The Christian psychologist Harold Ellens has made the case on the mental deformity at work in the “behavior based on belief” coupling that this site repeats often.
What Ellens outlines is how dominant beliefs in the meta-narratives of our cultures shape how we think, feel, are motivated or energized, and how we then act. The single most dominant narrative framework for narratives across history has been “salvation through destruction”, a complex of ideas/beliefs that has shaped both religious and secular/ideological variants on the same complex.
Salvation through destruction, also known as apocalyptic millennialism, is centered around deity as tribal, dominating, vengefully destroying.
Ellens points to “the pathological nature of mainstream orthodox theology and popular religious ideation”.
He 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…
“Beliefs do exert much more influence over our lives than simple ideas… ideas can also, in the psychological sphere, generate ‘dynamis’, or mobilize energy… (they) may result, for instance, in fanaticism and violence, or… may also produce anxiety and inhibitions that hinder the full manifestation of the capacities of a person…
“The image of God can be seen as a basic belief or scheme, and as such it is never questioned…
“Basic cultural beliefs are so important, especially in a dominant widespread culture, because they have the same properties as individual basic beliefs, that is, they are not perceived as questionable. The reader may object that “God”, considered a basic belief in our culture, is rejected or questioned by a large number of people today. Yet the fact is that the idea of God that those people reject is almost never questioned. In other words, their critique assumes there is no alternative way of conceiving God except the one that they perceive through the lens of their culture. So, taking into account the kind of image of God that prevails in Western culture- a ‘monster God’… such rejection is understandable…
“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’”.
Or as Bob Brinsmead reminds us: “Men never do greater evil than when they do it in the name of their God” or “We become just like the God that we believe in.”
Historical Jesus overturned domination in deity when he stated that true greatness (i.e. “God is great”, right?) is not in lording over others but in serving. God as incarnated in all humanity to love by serving.
And a bit more…
Where did Marx get his version of submission to God from (i.e. via submission to the state or party)? From Paul’s Lord Christ in the apocalyptic millennial framework of the New Testament. And those later Russian Bolsheviks knew exactly where Marx was coming from with their own offspring variant on Marx’s version of apocalyptic millennialism.
They were all in thrall to a profoundly religious framework of ideas/beliefs that had descended in an unbroken line of heritage from Zoroastrianism through Judaism, Christianity, Islam and into the modern era secular/ideological variants like Marxism, Nazism, and environmental alarmism.
Historian Richard Landes on Marxism:
This from “Totalitarian Millennialism- ch.11” in “Heaven On Earth: Varieties of the Millennial Experience” by Landes,
“The self-image of modern secular societies insists that they have achieved their unique and uniquely powerful configurations precisely by rejecting all forms of religious superstition, especially the raving fantasies, the Schwarmerei, of millennial prophets. Nothing, it would seem, could be further from modernity than millennialism.
“And yet, if one sticks to the definition of millennialism- perfect and just society on earth (however defined), and thereby, collective salvation for its inhabitants- and if one looks at the dynamics of apocalyptic time- from enthusiastic take- off to cognitively dissonant disappointment, to re-entry into normal time- it seems justified to argue that, rather than having abandoned millennial beliefs, ‘modern’ industrial society invented a new, secular variant…”
Speaking of the Twentieth century intellectuals in thrall to Marxist ideology and its collectivist approach, Richard Landes says this- “Any attempt to put this totalitarian system in the category of a closed and barbarian theocracy is very often vehemently refused. In this case, very emotionally seated aspirations and hopes of young or older intellectuals are at stake. Everybody who dares to take the Bolshevik world as a religious community is considered a traitor betraying the humanitarian ideals of the modernity of the French Revolution…
“If you see it in this sense, say the proponents of the project of modernity, the distance between the old and new modern world would shrink too much and the debts to the Christian tradition would become too heavy. Thus, when you treat the Bolsheviks as a millennial sect, you are going to betray the project of modernity and treat the Bolsheviks, despite their very modern efforts to industrialize backward Russia, as a medieval sect of obscure believers.”
