Rick Warren: Master Assimilator For The Christian Collective

[MisterSwig]

Hi all,

I’ve published my fourth paper on the threat of religious dictatorship in America. It’s called Rick Warren: Master Assimilator for the Christian Collective, and you can find it in the Essays section here at Objectivism Online or at my personal Web site.

The bulk of this paper examines the psychology and tactics of the predatory, collectivistic evangelist. I also address the question of how Christianity has survived and now resurged in the face of all the revolutionary, scientific advancements since Galileo. And in the end I offer my initial thoughts on a possible solution to the widespread problem of Christian collectivism.

It’s a long article with a lot of things to say about Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life has now sold over 25 million copies, making it the all-time bestselling nonfiction hardback in American history. I hope you’ll check it out and let me know what you think. I’m currently re-editing all of the articles in this series, with the aim of compiling them into a future book for a more general audience, and I would appreciate any criticisms or comments you have. Thanks.

[softwareNerd]

Thanks, I enjoyed the essay.

I've been curious about the "Purpose Driven Life" book ever since that hostage in Atlanta calmy read to her captor from that book. The calm she displayed aroused my curiousity. After reading your essay, I would suggest that her unrealistic calm was just that: unrealistic. What she displayed was, perhaps, not so much a deep understanding of how one deals with a criminal, but rather an ignorance of danger that one might expect from a young child or an imbecile.

[tommyedison]

Very nice essay. I disagree however that we need an understanding of consciousness to defeat Christianity. Those who believe in fantasies like God in their soul at at multiple places at all times, have already rejected the Law of Identity. Reason cannot convince them and at such a stage, I doubt anything else will.

[softwareNerd]

I disagree however that we need an understanding of consciousness to defeat Christianity....

I tend to agree -- after a very good explanation of Christian evangelism, the essay seemed to jump to its conclusion rather than build up to it.

In particular, the following paragraph:

For this reason, I am beginning to think that more than Objectivism is needed in order to end Christianity. I suspect that the average person needs to be able to understand his own consciousness, his own soul, like a scientist understands the physical world. He needs to possess the principles and the skills and the tools that will allow him to comprehend and master his own mind, like a scientist comprehends and masters the material of nature. If the majority of humanity is going to drive God out of their souls like scientists have driven God out of the universe, then perhaps we require a Psychological Revolution. [emphasis added]

The logical step implied by "for this reason" is not clear to me. The reason referred to (the previous paragraph) was...

...Christian collective might find a way to militarize their brainwashed schools of fishpeople, and this religious power will dutifully and ruthlessly silence any heretic or individualist who gets in their way, exactly like other large groups of Christians did during the Dark Ages...

I don't understand how this reason suggests the need for a "Psychological Revolution".

[DavidV]

By the way, I also wrote a "review" of the book:

http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.php?showtopic=2424

[softwareNerd]

Thanks for the link, GC. I hadn't read that thread.

Funnily enough, this thread reminded me of a different thread that you began, a long time back, titled "Do Objectivists need a Church?"

[MisterSwig]

I've been curious about the "Purpose Driven Life" book ever since that hostage in Atlanta calmy read to her captor from that book.

I too noticed this story when it happened. A few points:

1. I never take a Christian fundamentalist's word for granted. If they tell me that they had a hamburger for lunch, I'm skeptical. Seriously. Their brains are so full of lies and confused ideas that the probability of truth slipping from their lips is very low. I would not place my money on her accurately conveying her experience with this criminal. When a story is largely built upon the utterances of a Christian fundamentalist who has been reading Rick Warren to a mass murderer, I consider it pretty much worthless and unreliable as to the facts of the case.

2. I submit that the woman could have read Atlas Shrugged to her attacker, and he still wouldn't have pulled the trigger. He didn't want to kill her. He simply wanted to talk to someone and eat real food and watch TV and "do normal things that normal people do" before he had to go back to jail. It's right there in the story--plain as day. She could have read Cat in the Hat, and that guy still would have ultimately given in to her request that she be allowed to pick up her daughter from church. All she had to do was talk to him a bit and cook him some pancakes.

3. Finally, notice the truly disgusting implication of her words when she tells the reporter:

"I said [to him], 'Do you believe in miracles? Because if you don't believe in miracles -- you are here for a reason. You're here in my apartment for some reason. You got out of that courthouse with police everywhere, and you don't think that's a miracle?"

She's basically saying that it was God's will for this bastard to murder a judge, a court reporter, a deputy, and a federal agent so that he could escape from the courtroom and be divinely guided to her apartment so that he could learn about the miracle of God's will for him.

How horrific is that?

[MisterSwig]

Very nice essay. I disagree however that we need an understanding of consciousness to defeat Christianity. Those who believe in fantasies like God in their soul at at multiple places at all times, have already rejected the Law of Identity. Reason cannot convince them and at such a stage, I doubt anything else will.

