Thanks for this. I had been hoping, just in the last couple of days, that you'd write about psychopaths. I've been reading here for years and can use the search function as well as anyone, but felt that I needed help fleshing out my understanding.
My exact train of thought (if the sync fairies care to hear it) was based on your hospital society post from a couple of days ago. I read the title and first couple of paragraphs, and the first thing to pop into my head was that in my undergrad years, many of the pre-med students struck me as psychopaths. Of course everyone at the University was in some way sick or system-oriented, or they wouldn't be there. The pre-med students I knew seemed to especially delight in personally destroying things, and I was disturbed that these were future doctors! So even though the hospital society post was not literally about hospitals, doctors, students, and psychopaths, it's been on my mind. I also want to be clear that I'm not talking about all doctors or pre-med students, just general observations at a certain time and place.
23 November 2023 at 00:56
Colin said...
“ if someone was a full, "qualitative", total psychopath For Sure; then he would certainly be damned,”
Why would such a one ever be born - with no chance of salvation. Just to disturb the rest of us…?
We are like mini-gods ourselves. Free will/ agency means that our mind, our soul, is not transparent - not even to God.
God can infer our probable inner nature from our behaviour including thinking - but this inference may be mistaken. This is how Satan and the demons happened.
25 November 2023 at 09:50
Colin said...
None of us know for sure what another will choose at death. So ‘psychopath’ is our assessment/intuition of what another will choose based on our experience of them in this life.
My natural sense of the meaning of the word is the conclusion that someone will never change in this life. Which only makes it highly unlikely they will at death.
@Colin - I agree. But I am saying that - in principle - it may be that some incarnate mortal Men are actually incapable of love, and these would inevitably reject salvation. But as you say, we cannot know this outcome for certain - and neither can God (or, perhaps if God can know this, then that soul will not be incarnated - just as some demons are never incarnated).
25 November 2023 at 11:55
Perhaps the term “psychopath” (when used accurately) is nowadays serving as a materialistic pseudo-medical description of what is actually a spiritual situation: that is, a person with an innately evil nature. That is, a true "psychopath" would be someone who, by nature, is incapable of love. Such people have always been known through history - variously conceptualized. Psychopathy was at one time called “moral insanity”. At a psychological level, psychopathy shows as a lack of empathy, or ‘sympathy’; coldness, insensitivity, hardness of personality – the inability to experience emotions appropriate to social relationships. But from a spiritual and Christian perspective, such ‘medicalizations’ seem like evasions of a profound spiritual deficit. Qualitative/ total psychopaths are probably rare (although probably more common in some places than others, and more common now than in the past).
But it seems there are larger numbers of people whose capacity for love is weak and easily overcome by expedience, or whose capacity for love is only very intermittent. Such people are natural allies of the powers of evil, and are capable of serving any agenda, and doing anything – so long as it provides them with personal gratification, or enables them to avoid suffering. Spiritually speaking; if someone was a full, "qualitative", total psychopath For Sure; then he would certainly be damned, because he would not want and would reject salvation. A psychopath would not repent his sins; would not be prepared to discard and leave-behind all that was incompatible with Love. Or, from the inverse perspective: Heaven is a state and place of Love - so than any Being incapable of living wholly by Love cannot inhabit Heaven. However, (in absolute spiritual terms) because of the reality of free will/ agency; Men's minds and motivations are not transparent, so the status of love-less-ness can be inferred indirectly, but not known with certainty. I presume that this lack of certainty is why psychopathic souls – apparently incapable of love, and therefore very probably self-damned – are nonetheless sometimes incarnated. Maybe such souls will, after all, have sufficient capacity for love to choose to follow Jesus? Why - spiritually speaking - are there more ‘psychopaths’ nowadays (if that is indeed true) – aside from the obvious biological cause that psychopaths out-reproduce normies under modern social conditions? Spiritually speaking; I wonder if the ‘supply’ of pre-mortal human souls that are overall pretty good by-nature is in practice finite, has been mostly used-up; and is therefore recently becoming depleted? So modern societies are, in effect, scraping the barrel, because God is perhaps currently incarnating a lot of the dregs!… ** The above derives from a comment to a post by Richard Cocks over at the Orthosphere that rather got "out of hand" and off-the-point...
""Psychopath" is a materialist reduction of "innately evil""
5 Comments -
Thanks for this. I had been hoping, just in the last couple of days, that you'd write about psychopaths. I've been reading here for years and can use the search function as well as anyone, but felt that I needed help fleshing out my understanding.
My exact train of thought (if the sync fairies care to hear it) was based on your hospital society post from a couple of days ago. I read the title and first couple of paragraphs, and the first thing to pop into my head was that in my undergrad years, many of the pre-med students struck me as psychopaths. Of course everyone at the University was in some way sick or system-oriented, or they wouldn't be there. The pre-med students I knew seemed to especially delight in personally destroying things, and I was disturbed that these were future doctors! So even though the hospital society post was not literally about hospitals, doctors, students, and psychopaths, it's been on my mind. I also want to be clear that I'm not talking about all doctors or pre-med students, just general observations at a certain time and place.
23 November 2023 at 00:56
“ if someone was a full, "qualitative", total psychopath For Sure; then he would certainly be damned,”
Why would such a one ever be born - with no chance of salvation. Just to disturb the rest of us…?
25 November 2023 at 09:44
@Colin - Because God does not know this.
We are like mini-gods ourselves. Free will/ agency means that our mind, our soul, is not transparent - not even to God.
God can infer our probable inner nature from our behaviour including thinking - but this inference may be mistaken. This is how Satan and the demons happened.
25 November 2023 at 09:50
None of us know for sure what another will choose at death. So ‘psychopath’ is our assessment/intuition of what another will choose based on our experience of them in this life.
My natural sense of the meaning of the word is the conclusion that someone will never change in this life. Which only makes it highly unlikely they will at death.
25 November 2023 at 10:17
@Colin - I agree. But I am saying that - in principle - it may be that some incarnate mortal Men are actually incapable of love, and these would inevitably reject salvation. But as you say, we cannot know this outcome for certain - and neither can God (or, perhaps if God can know this, then that soul will not be incarnated - just as some demons are never incarnated).
25 November 2023 at 11:55