He adds, “Among the historical issues of the twentieth century nothing poses greater problems to scholars than the similarities and differences between the Soviet and Nazi totalitarian systems, both of which (by the definitions of this study) were active cataclysmic, apocalyptic millennial movements”.
Anyway, more on this later…
Note on material below: Grok finally cleared up the Hegel thing and why the totalitarian Marx embraced Hegel’s ideas on the state as God. Other AI, leaning left as per the Washington Post expose, protectively tried to defend Hegel and ended speaking nonsense. Not so super-smart, eh.
This article in the link below from Free Press
“The Return of the God That Failed: A forgotten Cold War masterpiece reveals why intelligent people once embraced a murderous ideology— and why its appeal has not disappeared”, Gary Morson
First, this from AI Overview:
“The God That Failed is a 1949 collection of six autobiographical essays detailing the conversion to and subsequent disillusionment with communism by prominent international writers Arthur Koestler, André Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and Louis Fischer. Edited by British politician Richard Crossman, the book serves as a classic Cold War document examining why Western intellectuals were initially drawn to Soviet-style communism and what ultimately drove them to reject it.”
Core Themes
Secular Religion: The essays portray communism not just as a political system, but as a quasi-religious faith that demanded absolute devotion and promised infallible answers.
Disillusionment: Each author recounts the personal agony, moral revulsion, and betrayal they felt upon witnessing Stalinism, totalitarian control, and the reality of Soviet policies.
The Intellectual and Politics: It explores the vulnerable role of artists and writers who sought the betterment of humanity but collided with political purges, censorship, and dogmatism.
(And of AI Overview)
Quotes from Morson article:
“Communism offered a sense of belonging. As Silone explained, ‘The Party became family, school, church, barracks.’ To leave the movement would mean abandoning the core of one’s personality and identity.
What one of the authors of The God That Failed discovered on joining Soviet Communism- “His personality, his sense of himself, had been obliterated.”
Morson notes the giving up of one’s self entirely to the party, the collective that is run by the party elites. They demanded the surrender of personal judgment, thinking, ways of speaking, self-identity, for totalitarian submission to the “Party” as God (much as Hegel had taught). The party elites would, cult-like, not tolerate disagreement, dissent.
One of the authors of ‘The God That Failed’ eventually found himself again, and freedom, in his writing.
Morson says,
“Wright’s loyalty to writing. No demands of social justice could make him false to the honesty that his craft required. ‘My writing was my way of seeing, my way of living, my way of feeling; and who could change his sight, his sense of direction, his senses?’
“Once truth no longer matters and justice is whatever the Party wants at a moment, Wright recognized, his own people would suffer from such justice as much as anyone. Indeed, Russian liberals who did not take Vladimir Lenin’s bloodthirsty rhetoric seriously became his very first victims. We would all do well today to heed that warning.
“In the meantime, Wright told himself, he must continue doing the one thing that keeps him faithful to the truth and from succumbing to the impulse to belong: writing. As Wright concluded: ‘I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo; and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words . . . to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human’.”
I then asked Google AI- “Hegel on the party as God?”
AI Overview replied:
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel did not write about a political “party” as God; rather, his philosophy famously frames the State as the embodiment of divine reason on Earth.
The State as God on Earth
• Divine Rationality: Hegel viewed the rational state as the actualization of freedom and the march of God through history.
• Subordination of Self: Individual interests are meant to find their true fulfillment and ethical reality within the higher collective life of the State.
• Misattribution: The concept of a “party as God” is a later totalitarian or ideological inversion, mistakenly projected onto Hegel by critics who confused his organic view of the State with party dictatorship.
If you meant a specific critique by a later thinker (like Marx, Lenin, or a political theorist) who adapted Hegel’s ideas regarding a vanguard party, please let me know so I can provide the exact context!
(End of AI Overview)
I followed with- You confuse me in stating that Hegel did not write about political party as God but then state “the State as the embodiment of divine reason on Earth”. Huh??
