NOBLE ATTRIBUTES TRANSMUTED INTO RUTHLESSNESS: Are YOU Emotionally and Sexually Intact or a Mental Health Defective?

¨The following is an article entitled, The Irrationality of Homophobia: A Defect in Mental Health, that I wrote several months ago that I think is appropriate to reiterate in this context:

In his book, In Our Time, Eric Hoffer*, who was an excellent philosopher, was self-educated, blind for the first fifteen years of his life, and became a migrant worker and then a longshoreman, wrote the following:

In the alchemy of man’s soul almost all noble attributes - courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty - can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: Where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless. Thus the survival of the species may well depend on the ability to foster a boundless capacity for compassion.

So many in the United States (and elsewhere) lack that essential emotion, "compassion," that will help ensure the survival of the species! Indeed, the hostility visited upon LGBT people is a very strong indicator in our time of that deficiency!


¨All sorts of rationalizations have been trotted out by the ignorant and/or hatefully homophobic to try and justify discrimination against LGBT people, ranging from "maintaining traditional family values" to linking Gay people with pedophiles to causing all sorts of societal calamities. The very irrationality of their arguments in favor of deprivation of civil rights to LGBT people both bespeaks lack of compassion as it bespeaks gullibility and/or lack of compassion of those who take their rhetoric seriously


In his book, The Passionate State of Mind And Other Aphorism, Hoffer states:

Passions usually have their roots in that which is blemished, crippled, incomplete and insecure within us. The passionate attitude is less a response to stimuli from without than an emanation of an inner dissatisfaction.

¨A poignant dissatisfaction, whatever be its cause, is at bottom a dissatisfaction with ourselves. It is surprising how much hardship and humiliation a man will endure without bitterness when he has not the least doubt about his worth or when he is so integrated with others that he is not aware of a separate self.

¨And it is to this phenomenon every person who possesses both a critical intellect and the necessary emotion of "compassion" must turn to help understand why there are some homophobes who make their homophobia something like a career. So many spend an inordinate amount of time condemning God's LGBT children, and one must understand that their animus ultimately resides, not in the object of their hatred, but in their own psyches that betrays their blemishes, crippled natures, incompleteness, and insecurities.

After all, if someone is emotionally and sexually intact, why would there be a need for their obsessive c-ndemnation of other consenting adults' emotional/sexual orientations?

How is same-sex marriage, for example, going to adversely affect anyone's heterosexual marriage? Is there anyone who can give a reasonable answer to that question?¨ read it all, By The Reverend Jerry Maneker
HERE (emphasis and photos added by Leonardo Ricardo)

Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983

*¨Hoffer was among the first to recognize the central importance of self-esteem to psychological well-being. Hoffer focused on the consequences of a lack of self-esteem. Concerned about the rise of totalitarian governments, especially those of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, he tried to find the roots of these "madhouses" in human psychology. He postulated that fanaticism and self-righteousness are rooted in self-hatred, self-doubt, and insecurity. As he describes in The True Believer, he believed a passionate obsession with the outside world or with the private lives of other people is merely a craven attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life.

The mass movements discussed in The True Believer include religious mass movements as well as political, including extensive discussions of Islam and Christianity. They also include seemingly benign mass movements that are neither political nor religious. A core principle in the book is Hoffer's insight that mass movements are interchangeable; he notes fanatical Nazis later becoming fanatical Communists, fanatical Communists later becoming fanatical anti-Communists, and Saul, persecutor of Christians, becoming Paul, a fanatical Christian. For the true believer the substance of the mass movement isn't so important as that they are part of that movement. Hoffer furthermore suggests that it is possible to head off the rise of an undesirable mass movement by substituting a benign mass movement, which will give those prone to joining movements an outlet for their insecurities.¨ read it all
, HERE

· Thanks to Christian LGBT Rights, sidebar
· Thanks to Eric Hoffer
· Thanks to Wikipedia, Eric Hoffer
· Thanks to The Reverend Jerry Maneker
· Thanks to Flickr Photo Sharing
· Thanks to A Christian Voice for Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgenders, sidebar