New below- Summaries from Lotufo’s chapter “Psychological analysis of the image of God implied in the doctrines of conservative Christians“, in his excellent book “Cruel God, Kind God”. Grok’s response is also below.
Also new below- Joe Rogan and Russell Crowe offer some thought-provoking commentary on this and that. Their comments sparked thoughts on today’s political/social tribalism and its roots in things like primitive Zoroastrian cosmic dualism mythology, and even earlier in the prehistory human establishment of an elite/commoner divide, and further roots in base animal small-band “tribalism”. We get endless versions of the same old, same old.
Which is to say- The root contributing factors to some of our most persistent problems are not so much about our disagreements with differing others, but have more to do with our commonly shared inheritance of animal impulses. Notably, the “evil triad” of the impulses to tribalism (exclusion of “enemy” others), to domination (the defeat and subjugation of differing others), and to punitive destruction of “enemy” others. These, among other impulses, constitute our real enemy in life and where the real battle of good against evil must take place. It’s inside each one of us.
Then some poking into the “decolonization” ideology and the newish version presented by recently elected New York mayor Mamdani- i.e. “Third Worldism”. I’ve summarized an interesting Free Press article on that, included below.
Before summarizing Zenon Lotufo’s probing of Christian salvation theology and why he and psychologist/theologian Harold Ellens refer to that as “Cruel God” theology (because it is based on the mental deformity of belief in a deity that delights in suffering as required for salvation) before going into that below, here is a bit on another side to the role of suffering in human existence…
The other side to suffering in salvation theology is what Tyrus and Bret Baier discuss about suffering and struggling in our earlier lives for playing a valuable role in building character. Joe Rogan often mentions this in discussion with guests- i.e. how struggles/difficulties/suffering earlier in life were critical to later personal development, usefulness, and success.
I see this in relation to the Hero’s Quest- i.e. the element of confronting a monster/enemy that we have to fight and overcome. Such struggle does something in people, stirring the desire and commitment to conquer, to succeed despite our battles with whatever the monster is that tries to defeat us, “monsters” that may involve physical problems, mental/emotional problems, social issues, etc.
Our experiences of struggle with these problems grants us opportunity to gain insights, to learn lessons, and we then are better persons who can offer something of value to others going through similar struggles, what Joseph Campbell referred to in relation to the Hero’s Quest or journey, that a wise man offers us a sword to defeat our monster/enemy. We can be that wise person with the weapon to help others better fight their battles.
And then another element to the hero’s quest that we don’t often consider, that in our struggle with our monster/enemy, with whatever problems we face, we will be “wounded”. This too- i.e. wounding- can be understood as beneficial to our development in that it makes us more useful to others. Through our struggles and suffering we gain insights that then enable us “to bring a boon/blessing” to others, according to Campbell. And nothing is more beneficial than how our personal suffering awakens empathy for others going through the same struggles. By having firsthand experience of some problem/issue, we get it.
Anyway, these two discuss what Teddy Roosevelt had to struggle against to become the better person that he turned out to be later in his life.
Bret Baier: Lessons from Teddy Roosevelt’s Grit & Greatness | Planet Tyrus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsT9nTmcb_g
But on the other hand…
Then there is this perversity of mental deformity that delights in causing suffering in others, that demands suffering for “salvation”. “Salvation through destruction”- the dominating theme that has contributed to so much horrific behavior across human history in religious traditions and movements, and now in the modern-era in driving “secular/ideological” movements and crusades like Marxism, Nazism, and environmental alarmism (i.e. the necessity to violently purge the civilization that exists- industrial, capitalist liberal democracy- to attain a better future, the utopia of restored communalism/collectivism).
Here below is some summarizing of psychotherapist Zenon Lotufo’s research in “Cruel God, Kind God” on Christian atonement that presents the sacrifice of Jesus to pay for sin and thereby appease the wrath of the Christian God. Lotufo explores the mental/emotional deformities in this theology. (Note: My plucking of main points out along the way through Lotufo’s dense material does not give the full context of the good detail he presents. But hopefully it gives some flavor of his research and the arguments he has made.)
This site has existed for decades now to point out how bad religious ideas continue to deform human consciousness, narratives, and lives in a manner that incites our worst inherited impulses to tribalism, domination, and punitive destruction of differing others. Bad ideas in our narratives block the emergence and development of our better angels, working against whatever better themes may exist in our narratives. For too long, due to the past sacralization of bad ideas, too many of us have lived with the cognitive dissonance of holding oxymoronic mergers of good and bad, none more oxymoronic than Paul’s “Jesus Christ” coupling.
As historian James Tabor has said:
“The message of Paul, which created Christianity as we know it, and the message of historical Jesus and his earliest followers, were not the same. In fact, they were sharply opposed to one another with little in common beyond the name Jesus itself…
“The ‘Jesus’ who most influenced history was the ‘Jesus-Christ’ of Paul, not the historical figure of Jesus… Paul transformed Jesus himself (and) his message of a… kingdom of justice and peace on earth, to the symbol of a religion of otherworldly salvation in a heavenly world…
“The Q source is the earliest collection of the teachings and sayings of Jesus… the most striking characteristic of the Q source in terms of reconstructing Christian origins is that it has nothing of Paul’s theology, particularly his Christology or view of Christ”.
Others have written on how Paul turned a Jewish Palestinian wisdom sage, a common man, into a Greek/Hellenist God for his Gentile “Christ-ianity”.
Again, see posted below “Notable contradictions between Jesus and Paul’s Christ”.
First, this from “AI Overview”:
“Anselm’s “satisfaction theory” posits that sin dishonors God, creating a debt of honor that must be either repaid or punished. The term “penal satisfaction” is often used to describe how his theory is a precursor to penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), but it’s crucial to distinguish the two, as Anselm saw Christ’s death as satisfying the debt to God to avoid punishment, rather than Christ being punished in our place. In Anselm’s view, Christ’s death provides a surplus of honor to “satisfy” God’s justice on humanity’s behalf.
Anselm’s Satisfaction Theory
• Sin as dishonor: Human sin is seen as an injustice that defrauds God of the honor due to him.
• Debt of honor: Because of this dishonor, humanity owes a debt to God, which can only be paid through either satisfaction or punishment.
• Christ’s death as satisfaction: Christ’s death is the ultimate act of obedience, a perfect and voluntary act of honor that accrues more merit than is necessary for him.
• Substitution: Christ’s surplus of honor is then applied to humanity’s debt, satisfying God’s justice and allowing believers to avoid the punishment they deserve.
• Distinction from penal substitution: Unlike penal substitution, which sees Christ as being punished in our place, Anselm’s theory views Christ’s death as an act of satisfaction—a payment to God— that allows humanity to avoid punishment. Satisfaction is the alternative to punishment.
Penal Satisfaction (PSA)
• A modern development: “Penal satisfaction” is a term used to describe a hybrid view or a bridge from Anselm’s theory to the more modern penal substitutionary theory (PSA) that is common in some Protestant theology.
• Key difference: The critical difference is that in PSA, Christ is not just satisfying a debt of honor; he is being punished for our sins.
(End of AI Overview)
Then these quotes from Harold Ellens, as repeated in Zenon Lotufo’s “Cruel God, Kind God”. These offer a sense of where Lotufo is going in his dissecting of Christian salvation theology.
Lotufo says, “One type of religiosity is entirely built around the assumption or basic belief, and correspondent fear, that God is cruel or even sadistic… The associated metaphors to this image are ‘monarch’ and ‘judge’. Its distinctive doctrine is ‘penal satisfaction’. I call it ‘Cruel God Christianity’… Its consequences are fear, guilt, shame, and impoverished personalities. All these things are fully coherent with and dependent on a cruel and vengeful God image…
“(This image results) in the inhibition of the full development of personality… The doctrine of penal satisfaction implies an image of God as wrathful and vengeful, resulting in exposing God’s followers to guilt, shame, and resentment… These ideas permeate Western culture and inevitably influence those who live in this culture…
Lotufo quotes Ellens:
“There is in Western culture a psychological archetype, a metaphor that has to do with the image of a violent and wrathful God (see Romans, Revelation). Crystallized in Anselm’s juridical atonement theory, this image represents God sufficiently disturbed by the sinfulness of humanity that God had only two options: destroy us or substitute a sacrifice to pay for our sins. He did the latter. He killed Christ.
