news networks! So shut your big yaps. -Check.

“If men and women were angels, there would be no need for government. Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So, we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure”.—Bringing up the infallibility of The Founding Fathers (even though they liked dueling pistols) while simultaneously reinforcing the need for the common sheep to be ruled with an iron fist. -Check.

“As I said while campaigning for others last March in Arizona during a very heated primary race, “We know violence isn’t the answer. When we ‘take up our arms’, we’re talking about our vote.”—Whenever we are quoted or sighted in any way, shape or form using hate speech, it is either in jest or we are using a metaphor - and only stupid liberals and lone gunman can’t tell the difference. -Check.

“Yes, our debates are full of passion…”—Smear campaigns = debate. Hate rhetoric = passion. -Check.

“And we will not be stopped from celebrating the greatness of our country and our foundational freedoms by those who mock its greatness by being intolerant of differing opinion and seeking to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults.”—All liberals are intolerant of any ‘differing opinion’ and always want to ‘muzzle dissent’. -Check.

“Recall how the events of 9-11 challenged our values and we had to fight the tendency to trade our freedoms for perceived security.”—Invoking 9/11 - with a nod towards the joys of totalitarianism. -Check.

“We need strength to not let the random acts of a criminal turn us against ourselves, or weaken our solid foundation, or provide a pretext to stifle debate. We are better than the mindless finger-pointing we endured in the wake of the tragedy”.—Only those who wish to stifle debate or who are mindless finger-pointers would ever dare criticize me - or my friends. -Check.

“May God bless America.”—“God Bless America” -Check.

My feeling is that I don’t really feel comfortable around people who claim the only thing standing between them and mass murder is their relationship with an imaginary friend.

Quoted for truth.

Hobbes, I would go a step further.  I don’t start from the assumption that our natural state is evil and we need to have controls on it.  I think the evidence is pretty solid that most people don’t want to kill people, that killing is harder than not-killing, etc.  One of the biggest struggles armies have is getting their soldiers to squelch their instinct to not-kill.  One of the strategies is dehumanizing the enemy.  But that’s the thing—-you have to move a person from not-kill to kill mode in most cases, not the other way around.

MHF, excellent! Of course, at redstate they are crowing about the “presidential” tone of Palin’s <strike>speech</strike> YouTube vid and calling for Obama to rewrite his speech (which they haven’t heard because it hasn’t happened yet. But in any case they aren’t going to watch anyway, since they already know it will be horrid, selfish, and unAmerican, etc.). Because, apparently, Obama is speaking in response to Palin? And he needs to take cues from her on how not to make it all about him! The delusion of her few fans is pretty staggering and would be entertaining, if they weren’t so dangerous.

Hi Amanda.  Regarding atheists being underrepresented in the prison population: I work with exonerated death row prisoners, and being an atheist myself, it has been interesting to see how intensely religious (or at least spiritual) most of them are. 

I think the reason for this is when they were on death row (and I would be willing to bet this is similar for long-timers in prison in general), their community shunned them, their loved ones eventually stopped visiting, and some were even abandoned by close family members.  They lost parents and siblings to disease and old age (one wasn’t allowed to donate a kidney to his brother, even though he was a match, and the brother subsequently died), and didn’t get to see their kids grow up.  In the case of the exonerees, this was compounded by the fact they were in some cases weeks, days and even hours away from being murdered by the state for a crime they did not commit. 

So for many of them all they had left was some version of “faith.” They turned to it as a mechanism to cope and get through the hell on earth that was visited on them by our criminal “justice” system, and to keep them sane and alive (many attempt to commit suicide on death row).  It sustained them, and I have to recognize and respect that, even though I am not a believer myself.  The positive side of this is that they have been uniquely situated to speak to believers about the death penalty, and have changed the minds of many who supported the death penalty or were on the fence, even though they considered themselves “good” Christians.  www.witnesstoinnocence.org

The most important thing is that your kid instantly, unquestioningly does exactly what you tell them?  And what are they supposed to do when you’re not around to tell them what to do every moment any more?  I suppose they’ll be ok if they receive daily instructional emails from God like E. Erikson seems to do, but the rest will be out of luck.