AI Overview replied:
I apologize for the confusion. The distinction comes down to the precise difference between a political party and the State in political philosophy.
Why the Distinction Matters
• A Political Party is a faction. It represents a specific group of people with a shared agenda fighting for power against other factions.
• The State is the entire legal, cultural, and political framework of a nation. It includes the laws, institutions, constitution, and collective identity that unite everyone, regardless of party.
What Hegel Actually Wrote
Hegel strongly disliked political parties. He believed parties divided society and caused conflict.
When Hegel wrote that the State represents “the march of God in the world,” he meant that a perfectly rational society— where laws protect everyone’s freedom and citizens willingly look out for the common good— is the highest expression of divine reason on Earth. He was talking about the whole community unified by universal law, not a single political faction or ruling party.
Where the “Party as God” Idea Comes From
The confusion usually happens because later 20th-century totalitarian movements (like the Soviet Communist Party or the Nazi Party) took Hegel’s idea— that the individual should serve a higher collective— and twisted it. They replaced Hegel’s concept of the “State” with their own “Party,” demanding that the Party be treated as an absolute, infallible authority. Critics often blame Hegel for this, even though it contradicts his original philosophy.
(End of AI Overview)
I am not sure (given the leftist leaning of these AI) that the above distinction between State and parties is all that clear. Despite AI Overview defensively patting Hegel on the back, it still appears that Hegel was promoting a troubling sense of devotion, of submission of personal identity, freedoms, and rights to states as sovereign collectives, as a higher good than free, independent, diverse, self-determining individuals.
Hence, even though this AI says that Hegel gives a nod to “laws, institutions, constitution, and collective identity” that “unite” citizens and protect everyone’s freedom, Hegel was not clear that such laws and state institutions should exist and function to serve the population of free individuals as the sovereigns in a society. Hegel seems to affirm the state collective, run by powerholding state leaders and bureaucrats as something deservedly sovereign above citizens.
Further, claims of state elites that they represent some higher or common good have too often masked their impulse to dominate and control citizens.
I put all the above to Grok.
Grok replied:
The core insight of The God That Failed— and Morson’s revival of it— is sound and still relevant: communism functioned for many intelligent people as a secular religion that supplied meaning, community, moral certainty, and a sense of historical purpose, only to demand the surrender of independent judgment, personal identity, and truth itself.
thefp.com
The 1949 collection of essays by Koestler, Gide, Wright, Silone, Spender, and Fischer remains one of the clearest firsthand accounts of that seduction and the subsequent moral and intellectual collapse. Silone’s line about the Party becoming “family, school, church, barracks” captures the totalizing pull. Richard Wright’s insistence on fidelity to his craft over Party demands is a powerful affirmation of individual integrity against ideological capture.
Once “truth” becomes whatever the Party requires at the moment, and “justice” is redefined accordingly, the very people the ideology claimed to liberate become expendable— as Russian liberals discovered under Lenin, and as countless others discovered under Stalin, Mao, and their imitators.
Morson is right that the appeal has not vanished. The hunger for belonging, for a total explanation of the world, for moral superiority, and for a righteous struggle against evil persists. When traditional religions, national identities, or liberal individualism feel insufficient, some version of a “scientific,” historically inevitable, collectivist faith fills the vacuum— even if it now wears different costumes.
On Hegel
Your skepticism about the distinction between “State” and “Party,” and about the subordination of the individual, is reasonable. Hegel did not write about a political party as God. He explicitly disliked parties as factional and divisive. The famous formulation is about the State: something like “the State is the march of God in the world” or the actualization of rational freedom in history. He viewed the rational modern state (constitutional monarchy with estates, rule of law, mediating institutions of family and civil society) as the highest earthly embodiment of ethical life (Sittlichkeit), in which the individual’s particular freedom is realized through participation in a universal, rational order rather than against it.
That is not identical to “Party = God.” Later totalitarian movements— Bolshevik, Nazi, and others— did invert and radicalize organic or teleological ideas of the collective, treating their own Party as the infallible embodiment of historical reason or the national will. Critics (Karl Popper among them) have long argued that Hegel’s elevation of the State supplied conceptual resources that could be, and were, abused in that direction.