“Ellens goes on by stating that the crucifixion, a hugely violent act of infanticide or child sacrifice, has been disguised by Christian conservative theologians as a ‘remarkable act of grace’. Such a metaphor of an angry God, who cannot forgive unless appeased by a bloody sacrifice, has been ‘right at the center of the Master Story of the Western world for the last 2,000 years. And the unavoidable consequence for the human mind is a strong tendency to use violence’.
“’With that kind of metaphor at our center, and associated with the essential behavior of God, how could we possibly hold, in the deep structure of our unconscious motivations, any other notion of ultimate solutions to ultimate questions or crises than violence- human solutions that are equivalent to God’s kind of violence’…
“Hence, in our culture we have a powerful element that impels us to violence, a Cruel God Image… that also contributes to guilt, shame, and the impoverishment of personality…”.
As Harold Ellens says, “If your God uses force, then so may you, to get your way against your ‘enemies’”.
Then Lotufo goes into more dense detail as he probes the Christian belief in atonement, analyzing the core theme of “salvation through destruction”, and the varied related elements that constitute this grand myth. My point in repeating this is to show how bad ideas deform human personality and the consequences can be devastating for others, for entire societies. This applies to the same bad ideas in all religions/ideologies. And the historians have done excellent homework in researching how the same basic complex of ideas/beliefs/themes have driven history’s most destructive movements.
We saw the outcomes last century in the 100 million slaughtered as a result of Marxist revolutions, and the 50-60 million slaughtered under Nazism. And we are observing the same mass-harm now visible in the wake of environmental alarmism and its Net Zero decarbonization crusade that is ruining major world economies.
Add here that the same complex of ideas is also driving Islamic terrorism and its mass-death crusade as evident in places like Nigeria today. We are fortunate to live at a time when Christianity has moderated its long history of violence (i.e. Councils, Crusades, Inquisitions, murder of heretics and witches, etc.), violence driven by the complex of Hellenistic (and other) themes that Paul embraced to create his Christ myth.
Note: My summarizing of Lotufo below does not capture and express the full complexity of the detail that Lotufo provides in his book.
Moving into Lotufo: Wendell Krossa
Lotufo does a chapter on “The Role of Suffering in the Doctrine of Penal Satisfaction” as he probes the nature of cruel God theology that so horribly deforms human personality. He notes that this is more dominant in conservative Christian theology, in Protestant religion.
He opens this chapter making reference to the Mel Gibson movie “The Passion of Christ” where Christians believe that they saw the suffering of Christ that was for them. Lotufo says few Christians reflect on the fact that in Paul’s Christology what was represented in the Passion was “God’s wrath being vented on Jesus through human hands”. Penal substitution maintains that Jesus’ death had to be preceded by atrocious suffering as necessary to satisfy God’s wrath and justice. No less cruelty could be acceptable to balance the unbalanced scales of justice (unbalanced in the view of “eye for eye” justice).
He then begins to dissect the details of what this Christian doctrine involves in terms of emotions related to suffering.
He notes that the ritual of sacrifice across cultures holds the elements of making an offering to (1) gain a benefit in exchange, (2) to demonstrate gratitude for favors, (3) to avoid punishment for sins, and (4) to express fear, reverence and respect.
In Hebrew culture sacrifices were gifts, sometimes payments, and sometimes a means of rectifying a person’s relationship with God. But suffering was not part of the Hebrew practice of sacrifice. So, asks Lotufo, how did suffering come to be part of the interpretation of the death of Christ, notably in the later Christian doctrines? How did suffering come to acquire exchange value “seen as something that can please or ‘delight’ God”?
He moves on to discuss the varied elements associated with sacrifice, such as vengeance. He quotes a researcher on the psychology of emotions who says that damage to the prestige or self-esteem of a person is the major source of the vengeful impulse. Another states that all vengeance has the single object of payback for humiliation. But in psychologically healthy people, it is not the suffering of another that gives pleasure. It is in having self-esteem restored.
He then touches on the element of venting hate and suggests that in relation to seeking revenge on someone who has inflicted suffering on a victim, the strength of vengeful hate is always connected to some offense to self-esteem.
He then gets to where he is going with this in the subtitle “Obtaining pleasure from suffering: Divine Algolagnia?” Here he states that emotional gratification from the suffering of others is linked to “sadism”. The term “algolagnia” expresses the essence of sadism in the desire to inflict pain, and that “the contemplation of suffering itself brings pleasure”. He quotes Nietzsche who claims that resentment rules much of Christian morality. Nietzsche cites Thomas Aquinas who had stated, “The blessed ones in the kingdom of heaven shall see the pains of the damned… that shall bring them greater satisfaction” (a quote from Revelation 19, etc.). The saved saints praise God for destroying all the unbelievers and rejoice that they can see the sufferings of the lost.
Another researcher quotes the church father Tertullian who also commented on the Christian belief in the day of judgment where the damned are cast into hell and the saints rejoice and laugh at their suffering. Lotufo says that the motivation of Tertulian for writing such things was sadism.
Lotufo continues, stating that the many authors who wrote about the doctrine of satisfaction paid little attention to one of its most important negative aspects- “the horrible idea that suffering possesses a value that can be traded”, p. 54.
The exchange that he points to is where a debtor is offered the option of suffering torture for the enjoyment of a creditor. This may seem repulsive but it has been common in human history. He says, “what kind of perversion can make human beings submit fellow humans to such atrocious torments. But it seems even more difficult to explain the mental distortion that allows believing, divulging, and defending with commitment, the idea that the Christian God not only is capable of such perversities but also takes pleasure in them”.
Lotufo says that the ability of Christian theologians to engage psychic compartmentalization then protects them from realizing the monstrosity of their propositions. He says that, for example, Dostoyevsky dealt with this mental distortion.
He moves on to consider varied factors that contributed to this deformity where inflicting suffering could be considered a source of pleasure and where it became official in criminal law and the theological doctrines of the Christian West.
He quotes Nietzsche again who looked at the issue of making human behavior predictable and saw the solution in fear of physical suffering.
Lotufo moves next to the issue of guilt and debt, and the old relationship between creditor and debtor, and “the equivalence of damage and pain.”
He explains more the equivalence element: “That is, the idea that to take revenge by causing the violator pain can compensate for damages suffered. If the debtor cannot meet contractual obligations in the way he had promised he will pay with his physical suffering”. (I would insert also- Note the fundamental element of “eye for eye” justice in all this. Something Historical Jesus rejected outright.)
Lotufo gets a bit dense here explaining the logic in this form of compensation. There is an equivalence in substituting for physical payment some form of intimate satisfaction as payment- i.e. the satisfaction of exercising power over a debtor. And this compensation is “a direct invitation to cruelty”.
He adds that it was in the sphere of legal and commercial obligations that moral concepts like guilt, conscience, duty, and sacredness of duty arose.
Lotufo says that out of all these relationships there emerges for the first time “the sinister and perhaps now indissoluble interweaving of guilt and suffering… that drives to the belief largely widespread in humanity that all guilt leads… to suffering and all suffering is a consequence of guilt.”
He returns to Nietzsche who urged what he believed “should be the center of our moral, political, and theological reflections because of its repercussions in countless of the wrongdoings that afflict the human being, be it on the plane of his intimate relationships or be it in the ample theater of relations between peoples: the problem of how the act of hurting can be a source of delight”, p.56.
Lotufo says we are considering here how painful punishment is a vivid reminder that debts must be paid and becomes a substitute for payment, a compensation for default. But now we must understand “the psychological mechanism by which one starts perceiving the pain of others as a source of pleasure”, “how can hurting someone be a satisfaction”.