First I want to state that I'm still at the initial stages of my thinking regarding the need for a psychological revolution. So, I'm open to being completely wrong about it.

Having said that, I’m not convinced that everyone who accepts the fantasy of an indwelling God has rejected the Law of Identity.

I put Christians into at least three different hierarchical classifications: those who believe the fairytales, those who believe the principles, and those who apply the principles. The worst kind of Christian is the type who is consistently applying the principles of Christianity (evangelists). And a decent Christian is the type who believes in some (maybe all) of the fairytales, but for whatever reason can’t or doesn’t take the principles seriously.

People who can’t or don’t take the principles of Christianity seriously, they probably don’t even know what the Law of Identity is. They certainly haven’t explicitly rejected it. And I doubt that they've implicitly rejected it. Many ex-Christians, like myself, never rejected the Law of Identity in any sense. We believed in the Christian fantasies, but we didn’t wrap our arms around the principles. We didn't declare our great love for faith and our willingness to believe the Bible over the facts of reality. We kept searching for the truth about this world, even though we had absorbed some religious “truths” from our cultural upbringing. We took the world and our minds seriously. We were of course fooled into believing that something was true when it was not. But we never rejected the world or our mind. We didn't believe that contradictions were possible or that knowledge was impossible. It was our implicit acceptance of the Law of Identity that ultimately enabled us to identify and reject the fairytales we had mistakenly accepted--not on faith, but on authority.

The rejection of religious fantasies is similar to the rejection of other popular fantasies that are pushed on us by our parents, fantasies such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. At a certain point the honest, informed individual realizes that he was wrong. It was all a scam perpetrated by those we love, admire, look up to, and rely on for knowledge. We made a mistake in taking the word of an authority figure.

Would you say that a kid who still believes in Santa Claus has rejected the Law of Identity? I’d say that he is honestly mistaken. He has simply committed an error in thinking, due to the lies of his parents, who are his authority figures. Likewise, there are many young, honest Christians who have made similar mistakes and have yet to correct their intellectual errors, because they are not smart enough to intellectually challenge the rhetoric of their authority figures. Maybe they’ve never heard good arguments for atheism.

Unless someone has consciously embraced the principles and habits of Christianity, I think there is still a decent chance that they are honestly mistaken and have not rejected the Law of Identity. This chance, of course, drops significantly depending on the level of their maturity and education. I wouldn’t, for example, claim that the typical, middle-aged “born again” churchgoing Christian is honestly mistaken. As I said in my paper, the regular churchgoer is probably a lost cause.

But what about the millions of unchurched Christians who have secular jobs, secular friendships, secular hobbies, who don't take religion very seriously, and who have to be forcibly taxed by our government before they will "willingly" sacrifice for faith-based initiatives? Are they a lost cause? Or might a rational psychology help them to correct their understanding of their own soul by making perfectly clear to them a contradiction between the facts of their consciousness and the fantasy of God? And would this knowledge then help them to reject Christianity?

I don't see why it wouldn't, if the subject is honest.

After a very good explanation of Christian evangelism, the essay seemed to jump to its conclusion rather than build up to it.

I see your point about the lack of logical structure. That is something I'll have to work on. Thanks for noticing it.

Edited May 18, 2006 by MisterSwig

[MisterSwig]

By the way, I also wrote a "review" of the book:

http://forum.ObjectivismOnline.com/index.php?showtopic=2424

Another good essay on Rick Warren written by Objectivists is here.

[softwareNerd]

I submit that the woman could have read Atlas Shrugged to her attacker, ... Cat in the Hat, .... All she had to do was talk to him a bit and cook him some pancakes.

Quite likely. Actually, his reaction never struck me as particularly curious. It's more the kind of thing that looks strange at first glance but one immediately realizes that "it makes sense" that he'd calm down at such an approach.

It was her extremely calm approach that seemed bizzare to me.

[softwareNerd]

On reading this again...

... what about the millions of unchurched Christians who have secular jobs, secular friendships, secular hobbies, who don't take religion very seriously, ... ... might a rational psychology help them to correct their understanding of their own soul by making perfectly clear to them a contradiction between the facts of their consciousness and the fantasy of God?

I realise that I'm not clear on what you mean by "psychology" here. Could you give some examples of the wrong psychology that these people have?

[MisterSwig]

On reading this again...I realise that I'm not clear on what you mean by "psychology" here. Could you give some examples of the wrong psychology that these people have?

By psychology I mean a scientific knowledge of one's consciousness and how it relates to behavior. There are all sorts of unanswered questions in psychology, because it is a relatively new science. I don't know, for example, whether anyone has defined the principles of psychology yet. If you know of someone who has, I'd love to hear about it.

I'm not a psychologist, and I've only started seriously researching the subject, so I can't get much deeper than that right now. But an example of a clearly wrong psychology is believing that God is in control of aspects of your consciousness or that God speaks to you through your conscience. There's also the example of behaviorism as a wrong psychology that people hold.