Torture To Death: Christ’s Crux

Patrice Ayme’: The angry, cruel, somewhat demented, child murdering, jealous, holocaust-prone god of Judaism-Christianism-Islamism justifies bloody despots. (So does Literal Islam, and even much more so, but that’s besides the point here. What is interrogated here is the origin of Christianism’s, and thus Islamism’s, hyper-violence)

Chris Snuggs: “Christianism does not belong in the same basket as Islam. Disregard how men have perverted both; just compare what they ARE, what their fundamental message is.”

PA: Agreed… If one forget that they are not at the same stage of development, and if one uses a stochastic filter. Stochastic comes from the word for “aim” in Greek. It’s used to mean “probability theory”. So the idea is to look at the New Testament, and take, so to speak, the average statement, ignoring those where (the mythical) “Christ” speaks about swords and all that… Sword, as an instrument to foster faith. Force, the Sword, is what made Christianism seductive to Constantine. He was a forceful man. He steamed his wife, alive, killed his nephew, and had his meritorious, accomplished, most famous general and admiral of a son, executed.

Force & the Sword, Justified & Practiced by God, Is The Christian Mood Which Seduced Constantine, Because So Was His Calling

[Roman Emperor Constantine’s statue at York Minster, Britannia, his birth place.]

Here is a sample I have often used:

Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

Some will play it down: ‘Oh, it’s just one sentence!’ Others turn this around, and sneer, when one criticizes Islam’s violence:’Oh, there are also violent statements in Christianism!’. Both COUNTER-IDEAS miss the point: just as one horrible scream can create a terrible mood, so can a horrible statement. PPP Torture Is Intrinsic To Christ’s Business Model [Final Judgment.]

And, by the way, there are actually multiple statements of the greatest of horror, and an insistence that horror was prescribed, ordered, glorified, organized, instituted by god himself. It’s not by accident that the very symbol of Christianism is the worse torture known to man. Even Christ could not figure it out. Well, my child, lonely nailed on your cross, I did: “VIOLENCE IS THE PRICE OF LOVE’. And it was fun to figure it out.

Judaism, its child, Christianism, and its grandchild, Islamism were all war religions. Judaism appears shortly before King David, the enlightened founder of the Greater Israel. (At least so says the Bible written by captives in Babylon, more than half a millennium later.) Christianism, or more exactly what he called “Orthodox Catholicism” (= “Orthodox Universalism”) was imposed by Roman emperor Constantine, who was one of the greatest warriors in history, second to none. As a teenager, the special force like, privileged youth Constantine already terrified the imperial court. Emperor Galerius, the “animalistic, semi-barbarian” persecutor of Christians, tried to get rid of Constantine with a number of dangerous challenges, including suicidal cavalry charge, and fighting a lion in single combat.

Constantine became the single emperor of the entire empire, after many decades of multiple emperors governing in a more or less collegial manner (there were up to 6 emperors at a time, mostly because of the problem of distance in the far-flung empire!).

Christianism is a system of thoughts. But it’s also a system of moods. Systems of thought can be subtle: Islam, for example comes equipped with two meta-principles: Taquiyah (lying to unbelievers as religious principle) and the Abrogation Principle.

Christianism did not have Taquiyah: early Christians obstinately refused to lie, and diminish their god, or their faith, in any way, to the bafflement and anger of other Romans. But Christianism definitively has the Abrogation Principle; when god feels it is good medicine to torture to death his own son, who did nothing wrong, definitively the message that it is good to torture to death people who have done nothing much.

Systems of moods are even more subtle than systems of ideas, because they do not say things directly and explicitly. The mood in Christianism is, basically, that it’s OK to kill, horribly, for no good reason: after all, man is created in the image of god.

Now is there anything more significant to torture to death the innocent? Should we call torturing to death the innocent the most prominent, the most significant, the most particular, the most peculiar, and marking art of the Christian god?

As I insisted, most human beings have known and practiced love. Human beings don’t need lessons on love, as if it were an alien planet never seen before.

But human beings have not known, and, or, practiced, nor justified, excused and become familiar with, torture to death. Christianism not only justified torture to death of the innocent, but made it the crux of its entire system of mood. Torture to death is the clé de voûte, the keystone, the part without which the entire edifice of Christianism collapses.