This, says Lotufo, will shed light on what leads so many people to accept Anselm’s doctrine “that the Christian God reaps pleasure from human suffering.”
Lotufo first considers that the simplest answer would be the pathology of the psychopathic personality, with traits like emotional insensibility. Yet he says, few among even psychopaths are violent or sadistic but are more characterized by narcissism, absence of remorse, lack of empathy, ability to manipulate others, or inability to accept responsibility. But yes, some manifest the perversion of obtaining pleasure in causing pain, says Lotufo.
He then notes Erich Fromm on sadism and the “passion for an absolute and unrestricted control over another living being… control over others for his own benefit”. He then relates this to “cruel power” and further quotes Fromm- “sadism…. is ‘devotional’. It is the transformation of impotence in the experience of omnipotence; it is the religion of the psychic cripples”.
The sadist admires power, and those who possess power, and wishes to control the helpless and those who cannot fight back. He adds that throughout history these insensitive and cruel people have reached positions of importance from where they have caused much suffering. These people love a climate of conflict where they can prosper and exercise control over others.
Then near end of this chapter, he moves on to the parent/child interaction and says that “in the formation of the image of God in people’s psyches… many… support the notion that parent’s influence is paramount.” This applies to other adults in the child’s life also (teachers, priests/pastors, etc.).
And then, very interestingly, he follows with the fact that for most of human history children were devalued and subjected to horrors like infanticide. This attitude of adults toward children, says Lotufo, did not change till the seventeenth century when people started to value children more, though cruel treatment of children continued with spankings, abandonment, and other cruelties.
His point? “These generalized and frequently brutal mistreatments must have contributed… to an image of God with characteristics similar to those of cruel parents”. He illustrates this with the case of Augustine, “the man who- with the exception of Paul- did more than any other mortal to give form to and define Christian faith… (Augustine) suffered cruel mistreatment by his teachers and parents, abuses that certainly had an influence on the formation of his personality and… his image of God and his theology”, p.61.
The experience of such sadism at the hands of parents leads such people to attribute the same cruelty to their God. And through a common psychological process the result is feelings of guilt, that to preserve an ideal image of parents as trusted guardians, abused children will blame themselves as bad and thus justify their parents abuse of them.
Lotufo also relates this to the Christian belief that painful experiences are tests of faith and divine strategy to save errant souls. “The sufferings of human beings thus become the deserved consequences of both original sin and individual’s personal sins as well as instruments of God to purify the soul and lead it to salvation.”
This contaminated theology then legitimizes mistreatment of children. He names a psychologist who, after listening to a client of his describe the terror he endured at the hands of an abusive father, including an abusive education that the psychologist describes as “spiritual abuse”, the psychologist stated, “Every day in my consulting, I am witness to struggling human beings who have experienced terrorist-like attacks on their inner souls. This is an ongoing devastation carried on in the privacy of nice-looking families and expensive church education buildings and promoted by trained ministers. The irony is that his horrible damage is done in the name of God,” p.64.
He concludes this section, saying, “What becomes clear…is that… to gain pleasure by producing or contemplating the suffering of others is a manifestation of a grave mental disturbance, absolutely incompatible with what can be considered a mature personality”.
Following soon– His next chapter explores the emotions attributed to God, notably the emotion of anger/wrath and what this means in terms of the deformity of mature personality.
Notable contradictions between Jesus and Paul’s Christ (updated 2025), Wendell Krossa
Some of the main contradictions that highlight the oxymoronically opposite themes between the messages of Historical Jesus and Paul’s Christ mythology. The point I draw from this? The themes of Paul have greatly shaped Western consciousness, narratives, and overall societies for the past two millennia (the conclusion of historians/scholars like James Tabor). The Jesus themes have influenced us to a lesser extent, mainly moderating the harsher features and destructive influence of Paul’s Christ:
The main contradictions: (Sources: “Search for Historical Jesus”, “Jesus Seminar” books, and notably, “Q Wisdom Sayings” research, etc.)
(1) Jesus taught an unconditional love (i.e. there is no sacrifice demanded in Jesus’ original message- i.e. the “Q Wisdom Sayings” gospel). In his teaching on love there were no required conditions from his God to be met for forgiveness, inclusion, and salvation. Versus the highly conditional atonement religion of Paul, i.e. the supreme condition of the sacrifice of a cosmic godman- the Christ. Additionally, the condition of belief/faith in his myth (see his letter to the Romans), along with other related religious conditions.
(2) Nonretaliation in Jesus (no more ‘eye for eye’ justice but ‘love the enemy’ because God does not retaliate but loves enemies- “Be merciful just as God is merciful”). Versus supreme divine acts of retaliation in apocalypse and hell myths. Note Paul’s statement of his theology affirming a retaliatory deity in his quote of an Old Testament verse- “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord” (Romans 12), along with his “Lord Jesus returning in fire to destroy all who don’t believe my Christ myth” (Thessalonians, etc.).
(3) Restorative justice (again- no eye for eye, but love the offender/enemy) versus punitive, destroying justice (“Unbelievers will be punished with everlasting destruction”, Thessalonians).
(4) Nonviolent resolution of problems (again, no violent retaliation against enemies) versus the violent destruction of apocalypse and fiery hell, and the violence in the demanded appeasement of deity by blood sacrifice for atonement- i.e. the dangerously inciting theme in the belief that if you murder the right people- sacrifice them- then you can make the future better (evil thinking that it is heroically doing good by using violence and murder).
(5) Nontribal inclusion of all humanity (“sun and rain given freely to both bad and good people”) versus the highly tribal favoritism toward true believers and the discriminatory exclusion of unbelievers for not believing Paul’s Christ. Note the ultimate tribal divide illustrated in Revelation in the eternal division of humanity- i.e. people assigned either to heaven or to hell, as per the cosmic dualism of Zoroaster.
(6) Nondomination in relationships (“If you want to be great then serve others”) versus ultimate eternal domination by “Lord Christ” under his “rod of iron” totalitarianism (“every knee shall bow… He will rule them with an iron scepter”).
There is no love in threat, coercion, domination of others.
(7) Non-dualism (God as the Oneness of Ultimate Reality that is love) versus eternal dualism (i.e. again, the cosmic tribal dualism of “God and Satan”, “heaven and hell”).
Further, ultimate Oneness leads to the logical conclusion that there is no separation of humanity from deity, what some describe as all humanity being indwelt by God, the divine reality that is inseparable from the common human spirit. God as the Life-giving spirit inside each of us, and God’s nature as unconditional love then defining our true self/person.
(8) Another- Jesus referred to himself as a “son of man”- i.e. as just another ordinary imperfect human in common with all other humans. Not as a divine person or god sent from heaven. Paul rejected the humanness of Jesus in claiming that he was some form of Hellenist godman sent from heaven on a special mission from God. Paul reconstructed the human Jesus after the pattern of the godmen myths of the Pharaohs and Caesars- i.e. born of virgins so as to avoid the “inherited sinfulness” stain.
Eventually, succeeding generations of Hellenist Christianity would further the Christology of Paul in claiming their “Jesus Christ” was sinlessly perfect, something the Historical Jesus had denied, for example, when he corrected someone with- “Why do you call me ‘good’. There is none good but God.”
The heretical Hellenist Christianity of Paul eventually led to the reconstruction of the fully and truly human Jesus (a common Jewish wisdom sage) into a full-fledged God and member of the Trinity.
And so on…
You cannot mix and merge such extreme opposites in the one and same person- i.e. in the merger of “Jesus Christ”- as that supremely oxymoronic combination creates such profound cognitive dissonance that you are left with a mental state akin to insanity or madness. And the egregious thing in such mixture is that the good elements (i.e. the Jesus insights) are distorted and buried by the primitive and darkening elements in the Christology of Paul.