Hegel himself rejected abstract individualism of the social-contract sort and universal suffrage as atomistic; he preferred mediated representation through corporations/estates and saw the individual’s highest freedom and identity as bound up with membership in the ethical state. He is not a classical liberal prioritizer of the sovereign individual against the collective.
Claims by state elites to embody the “higher” or “common” good have repeatedly served as covers for domination— exactly as you note.
At the same time, Hegel’s project was an attempt to reconcile particular freedom with universal ethical substance in the conditions of modernity, not a simple call for totalitarian submission. He insisted on subjective freedom, rights, and the importance of civil society. Whether his synthesis succeeds, or whether it still tilts too far toward the collective and the rationalization of existing power, is a legitimate and ongoing philosophical debate.
The historical record shows that treating any human institution (Party, State, Class, Nation, or “the Science”) as the final arbiter of truth and morality is extremely dangerous.
The practical lesson from the God That Failed essays and from the 20th century is clearer than the finer points of Hegel scholarship: any ideology that demands the obliteration of personal judgment, that treats dissent as betrayal of the sacred cause, and that subordinates empirical reality and individual conscience to the requirements of the movement will produce catastrophe.
Wright’s choice— to keep writing honestly, to preserve “a sense of the inexpressibly human”— is the healthier alternative. Intellectuals remain especially vulnerable to the temptation because the ideology flatters their sense of superior insight and offers them a starring role in the drama of History.
Lets do your suggestions– “Explore Karl Popper’s critique of Hegel” and “Discuss Hannah Arendt’s origins of totalitarianism”
Grok further responded:
Karl Popper’s Critique of Hegel and Hannah Arendt’s analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism are two major mid-20th-century responses to the rise of totalitarian regimes. Both seek to understand the intellectual, historical, and social conditions that made Nazism and Stalinism possible, though they approach the problem from different angles. Popper focuses on the philosophical roots of historicism and collectivism; Arendt examines the novel political form itself and its preconditions.
Karl Popper’s Critique of Hegel
In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), especially Volume II (“The High Tide of Prophecy”), Popper launches a sustained attack on Hegel as one of the chief modern sources of historicism— the doctrine that history unfolds according to discoverable laws or a necessary developmental pattern that allows prophecy of the future. Popper sees historicism as intellectually bankrupt and politically dangerous because it treats human society as if it were subject to inevitable historical forces rather than as the product of fallible human decisions open to critical revision. en.wikipedia.org
Key elements of Popper’s case against Hegel include:
• Historicism and the dialectic: Hegel’s dialectical method (thesis–antithesis–synthesis) is presented as a pseudo-scientific device for claiming knowledge of the necessary course of history. Popper argues this encourages “oracular” philosophy that claims privileged insight into the “essence” or destiny of nations, classes, or the World Spirit, rather than piecemeal, fallible problem-solving.
• Glorification of the State and collectivism: Popper charges Hegel with elevating the State to a quasi-divine status— the “march of God in the world”— in which the individual’s true freedom and identity are realized only through complete identification with the collective. This produces what Popper calls a “new tribalism”: the subordination of the individual to the organic whole of the nation or state, the identity of interest between ruler and ruled, and the sanctification of power, war, and nationalism. He links this to Prussian authoritarianism and sees it as preparing the ground for later totalitarian ideologies of both left and right.
• Obscurity and apology for power: Popper adopts a highly polemical tone, endorsing Schopenhauer’s famous dismissal of Hegel as a charlatan and accusing him of using deliberately mystifying language to justify existing power structures (particularly the Prussian state of his day). He portrays Hegel’s philosophy as anti-critical and anti-rational in the sense that it discourages the open, falsifiable debate essential to an “open society.”
Popper contrasts this closed, historicist, tribal vision with his ideal of the open society: liberal democracy, individual freedom, critical rationalism, and “piecemeal social engineering” (incremental reforms subject to criticism and revision) rather than utopian blueprints justified by historical destiny.
