-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Other Altars - Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder Craig Lockwood©1993 CompCare Publishers 3850 Annapolis Lane, Suite 100 Minneapolis, MN 55441 612.559.4800/800.328.3330 ISBN 0-89638-363-6 255+pps — out-of-print/one edition. ----- A very interesting and excellent book. Om K --[11]-- Chapter 11 Relatively Speaking Postmodernists, Primitives, And Religious Idealists "We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation'' -Edward Sapir Postmodem academia has embraced the sorcerer's question, "Who has the power to make 'truth.' " If the ideal of achieving unfettered, omniscient magical power is at the heart of individuals and cults who practice ritualized abuses, no better form of philosophical justification than relativism has yet arisen. Relativism is based on an overarching postmodern philosophy that defines all truth as subjective, contingent, and relative. In the relativist view, ethics, morality, and knowledge have no objective worth because they are based on judgments, and thus are subjective concepts—relative to who is observing and his or her particular cultural background. Relativism found a permanent place in academic thought and became an important part in the foundation of the prevailing liberal intellectual canon. When applied to history, anthropology, and sociology, relativism maintains that no culture is "better" than another. Philosophy, law, social organization, medicine, religion, technology—the bases of Western civilization—can no longer be used to evaluate other cultures. They are simply ethnocentric judgments. Discarded in the intellectual community's rush to accept relativism, was the concept of rigorously applied scholarship, judgment and comparison—basic hand-tools in the Western intellectual toolkit. Left-wing and Marxist academics as junior faculty members in the late 1960s and early 1970s enthusiastically embraced relativism and its associated postmodern philosophical stances. Over the years they gained tenure and rose to important academic positions. Stanley Fish in Doing What Comes Naturally wrote that since objective standards such as ethics no longer applied, simple political strength could be substituted where needed to achieve an academic end, resulting in a form of intellectual might-makes-right. It was the beginning of what would come to be called "political correctness."[1] Using this kind of postmodern reasoning, a Bolivian cocaine-smuggler's hiring of a Peruvian yatiri to conduct a human sacrifice to ensure the safe shipment of a ton of drugs was the spiritual equivalent of Pennsylvania Mennonites praying for God's blessing before building a neighbor's barn.[2] Constructing Social Constructionism According to Alfonso Martinez-Taboas, a psychotherapist practicing in Puerto Rico and a contributor to Dissociation, even the concept of multiple personality disorder is relative when looked at through the postmodern lens of social constructionism. Martinez-Taboas maintains that a "wide variety of personal experiences," emotions and attitudes are determined in the main by cultural systems of belief. Emotions aren't natural responses elicited by natural features inherent in a given situation, but "socio-culturally determined patterns of experience and expression," acquired and subsequently manifested socially. Constructionists have been paying attention recently to how diverse societies and cultures view the "self." Martinez-Taboas notes that the Japanese sense of self is based on a high degree of interdependence with a larger social unit. American society, on the other hand, doesn't value overt connectedness, but stresses individualism, independence, privacy, and detachment. Martinez-Taboas suggests that "the consequences of this type of conceptualization could be staggering. If the self is a social construction, then it follows logically that many different experiences of the self will be found throughout the world and its history." Individualistic societies such as in Canada and the United States could be expected, by constructionist standards, to have high incidences of MPD.[3] Community-based societies, in which children are respected and valued, will have little or no incidence of MPD.[4] What seems more probable is that preliterate, pretechnological societies offer neither the freedom from traditional authoritarian family/tribal control nor the ability to understand psychosis or dissociative behaviors caused by trauma as anything but spirit-possession. Also commonly under-reported by those who study such societies is the sexual use of children, which is extremely high in just these kinds of societies.[5] To justify their behaviors, Western pedophiles, who generally exhibit a high degree of cultural sophistication, have pointed out Greek and Roman societies as paradigms of civilization in which the sexual abuse of children by adults was commonly accepted with no obvious psychological injury. Since Rome lasted as a civilization much longer than most, pedophiles can also invoke the "test of time." What they ignore was the brutal nature of Greek and, especially, Roman societies, in which slavery was the norm and humans were routinely sacrificed, tortured, and publicly crucified. Did pedophilia and the widespread sexual use of children play a part in perpetuating the climate of brutality? We'll never know. Today, clinical experience and research indicate that angry, aggressive adults, who indulge in antisocial behavior, are largely the product of abusive backgrounds. One culture's dissociation may well be another's anticipated spiritual experience. While Western psychology defines dissociation as an "identity disorder," Vodoun Haiti defines it as a perfectly acceptable way to spend Saturday night at the hounfor. [6] Except in certain religious groups, people in the United States generally don't encourage dissociative behavior in children. U.S. and European law have criminal statutes restricting the ingestion of psychotropic plants and substances derived from them that create dissociative behavior. They also frown on public displays of spirit-possession. Legal and social exceptions are made, however, when Native American tradition calls for the ingestion of such plants. Being mounted by an orisha on the streets of Rio during Carnival is perfectly acceptable in Brazil. The same behavior on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles on the same day of the month and year, will first draw