Judgment And Torture Constitute Christ’s Business Model

And indeed, the last executions and torture to death of Christianism in Western Europe happened during the Nineteenth Century. In the preceding century, Voltaire had railed against the execution by “slow fire” of quite a few people, from a senile Jesuit to an eighteen year old a Jewish girl. The People was upset because of the Lisbon quake cum tsunami, which caused massive, irreparable damage. The girl was burned slowly just because she was Jewish.

Literal Christianism set up the mood which Literal Islamism inherited. Both originated with the guy who steamed his wife (and is a saint of the Orthodox branch of Christianism. Yes, this had deep consequences, including economic.

In the preceding, torture to death was vilified as Christianism’s ugliest mood. However, it does not stop there. The mythical Jesus, a rabbi, approved of the entire Old Testament. And that includes the mood of being willing to kill one’s own child to please one’s boss (“god”).

Yet, it does not stop there. Just as the cross is an add-on not found in old Judaism, Christianism is full of would-be cannibalism (“drink, because this is my blood”, “eat, because this is my flesh”). Would be cannibalism? Well, no wonder the Crusaders roasted children when they got hungry. History is not just an exacting teacher. Like the Christian god, history has no qualms, it just is.

And history is not just about facts and ideas. It is also about moods. Christianism went hand in hand with plutocracy, because it was all the excuse plutocracy needed to reign by the sword. And love was the screen behind which it hid its vicious rule.

How and why Christianism became supreme, as Constantine’s Catholicism, goes a long way to explain, and excuse, Literal Islam. This is the main reason to consider this agonizing corpse.

Patrice Ayme’

Trumped: Hillaryously Cruzing To Hell

Trumped by the hilarious Hillary Clinton, the USA may be cruising towards Ted Cruz:

Looking at the possible future presidents of the USA, one is left with nervous ticks. The only one I like is Senator Sanders. Contrarily to his reputation of wild radical, he is anything but. Long time Senator of Vermont, Sanders supports the availability of guns so Americans can shoot each other, a fundamental right, and Sanders supports the F35, the most expensive, corrupt military project ever (it’s a flying Maginot Line, except the Maginot Line worked, and the F 35 does not).

Sanders: “I want to end the international embarrassment of the United States of America being the only major country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to all people as a right, not a privilege.”

Clinton, second greatest recipient as a Senator behind Rick Santorum, of health care industry dollars, of course, is using weasel concept (“we have to be careful, how can we afford it?”) to sustain the health care plutocracy, one of her main supports. Fortunately, God, or Satan, whoever rules heavens, has a direct line to a much more inspired candidate:

Senator Ted Cruz Does Not Need The Message From The Messenger Muhammad, He Has God In His Head

Muhammad said he had a vision, in the desert, and a professional Christian monk, cousin from Muhammad’s very rich first wife, told him that he had encountered Archangel Gabriel. Muhammad was not going to contradict an expert. Now, in 2016, Americans will have the opportunity to elect the new Archangel Ted. It cannot be an accident that His name means “Cross”.

Now, craftily, Cruz propagandists say that Ted Cruz may never have said such a thing. Exactly. Instead he said it in bits and pieces: “Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief of this country… I am blessed to receive a word from God every day in receiving the scriptures and reading the scriptures. And God speaks through the Bible.” Cruz presents himself as the Christ specialist: “will simply show up and vote our values, we’ll turn this country around. We can turn our country around, but only if the body of Christ rises up.”

Divine Justice: Health Care, Ted Cruz’s Style

Cruz was booed off the stage for his frantic support for Israel. He accused those who disagreed of being “consumed with hate” concluding, “If you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you.” I guess Cruz is not bringing back the Inquisition any time soon.

All the other candidates to the presidential election are caricatures from the Dark Side.

To recapitulate: in the 1990s, president Clinton, an ignorant, yet conniving schmoozer who used empathy as a weapon of mass domination, followed the orders he got from Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, and “deregulated” finance. Basically Clinton took all the work from President Roosevelt on finance, and flushed it down the toilet of history. Financiers were given carte blanche to do whatever they pleased.

On the other hand, Clinton “never had sex with that woman“. At least before DNA.

