Catholic Church | Charles Konia, M.D.

The Breakdown of the Separation Between Church and State

Without fully recognizing it, the Founding Fathers had a strong sense of the emotional plague that is endemic in human beings, and they did everything in their power to prevent it from organizing and destroying this country.

This sense of evil was based on the healthier character structure of the people in those times. Their authoritarian character structure allowed them to recognize the importance of separating secular and religious authority as a safeguard against tyranny. But then, as a result of the breakdown of the old authoritarian order into anti-authoritarianism around the 60s, the plague organized itself and infested every area of social life.

This was accompanied by the dissolution of the authoritarian family, of a decrease in people’s muscular armor and an increase in their ocular armor. The contactless masses became secularized and so did their latent tendency for mysticism. Instead of having faith in the afterlife, people now demanded heaven on earth. Freedom peddling politicians on the left appeared and supplied disillusioned followers of the church with the political illusion that they wanted.

This was the time of the marked shift of the social mainstream to the left of political center and the decline in the census of faithful church goers. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the church leaders of all denominations had no other option than to embrace the policies that the leftist ideologues in America were peddling.

Together with the personal idealistic tendencies of Pope Francis, the operation of the emotional plague through socio-economic factors is the real reason that the Catholic Church on the political right is currently cozying up to Barack Obama, a political activist on the far left. For the first time in America’s history, a pontiff addressed members of the joint session of Congress and sermonized, among other things, about what they should do about the environment, about income inequality and that they should learn how to get along with each other.

This collusion of church and state is one more step in the globalization of the emotional plague as the ideologies and the moralities of the far left and the far right merge into one.

September 26, 2015
Categories: emotional plague, Politics, socio-political character . Tags: anti-authoritarian transformation, Barack Obama, Catholic Church, Congress, politicalization, Pope Francis, religion, separation of Church and State . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 7 Comments

Environmentalism: The Mystical Collusion Between the Left and the Right

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Clueless:
The emotional plague is a malignant social disease that is highly invasive from person to person and from one social institution to another. Because of the massive shift to the left in people’s thinking not only in the West but worldwide, religious mysticism in the masses – people’s faith in a better afterlife – has been replaced by secular mysticism – people’s longing for a better life in the present, in the here and now. This mystical need on the part of armored human beings gives freedom-peddling ideologists on the left an enormous political advantage.

Religious mystics on the political right, see the handwriting on the wall and realize that if they do not embrace some of the popular political ideas promoted by leftist ideologues soon, they will be left without a power base, their congregation.

In addition to being sympathetic to the world’s poor, an ideologically painless way that religious mystics on the right can become involved in secular matters is by going along with leftists on their political stand on the environment.

The Catholic Church would usually condemn blatant politicization of theological documents such as Pope Francis’ encyclical on May 24, 2015, Laudato si.’ But this time it did not. In his encyclical, he critiques people’s relentless destruction of the environment for which he blamed apathy, reckless pursuit of profit, excessive faith in technology and political shortsightedness. He unambiguously accepts the purportedly scientific consensus that climate change is largely man-made and warns of unprecedented destruction of ecosystems if climate change mitigation efforts are not taken mainly by reducing fossil fuel emissions.

Then, when President Obama announced new Clean Power Plant regulations “to help mitigate climate change” on August 3, some 170 evangelists, pastors, religion professors, non-profit directors and others, sent an open letter to the president “to offer our support and encouragement for your efforts to overcome the climate change.” President Obama responded in true faith healer style: “As Pope Francis made clear in his encyclical last summer, taking a stand against climate change is a moral obligation.”

August 10, 2015
Categories: Politics, Social Sciences, Uncategorized . Tags: Catholic Church, Clean Power Plant, climate change, emotional plague, environmentalism, Laudato si', mysticism, Pope Francis, religion . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 1 Comment