If you look into the Quiverfull/Patriarchy movement, they actually have a plan for this.  It’s called umbrella patriarchy or umbrella authority.  Kids obey parents, wives obey husbands, husbands obey their fathers even after they’re married and/or they obey their male church leaders, and the church leaders obey they movement royalty like Bill Gothard, who supposedly obeys God (as he interprets it from the Bible).  But really, there’s just one man at the top who is scamming them all and they don’t realize it.

One of the biggest struggles armies have is getting their soldiers to squelch their instinct to not-kill.  One of the strategies is dehumanizing the enemy.  But that’s the thing—-you have to move a person from not-kill to kill mode in most cases, not the other way around.

Indeed, people underestimate how hard it is.  And even dehumanizing the enemy isn’t enough: what good armies have long known is that you get a person to fight by making sure they’re aware that by not fighting they’re not only risking their own lives but the lives of the others in their unit.  In other words the most effective way of getting someone to be willing to take the life of another is by them knowing that doing so is saving the lives of someone else.

To use one of the more extreme examples, while the SS had their share of sociopaths and people who took delight in death, the vast majority of them had to be motivated the same way: we kill the Jews/homosexuals/Slavs/whatever now because if we don’t they’ll (continue to) be a threat to our people.  And even that wasn’t justification enough for many of them.  The gassing trucks, and later the gas chambers, were developed because Himmler acknowledged how hard it was to kill someone.  He’d attended one mass execution by one of the Einsatzgruppen in Russia and had himself become ill, and recognized that making his men kill directly was taking a toll on them.  Even with full support of their leaders, their peers, and their own prejudices, shooting helpless men, women, and children was psychologically crushing.  The switch to gassing was to make it cleaner, reduce the number of people it took to do the actual killing (so you didn’t need as many who could tolerate doing it) and put distance between the act and the result, and if someone couldn’t bring themselves to do it, by and large there was no negative repercussion: they were transferred to other duties.

Slightly off-topic, but regarding Loughner’s attitudes toward women we have this from the WSJ, which got ahold of his posts from on-line gaming forums. Choice excerpts:

The online-forum messages exhibit a growing frustration that, at 22 years of age, Mr. Loughner couldn’t land a minimum-wage job and was spurned by women. By May 15, he wrote, he hadn’t had a paycheck in six months. A month later, he wrote that he had submitted 65 applications, yet “no interview.”

[...]

The postings exhibit fixations on grammar, the education system, government and currency, which some friends and acquaintances have described separately in the days since the attack. They are peppered with displays of misogyny.

[...]

Later that day, he posted a rant titled “Why Rape,” which said women in college enjoyed being raped. “There are Rape victims that are under the influence of a substance. The drinking is leading them to rape. The loneliness will bring you to depression. Being alone for a very long time will inevitably lead you to rape.”

So Amanda’s instinct was right on there (they mention a lot of mansplaining and JAQ-ing off, too). Of course, all that people like Erickson will take from this article is (say it with me) “videogames are eeeevill and Satan’s tool.”

Don’t these assholes have mothers? Were they hatched? My mother used to say all the time, “How would you feel? No, I don’t care about (some excuse or this or that.) How would you feel? It doesn’t matter what they did. You know better. It’s bad because it’s bad. It’s always bad, and yes, that means even when it’s a bad person. I don’t care if you can get away with it. It’s not right. It’s not right even if nobody knows.”  I don’t know what doctrine that is, but she was right, and she boiled it down really effectively.  You don’t hurt people because it’s wrong. You don’t steal because it’s not your stuff and so on. But to listen to Repubs it’s only fear of exposure, shame, and embarrassment that make th em not do stuff. They apparently have no concept that other people have thoughts and feelings, even though they’re incredibly about every last slight. Sarah Palin’s invocation of the blood libel will just result, no doubt, in her staff sitting her down and trying to find small enough words to explain anti-Semitism to her, after which she’ll probably brighten right up and say, “But that’s just what I meant!”