Now Hillary Clinton, who declared herself “broke” after the presidency (imagine: everything is paid for you, and then one gets a measly 450,000 dollar tip on top of that!), is the proud owner of at least 50 million dollars (just in case she has a problem remembering her “friends” when she becomes president). Hilarious Hillary repeated the far right talking points against single payer health insurance which both Sanders and Trump favor, attracting the furor of the health care plutocrats (apparently Obama got 350 million dollars from them in 2008).

To understand Clintonphobia, you have to understand that, in the existent fractional reserve banking system, private banks create money (through credit). Deregulation allowed banks and their financial accomplices to create as much money as they please, for their managers, stakeholders, and accomplices, and buy the world with it. Including politicians and administrators as found inside the USA and the EU (or Britain, or China, Russia…)

The maneuver was comparable to stealing candy from baby.

So now here we have the “dangerous” Trump perilously suggesting the USA needs single payer health insurance, or even, horror of horrors, “Socialized Health Care”, as in “Scotland”. Trump is really a horrible man, a mad man.

It goes without saying that the pseudo-left, the so-called “liberal with a conscience” are hysterical against Trump. Gee, with Obamacare, 30 million go without health insurance, and prices of drugs keep on creeping up (+ 4.5% last year). That’s all real progress, sing the likes of Krugman from the rooftops, while watching little students below pay $70,000 dollars to listen to the great masters of the dark art of economics…

While the “left” focuses its ire on Trump, it feels ready to accept anybody-but-Trump. This fostering of the mood of anybody-but-Trump fosters whom plutocracy much prefer. Not a traitor like Trump, but an obsequious servant.

Senator Ted Cruz says worse than Trump, calmly, and much more crazy, but nobody notices… Aside from the likes of Goldman Sachs. Ted has made already 4 million dollars. Having his wife work at Goldman Sachs cannot hurt.

Senator Ted Cruz makes Trump sound reasonable

Glenn Andrews: I was thinking exactly the same thing. It Trump were elected, other world leaders might detest him but they would at least understand what he was. With Cruz, they would be left scratching their heads.

So what is going on at this point? Cruz says that talking to god in one’s head is fine, and, by looking most reasonable, advocating this, he advertises the very mood which makes Literal Islam, and crazed out Christianism strong. Cruz makes jihadism honorable. Hillary Clinton, not to be undone, said that Trump was helping the Islamist State. Trump responded strongly to Clinton’s debate statements over the weekend, calling her a “liar.” “It’s just another Hillary lie. She’s a liar and everybody knows that.”

Fact checkers said there was no public evidence to support the comments Clinton made during the Democratic debate on Saturday. Hillary Clinton subsequently changed her music.

Trump says socialized medicine may be the answer.

For all these years, we have listened to Obama, who basically said nothing, as he droned on, smothered by the impotence of reasonability unchained. Now we have Cruz, a new Ayatollah Khamenei, who, likes Hitler, and unlike Ayatollah Khamenei, wants to be elected, while praising god. As Cruz does this show, common Americans are told it’s OK to be crazy with god. Trump’s message is strikingly opposed: he wants to bar those crazed with god.

Plutocracy has learned to reign with decoys. In France, Marine Le Pen calls to national thoughtfulness are derided as fascism. So one does not have to debate the fact that France needs a massive devaluation of the Euro, or that some of the points of David Cameron against the present European Union constitution may be reasonable. Properly managed, Trump becomes a decoy to free the path to the major insiders of plutocracy, Hillary and Cruz.

We are hilariously cruzing towards more the same, just worse. As time goes by, the mood that plutocracy is here to stay feels ever more reasonable. Now the future president is inhabited by god. What could go wrong?

Patrice Ayme’

MOODS RULE THOUGHTS

Systems Of Moods Overwhelm Systems of Thought.

MOODS MAKE UP THE GENETICS OF LOGIC:

Are we born with “instincts” such as “care”, and the like? Or do we learn? I believe we learn (much of this being fast learning, and, mostly, subconscious). How does that work? Well, it would work from General Topology informing neurogenesis.

French philosopher Foucault baptized himself historian of systems of thought, when he got a professorship at the prestigious Collège de France in 1970. (Collège de France, the ultimate think institution, is five centuries old.)

