And it occurs to me that the motto of their generation is “spare the rod and spoil the child”. According to my baby book, I got my first spanking at 12 months, for touching an electric plug. I don’t know how hard I was hit, or how often, but as I dig deep into my affective memory, my kinesthetic memory, I feel this terrible fear of being punished, seemingly at random, and lacking the cognitive advancement to understand why I was being hit. If you are going to use corporal punishment, it seems the child needs to at least be old enough to understand well enough why he is being punished to not do it again. I wasn’t old enough.
But in their own minds, and this is the core point I want to make, my parents were doing me GOOD. They were being good Christians. They were doing their duty–this is what they told themselves–even as they took their resentments out on me, of my frequent crying, my neediness, of all the things ALL children do. I well understand getting tired of little children. I have been there. I have often said that any parent who claims they don’t occasionally fantasize about killing their kid in the first couple years is lying.
At the same time, most kids get through that period, because their parents exercise self restraint, and also learn to value all the countless HAPPY moments, JOYFUL moments that little kids also bring.
But think of all the evil committed in the name of the church, of Goodness, of God. Sade could plausibly argue, as he did indirectly, that no God that was not evil could inflict on humanity anything like the Catholic Church, which for many centuries ROUTINELY tortured anyone who questioned them, and quite often murdered them in a very painful fashion. This church also routinely excused the worst crimes of kings and others, when it was to their benefit. Even today the Vatican is, in my understanding, the richest nation per capita on the planet, because of all the gold in its vaults, gold stolen from many places, gold and other treasure with blood on it.
Thus I would argue that the fundamental mechanism of most evil on this planet is that of RATIONALIZATION, of having a mechanism whereby the basest impulses of greed, violence, lust and all the rest are made VIRTUOUS. Islam is perhaps the most conspicuous example, in that men were encouraged directly from their holy book to go out and rape women and enslave them, to attack their men, kill them, and take all their possessions. All of this was rationalized for them.
With regard to the Bible, nothing in the New Testament allows for violence. Historically, that is what the Church was for, and the effects in many cases not all that different from those inspired by the Koran.
Few thoughts.