Keithm, I’m reading a book by Richard Rhodes on that very subject right now.  Christ, who knew how relevant that would be? But then again, who could predict Palin’s incredible self pity and Erickson’s…..I don’t know what to call Erickson.  You all saw his anti-feminist bullshit from last year, right?

ginmar,

You have a really great point but I wish you wouldn’t frame it like parenting or instilling values is a job primarily for mothers (and not fathers, teachers, society in general, etc).

They apparently have no concept that other people have thoughts and feelings

I am actually amazed at how little empathy they have, and how much they actively dislike empathy.  In me, empathy showed up very young and without much outside coaching.  I wonder if they never developed it, or if they did develop a sense of empathy and somehow lost it.

Amanda @42:

I don’t start from the assumption that our natural state is evil and we need to have controls on it.

Sorry, I should have made it more explicit that I was considering the case of our AZ shooter specifically - putting someone in the situation where for some reason their instinct is “oh damn I need to kill [person]” as his clearly was. And most people, I think, would still choose to not kill that person. However, most of those stages of moral reasoning could also be applied to the decision TO kill someone:

1. Avoid punishment - if you don’t kill [person], other manly men will call you a pussy.
2. Seek reward - if you kill [person], other manly men will think you are manly.
3. Social norms - Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin/Tea Party would want you to kill [person].
4. Law and order - [person]‘s death is requisite for maintaining the rule of law (cf. death penalty).
5. Societal contract - it is your duty to society to kill [person].
6. Principled conscience - our justice system would inadequately deal with irredeemable [person].

Mostly my point was that catgirl nailed the discrepancy between the level of reasoning which threats of jail or hell appeals to and the level of reasoning at which many of us operate. I wasn’t making any statements about the nature of human beings (which I believe to be kind of a “some of both” situation).

The thing that disturbs me the most about the “Jesus keeps me from killing people” line is that murders don’t happen that way.

I work in the legal field an I have reviewed basically every manslaughter and murder case prosecuted in Canada during the past ten years. The idea where someone thinks and plans a murder with no outside influences, is just so incredibly rare.

Most ‘murders’ are actually manslaughters, and completely accidental. Most involve alcohol. Many involve addicts. It’s almost always an argument that ‘got out of hand.’

Even when we cross into those that can be categorized as murder, most are committed during the commission of another crime, so that whole premeditation thing gets pretty wishy-washy.

So out of the people who kill category you already have a teeny tiny minority who are actually going to be able to sit and think what the overarching consequences of their actions are.  In most cases there’s no real time to do a risk/benefits analysis.

Then you have all the other situations that are going to seriously impede this notion of being able to come to a free, clear and reasonable choice to murder someone. It could be gang related, there could be money issues, etc. Honestly, I could go on forever.

This ‘blood libel’ thing brings an extra layer of disgust to all this, for me—because of course for just about the entirety of christianity’s existence one of its most persistent goals has been the degradation/elimination of judaism (close along with the degradation/elimination of alternative interpretations/power structures within christianity itself).  Christians certainly can be moral, but no honest look at history can conclude that there’s any direct link there.

Don’t these assholes have mothers? Were they hatched? My mother used to say all the time, “How would you feel? No, I don’t care about (some excuse or this or that.) How would you feel?

You’re assuming its nurture.  Given the existence of “mirror neurons”, there’s a case for it being nature.

You definitely can’t infer anything based upon prison populations. Too many parole boards have Christians on them. If you’re in a jail, and an atheist, “finding Jesus” can be the difference between making and missing parole.

I am a new member but have been a reader for a while! Wanted to comment on a detail toward the end of your article. I hope it’s not derailing too much.

16, 35 and 44 touched on this a bit, but from what my best friend who was in DC max-security prison in the early 90’s has told me about prison life, religious services AT THAT TIME (with the growth of the prison industrial complex, I wonder how this has changed???) was the only time he could get away from his cell or the common area. I called him up to ask to clarify details but realize this is still hearsay.