I have gone one further, by introducing Systems of Moods. Why moods? Emotion Primes Reason. However, rarely does one emotion rule alone, but for ravenous hunger, abject terror, and other animalistic crazes. Instead, when we meditate ponderously, we are usually ruled by moods.

What’s a mood? It’s a cocktail of emotions. Systems of Moods are articulated with their own logic. Pascal discovered this, when he said “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison n’a pas”.

Why and how does the “heart” have its own logic? The answer has to do with where does logic come from? Logic is basically about arrows, implications: ’if A, then B’.

Where do these “thens”, these implications, come from? When one says:’I have a bad feeling about this’, one reasons out of a mood: the forest is suddenly too quiet, or a bird made an alarm sound… And suddenly all of one’s senses are in full alert.

Sets of moods will tend to topological relations. Instead of the one to one relations of logic or category theory. Topology, the logic of places, can bring to bear relationships that are much more general than ‘if A then B’. Relations such as: ’if A is close to B while C is close to D, when closer to A than B, then…’

This topo-logic can be embodied by neurohormones, neurotransmitters, and the neighborhoods they create (neighborhood is here used in the exact mathematical, General Topological sense). This no idle theory: it’s known that dendrites, and other neuronal structures, tend to grow in some directions, depending upon these chemicals. That means that the neurological relations of linear logic are built from the emotional and neurohormonal calculus.

***

AN EXAMPLE WHERE MOODS DOMINATE, AND LOGIC IS SECONDARY:

I am going to use an example that arose from my adventures at a philosophy website. It’s rather complex, so let me give an abstract first: a philosophy professor drew a correct conclusion, yet the EXACT OPPOSITE conclusion is also valid. How is that possible? It is because, once some moods and emotions are rolled out, logic can go one way, or the other.

So much for the old hope that determinism and logic (in the conventional sense) rule all.

The example was extracted from Scientia Salon, a site run by university philosophers.

Philosophy professor Gregg Caruso considered polls on the behavior of USA citizens (that’s called “experimental philosophy”). Verdict? The relationship between believing in Free Will and believing that low lives dug their own fates, seems strong in the USA.

Gregg wrote: “juries — eager to preserve their belief in a just world — are already inclined to see the victim … as other than innocent… just one unfortunate example of the pernicious nature of belief in a just world… since, of course, if the world is just, then people must have brought these circumstances upon themselves. This blaming of victims (in defense of belief in a just world) has been established by numerous studies… the stronger the belief in a just world the greater the likelihood of blaming victims for their unfortunate fates.”

Any society rests on logic. The logic does not have to be all-embracing, it just has to be effective enough to support the social organization. Gregg’s general thesis is a good antidote to the present logic dominating the USA. Yet a USA social truth does not have to be a truth of human ethology.

And it is not, as egregious cases in non-USA based history and geography show.

The Nazis believed the less Free Will, the better: “society’s needs come before the individual’s needs” (Adolf Hitler). So did the followers of Stalin. So do, to a great extent some of the Muslim religions (so called “branches” of Islam). All believe(d) that individual Free Will had to be eradicated. Islam comes from aslama “he submitted”.

All believe(d) that the world could be made just through the application of strength, and the Will of God, the General Secretary, or the Guide.

Now, if I abstract the examples above (Stalinism, Nazism, Islamism), I can rephrase the grand conclusion of Gregg, into its complete contradiction. Below I just changed “Free Will” into “NON Free Will”:

…belief in NON free will, it was found, by studying the historical examples above, is associated with just world belief, authoritarianism, religiosity, punitiveness, and moralistic standards for judging self and other. While these considerations do not prove belief in NON free will is mistaken, they do indicate that the putative pragmatic benefits of believing in NON free will and desert-based moral responsibility are bogus.

Gregg showed that in the USA to doubt Free Will would allow society to progress. History, in many other places show that rejecting Free Will led to horrible societies.

How come Gregg’s informed logic and concrete polls can be turned on its head? What is going on?

The answer is from the theory of systems of moods. The reason that the logic can be turned on its head is that what truly matters are the mood and subjacent emotions.

Example. The Nazis posed themselves as victims of an unjust world (big, bad, rich, hypocritical, Indian exterminating America; Versailles Treaty). Germans, all over, were oppressed minorities. Only surrendering Free Will would be bring back justice and stop the punition they were submitted to.