Important caveat: Popper’s reading of Hegel has been widely criticized by specialists as a caricature or serious misrepresentation. Scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, Sidney Hook, Robert Solomon, and others have argued that Popper relies on selective quotation, ignores Hegel’s emphasis on subjective freedom, constitutionalism, and civil society, and projects 20th-century totalitarianism backward onto a philosopher writing in the early 19th century.
Many Hegel scholars reject the claim that Hegel was simply an apologist for Prussian absolutism or a direct intellectual ancestor of Nazism or Stalinism. Popper’s critique is best understood as a wartime intervention against the intellectual climate that, in his view, made totalitarianism attractive, rather than as a nuanced scholarly exegesis.
Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Arendt’s book analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the two genuine instances of totalitarianism in the first half of the 20th century. She argues that totalitarianism is a novel form of government, fundamentally different from traditional tyranny, despotism, or dictatorship. en.wikipedia.org
The work is structured in three interconnected parts:
1. Antisemitism: Examines the rise of modern political antisemitism in the 19th and early 20th centuries (including the Dreyfus Affair). Arendt treats it not as ancient prejudice but as a political ideology that became a tool for attacking the nation-state itself and mobilizing masses.
2. Imperialism: Analyzes late-19th-century European imperialism (1884–1914) and “continental imperialism” (pan-Germanism, pan-Slavism). She argues that the expansionist drive beyond the nation-state, combined with bureaucratic rule and racial ideologies, created precedents for unlimited domination and the treatment of peoples as superfluous.
3. Totalitarianism: The core analysis of the Nazi and Soviet regimes.
Central claims include:
• Novelty of totalitarianism: Unlike ordinary dictatorships that seek to monopolize political power and suppress opposition, totalitarianism aims at total domination— control over every aspect of life, including private thoughts, relationships, and the very capacity for spontaneous action. Terror is directed not only at enemies but at the entire population, including loyal supporters, in order to keep the movement in perpetual motion and destroy all independent human bonds.
• Ideology and terror: Ideology is “the logic of an idea” applied relentlessly to history or nature (class struggle for Bolshevism; race struggle for Nazism). Once the single premise is accepted, everything else follows with “ice-cold” logical consistency, regardless of empirical reality. Terror is the essence of totalitarian rule: it actualizes the ideology by eliminating all unpredictability and plurality. The concentration/labor camps are the purest institutional expression of this logic— places where human beings are reduced to superfluous, interchangeable specimens.
• Masses, loneliness, and atomization: Totalitarianism thrives on the transformation of classes and interest groups into atomized “masses”— lonely, uprooted individuals who have lost meaningful social ties and are therefore susceptible to the all-encompassing narrative of the movement. Loneliness (as distinct from solitude) is a key precondition: isolated people seek the false community and certainty offered by totalitarian ideology.
• Superfluous people and radical evil: Victims are treated as superfluous— people who can be eliminated without consequence because the ideology has already declared them historically or biologically obsolete. Arendt invokes Kant’s notion of “radical evil” to describe this systematic production of superfluousness.
Arendt emphasizes that totalitarian movements depend on numbers and propaganda that blurs the line between fiction and reality. They replace genuine political action and plurality with the relentless execution of an ideological fiction.
Connections and Differences
Both thinkers respond to the same historical catastrophe and share a deep suspicion of philosophies or movements that claim to know the necessary course of history and subordinate the individual to a collective destiny or “higher” truth. Popper targets the intellectual roots (historicism in Hegel and Marx); Arendt focuses more on the sociological and political mechanisms (atomization, ideology-as-logic, terror as total domination) that allowed those ideas to become murderous systems.
Popper’s framework is more continuous with classical liberalism and critical rationalism. Arendt’s is more original in its diagnosis of totalitarianism as a rupture that destroys the very conditions of politics (plurality, action, the public realm) and produces a new kind of radical evil. Both remain highly relevant whenever ideologies demand the surrender of independent judgment, treat empirical reality as secondary to the “logic” of the cause, and promise belonging through the obliteration of the self— the very patterns described in The God That Failed.