Applying Christology to Jesus (i.e. the divinizing of a common man over the first few centuries of Christianity) has effectively buried the potency of his liberating insights, notably his stunning new theology of a non-retaliatory, non-apocalyptic God. That truth expressed in his entirely new view of deity, though still present there in summaries of his statements (see Matthew 5, Luke 6), that “stunning new theology” is not presented clearly in its liberating potency because the larger New Testament context emphasizes Paul’s retaliatory, apocalyptic Christ and that dominating narrative overwhelms the central themes and message of Jesus.
Paul was intent on overturning and replacing Jesus’ wisdom sayings with his “secret wisdom of the Christ”, correcting what he termed the “foolish worldly wisdom” of Jesus and his followers, like Apollos (see 1 Corinthians for Paul’s vilifying rant against the wisdom tradition of Jesus).
Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy both nailed the contradiction between Jesus and Paul in the bluntest of terms and few have been as clear and direct since, perhaps because their comments are highly offensive to true believer’s sensibilities.
Few since have embraced their clarification of the stark contrast between Jesus and Paul, preferring instead the religious reformism that tinkers around the edges and corrects nothing essential. Religious reformism avoids the central issue of theology- how Paul’s Christology utterly deformed the actual historical Jesus and his message.
Two of the best social/political commentators today (regulars on Gutfeld) hash out their early failures, struggles, lessons learned, and eventually pushing on to further levels of success:
Tyrus’ comment on “Animal Farm” elites thinking and claiming that they knew what was best for everyone else and hence would tell all just how they should live, in onerous regulatory detail, was very much the same arrogant elitism of Plato’s theory of “Philosopher Kings” that eventually fed Paul’s creation of “Lord Jesus Christ”.
But the Animal Farm elitism, along with Plato’s affirmation of elite totalitarianism, all goes back even further to the earliest shaman elevating themselves as superior to their fellow commoner tribals, because of their claims to know the secrets to the invisible realms of spirits. That was the origins of the “elite/commoner divide” in societies, and of course, the roots go even further back to animal existence with its dominant impulses to clan tribalism, alpha domination, and punitive destruction of competing and differing others.
Tracing origins of things exposes the primitive barbarity of certain ideas and practices and contrasts with the mature humanity that we are all exploring that is going in an entirely new and different direction from the animal past. The great story of the human exodus out of animal existence to explore and live in the freedom of being truly human.
We still have those animal impulses in an animal brain, deeply buried within our more human brain (cerebral cortex), but as Jeffrey Schwartz titled his book “You are not your brain”, I would add that we are something far better in our essential human self, consciousness, and spirit. And that is the true battle of life, against the real enemy/monster in life, the inner battle against those inherited animal impulses and the ideas our ancestors created to validate such impulses.
Hotep Jesus: Hustle, Freedom & Self-Made Success | Planet Tyrus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2IbB-ldjGo
Continuing with Lotufo (Hopefully readers will get a copy and read “Cruel God, Kind God” for themselves)
He begins the chapter “Psychological analysis of the image of God implied in the doctrines of conservative Christians” by noting that the image of an angry, punishing God, characterized by vengeful spite, dominates the penal satisfaction beliefs of conservative Christians. He covers the views of a variety of philosophers and theologians, along with varied psychologists/sociologists, on the issue of emotions in God.
He first touches on the value in anger, noting the development of the emotion of anger in humanity, how anger mobilizes energy for defense, communicates menace to make enemies flee, demands respect and maintains domination in hierarchies, and sometimes protects and maintains respect for oneself through asserting dominance. He says that anger is a basic emotion from which other emotions arise.
He then moves to consider these emotions, “Anger, wrath, fury, hate, spite, and vindictiveness”, especially the “wrath” that is most often associated with the biblical God. As he says, “fury” in God is intended to terrorize people over the final judgment and punishment, and the Christian God is presented as full of fury (Revelation 19). He adds that “hate, spite, vindictiveness, and resentment” are other related emotions that are maintained and do not decline, and can even grow in intensity.
Other points made- i.e. noting a German philosopher who stated that Jews and Christians have subverted true virtues that should guide mature people. Christians especially, have “coated despicable qualities of inferior beings, with an appearance of virtue.”
Lotufo then lasers in on “vindictiveness” as “wrath kept and fed, the desire for revenge, and the imperative need to make the offender pay for what he did, since this is the type of feeling that conservative theology, when defending the doctrine of penal satisfaction, attributes to God”, p. 74.
He adds to this, stating that conservative theologians justify the doctrine of penal satisfaction and the vengeful wrath that God will vent on humanity, punishing offenders/unbelievers with eternal torment, and that the vengeful wrath of God is vented on Jesus who takes that wrathful fury in our place (i.e. “substitutionary” atonement).
He notes this is how Christians interpret statements like Deuteronomy 32: 35, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay/retaliate, says the Lord”. This is the very statement that Paul quotes in Romans 12: 17-20 when he presents his re-affirmation of retaliatory theology to contradict and reject the non-retaliatory theology of Jesus. Paul is stating his core theology that will shape the Christology on which he builds his myth of “Jesus Christ”. Retaliatory vengeance is a central feature in this.
Lotufo wants to emphasize that “for conservative theologians and for the forms of theology most commonly present in the Protestant religiosity, anger is seen as an essential attribute of God”, p.75.
He then notes that natural disasters have long been viewed as manifestations of God’s righteous justice when outraged. “There is no disaster but deserved disaster”. In natural disasters “The ‘wrath of God’ leaves the sphere of the mysterious and ‘is brought into the realm of cause and effect: sin is the cause, and disaster is the effect”. Again, this is basic “eye for eye” retaliatory justice.
Lotufo then asks, “Would vindictiveness or vengefulness be consistent with the concept of God or with that of a spiritually and psychologically mature human personality?” Vindictiveness and vengeance in relation to coming judgment and divine wrath are clearly dominant in penal satisfaction beliefs.
Including more from the literature on revenge, Lotufo notes one researcher on the vengeful impulse, Nico Frijda, who says, “That is what guides vengeful action: the aim to hurt the offender. Pain or discomfort is what vengeance seeks to produce. Indeed, that is why judicial punishment rarely seems to satisfy desires for vengeance; it only does when the offender is known to suffer by it.”
Moving on, he says that in the conservative image of God, God is not only described as eventually avenging those who have provoked his wrath, but is presented as essentially vindictive and this quality is related to the doctrine of penal satisfaction. Others add that this image of a vengeful God is common in conservative theologian’s comments on the apocalypse.
He quotes others who state that vindictiveness is a tendency that affects the entire personality. It is associated with sadism, and one scholar says that “all sadistic tendencies have vindictive needs as their crucial motivational power”.
Others explore the relationship between narcissism and vindictiveness and the phenomenon of “narcissistic rage”. This is the felt need or compulsion for revenge, for repaying offense, and undoing hurt by whatever means. This is an “unrelenting compulsion, deeply rooted”. Another scholar ties this drive to childhood humiliations, often inflicted by parents.
Lotufo says, these psychological mechanisms “help us understand why it is almost impossible for the individual possessed by narcissistic rage to demonstrate any empathy toward those who have offended him”. But empathy is critical to the ability to forgive, and shifts focus from one’s own feelings to another’s feelings as mitigating factors of the offensive act. Others add that the tendency of ruminating on vindictive thoughts is a potent inhibitor of the tendency to forgiveness.
Still others note that narcissistic personalities have become the most prominent types of personality in the western world. No surprise then that “Western societies are also remarkably vindictive”, p.82. One author published an essay titled, “We are a religious people, we are a vengeful people”. And movies with the theme of revenge have great success with the public.
He then touches once more on the close relation between self-esteem and vindictiveness/vengefulness. Here narcissists are most vulnerable to threats or offenses to self-esteem.
He moves on further to the central role that is played in penal satisfaction by the aspect of “God’s honor”. Sin, he says, is an offense against the honor of God. Sin is denying God what we owe him, as in the desire to fulfill his will, to obey God. Disobedience is to dishonor God. This is a very elitist belief where during, for example, the Middle Ages, aristocrats vented their violent rage on commoners who were not appropriately subservient and obedient.