Strong emotions, bound by strong logic, make strong medicine. Yet, the logic is secondary. It could go whichever way. This is what the apparent truth of both Free Will Skepticism, and the truth of its exact opposite, my pernicious anti-thesis (just an observation, too), demonstrate.

Foucault suggested that power laid in discourses, more than anything else. I agree. Yet, beyond that, power lays in the raw emotions, and the moods they blossom into. The exact nature of the way they get organized is an afterthought.

Here is an explicit example: Christianism and love. Christ said that to love was the commanding commandment. Fine. However, read what he exactly said:

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

What’s the strongest emotion here? Jesus says it himself: loving obedience to “the Lord”. He puts it first. However, obedience is not the most prominent feature of human ethology (raw love probably is, next to the survival instinct). Thus the implied logic is the violence one has to exert to do something unnatural, obeying a so-called “Lord”.

In the end, Jesus’ primary emotion holds in just one word: “Lord”. Jesus is a plutophile: loving a “Lord” is the first law.

He, and others, can put whatever logic they want after that to embellish the ugliness, and comfort the horror. It does not really matter. The overall mood flows from there, one concept: “the Lord”. The rest is just rearranging the chairs on the sinking Titanic of Jesus’ make belief goodness.

Patrice Ayme’

Was Jesus Christ Immoral?

‘TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK’ MEANS COLLABORATING WITH EVIL.

Instead, Forget Abraham, Resist, Crush Infamy, and Save the Little Children.

Jesus is an imperial Roman fabrication. Not only his mythology was cut and pasted from pre-existing religions, but even His birthday was displaced from one side of the Sun to the other. This 6 months translation made it coincide with the Winter Solstice and the Saturnials, the feast and celebration of the Greco-Roman empire which lasted weeks.

No philosopher of note has considered Jesus since Nietzsche noticed that the crucifix was a sex symbol for frustrated Christians. So why do I bother? Well, the USA is pervaded by God, and Jesus is his son. That would be OK, except that the GDP of the USA is growing at an annual rate of 5%, whereas Europe, and even Germany, has been stagnating with zero percent growth since 2008.

Both facts are related, but I will not get into that for this essay. Another point is that a version of the remarks on Jesus’ morality was censored on a philosophy website, because the moderator, a professional philosopher, and self-declared atheist, viewed it as “unduly offensive”.

Real philosophers offend the baffled and uncomprehending masses with true ideas they cannot swallow yet.

In the West, for more than a millennium, “Jesus” was viewed as the paragon of morality. Instead I will propose the exact opposite, by analyzing carefully what may be Jesus’ most famous saying. It made “Jesus” into the whetstone on which Nazism, among other evils, was sharpened.

I already pointed out that Jesus had homicidal tendencies: not only did this rabbi make explicit threats, but he said he came to impose the “Law” the Old Testament.

Said Old Testament depicts a God drunk on power, mass homicides, and a passion for torturing to death little children, so as to humiliate or punish their parents. It is hard to find a more despicable character in the history of ideas. The Biblical god can do whatever He pleases and call that divine.

The local plutocrat, our local lord, made in God’s image, was then morally justified to behave just as he wished all along. Hence the dealing and pushing of Christianism onto the mystified masses by plutocrats, from Constantine to Putin.

Jesus said: [those who] serve other gods … thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die.” [Bible New Testament; Dt.13:6-10]

A Christian, Elizabeth Carter, was not thrilled with the unconventional picture of Jesus I gave. She commented (Dec 5, 2014):

“Christ taught us not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek.

He said that if you choose to live by the law of Moses you will be judged by the law of Moses…

Jesus was crucified and did not resist the evil that was being done to him at all. Christians were told to follow Him.”

The statement “Christ taught us not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek,” is the epitome of immorality.

Jesus, even if he existed, was a savage of 2,000 years ago who repeated like a parrot what rabbi Hillel The Elder said a century before. Even the conservative Edmund Burke, 250 years ago, came to realize that Jesus was morally evil. Said Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Ironically this idea is central to the French Revolution, which Burke hated. In the French revolution, good men decided to do something about plutocracy… And the struggle is not over. Voltaire’s “IL FAUT ECRASER L’INFAME” got it right, and got the whole world rolling in the correct direction.