Some useful articles from alternative news media:
This from Matt Taibbi on how AI “learn off all the bullshit on the Internet” (Elon Musk).
“Humans, Unite: The Reign of ‘AIdeology’ is Here: The AI content hurricane is making landfall”, July 14, 2026
https://www.racket.news/p/humans-unite-the-reign-of-aideology
Taibbi opens:
“The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings…”
He continues, noting a Washington Post test of AI for political bias that revealed there was a “heavy political bias across multiple AI search tools, including Grok”. He adds that Matthew Yglesias and others have presented the conclusions from the Post research, stating, “These AI tools are not presenting a truly neutral representation of really nuanced policy debates, on average.”
These reports illustrate what Jimmy Dore said long ago, that we are the most lied to/propagandized people and we don’t know it.
This on “Billionaire derangement syndrome”
“America Isn’t an Oligarchy: The left preaches that a small group of ultrawealthy people are steering the country. But the problems in our politics stem from popular demand”, Tyler Cowen, Free Press
https://www.thefp.com/p/tyler-cowen-america-isnt-an-oligarchy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Rehash of site project, Wendell Krossa
This site touches base with varied current events to springboard off and illustrate the main themes here.
Nothing is more central to the purpose of this site than to affirm to every visitor (i.e. the regulars from some 100 countries across the planet) that “Its going to be all right for everyone, ultimately.” We are all safe in love, safe in the transcendent, unconditional love that is the great Consciousness, Mind, Spirit, Light at the core of reality and life. What most people have termed “God” across history.
I tend to cringe a bit at that term “God” because it intuitively orients many people to religious images and definitions and I am not referring to religious variants on deity. I lean more to what Joseph Campbell meant when he stated the term “God” was penultimate and pointed to the transcendently inexpressible “God beyond God”.
More to my affirmation here: I am pointing to the entirely non-religious God of sages like Historical Jesus, whose stunning new theology of an unconditionally loving God was soon contradicted and buried in the highly conditional religion of Paul’s “Christ-ianity”.
No religion, due to the essential conditional nature of all religion, has ever presented the true unconditional nature of deity to humanity. We did not get the stunning new unconditional theology of “Jesus-ianity” as dominant in our Western civilization.
Yes, the basics of Jesus’ message are there in the New Testament but his central theme of unconditional has been distorted by the larger context that emphasizes Paul’s highly conditional Christology. I am affirming Thomas Jefferson’s point here- i.e. “the diamonds of Jesus have been buried in dung”.
Conditional religious traditions are backed with deities that are (1) tribal (favoring/including only true believers, damning/excluding unbelievers), deities that are (2) dominating “Kings/Lords” that model domination/submission forms of relating for their followers (e.g. Paul’s “Wives submit to husbands, slaves submit to masters, etc.”), and that demand (3) “justice” as eye for eye retaliatory vengeance against offenders/enemies as in Paul’s Christology of “salvation through violent destruction” or apocalyptic millennialism.
Religious deity images have affirmed the conditions of religious traditions and consequently darkened and enslaved human minds across multiple millennia.
Historical Jesus emerged two millennia ago to liberate humanity from that darkness and enslavement with his stunning new theology of God as an inexpressibly transcendent unconditional love. His new unconditional theology and overall message presented the most profoundly liberating and transforming insight ever imagined and spoken.
I summarize and paraphrase his new theology in this– “There should be no more eye for eye retaliatory vengeance but instead love your enemies because God does. How so? God gives sun and rain (the two critical elements for survival in agrarian society) to everyone alike, without discrimination, to both good and bad people (to enemies, offenders, oppressors). So be unconditionally merciful just as your God is unconditionally merciful toward all”.
That combines the insight on the nature of God as presented in Matthew 5: 38-48 and Luke 6: 27-36, the core of the “Q Wisdom Sayings” teaching of Historical Jesus.