attention, then a paramedic unit, sedation, and hospitalization. Postmodern Primitives Today, when adjectives like barbaric, savage, uncivilized, and primitive surface in discussing cultures and societies, postmodern idealists frown. Those who romanticize "pretechnological" or "preliterate" peoples and societies tend to be judgmental about words they feel imply cultural judgments. Suggesting that primitive or preliterate cultures and religions tend to be physically brutal may bring down the ire of the nearest postmodernist, who will quickly counter with copious contemporary examples of Western social and religious brutality. This argument, however, simply emphasizes the point that no matter what our race, economic class, ethnicity, or gender, our only real foes are human. We are always our own greatest enemies. Reconciling human behavior with postmodern concepts can prove difficult. So strong is the postmodernist's desire to conform to prevailing ideological dogma-that we humans are inherently good but have simply gone astray from our pristine beginnings-that they will suspend belief to function on faith. Irrational political and religious faiths often create more problems than they solve. While we can cooperate to form governments, build cities, bridges, and industries, produce huge quantities of food and goods, we often violently obliterate these accomplishments with remarkable regularity, in the name of one political or religious system or another. To pretend otherwise, for whatever well-intentioned reasons, performs the ultimate disrespect to human history: it disregards it. Good intentions of this nature often become a dangerous form of ritualized magical thinking that obscures truth. Religious Idealists and Revisionists Regarding early Judaism and Christianity, religious idealists take much the same position as the social idealists. Numerous incidences of human sacrifice are recorded in the Holy Bible (New Oxford Annotated Bible, Standard Revised Version). >From Psalm 106: "They sacrificed their sons / and their daughters / to the demons; / they poured out the blood of their sons and daughters, / whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; / and the land was polluted with their blood. Thus they became unclean by their acts." >From Ch[r]onicles 28: 3-4: "Ahaz ... burned his sons as an offering, according to the abominable practices of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel." >From Jeremiah 7:3 1: "And they have built the high place of Topheth ... to burn their sons and daughters in the fire. Up until 700 years B.C., babies were probably still being sacrificed by ancient cultures. Excavation in 1984 of Phoenician settlements near Tunis in North Africa uncovered a multilayered structure referred to by archeologists Lawrence Stager and Samuel Wolff as "the largest cemetery of humans "[7] ever discovered. The Phoenicians, the biblical Canaanites, gave the Hebrews their alphabets, and probably some of their sacrificial religious practices. People, to propitiate their god and gain favor, did what they believed worked. If that meant sacrificing a kid-human or goat—so be it. In times past, people didn't think about themselves, others, or the world around them in the manner in which we think of ourselves and our environment today. Two hundred years ago—ten thousand years ago—people did what they thought they had to do, what they could, and what they could get away with, to survive. By romanticizing and idealizing primitive cultures, we indulge in microscopic hindsight. We have to be careful not to retroject twentieth-century attitudes into earlier times—especially when it comes to attitudes about death. Conversely, insisting that our own contemporary cultural, academic, and social standards are the only valid guidelines limits research and inquiry. Living with Death Death, in our not-so-distant past, was more a part of life than Western civilization allows it to be today. Contemporary urban populations are removed from what was common in Western life when our societies were primarily rural. Rarely did death occur under today's sanitary conditions. Slaughtering animals of every edible species had been common to hunter-gatherers, villagers, and farmers since human beginnings. They killed the animals they ate. They hunted; they trapped. They raised pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, and fowl for food. They butchered them in their barnyards and kitchens. Our language is still replete with the home-spun phrases of husbandry: "Running around like a chicken with it's head cut off." "Like a lamb to the slaughter." "Bleeding like a stuck pig." Most people, as a part of life, lived close to death. People died at home. Funerals were held in the parlor. Wives and mothers washed and prepared the dead for burial. They knew death's smell, its pallid face, its finality. Death was part of everyday life. Blood, tissue, entrails, and bone, when available, were what people intimately handled in the daily preparation of food. Since the ritual consumption of foods is an important part of all human rites and religious practices, the inclusion of food as propitiatory offering was a fixture of early religious cultures. In most religions and cults it still is. In contemporary Western societies who not only profess humanistic, moral, and ethical beliefs, but institutionalize them with a legal system based on precepts reinforced by Judeo-Christian values, it seems unthinkable to most of us that sacrificial cults could have either continued to exist or regenerated and flourished. The commonly asked question is "why?" The early history of Christianity holds the answer. pps. 121-128 --[notes]-- Chapter 8 1. T. M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual, Magic, and Witchcraft in Present-day England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 341-42. 2. C. Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), 8-9. 3. W. Burkett, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (University of California Press, 1983). 4. N. Drury, Dictionary of Mysticism and the Occult (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985). 5. Janet and Stewart Farrar, The Witches' Way: Principles, Rituals, and Beliefs of Modern Witchcraft (London: Robert Hale, 1984), 22-23. 6. F. King, Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (London: Carol Publishing Group, 1971). --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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