What did Chris thought he was achieving with turning the other cheek? Looking somewhere else? Indicating that punishment, cheek slapping, should be pursued, until morale improve, or one passes out?

Or was Christ, by turning the other cheek to evil, teaching us to collaborate with evil? Or, to put it more crudely, and to the point, to collaborate with Auschwitz? Let Him get to the oven first. With my most sincere contempt.

The hundreds of extermination camps the Nazis set-up all over Germany could function only because, like Jesus, the average Christian German decided to turn the other cheek and look somewhere else. Some extermination hells, such as Dachau, were in full view, a few kilometers from Munich. An outraged American general forced the whole local population of good Christian Germans to visit this place of extermination. The honorable German citizens put their finest clothes, and grimly contemplated what their hellish culture of cheek turning allowed to happen.

Jesus is distinctly less popular in Germany now. He had told the Germans to avert their eyes, and not fight evil. Jesus was wrong as wrong could be. All over Europe, he does not cut the saintly figure he used to.

Christians were told to follow their love boy, Jesus, and his dad. Germans were told to follow their “Guide” (Fuhrer).

Evil’s face could be that of a hungry lion, or that of a thug, or a rampaging dictator. Turning the other cheek only encourages it. The mythical Jesus Himself, when confronted with a few merchants in the Temple, not really an outrage in my opinion, got very angry, and physically violent, as he threw them out.

Thus the alleged acts of the mythical Jesus make no emotional sense: if some fast buck artists soil the Temple with their wares, He attacks them, but if some dictator puts a child in the oven, He turns the other cheek? Insignificant is outrageous, and outrageous, is insignificant?

Is it this perverse logic which allowed hungry Crusaders to roast and eat little Muslim Children?

(This evil culinary fact is well documented through direct eyewitnesses and participants; one would assume that, as good Christians, the Crusaders just turned the other cheek, so they could munch better…)

Essential to Jesus’ “teaching” is that one should not resist infamy. The very fact lover boy Jesus did not resist his own crucifixion, as Christians say, is the very proof that, either he deserved it, or he was of the lowest moral sort.

Or maybe he was a masochist who wanted to be crucified, because that gave him a sexual kick, to rub his buns on rough wood.

And his followers are even worse. I mean what are these creeps going to do when some monsters come to torture a child? Turn the other cheek? Not resist? Celebrate Abraham, who bound his own son, to slit his throat, because he was in love with his boss? That’s clearly worse than gay marriage, it’s gay murder.

How much more despicable can one be?

Those “Christian” ideas ought to be buried in the mental rot to which they belong. They are precious only in the sense that they laud the exact sort of systems of thought and moods we should avoid like the mental plague they are: lethal and contagious.

To have made a religion out of collaboration with infamy, is not just inhuman, absurd, demented, and an insult to our true creator, biological evolution. It should outright be made unlawful to teach it as non-fiction. And frowned upon, submitted to the severe punishment, as non-assistance to children in danger. Some demons will laugh: ‘No wonder Christians love the cross so much: deep down inside they know they all deserve it, being the lowest of the low’.

Amen.

Happy Birthday, Christ. Should you have truly existed, as the Good Lord, no doubt you taught the exact opposite of many of the words plutocrats such as emperor Constantine put in your mouth.

Patrice Ayme’

PAIN & PASSION For Balanced Mental Diet?

Today Christians celebrate the suffering of Christ (that’s what “passion” means; the word was more or less created for this, the suffering of Christ, in 12C France). Why?

Are Christians celebrating suffering in general, or the gift the Son of God supposedly made to them by consenting to suffer too? Or both?

If suffering is celebrated, what for? Because it brings good things, or because it is, per se, a good thing? Or is suffering celebrated because it is central to the human condition? Then, refusing suffering would be to refuse the human condition itself.

Pope Gets Down To Business

A specialist of Buddhism, Philip Short, author of several best seller scholarly books, told me, in connection with explaining the holocaust in Cambodia, that, by spiting pain, Buddhism made people more indifferent to suffering… And thus more tolerant of suffering, and of those, or what, the systems of thoughts and emotions, that inflict it.