About a year ago, he read me this terrifying letter he’d written to his girlfriend while in prison, Biblical refs and all. He became a deacon for “the white people,” population 1 or 2, in order to get out of his cell. He had contact with the other deacons in there—their job was to counsel inmates. He didn’t consider himself a Christian before, but he tried to be the best Christian he could be while locked up—this ensured a bit of freedom outside his cell, and also became another way to relate to the more violent inmates besides being entertaining with his rapping and prankster persona. (TW!!!!) If he hadn’t done that, he probably would have been raped and/or burned alive like the other white dude who wasn’t as sociable.(/TW)

He had to stay amusing and worth keeping around for the more brutal in the cellblock. Becoming Christian to survive is probably one of the more “normalized” things he did to cope. While having religion outside of prison is sometimes for power and to compensate for social-being-fail, like Erick Erickson, it’s probably more about survival for those in dire situations. And for my friend, it actually worked—that and the fact that he was cut slack for being white. For every relative and friend any of us have who is an African American man, knowing that 28% of this subset of people will be in jail or prison in their lifetimes…that is a desperate situation on a whole different level. The two ways he talks about prison religion is that it serves either as this protective purpose or as a way to cleanse yourself. He told me once about an inmate who was trying to speak in tongues while pretending to read the Bible to cleanse himself of his demons—this man was first of all one of the many black men in the DC prison system, and he was also illiterate, failed twice and probably more by society, so tongues was all he could do without someone else reading it to him. I don’t even know what to say about that incident of religion-molding to suit needs. :(

That billboard really hit me in the gut (heh, violent reference in response to violent rhetoric/imagery…? who’da thunk it!) in an “Eew-I-hate-violence-loving-preachy-people” way. Wow… and yes, the “blood libel” thing was a real lowlight of that speech in terms of mitigating violence.

Mr_Sub: thank you for the clarification.  I’ve come across fundys before that insisted that once they were saved they no longer sinned!  As a good modern Calvinist (even if a liberal one) I was horrified!

Catgirl, I have to say…. ‘imply that it’s mothers only’? Really? Don’t strain anything reaching for that. You have to learn it somewhere and if you want to toss and turn—-or just deliver the sort of little sting that Shakesville readers like to dish out—-you can worry that I’m endorsing motherforhood for fuck only knows who. But the fact is, people have to learn it from somewhere,  the earlier the better,  parents are the ones who usually do it, and if you think a stray anecdote about somebody’s mother is endorsing motherhood, well, that might be part of the problem in itself. I think it’s pretty fucking obvious I was not doing even close to what you implied. But thanks for the good faith! I guarantee you the implication pisses me off enough that it made me roll my eyes. And no I’m not going to tapdance around and qualify this and that and parse fractions or minutiae or whatever.  Not the point. Don’t have the time.  Maybe that’s why the righties are dominating the message.  Maybe zinging somebody who’s on your fucking side for something that’s extraordinarily unfair and illogical is not the way to teach, or be constructive or whatever the hell the liberal yuppie condescending teaching moment word of the day is. But while we’re at it, I TOTES think women should be chained in the kitchen till the kids are eighteen! You caught me! Happy now?

  God, I miss Molly Ivins. I’m sure somebody got offended when she called Camille Paglia honey and told her to chill.  John Stewart only partially filled the void she left, and that’s why he’s so hugely popular.

  The Righties lack empathy but the Lefties are hamstrung by too much and a passion for sweating the small stuff. Well, okay, the Righties don’t lack empathy: they regard empathy as an enemy, as a weakness, and they rejoice when they kill it. They kill it, deliberately, by listening to and idolizing sadistic assholes like Beck, Palin, and Limbaugh. 

Phoenician,  that falls under the category of ‘sounds suspiciously like evo-psych’ to me.  And it sounds like what Amanda mentions: it’s basically evil to be without empathy. I read something somewhere that said that men who are abusive, for example, are likely to seriously over-represent the number of abusers amongst men. They’re projecting in other words. They weren’t born that way, which is scary. They got that way. And I think that people like this, who not just buy into this bullshit but seek it out, avoid the facts, and eagerly support Beck and Limbaugh and O’Reilly—-they want to believe all that hateful shit. It makes them victims in their shitty little lives, and it gives them heroes——-and villains. And they’re the victims. 