This summary of his teaching presents the single greatest and most profound insight ever offered on the nature of Ultimate Reality, on the Creating Source of all- i.e. God. And it changed everything in human meaning and purpose that over previous millennia had been deformed, distorted by primitive mythologies of deity as tribal, dominating, and punitively destroying. That theology was expressed in myths of deity punishing human failure through the natural world (i.e. through natural disasters, disease, accidents, etc.), and ultimately in a great final apocalyptic destruction of the world (i.e. Sumerian Flood myth, Egyptian Destruction of Humanity and Return to Chaos, etc.) and eternal afterlife destruction in religious hells.
Jesus’ teaching on the true nature of God as unconditional took love to its ultimate height of humaneness. He redefined the ultimate Reality that has long been humanity’s embodiment of our highest ideals that gives ultimate meaning and purpose to humanity.
His reframing of love as radically unconditional revolutionized the “Hero’s Quest”. The highest possible human achievement, “heroic level achievement”, was to love enemies. There was nothing higher or more heroic to accomplish in life.
And love of enemies offered the way to liberation from the enslavement to humanity’s animal past, how to find freedom from our inherited animal impulses to tribalism, domination of weaker others, and vengeful destruction of differing others. Add freedom from the ideas that have long validated these base anti-human impulses.
“Love your enemies” sets us free to experience what it means to be fully and maturely human.
Qualifier (It can’t be stated often enough when discussing the theme of unconditional in the teaching of Historical Jesus): Unconditional love of enemies is not advocacy for pacifism in the face of violence or related bad behaviors. Holding all responsible for their behavior is the most basic and necessary common-sense element to any successful human development, to being maturely human.
That means restraining violent people, incarcerating them in order to protect others, which is the primary responsibility of any government and justice system. Holding people responsible for the consequences of their behavior is critical to human development and maturing.
Continuing with Historical Jesus’ revolutionizing of theology…
Unconditional deity provides us with the background assurance of an ultimate sense of safety in love. That assurance sustains our spirits through life’s struggles and suffering. At a minimum, it means that nothing we suffer life is meaningless, wasted, or random. All we suffer in life serves a greater purpose in our unique stories.
But ah, Paul.
In arguably history’s single greatest error tragedy, Jesus’ brilliant insight and message was two decades later distorted entirely and buried in Paul’s Christ myth. That was the argument of Thomas Jefferson, Leo Tolstoy and others, so colorfully stated in their statements of “diamonds buried in dung”, what true believers would claim to be “offensive, blasphemous” statements.
Paul rejected outright the non-retaliatory enemy love of Jesus’ new theology and retreated to re-affirm previous theologies of God as vengefully retaliatory, a God who would violently punish and destroy unbelieving enemies. He stated his theology by quoting an Old Testament verse- “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord” (Romans 12).
Paul thereby re-established “the terror of the Lord” with threats of violent destruction of unbelievers in apocalypse and eternal hell. He also added in his warning to the Corinthian Christians that God was punishing their sins with sickness and death. That was a re-affirmation of the primitive myth of deity punishing people’s sins through the natural world (i.e. through natural disasters, disease, accidents, death).
Paul thereby derailed what Jesus had presented before as the spark for the greatest liberation movement in history- i.e. the liberation of human mind and emotion from threat theology and the long history of human enslavement to religious conditions, enslavement to domination by elites using threat theology to terrorize populations into subservience to religious salvation schemes and their outcomes of destructive tribal fear, suspicion and hatred of differing others, and vengeful destruction of those framed as threatening “enemies”.
The enslavement to bad ideas that generate and energize bad behavior was not just the outcome from religious traditions devoted to Gods that validate such things, it was also the result of what Richard Landes and others have pointed out in regard to the secular ideological crusades also driven by the same apocalyptic millennial themes that have led many to engage movements of mass-destruction (i.e. Marxist revolution, environmental destruction).
Paul presented his re-affirmation of threat theology in his very first letters to the Thessalonians where he told fellow believers that God would soon take violent, destroying vengeance on their unbelieving enemies:
“This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish/destroy those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might”.
