Karl R said:
Instead of inventing wild myths about what theists think, feel and believe, why don't you try listening to us?
Glaswegian said:
That is just Christian subterfuge. It is the same form of subterfuge that was employed by all those Muslims who pretended to be offended by the Mohammed cartoons. What it seeks to do is undermine the critic of religion by appealing to his sense of pity.
To reiterate what I said earlier: When the religious believer asks the critic of religion to try 'listening' to him this should be understood as a cry for help, as an attempt on his part to surreptitiously obtain pity and solicitude for the psychological pain and turmoil caused in him by his religion.
Karl R said:
How on earth do you arrive at this conclusion? :bonk:
I arrived at it by the following route:
After the patient and dedicated investigator of religious subterfuge has penetrated through each successive layer of psychological sublimation, after he has peeled aside every veil which conceals and distorts, after he has opened up the Russian doll and the whole series of dolls hidden within that doll, after he has negotiated his way past all the decoys which lie between himself and what he seeks - after he has done all of this and much, much more - he eventually comes to the ultimate, underlying motivation behind the Mohammed Cartoons fiasco. Finally, he beholds the real motivation lying there before him like a startled, wriggling insect uncovered from beneath its boulder and exposed to the light! - the fundamental,
covert motivation which was this: The Muslim, at a secret level of his being, wanted the secular West to
urinate on him - in a metaphorical sense, of course. Why? Because when the Muslim interpreted the Western media's publication of the Mohammed Cartoons as a degradation of what he most closely identifies with - viz. Islam - he was effectively interpreting their publication as a degradation of
himself. And this vicarious debasement was necessary for the Muslim because it served to alleviate the bad conscience he has about his religion.
Why does the Muslim have a bad conscience about Islam? Because, like the Christian and every other believer in monotheism, the Muslim
secretly hates his religion. In his heart of hearts, he experiences Islam as an alien reality imposed on him from outside which undermines his moral and intellectual freedom and his capacity for autonomous development. That the hatred which the Muslim feels towards Islam tends to exist at a subterranean level within him is largely the result of the severity of the penalties meted out (historically and in the present day) against those who openly condemn and despise it.*
Because the average Muslim lacks the moral courage to give public expression to his hatred of Islam, because he cannot even bear to admit to himself the hatred he feels towards it,
because he dare not allow his hatred for Islam to enter his conscious awareness for a single moment, this causes certain psychological defence-mechanisms to come into operation in him at an unconscious level. Here I will mention just two of them.
One of the defence-mechanisms is
reaction-formation which involves the conversion of an unacceptable or threatening impulse into its opposite - in this case, the Muslim's dangerous, subversive hatred of Islam is converted into an
ostensible love for it which, of course, is much more acceptable to his socio-cultural milieu. A second defence-mechanism is
displacement which involves the shifting of an impulse from its proper object onto a substitute one - in this case, displacement redirected the Muslim's unconscious hatred of Islam onto the West and its media and thereby served to provide temporary relief from the conflict and tension produced in him by the ambivalent attitude he holds towards his religion. This is why the layman, who has no explicit knowledge of the operation of either of the foregoing defence-mechanisms, was nevertheless right to suspect that the Muslims who used the Mohammed Cartoons as a pretext to profess their 'devotion' to Islam in the most vociferous and violent ways are precisely those Muslims whose faith in their religion is most superficial and tenuous.
Had Shakespeare been alive today he would have wrote of the Muslim's phoney outrage over the Mohammed Cartoons thus:
Methinks the Muslim doth protest too much.
Incidentally, the psychological defence-mechanism 'reaction-formation' can also be seen at work in the Christian male's condemnation of homosexuality. Thus, Christian males who complain that homosexuality is an abomination because it is 'sinful in the eyes of God' are only pretending to be shocked by it. Their outrage about homosexuality is only ostensible outrage -
pseudo outrage - because these Christian males are really drawn to this form of sexual behaviour and would like to indulge in it themselves. We can glimpse the repressed homosexuality in this species of Christian male by examining some of the ways in which he uses language to conceptualise his 'relationship' with Jesus.
For example, he often conceives of his soul as the
'bride' of Christ and Christ as its
'bridegroom'; and he ardently desires to be
'penetrated' by Christ's love; and he anticipates that his
'union' with Christ will be
'ecstatic' when he
'opens himself up' and lets Christ
'come into' him so that he can
'feel the vibrating, pulsating power of His love inside'. The nature of the Christian male's homoerotic love for Jesus varies from individual to individual. Thus, the masochistic Christian male wants to be
'possessed' violently by his
'Lord' while the Christian male whose sensibilities are more delicate wants Jesus to be
'gentle' with him and to be
'caught up in His everlasting arms'. Then, of course, there is the Christian male who cries in a paroxysm of passion:
'I am yours Lord! Do anything you want with me!' Plainly, this kind of Christian is besotted with Jesus: he
'trembles with desire' for his
'Lord' and wants to
'prostrate' himself before Him
'abjectly'. Thus, in these and many other ways the Christian male who has repressed his homosexuality gives expression to his secret desire to be Jesus's 'woman'.
* The reason for the monotheist's secret hatred of his religion is discussed in more detail in my post
Religion And The Need For Blasphemy in General Religious Debates.