Regarding soldiers in wartime, I read somewhere that in WWII most soldiers simply didn’t fire their weapons. By Viet Nam===another era of bitter rhetoric,  with great social polarization——-the number had jumped from somewhere around 2-somthing percent to being in the high eighties or nineties. And Viet Nam was a savage war.  It wasn’t just My Lai; there was also the Casualities of War rape and murder, where no less than President Nixon either pardoned or reduced the sentence of a murderer/ rapist. When the President is willing to gloss it over….Well, what kind of country is that? And what kind of people?

  This is something I keep obsessing over: the guy who blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib—-Joseph Darby—-was ridden out of town on a rail. Islamophobia had something to do with it,  but the town where the torturing reservists came from lined up behind them. Why? Because those soldiers came from that culture, and that culture produces some very evil people for whom the idea of torture some Mooslim in a mandress is not a horror, but merely a job to be done for the good of…something. Because all them Mooslims are members of Al Kayda, ain’t they? You have to wonder if it’s just an excuse to torture.

To them, liberals are just as much non-human furriners as some perfectly moderate, liberal, civilized secular Muslim from Baghdad’s suburbs, who drinks a beer after dinner and goes to Mosque once a week,  less often than he goes to a club or two.  You get the feeling, listening to their rhetoric, that they’d love to rampage across the country like Muqtada al-Sadr, even though they’d be horrified at being compared to him. I just don’t see much difference.  You get the feeling that they’re just waiting, waiting, eagerly, for a spark to start shooting. Kind of ironic, because very few of them ever serve, because there’s rules and standards, and until Bush II, there was a fairly-enlightened officer and NCO corps,  which religious infiltration has severely damaged.

Regarding my fourth paragraph and why evil people want you to believe that everybody else is evil….Well, it kills hope, doesn’t it? And it lowers the bar for everybody. It sounds an awful lot like “Both sides are doing it, too.”  I never realized before how they’re trying to say that everybody is evil.

What this Ericson talk shows isn’t Christian morality, but that it doesn’t have one.  It claims to follow the word of God, but a God that doesn’t say “do this for it is right” but “do this for I have commanded and I have a big stick”.

Ericson is showing that, in his belief system, he isn’t a morally upright man, but a collaborator trying to score points with a deity that will send him to Hell for the sin of not guessing the right religion hard enough.

Phoenician, that falls under the category of ‘sounds suspiciously like evo-psych’ to me.

No, demonstrated neuroscience.  The link to lack of empathy is mainly speculation with some research support at this stage, AFAIK, but it seems plausible.

If there are people with greater or lesser degrees of some brain functions (and I know I have problems with face recognition), then you can speculate that this applies to empathy from being able to mirror other people’s internal states.

I’d rather go for the “motivated social cognition” theories, myself - conservatism is a reaction to fear of the unknown and death.

...You didn’t necessarily have to ask for forgiveness that sincerely, but you still had to occasionally think the magic words in a Goddish direction.

I often unconsciously/automatically hit Ctrl + S while typing something; it’s just habit. Sounds like all this very srs religion business requires about that level of thought and commitment. Jesus must be mad impressed.

mr_subjunctive @7 said what I was thinking re religion in prison.

Don’t these assholes have mothers? Were they hatched?

Pretty straightforward there, I think.  If you meant parents, society, whoever, but in your case it was your mother that should have been your response, not going off on catgirl because she pointed out what you very clearly had done.  Touchy are you?  It certainly looks like it, probably because yes, you didn’t mean to imply mothers.

Ginmar is correct about soldiers. Military psychologists have been working for a long time on this, because they want soldiers to kill, but ONLY to kill enemy soldiers. Conditioning people to make them capable of killing is hard enough; making that a switch you can turn off is harder yet. Viet Nam is really where they started to get good at it in the training methods.

I remember my old Scouter (a former air force guy) talking about his time in Ireland, when he got that scar on his lip by running through a shop window. He was being shot at, and every time he shot somebody else, he kept expecting the points to come up, as if that other human was simply a target worth points on his shooting drill. Pretty frightening, in many ways.

