The Messianic Imperative
SCOURGE OR SAVIOR
by
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About the Book
About the Book, for the Website Begun as a scholarly work of religious and psychiatric import, 9/11 and its aftershocks has turned this work on messianism to the task of survival of our civilization. For the core motivations of widely disparate people – Islamic terrorists, Israeli settlers, and American fundamentalists – are frankly messianic. And they are positioned to move the world towards a disaster long depicted in apocalyptic terms on the Plains of Abraham, but now also present in our midst. A degree of self sacrifice is present in messianism, ranging from the purely spiritual to full expression in the Islamic terrorist who glories in a physical immolation that leads to eternal life. The crucial issue for the rest of us lies in its imperative nature, calling for the termination of our lives. Can we reach such people, who live in these other spiritual worlds, and who threaten to evict us from ours? They live in the certitude and rectitude of their cause, and are intolerant of the ambiguity of modern civilization. Their certitude lies in a strangely similar belief in a messenger of God who brings tidings of the End of Days on earth, and a coming glory in a heavenly company, populated by God and the principal figures of their religion. Each of these religions has its own visionary, man of God, or messiah, extant or to come. My thesis is that the key to reaching such imbued people, so alienated from the rest of us, is through utilization of the little we know of reaching alienated individuals and groups. That knowledge has been chiefly developed in asylums by the original alienists, psychiatrists, also the social and political sciences and the pastoral discipline. The Messianic Imperative: Scourge or Savior is offered as a contribution to that study. More so, it is offered as a journey into unfamiliar terrain. It may hopefully lead to a manual for action on the part of people, worldwide, alert to the current danger, who wish to contribute to the world family aborning in these parlous times.