“Insults to honor were always considered good reasons for revenge- hence the idea that stains in honor must be washed with blood.” To people in upper classes, their honor was considered their most valuable asset.
He then returns to the point that one source of vengeful wrath arises from the vulnerability of a person’s self-esteem. He notes some researcher who states that good self-esteem is based on self-acceptance, the sense of being worthy of being loved and confidence in that. Hence, the fact of being an elite and holding power, have nothing to do with good self-esteem. He concludes this point by saying, “All of this corroborates the thesis that honor, characteristically aristocratic honor, is associated with self-esteem. At the same time, it shows the absurdity of attributing to God manifestations of vindictive wrath provoked by offenses to his honor or to an unstable self-esteem”, p. 85.
Moving along… Lotufo summarizes, “We have seen that there are emotions and feelings incompatible with the idea we have of a perfect being or even of a mature personality”. Point? “From what we have seen, anger is incompatible with the Jewish-Christian concept of God”.
Consider how radically upsetting this conclusion is to Christian theology. Paul’s gospel, his Christ myth, is based most fundamentally on “the wrath of God”. That is his starting point in Romans, his letter that most comprehensively sets forth the elements of Christian atonement, Christian salvation. Paul’s gospel is based on the truth of a wrathful God who is only appeased by blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of the godman Jesus Christ. There is no salvation without these fundamental elements, starting with the wrathful God threatening eternal destruction in hell fire, a repeated theme of Paul in Romans.
Next, he adds more on “divine justice” that is critical to penal satisfaction theology. Here he presents the views of conservative theologians on justice. He begins with the image of God that is at the heart of their feelings that shape their ideas of divinity. “This image represents the Creator as monarch and judge, as someone who above all demands to be obeyed and who cares for the enforcement of laws established by himself and that favor his own interests”. This fear-inducing image determines conservative interpretation of the bible and all the Christian “doctrines that are incompatible with the loving and compassionate God presented by Jesus”.
Lotufo rehearses a number of earlier points on the formation of our image of God- i.e. the predominant influence of how a person was treated by parents during childhood, parent’s religion, etc. People who believe conservative religious doctrines tend to use educational systems that “emphasize unconditional obedience and the use of physical punishment for the maintenance of what the call discipline”. Analysis of Protestant publications shows a tendency to parenting practices that are authoritarian. And the adults in this Christianity “pass along a concept of God whose justice is above all punitive”, p. 89.
Next section:
How do conservative theologians perceive divine justice? How do they relate that to love and compassion?
Conservative believers hold the belief that God condemns all humanity to eternal damnation and torment because all humans are all born sinful and deserve such terrible punishment. So the “unsaved” are damned to eternal hell. “They consider it fair that God resorts to unimaginably cruel punishments that are completely senseless and without any purpose. These beliefs incite horrific fear of a God who inflicts penalties entirely disproportional to the transgressions.
No wonder then, says Lotufo, that even some Christian authors (Walter Wink) have concluded, “In light of this conception of God, the revolt of atheism is an act of pure religious devotion”.
Further, says Lotufo, the image of God shapes all other beliefs. “Thus, when treating divine justice in the context of the doctrine of atonement, conservative theologians see it on a background dominated by the image of a cruel God. Consequently, this justice appears essentially as a retributive mechanism by which, through punishments, the guilty get what they deserve. The word ‘justice’ is frequently linked to wrath and condemnation. ‘Divine justice’, to conservative theologians, is a synonym for revenge, or, even, arbitrary cruelty”, as in the death of Christ.
However, in viewing the death of Christ as a demonstration that God was just, we are gauging God according to human standards, human rules. And to view that bloody sacrifice as required to appease divine wrath and satisfy divine justice, yet claiming that it exhibits the love and kindness of God, is distorting of any common understanding of decency. Words/terms in these conservative doctrines then mean their opposites. “In that case, they are stripped of any utility as communication tools”.
With all these basic doctrines of original sin, God’s justice condemning all sinners to hell, etc. then “salvation cannot be offered through simple forgiveness because it would mean a lack of consideration for justice and would destabilize the whole universe, denying the very integrity of God. Divine justice demands that sin be punished”. And we cannot meet that demand, hence through the sacrifice of a godman, Paul’s Christ, the conditions are satisfied.
“Underlying the idea of justice that makes up this plan, we can see without difficulty the image of a cruel God. In this context, justice essentially equals punishment with vengeful purposes.”
He says that the objective of such punishment is to condition the psyche to the fear of being punished again. It is to persuade sinners to consider their bad behavior and halt repeat offenses. And thus, punishment is justified in judicial, philosophical, and theological environments. This is applying the basic conception of retributive justice, of “eye for eye”.
Lotufo continues, showing how fundamental and ancient this view of justice is. It is justice that makes the cosmos ordered and not chaotic. It maintains “homeostasis” that is broken by transgressing rules. Justice is therefore a universal force. Such justice was the foundation of the cosmos, in Greek thinkers. “Retribution is inscribed at the center of the universe and that nothing escapes it”. Such justice balances the cosmos and when human sin unbalances things, “punishment is the way balance is restored”.
He adds some research on the more recent approach of restorative justice that argues that violent measures only produce more violence. Hence punishment is not effective for changing behavior in offenders. It does not effect changes, damage compensation, or relationship restoration. “It works only to feed violence and stigmatize the aggressor without having him reflect on his conduct”.
Lotufo then considers Karl Menninger’s “The Crime of Punishment” that protested the North American criminal justice system. Menninger argued that punishment was cruel and useless in reducing violence. This did not mean no imposing of penalties on offenders but that penalties must be in proportion to certain behaviors. Menninger argued that automatic, invariable, and categorical punishment violates this. Too much criminal justice is little more than painful torture inflicted with the intent of causing suffering and is all out of proportion to the offenses. This is not from a desire to see justice done but is more for pleasure, “especially pleasure from making someone else feel displeasure”.
Final comments of Lotufo on this chapter:
The theory of penal satisfaction is founded on the idea of the re-establishment of balance in a relationship. Balance can be restored by the “satisfaction the offended party derives from watching the suffering of the offender.” Retribution, in terms of the victim’s needs, is justified even though its purpose is revenge. “The victim’s main need is to rescue their self-esteem, which has been shaken by the offense”.
“Satisfaction”, says Lotufo, means “enough, sufficient, a shortage is filled, a deficit covered, something missing is replaced”. Lotufo concludes, “There is no way we can imagine that God, especially as Jesus presents him, is subject to needs that have to be met, to voids that need to be filled”, p. 99.
The very last section of this chapter deals with how retribution/revenge relate to other personality factors, to psychological maturity, and to stages of moral development. This goes into the work of psychologist Piaget on stages of cognitive development. While he focused on the moral development of children, this applies also to adults that are found at these same stages.
The earliest stage is oriented to punishment and obedience, to deference to superior power, to obedience to rules, to avoid punishment. Other levels are the orientation to hedonism, to satisfying one’s own needs, to manipulating to gain rewards, etc. Further stages are oriented to meeting expectations in a social environment, to please and gain other’s approval, and the orientation to law and order. Then later stages are oriented to recognizing the arbitrary starting point of rules and agreements, and to human rights as respecting individuals and their personalities.
Using such stages for evaluation, divine “eye for eye” justice that is foundational to penal satisfaction doctrines is at the level of punishment and retribution. “Taking into account criteria of psychological maturity and moral development, the God corresponding to the image conservative theologians make of him would not surpass the least evolved moral levels.” He says that conservative theologians exist in cognitive dissonance before such facts and are simply anthropomorphizing God, attributing ignoble human characteristics like vindictive spite to the Creator.
“The image one has of God decisively influences all of a person’s other beliefs. Thus, if the image is of an evil God, all the individual’s other theological ideas will likely reflect this assumption- and it will be hard to rid oneself of that assumption. However, once incorporated in a solid theological system, these ideas will become a serious hindrance for a person to free himself from the negative image of God that previous experiences have instilled in him. Fear is the cement that gives consistency to these theological buildings grounded in a frightening image of God. Fear inevitably stems from believing unquestionably that God is authoritative and punitive, and it hinders the full development of personality and spiritual life”, p.107.