Then you have my wife’s grandfather, who was a German judge. Proudly served in both world wars without firing his gun even once. Then emigrated to Canada where he lived in a harsh, isolated climate with no phone, radio, or TV…

But yes. It is hard to get people to be willing to kill other human beings at all, excepting extreme cases. You see it in the animal world as well, where piranhas slap each other with their tails, various deer butt heads instead of using their horns, etc. Humans are (thankfully) no different from other animals in this way. We will inflict violence upon each other, but rarely even try to kill each other.

The idea that we’ll run amok without religion is very obviously false, and yet it gets trotted out all the time.

Ginmar is correct about soldiers. Military psychologists have been working for a long time on this, because they want soldiers to kill, but ONLY to kill enemy soldiers. Conditioning people to make them capable of killing is hard enough; making that a switch you can turn off is harder yet. Viet Nam is really where they started to get good at it in the training methods.

Ginmar may be talking about this book, but I recall a long article on the topic in Rolling Stone several years back, which I took a copy of since it was so eye-opening.  Alas, RS’s site sucks chocolate salty balls when it comes to searching and I can’t track it down easily.  I suspect my copy is buried in boxes of junk after I moved, so I probably can’t lay my hands on it easily when I get home, either.

Ah - here we go - The Killing Factory by Jeff Tietz, April 2006.

The chilling thing there is how they take basic human instincts, such as brotherhood (“siblinghood” doesn’t seem to have the same ring, somehow) and turn them to their purposes so coldly and calculatedly.

Technically, it should be “goat fucking kid molester.”

Yeah, Helen, I went off because it was ridiculous and I’m not purging my vocab of every colloquial phrase there is so as to avoid a pile on by the more liberal-than-thou.  Touchy? You either haven’t seen or have eagerly participated in that kind of thing, where self flagellation is required when ever so righteously called out by one’s betters.  The whole ‘implied’ accusation is fascinating as well.  Yeah, I had to slyly work that in there, that I really want mothers to stay in the kitchen.  I sure implied it! Christ,  there is such a thing as overthinking. 

  PiaToR, which is it? Demonstrated science or speculation? Because you say both. Wikipedia is often more valuable for its footnotes and references than for the articles.  The MRAs, for example, like to edit the MRA and feminism and false rape accusation page occasionally. It makes for jarring reasoning. 

  I haven’t read either book. I can’t remember where I stumbled over it.  This used to be far, far more possible, by the way, before and between the Bushes.  Only infantry units really saw action in the wars: the ration of rear soldiers to combat troops was about ten to one in some conflicts.  After Bush I,  Bush II was probably determinded to have a war to show up Poppy, but nobody knew that till later. It was entirely possible to join the Army, serve twenty years, and never fire a weapon except on a firing range. 

  It might even have been a toss off in an article about a larger thing. I just picked up a book about Richard Rhodes, however, whose title escapes me at the moment, about the SS men who killed 1.5 million Jewish people and others before the building of the death camps.  This was literally in the last three days.  Some of this you see in the military, even if nobody wants to listen. What one learns about shooting human beings varies hugely depending on one’s job. The guys who fancy themselves macho tend to be hostile and belligerent generally; I saw those guys point their fingers at Iraqi civilians and I think if given the opportunity they would have shot them with no more deliberation than another person would step on a cockroach.  They also treated women that way. You might as well not exist and if you do exist, God help you.  By contrast my CO urged us to take that extra second if we were ever at the point of firing——which can happen at a moment’s notice, as when a potential suicide vehicle banged into our convoy——because people are people, and that means even in a war zone they do stupid shit.  Sometimes it’s naivete, which is kind of touching, I think.  A second is a long time.  Iraq is unusual in terms of wars because of the interaction with the population, and the capriciousness of insurgent attacks. The brain needs to believe that things are safe. When a mortar kills somebody in your tent but not you that will fuck you up.  Some people come into the service, and they’re ready to kill; some people will experience this event and be haunted, and some will use it as an excuse to get what they describe as revenge. Some will be profoundly fucked up by it and go off. The ones who come into the service and they’re poised to kill, to rape——that is what’s scary.  Nobody wants to deal with that.  Why? The culture made them that way long before they joined the military. 

