Amerika

Let us assume, as the evidence suggests, that Christianity is a compilation of previous religious beliefs and has some wisdom embedded within it. That being said, its means-over-ends approach leaves much to be desired.

Jesus argued the same thing. He opposed a rules-based order; he wanted a goals-based order, starting in what we might call “goal zero” which is achieving sanity and orientation toward the good instead of all the alternatives, which by not achieving good, are at a minimum tangential.

We might take a look at the seven deadly sins and re-frame them in a realist context as the psychological failings that they are:

• Pride: Focus on the self and solipsism.
• Greed: Using material desires in lieu of purpose.
• Wrath: Scapegoating and resentment.
• Envy: Jealousy in lieu of proactive direction.
• Lust: Emotional attachment to bodily desires.
• Gluttony: Consumption to fill the void of meaning.
• Sloth: Refusal to use effort to fix problems.

These are not moral wrongs so much as mental health wrongs because they redirect the individual away from adapting and thriving. They are pitfalls, but they are also things we learn intuitively with a small boost from culture, so putting them in religious writings seems excessive.

Mostly these serve as a way to browbeat children into shame, guilt, and fear by using overly broad categories. When the teacher notes a kid is proud of himself, she beats him down with the sin of pride and then smiles at how her authority has been asserted.

In the same way, fear of “greed” alienates people from their need to prosper. We know that the scriptures specify that “the love of money is the root of evil,” but this still remains unclear; we all love money, and it is only a problem when it becomes a singular life goal, excluding others.

• Pity: Focus on sympathy over practical activity.

Pity comes to us from the series of dysfunctional mental assertions like APE (altruism, pacifism, and empathy). Their goals are misdirects. You can only have peace when you have the conditions for peace, and wanting good for others can only be achieved by making life good, not direct aid.

Passivity might be another candidate, which is the habit of looking toward external options that “seem” to solve a problem (thesis in search of data) versus fixing the conditions of life that cause the problem (data in search of thesis). It is simply a defective form of thinking.

Christianity leads to bad mental health by emphasis on methods over goals, the inversion of what Jesus most likely preached. This causes people to think in narrow terms, become obsessed by symbols, and eventually adopt a nearly schizoid mental state.

To avoid inversion, one must have a goal, and this requires actively rejecting what most people want because most of them are making at least one of the eight errors above. Perhaps the only sin is a failure to be realistic in an eternalist transcendental context.

Tags: christianity, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, passivity, pity, pride, sin, sloth, wrath