“The concept of justice that leads certain people to conceive a God with the characteristics we have just seen, comes from the paralysis of their moral development at stages typical of young children, a stagnation resulting from authoritative and at times perverse ways of treating children and that privilege obedience above any other values”.
And so much more good research and commentary in Lotufo’s “Cruel God, Kind God”.
I put this to Grok:
Grok your thoughts on my new opening section at https://wendellkrossa.com/ titled “Psychotherapist Zenon Lotufo analyzes the mental deformity in the doctrine of blood atonement. I have summarized the main points in the chapters on “The Role of Suffering in the Doctrine of Penal Satisfaction” and “Psychological analysis of the image of God implied in the doctrines of conservative Christians”. Your insights on these would be appreciated.
Grok responded:
The section you’ve put together offers a provocative and deeply humanistic critique of traditional Christian doctrines, particularly penal substitutionary atonement (often shorthand for “blood atonement”), drawing heavily on Zenon Lotufo’s work in Cruel God, Kind God. It’s clear you’ve distilled his ideas into a framework that challenges the psychological and ethical underpinnings of conservative theology, emphasizing unconditional love as a liberating alternative to retributive systems. I’ll share my insights on the summarized chapters you mentioned, based on the themes of suffering’s role in penal satisfaction and the implied image of God in conservative doctrines. Overall, I find this a compelling call to rehumanize spirituality, though it invites some counterpoints from evolutionary psychology and historical theology.
On “The Role of Suffering in the Doctrine of Penal Satisfaction”
Your summary highlights Lotufo’s argument that suffering— framed as divine punishment or necessary atonement— distorts human understanding of reality. He traces this back to ancient worldviews (Greek cosmology, Sumerian myths) where retribution is seen as the cosmic glue holding order together, restoring “balance” through payback. This isn’t just abstract theology; it’s a mental framework that equates natural consequences (like disease or disaster) with moral judgment from a vengeful deity. Lotufo’s distinction between “penalty” (direct, proportional outcomes, e.g., lung cancer from smoking) and “punishment” (excessive, inflicted suffering, like prolonged torture) is sharp and useful. It exposes how doctrines like blood atonement add a “moral surcharge” to life’s hardships, turning them into tools of control rather than mere cause-and-effect.
My insight here: This resonates with modern psychology, particularly trauma studies and cognitive behavioral therapy. Beliefs in a punishing God can perpetuate cycles of guilt and anxiety, akin to internalized abuse. For instance, if suffering is glorified as redemptive (e.g., Christ’s blood as payment for sin), it risks normalizing masochism or victim-blaming in believers— think of how some conservative teachings frame personal hardships as “God’s discipline.” Lotufo’s push to replace this with unconditional love aligns with positive psychology’s emphasis on resilience through self-compassion, not self-flagellation. However, a potential blind spot: Suffering isn’t always meaningless in human experience; evolutionary biology suggests it can drive adaptation and empathy. The doctrine might be a cultural artifact of that, albeit twisted into something coercive. Your framing liberates by arguing no atonement is needed if God is truly non-retributive— a radical shift that could reduce religious-induced mental health issues, but it might undervalue how some find purpose in narratives of redemptive suffering (e.g., in recovery from addiction).
On “Psychological Analysis of the Image of God Implied in the Doctrines of Conservative Christians”
This part of your summary digs into how conservative views project a “cruel God” onto reality—angry, demanding sacrifice, enforcing domination/submission dynamics. Lotufo links this to psychological deformity: fear, shame, and vengeance stunted by a deity imagined as an alpha enforcer, not a non-coercive lover. He critiques how this image warps personality development, keeping people in subservient, animal-like states (echoing Mandela’s non-retaliatory power as true strength). The implication is that such theology hinders emotional maturity, fostering depression through constant submission and guilt over imperfection.
Insights from my perspective: This nails a key issue in religious psychology— attachment theory applied to God. If God is seen as conditionally loving (only after atonement), it mirrors insecure attachment styles, leading to chronic anxiety or authoritarian tendencies in adherents. Studies in the psychology of religion (e.g., via fMRI scans) show that punitive God-concepts activate fear centers in the brain more than benevolent ones, potentially explaining higher rates of scrupulosity (religious OCD) in conservative groups. Lotufo’s call to reimagine God’s power as forgiving and non-interfering is refreshing; it promotes agency and equality, countering hierarchies like male dominance in some traditions.
That said, not all conservative Christians fit this mold— there’s diversity, with progressive evangelicals reinterpreting atonement as solidarity in suffering rather than payment. Historically, blood atonement evolved from ancient sacrificial rites (e.g., scapegoating in tribal societies), which served social cohesion by channeling violence outward. Your summary rightly calls this a “great fraud” based on early logical errors, but it overlooks how such myths might have been adaptive in chaotic pre-modern worlds. Today, though, they’re maladaptive baggage, and ditching them for unconditional theology could indeed humanize ethics, reducing religiously motivated violence (as seen in critiques of groups like ISIS).
In sum, your opening section is a bold manifesto against conditional religion, using Lotufo to argue that salvationism is a wasteful detour built on fear. It humanizes the divine in a way that’s intellectually freeing, potentially bridging spirituality with secular humanism. Yet, while it dismantles the “mental deformity” effectively, it could engage more with why these doctrines persist— perhaps as coping mechanisms for existential dread. If unconditional love is the core (as you rephrase John 1), it flips the script on power, from domination to empowerment. Thought-provoking stuff; it challenges believers to evolve beyond primal impulses.
Consider the opening comments by these two, Wendell Krossa
Here (link below) Joe Rogan discusses with Russell Crowe, his recent guest, Crowe’s latest movie where he portrays Nazi second-in-command, Hermann Goering. Crowe says that the message of the movie, apparently, is that these Nazis were people just like us, normal people like us (not all, but most), but they became caught up in the Nazi mass-murder madness. And apparently the court-assigned US psychologist at Nuremberg was trying to probe this issue. He had found that the Nazi leaders were mostly rational men. However, the US officials did not want to hear that. They wanted to portray the Germans as horribly deformed monsters. But the psychologist had not discovered that.
I have not seen the movie, but it struck me that the psychologist’s discovery is exactly the point that Richard Landes and others have uncovered about the power of bad religious ideas to carry societies of good people into mass-death crusades and war. Normally good people caught up in destructive madness by deformed narratives that incite and validate their worst impulses.
And what exactly were those bad ideas? As the historians have revealed in their research on Marxism, Nazism, environmental alarmism, and including more straightforwardly religious crusades, the guilty group of ideas/beliefs is the complex of “apocalyptic millennial” themes that incite and motivate good people to do bad things. These ideas/beliefs have carried entire societies of such people into eruptions of “madness of crowds” violence and destruction.
And while doing so, these people sincerely believe that they are actually doing something noble, right, and good. They buy into the complex of ideas/themes that convince them that their former paradise has been lost, their lives are declining toward world-threatening apocalypse, and the only way of salvation is through destruction of that which threatens them, some irredeemably evil enemy.
We are watching this playing out in the US today in an intensified tribalism where the heroically righteous ones believe that they must save “existentially threatened democracy”. So also, the same righteous warriors frame the “climate crisis crusade” with similar ideas/beliefs- i.e. that they must battle and purge the evil enemy of industrial society as critical to world salvation (i.e. to “save the world”).
What is going on in this? Kristian Niemietz nailed it in stating- “Emotional satisfaction, not rational thinking, and despite contrary evidence, dominates our choice in beliefs.”