I think this kind of conditioning or whatever you call it only works on the willing and those who might be predisposed to it. And it’s not the band of brothers effect on these guys; it’s that these guys were fucked up in real life and somehow came to the military. God knows where else they go—-the GOP, obviously, but as CEOs of various companies? The boyfriends from hell?  We’re talking about the scary types, not the people who won’t fire unless fired upon. There’s a wide enough pool of the former, but there’s also a pool of secondarily-fucked up people, who aren’t exactly killers or rapists themselves but who can be lead to it by stronger personalities or pressures, and once it gets to a certain point,  a lot of people fold. It’s a matter of pressures,  applied by multiple people, combined with lack of other options, or relief from that one kind of personality.  There’s also those who stand by and can’t be persuaded to do squat when something truly horrifying is done.. They’ll go on the attack if cornered about it.  When it’s one guy against his whole command, in a war zone, he’s effectively become the enemy just as surely as if he’s outside the wire. The Repubs, in my opinion, recreate this dynamic very precisely. You have some leaders who are basically, by whatever means, straight out psychopaths,  you have people predisposed to it, the ones who have been eager for the chance to hate, you have the passive who won’t do anything, and you have the sort that just follow stronger personalities,  no matter what.

Oh, and I can’t recommend highly enough this book about Bundy by Stephen Michaud in which he dispensed with the notion that killers like Bundy were fucked up from birth.  Bundy had a lot of little choices in his life where he had a choice to go along with…something….or be passive. Being passive led him to being a killer. He didn’t think. He didn’t get help. He didn’t worry. He didn’t care. He didn’t turn away. He didn’t get back in his car,  he didn’t stop and think, didn’t think twice, didn’t….turn on some switch in his brain. It was a choice, and often, not doing something was what gave him the chance to kill.  Bundy was obviously also a rapist, but that gets obscured.  He’d be stalking some potential victim, and would just….turn off his brain. That indicates that he knew what he was doing.  Bundy himself talked about feeling different from other people from a very early age. He also hinted but would not discuss childhood abuse of some sort.  Bundy’s mother fled her father’s house when Bundy was four or five, and some people——relatives or friends——implied that Bundy was both her son and her brother, if you know what I mean. Whether or not that’s the case,  Bundy behaved in ways that his relatives noticed, and later on, various shrinks identified things that he was doing at the age of, say, four, as being sign of horrible abuse of some kind. Conscious memory in kids only reaches back so far. Maybe Bundy could remember the after effects of whatever it was, but not the event itself. But later on,  with Michaud, he revealed that he did have repeated choices that he didn’t take.  Killing for him was pleasant. He chose to please himself.  He didn’t think people would notice a few girls here and there being gone. 

I think there’s an undercurrent of hatred in this country that nobody wants to talk about, because it’s a central part of the American myth—-the bold explorer, divesting the Native Americans of their land, possessions, and eventually lives. How else do you do that but dehumanizing them first?  Maybe all those brave adventurers were actually some kind of psycopath, trying to leave society and its potential victims behind. Maybe they wanted to just get away.  But the Repubs use this crap in their messages to the public, over and over, especially and obsessively, the dehumanizing part. The thing is, dehumanizing people is hard. It’s an ugly sensation, I think. I might not believe people are born evil, or good,  but I do think at some point in early life one becomes aware of the pain of others, and that that can and should be developed. So maybe people are born with a great potential for good and society beats it out of them. (With little boys, this can be shocking; I’ve seen some awfully sweet little boys, who want hugs and affection and love to give it until it’s machoed out of them by older males, usually.)

PiaToR, which is it? Demonstrated science or speculation? Because you say both.

AFAIK, the existence of motor neurons is pretty much proven.  Their role, if any, in empathy is considerably more speculative.  I noted it when reading about “face blindness”, which I have a problem with.