Certainly Christians make a show of regretting the suffering of Christ, while revering the fact that, supposedly, he died for us. While Islam is rather gross in comparison, by revering “Jihad” (Holy war or holy war-like effort), Christianism is more subtle: it celebrates those who die for us in horrible suffering, just to obey their “Father”. (Implicit message, same as in Islam, where it is explicit (S 4, v 56): obey Your Lord, the one in the big castle on the hill, as ordained by God.)

In any case, if more than half of the planet is of a mentality inspired by Christianism or Islamism (including yours truly), it’s no doubt because both these religions view suffering as a good thing, sometimes, in their core doctrine. That reflectsthe human condition better. Whereas Buddhism, once upon a time a state religion in much of Asia, and all of India, was wiped out nearly everywhere (even Japan, where Shintoism was the official state religion).

The problem with Buddhism? It’ s too condemning of pain and suffering. The beast has to be tough, to be the beast.

Beasts manage pain, like anything else, because biological evolution manages everything, or, at least, used to manage everything, until our forebear, Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis, decided to burn coal in France, 73,000 years ago.

Pleasure one craves for, and pain, one avoids. That’s first order. In second order, evolution found out that sometimes one had to crave for pain. Thus pain became pleasure, on a more meta level.

A good example is the totally typical scene of the wildebeest (gnou) being eaten, slowly, by the hyena, guts ballooning out. Why would evolution want that the live dinner be drenched by endorphins, and thus not to suffer too much? Why would Evolution be a good and tender god? Why would evolution care? Well, Evolution cares about the predator being around to eat another wildebeest the following week. Thus Evolution cares about the wildebeest not hurting too much the hyena. Predators are fragile, precious: violence is a delicate behavior to live from, the prey’s cooperation is essential.

If they can, predators avoid risk, and will not even risk killing their prey, if they can have their cake, and eat it.

It’s pretty obvious that efforts bring suffering, but that, often, without efforts, or danger, there would be even more suffering. So one would expect that evolution would have prepared mechanisms that make suffering, and danger, to be perceived, somehow as pleasant, when they are obviously deemed to be important.

What morality to bring out of that? Suffering is not absolute. It’s relative, relative to the causality at hand. And the causality around the corner. Suffering for the good, or a greater cause, can be excellent. That’s one indirect message contained in the Passion of Christ.

And a warning beckons: humanity has a propensity to suffering, and not just as an inclination, but as something necessary for a fully balanced mind. It’s not just that “great” leaders want to hurt others. They do this, in part because they want themselves to hurt.

Could it be that suffering brings happiness? If suffering comes from physical exercise, it certainly brings endorphins! In this case, suffering is directly alleviated by neurohormones. But more generally, a tough condition, especially when it bring despair, completely transforms common existence: instead of being perceived as dreadful, the simplest thing become delectable.

Say you are stuck on a mountain, hanging in a harness, with not even a ledge to rest on, in winter at night with insufficient clothing, no food nor drink (one of my specialties). A return to simple flat ground will be perceived as paradise.

So paradise is easy to muster: just go about, suffering big time, and then return to normality (with luck). This is the attraction of extreme sports. But also war.

Humanity has evolved over several million years. Several millions years of happiness, but also pain and suffering. Can one go without the other? So, when John Lennon screamed that “when you talk  about destruction, you can count me out” (in his anti-revolutionary song, “Revolution”), was he unwise and unbalanced?

Proper mental ecology has more important things to worry about, than destruction, pain and suffering, says Evolution.

Certainly, stupidity is something more inhuman, than suffering itself, in which one can easily have all of humanity fall into, during these oligarchic times.

Today a famous novelist also died. Gabriel Garcia Marquez observed that: “Most critics don’t realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.”

Indeed, although novels are jokes, life is not a joke. Or then it’s a pretty good one. And also a pretty insufferable one. Fiction is a genre much honored. But who needs fiction, when one has reality? Is not fiction reality light?

Accept the pain, it’s the human thing to do.

Patrice Aymé

 

[Note: The preceding used in passing a Lamarckian (new semantics!) evolutionary mechanism. The evolution of pain mitigation appeared as a “smart” overall ecological system selections: herbivores too hard to eat were deselected by ecological system collapse. So Masochism is evolutionary advantageous from the point of view of entire ecology survival.]