And the contrary evidence is mounting that blocking the fossil fuels that drive industrial society, and substituting with intermittent and unworkable renewables, is raising costs of energy and inflating everything downstream from fossil fuel energy, namely the 6,000 “fossil fuel derivative” products that are basic to our lives. Blocking fossil fuel development now harms the poorest people, blocking their escape from poverty. Yet the climate crisis zealots sincerely believe that they are the righteous heroes on the just side of the great and noble cause of eliminating industrial, capitalist civilization because they have been convinced that they have to “save the existentially threatened world”. Their cause is “just” and they frame themselves as the righteous ones, the heroes fighting an evil enemy. It is hard to poke a pin in that mind-distorting bubble of a narrative when your entire identity survives on that.
These ideas (“apocalyptic millennialism” and the entire bad ideas complex) are still dominant themes in our religious traditions and have now been embraced in ideological versions. They frame a narrative that convinces otherwise good, rational people that they are doing good, they are saving life even through the outcomes have consistently been the destruction of societies (“salvation through destruction”). The outcomes of their crusades actually reveal that they are doing evil. But such a conclusion is unacceptable to a mind convinced that it is heroically righteous and on the right side of some tribal dualism or divide.
We have all around us in our world similar illustrating examples. In Islamic terrorism, etc. we see how bad ideas blind otherwise rational, good people. This is especially true when you alarm people with apocalyptic-scale fears that incite their survival impulse and render them susceptible to embracing wildly irrational salvation schemes like decarbonization to save themselves, their families, and their societies.
And yes Joe Rogan, one element in this is the dehumanization of our opponents, the differing others, as “evil enemies”, as a threat to us and to all life. It is then just a brief step to conclude that such subhuman and life-threatening enemies must be eliminated, must be purged as required to save ourselves, to save life, the world.
This same complex of bad ideas is driving Islamic extremism with the purported divine demand to purge infidels, those who threaten Islamic existence with their impure, polluting lives and their demonic unbelief.
These themes are common to all religions and are now embedded in ideological narratives.
And Crowe is right on the “nuts” idea that you can split us humans into two camps. That mindset comes from the Zoroastrian myth of “cosmic dualism”, the belief that there is a great good God set in eternal opposition to a great satanic Force or spirit. The good God demands that people must join his true religion to fight and defeat the evil enemies on the other side.
The true believers in the good God are convinced that they are the morally superior ones, while the other side, their enemies, are evil and destined for hell.
This mythology (better “psychopathology”) has, across history, incited and validated the endless construction of narratives of dualism, animosity, and hateful violence between differing groups of people. It eventually manifested, again, in the modern era’s victim/victimizer classifications of in Marxism, and is now presented in today’s woke progressivism with its classes of victims/victimizers determined by skin color. This has fueled a renewed discrimination and racism where individual character does not matter. Membership in today’s dualism categories is not based on individual merit/character but on these simple-minded categorizations that are determined by skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
“Joe Rogan Experience #2406 – Russell Crowe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4G2KGEkSyI
Another on tribalism:
We get endless “newish” iterations of the same old tribal dualism of us good insiders/fellow righteous ones, versus our opponents as evil enemies, Wendell Krossa
Note in the Free Press article below the recurrence of a fundamental theme that plays on related fundamental impulses- i.e. the tribally-based fear and hatred of the differing other, the impulse to defeat and dominate those who are viewed as threatening enemies, and to punitively destroy such competitors. This latest iteration below- i.e. “Third Worldism” or faddish “decolonization” ideology- embraces the same victim/victimizer tribal dualism of Marxist collectivism’s earlier “oppressed/oppressor” categories.
And the Marxist version traces back through history to the same old Zoroastrian cosmic dualism of good versus evil, a Good God versus a Satanic force, the “true religion” versus falsehood. This mental deformity leads to the demand for people to join the true religion and become true believers on the side of good that is set against unbelievers on the other or “evil side”.
And Zoroaster’s version traces back further to the earliest elite/commoner divides in human societies, where early shaman claimed to be the enlightened ones who knew the secrets of the spirit realm, how to appease the purported angry gods and thereby gain salvation of varied forms. They then promised fellow tribals that if they submitted to their elite authority and salvation schemes (i.e. sacrifices, offerings), then they could gain the goods from the shaman and their spirits- i.e. a better, safer future (“salvation”- as in protection from disease, accident, etc.).
And of course, these human-constructed dualisms ultimately trace back to human origins in animal reality with its clan/family groupings, or tribalism, the associated fear and hatred of the differing other, and the defensive impulse to defeat those threats.
Evolutionary biologists like Stephen Pinker suggest that early groups of humans engaged violent pre-emptive attacks on surrounding groups in order to eliminate them as perceived threats, to destroy threatening, competing others as necessary to survival. That is base tribal thinking.
As consciousness emerged in humanity, with its impulses to meaning and purpose (i.e. the felt need to understand and explain our reality), these fundamental tribal dualisms from our animal past were then validated by religious ideas like Zoroaster’s cosmic dualism of good versus evil. Wars of humans against humans were then given divine validation. “Our tribal God is on our side and we are fighting a righteous battle for our God”.
Tribal dualism is the denial of the essential oneness of the human family, a oneness that is based on “Mitochondrial Eve” hypothesis, or on the quantum entanglement that reveals a fundamental oneness to all reality. Add here that the same ultimate oneness has been revealed by the NDE accounts that often speak of the discovery of a stunning oneness in beyond material world realms. The NDErs try to express their experience of a love where there is no more tribalism or dualism of good versus evil, contrary to Zoroaster’s myth. There is only ultimate good in a profoundly transcendent love.
We have long possessed a variety of good insights to counter the destructiveness of tribalism, insights such as the Jesus message that there should be no more vengeful retaliation against “enemies” but, instead, we should “love enemies” as intimate family. Add the stunning new image of God that Jesus introduced that affirmed this family oneness when he stated that God treated all with the same unconditional love, all were included in the generous love of God, both “good” and “bad” people (i.e. “sun and rain given to all equally).
In the Jesus message there is no tribal differentiation with its exclusion of differing others/enemies. There is no domination of others (i.e. a related point made by Jesus that love/human greatness does not dominate/lord over others, but serves all). His precept that there should be no more “eye for eye” retaliatory punishment, further affirms restorative inclusion, and not punitive destruction.
This from Free Press,
“What the Right Gets Wrong About Zohran Mamdani: The New York socialist’s worldview isn’t born of Marx or Mecca—it’s heir to a 20th-century crusade that turned anti-imperial struggle into a moral identity”, Zineb Riboua, November 2025
https://www.thefp.com/p/what-the-right-gets-wrong-about-zohran?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The author starts with a challenge to opponent’s labels of Mamdani as “socialist… Islamist sympathizer” and states there is a deeper ideology that animates Mamdani- i.e. “Third Worldism”, “a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-20th century that recasts politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.” He adds that this holds “a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.”
Just to insert: He is recognizing the fundamental tribal dualism of Marxist “oppressors/oppressed” that is rooted in primitive Zoroastrian mythology of cosmic dualism of good versus evil, that is rooted further back the earliest elite/commoner divide of human societies, and even further in the inherited drives from small band animal existence, the earliest tribalism.
The author says Mamdani’s beliefs share a core belief that oppressed peoples hold a morally superior status and their liberation is the redemption of human dignity. He says Mamdani has brought this ideology of decolonization into the US to frame moral and political identity, notably in things like Wokeism that has been more effective as propaganda than political positions and policies.
He continues, noting other thinkers who “transformed anti-colonial resistance into a moral epic, portraying liberation not only as political emancipation but as the rebirth of the human spirit itself.”
The decolonization spirit continued, says Ribuoa, into the 1968 uprisings in France where distant colonial wars were replaced with “domestic cultural rebellion…”, and “the language of decolonization merged with the language of personal emancipation and identity, dissolving the boundary between private grievance and global injustice. It was the end of the beginning, the moment the revolutionary gave way to the citizen activist.”
Mamdani, says Riboua, has projected “global anti-imperial archetypes” onto New York politics where the streets of the city will now become the battlegrounds of decolonization.
He says that Mamdani happened to connect with the right moment when decolonization had become prominent in the US. He relates this to the resurgence of anti-Zionism at universities after Oct. 7, where decolonization gave students a new framework for interpreting their ideas of conflict.