Damn. s/motor/mirror

I think this kind of conditioning or whatever you call it only works on the willing and those who might be predisposed to it. And it’s not the band of brothers effect on these guys; it’s that these guys were fucked up in real life and somehow came to the military. God knows where else they go—-the GOP, obviously, but as CEOs of various companies? The boyfriends from hell?  We’re talking about the scary types, not the people who won’t fire unless fired upon. There’s a wide enough pool of the former, but there’s also a pool of secondarily-fucked up people, who aren’t exactly killers or rapists themselves but who can be lead to it by stronger personalities or pressures, and once it gets to a certain point, a lot of people fold. It’s a matter of pressures, applied by multiple people, combined with lack of other options, or relief from that one kind of personality.  There’s also those who stand by and can’t be persuaded to do squat when something truly horrifying is done.. They’ll go on the attack if cornered about it.  When it’s one guy against his whole command, in a war zone, he’s effectively become the enemy just as surely as if he’s outside the wire. The Repubs, in my opinion, recreate this dynamic very precisely. You have some leaders who are basically, by whatever means, straight out psychopaths, you have people predisposed to it, the ones who have been eager for the chance to hate, you have the passive who won’t do anything, and you have the sort that just follow stronger personalities, no matter what.

You should probably read this book.

I don’t know whether authoritarian-text religions or direct-revelation religions are more dangerous for something like this. Probably everyone works out their own pathology on the type of religion they have available. (I come from a liberal-episcopalian background, and one of the big gotcha questions in high school theology class was “If good deeds aren’t what get you into heaven, just faith, then why do good deeds?” In contrast with the Erickson-style born-agains, the priest teaching the course responded that if you truly believed that you had been saved, you would be so gol-darn grateful that of course you would do every good deed it was in your power to commit. Shows just how flexible that doctrine is…)

Let’s see,
the US is more Christian than Canada and more violent;
the US is more Christian than most of western Europe and more violent;
the US is more Christian than most of East Asia and more violent;
wait Brazil (and much of South America) is more violent ... and more Christian.

I see, being Christian does make you less violent.

I don’t think people who are genuinely good can turn bad,  PiaTor. I do think society rewards certain things by giving them the self-serving label of ‘good’ , but that’s not the same as good. Erick Erickson thinks that if you’re Xtian you’re automatically a good person. A lot of other people use different things for the same kind of excuse to call somebody good.  Jeffrey MacDonald, for example, and a lot of men, skate on this. “But he’s married! He’s a Green Beret! He must be a good person!”  Good people, I think, are often times damned unpleasant. ‘Good’ people are often the opposite——they’re pleasant and they don’t challegne people, so everybody’s happy.

I don’t think people who are genuinely good can turn bad, PiaTor. I do think society rewards certain things by giving them the self-serving label of ‘good’ , but that’s not the same as good.

Your comment rests on premises I am unwilling to accept, and if I argued with you, we’d get into a screaming match over definitions.

I do recommend reading the book,

So you say

Don’t these assholes have mothers? Were they hatched? My mother used to say all the time, ....

catgirl basicly agrees with you but politely points out a frame you may not even have noticed.
You go off on a tirade about how she is accusing you of wanting/advocating to chain women to the kitchen and trap them in childcare.
I point out that she is right about you implying it, probably unintentionally
And this somehow means that she and I are:

Yeah, Helen, I went off because it was ridiculous and I’m not purging my vocab of every colloquial phrase there is so as to avoid a pile on by the more liberal-than-thou.  Touchy? You either haven’t seen or have eagerly participated in that kind of thing, where self flagellation is required when ever so righteously called out by one’s betters.  The whole ‘implied’ accusation is fascinating as well.  Yeah, I had to slyly work that in there, that I really want mothers to stay in the kitchen.  I sure implied it! Christ, there is such a thing as overthinking.

Okay.  Alrighty then.  You have no sense of proportion and don’t like people pointing out that words mean things.  I’ll try to remember.

Yeah,  the Shakesville effect wins again.  Christ on a fuckin’ crutch.  Do you guys exchange high fives when you get your petty little jabs in here and there?

Isn’t it wierd how this always happens to you?  What’s the common factor, I wonder?...

Mother Avenger used to observe that crazy people usually think they’re the one who is sane, and that everyone else is crazy.

I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this post. I am hoping the same best work from you in the future as well. In fact your creative writing abilities has inspired me to start my own BlogEngine blog now. Really the blogging is spreading its wings rapidly. Your write up is a fine example of it.
Thanks!
http://www.claudevorilhon.com