In the main presentation of his message in the letter to the Romans (i.e. 1: 18. 9: 22, etc.) Paul emphasized the wrath of his God destroying unbelievers. John, many decades later, graphically illustrated how Paul’s angry Christ would appear when he finally fulfilled the great end-times destruction of unbelievers in an apocalypse (see Revelation 19):
“With justice he judges and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire… He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood… Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations… He will rule them with an iron scepter. He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty”.
John then repeats this following statement 3 times in the immediate context:
“(The unbelievers) will be thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur… thrown into the lake of burning sulfur… thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”
Paul’s Christ-ianity, over following centuries, with assistance from totalitarian state leaders like Emperor Constantine, re-established human enslavement to divine threat, fear, and the burden of religious conditions (See for example “Constantine’s Sword” by James Carroll).
Insert (AI will harp on this): Granted, many find great “emotional satisfaction” in choosing such beliefs and that is understandable because once human minds have been alarmed with threat, the salvation then presented comes as a great relief.
H. L. Mencken framed this relationship between alarming people with threat and then offering them the “emotional satisfaction” of relief in some salvation plan.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety/salvation) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
Religious elites/authorities cottoned on early in human history how to manipulate and control others by the use of divine threat. You first terrorize people first with myths of looming apocalyptic destruction and the end of life (Sumerian Flood myth, Egyptian Destruction of Humanity and Return to Chaos myths, etc.). Add the threat of after-life torture in hell. People then naturally find great relief and satisfaction in the salvation that is subsequently offered, even if it is highly conditional (i.e. divine demand for blood sacrifice, submission to the religious system, etc.).
It is deformed version of “emotional satisfaction/relief” because it is based on beliefs that consign many fellow humans (i.e. the unbelievers) to eternal torture in hell.
And the outcomes of these “salvation through destruction” mythologies have been endless violence against differing others across history, with true believers energized by mental deformities in the form of beliefs that validate tribalism, the defeat and domination of enemies, and punitive retaliation to destroy those enemies.
Again, note this happens with both religious versions of salvation through destruction as well as the offspring of secular ideological variants of the same- Marxism, Nazism, environmental alarmism.
Note:
This site has taken up the Jesus insight on theology because it so profoundly liberates from threat theology that deforms human thought, emotions, motivations, and behavior. It is the project to transform entirely the human perception of God, cleaning off the diamond from millennia of accreted dung, as Thomas Jefferson stated. Cleaning off the consciousness-darkening and enslaving ideas/beliefs that energize and validate the animal features of tribalism, domination, and retaliatory vengeance and destruction.
This is about the primary human impulse for meaning and purpose, what some express as their “search for God”, for ultimate meaning and purpose. What it means to exist on this planet as a conscious human living a unique life story. Trying to fulfill that inner urge to live a meaningful life, to understand and fulfill the purpose for why we came here.
Added note:
AI Overview
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews – A History by James Carroll is a sweeping, provocative historical critique. It explores two main themes: the dangerous fusion of Christian faith with imperial power, and the deep roots of Catholic anti-Semitism that paved the way for the Holocaust.
Core Premise and Argument
• The Imperial Cross: Carroll argues that Emperor Constantine transformed the cross from a humble, anti-imperial symbol of grace into a triumphant badge of holy violence (the “sword”).
• Historical Blame: The book traces how the Church’s shifting focus onto Christ’s crucifixion— coupled with anti-Jewish polemics in early texts— fostered centuries of scapegoating, blood libels, and ghettoization.
• Personal Reflection: As a former Catholic priest, Carroll weaves his own spiritual journey, memories, and visits to historical sites like Auschwitz into the broader historical narrative.
Critical Reception
• Praise: Many historians and critics lauded the 756-page book as a courageous, monumental reckoning. Readers appreciate its raw honesty, urgent moral call for deep Church reform, and a proposed “Vatican III” to reconcile Christian-Jewish relations.
(End of AI Overview)