The Third Worldism ideology now frames itself in terms of anti-Zionism, and opposition to Israel continues the project of decolonization- “a moral conflict that transforms the old fight against empire into a permanent contest between innocence and guilt.”
Riboua concludes, “(Third Worldism’s) power lies not in practical solutions but in its claim to moral purity and its ability to turn resentment into virtue. Universities have nurtured this sensibility for decades, replacing historical complexity with ideological certainty and teaching generations to interpret politics through the binary of victim and oppressor.”
Some pushback against “decolonization” ideology, Wendell Krossa
Here’s a bit of speculation re the need to push back against the “decolonization” crusade of today as too often an extremist-type ideology that distorts the overall greater human venture- i.e. the exodus of humanity out from Africa to explore, populate, and develop the entire planet. Decolonization ideology distorts this grand exodus of humanity, notably over past centuries, too often solely in terms of its mistakes and failures. And yes, those mistakes should be rectified today.
The fundamental mandate of humanity to go into all the world has been accomplished through successive waves of outward migration that involved invading, conquering, and defeating indigenous groups, across the world, through repeated ventures of colonization that began some two million years ago, with the main one occurring some 75-50,000 years ago. Note that in this larger project of humanity there was also significant intermixing of colonizers with different strains of indigenous peoples that existed in that past time.
https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/the-first-migrations-out-of-africa/
The “indigenous” peoples of the past few centuries, occupying varied areas of our planet, had themselves conquered other previous indigenous groups that were residing in the same areas before the newer “colonizers” arrived, who then defeated and enslaved the groups who had resided there before them. So why are the most recent waves of indigenous colonizers (i.e. those in place over the past few centuries) now considered the true and rightful owners of those areas? Oh, OK, they were “the continuous previous occupiers of the lands” just when the latest wave of European colonizers arrived.
This practice of successive waves of humans repeatedly colonizing and re-colonizing varied areas of Earth has occurred across millennia, stirring the question of who are the rightful owners and by what dates do we establish final validity of ownership? Those found residing in varied places over just the past few centuries when Europeans arrived? Or those who were previously defeated by the indigenous groups that were present when the Europeans arrived?
What about a previous indigenous tribe that was defeated by some later invading indigenous group residing in the same region, say, about 150 years ago, or 200 years ago? Is the most recent indigenous colonizer the legitimate owner, or the previous one that may have been on the land far longer than the most recent conqueror? What about rectifying such situations of indigenous colonization that has occurred between groups in the same region over past millennia? The Israeli/Palestinian situation sort of falls here.
But hey, this is just non-legal scholar, me. And the legal types do affirm principles like the “continuous previous occupation by indigenous groups when new colonizers arrived”. That seems to be the baseline legal standard today.
It appears that the “Johnny-come-lately” groups that were resident when the Europeans arrived now get legitimacy of ownership, as we have now entered, over the past few centuries, into the era of legal contracts, written contracts under large state’s legal systems/laws.
Our Canadian situation:
When Europeans first arrived in Canada in the 15th Century, there were somewhere between 200,000 to 500,000 native peoples populating the 2,467,265,689 acres that make up Canada.
These were roaming groups of aboriginals, often at war with other groups and displacing one another over previous centuries/millennia. They did not hold actual permanent title to the lands that they roamed across. Later, under European colonization, they entered treaties where they received compensation and those are legal contracts with the state/government in power then. See article just below.
And the native populations were so small that they were not effectively owning and actually using the vast territories that some now claim. And yes, where more recent historical, formal treaties were broken there should be compensation and corrections made, but where does this end, the guilting demands that never seem to cease and that are sustained perhaps by a learned dependency that does not affirm self-determining dignity in groups.
(The article below gives examples of indigenous groups that have done well in creating self-sustaining local economies that do not rely on never-ending support from outsiders, support that undermines the self-determining dignity of such groups.)
And some have suggested that we should also consider some of the balancing positives to the colonial movements over recent centuries- i.e. the installing of infrastructure systems like the British-built railroads of India and Africa, systems of common law that uphold the rights and freedoms of all individuals, equally in liberal democracy- i.e. internationally agreed principles, laws, and representative institutions that have been the most beneficial contribution of the West to the world. Past colonialism was not all evil.
But most important, underlying the colonialism of the past few centuries, there was that fundamental impulse of humanity to go out and explore, to populate new regions, and to develop further the entire planet. This is humanity’s birthright, obligation, destiny, mandate, purpose. And we do learn from our past mistakes, and we do better as we go forward. This is just to caution that we should not vilify, dismiss, or reverse the entire venture of colonizing earth as all evil. Certainly, it must be done non-coercively, and with proper compensation for previous indigenous residents, with proper legal agreements in the exchange of titles to land.
Overall, colonization is part of our larger fundamental mandate as humans, as also expressed in Genesis 1. God gave us a planet of wilderness with unlimited resources to develop for humanity and all life, to increasingly improve the human condition and advance human civilization. And as Julian Simon rightly concluded, we have overall been doing well and should celebrate “with a party to end all parties” (Ultimate Resource).
Again, none of this toying with colonial ventures and issues is to validate invasion, defeat and domination of any area and people, especially when done coercively with violence as in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Just to offer that in varied situations there is much complexity involved that simple dismissal, as in “decolonization” ideology, does not help clarify (i.e. with its simple-minded tribalism of all good versus all evil).
The Canadian case as illustration:
Kevin Klein: “It’s time to face facts about land rights in Canada: The path forward for Indigenous people is not through perpetual transfers of land or money with no clear results”, Kevin Klein, Nov. 3, 2025
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/kevin-klein-its-time-to-face-facts-about-land-rights-in-canada
Klein opens:
“Too often, emotion and ideology drown out fact. We hear claims that Indigenous peoples own all of Canada and that every acre of this country was stolen. That is not true and repeating it does not make it true. The assertion rests on selective readings of history and law that ignore the foundation of our country: negotiated treaties, court rulings, and shared development built over 150 years.
“Between 1871 and 1921, the Numbered Treaties covered most of Canada from Ontario to British Columbia. Those agreements, such as Treaty 1 here in Manitoba, were not casual arrangements. They were binding contracts in which Indigenous leaders ceded land in exchange for defined rights, including reserves, annuities, hunting privileges, and ongoing benefits. These are not opinions; they are legal documents recognized by Canada’s highest courts.
“Pre-Confederation treaties followed the same model. From the Royal Proclamation of 1763 through the Robinson Treaties of 1850, Indigenous signatories agreed — sometimes under hardship and population pressure — but the agreements remain valid. The Privy Council confirmed this in St. Catherine’s Milling and Lumber Co. v. The Queen (1888), a decision that still underpins Canadian property law today.”
Klein continues, noting that some 90 percent of Canadian land has been “ceded through about 70 historic treaties or modern agreements. The remaining 10 per cent, mostly in parts of British Columbia and the North, is subject to case-by-case legal proof.” He adds that a Supreme Court decision in 2014 confirmed “that Aboriginal title exists only where continuous, exclusive occupation before and after sovereignty can be proven — not everywhere by default.”
He adds a further note on the small population of indigenous Canadians (his estimates are higher than other scholarly reports that place that population between 200,000 to 500,000). His point- Using his largest estimated numbers he states there was less than one person per five square kilometers, and they were nomadic hunters who did not permanently own any particular land.
Insert: Using other commonly agreed on estimates, it was more like a population density of 1 indigenous person per 50 square kilometers of Canadian land (i.e. if only 200,000 original residents, not the “upper-end” estimate of 2 million).
Klein says that no credible legal system will recognize that 5% of a population (the indigenous percentage of Canada’s population) owns 100% of the land of a country. “Even the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples prohibits any claim that would undermine a state’s territorial integrity.
Klein concludes that respect for indigenous rights does not involve surrendering reason and by assigning collective guilt for events of past centuries. We have to stop letting the guilt and political theatre (“virtue signaling” of some) replace sound principle and facts.
(End of article)