A quote from the article from Randal Rauser:
“However, I shudder when the question of psychopathy is put in terms of the extent of grace, as it so often is. Once this is done, any skepticism about a predator’s conversion based on a long history of psychopathic manipulation can be dismissed as a cynical failure to grasp the power of grace.”
That is thought provoking, and highlights a struggle I have to balance trust with cynicism. We are warned repeatedly about false teachers, no doubt because they find people of faith easy marks, but it does seem like Christians still fall for schemes and frauds both in and out of the church. Pseudoscience, televangelists, faith healers, pyramid schemes, and multilevel marketing all seem to be associated with Christian groups. How do we balance faith with skepticism?
That’s a good question. MLMs specifically get me riled up as I see them spreading in church groups and often using similar language involving “faith” and “hope” and “perseverance” while pushing pseudoscience and discouraging simple mathematics, not to mention turning friends and family members into targets where friendship becomes a means to an end. At the same time, I can’t ignore the similarities I see to some evangelism strategies.
Trust but verify. Only half-joking. Online, I don’t trust anyone until they show themselves trustworthy. In real life, I’m mostly the opposite. I trust everyone until they show themselves untrustworthy. At least, I try to trust everyone. Sometimes the ole Spidey Sense kicks in …
Did you work with the inmates, or were you a volunteer? Just curious. I taught a prison Bible study for five years before I went to work in the juvenile system for a decade. They were very different experiences.
I definitely agree that those with the mental capacity understand right from wrong. Psychopaths definitely can show all the signs of remorse, but they don’t feel it. They fake it to make it. Deception and manipulation.
Great piece! Thanks for the tip. Lots to say but time is short. Poke me tomorrow.
He showed remorse, voiced remorse, and even sought to be baptized and the conversations with him by a pastor lead him to believe completely that he’s changed.
There is no real scientific reason that I’ve seen to believe that people who can reason through horrible things and commit them can’t also do the opposite and work back towards goodness and rehabilitation.
That is the problem right there isn’t it? Only God knows, and certainly his grace is sufficient. Just reading the Wikipedia account on Dahmer, it sure sounds as though he played the preacher, however, just as Ted Bundy played Dobson in the article referenced above. Of course, not every psychopath is a mass murderer. Some live amongst us, and those are the ones we need to we wary of.
I’ve read the pastors books, and his brother though extremely secret has reached out to a handful of people in the churches of Christ, and it seems like Dahmer legitimately felt sorrow and wished he never did it. Even by his actions in prison.
You can also read accounts of people who were in gangs that raped and killed, drug dealers, and so on. I’ve seen dozens of people that I’ve studied with that was called sociopaths that was shown love and had the gospel shared with them and they repented.
Gods grace is promised to everyone who repents and seeks his righteousness and does his will. To me it does not require to fall back on only god knows. If that was the case then it would be the same for everyone. Bearing the fruit of the spirit is not the same as perfection but it is evident in people’s life anyways.
Well, we cannot know what is in others hearts, but God knows. You are right that the fruit of the
Spirit can guide us in who we can trust, but in extraordinary cases, the evidence must be long term and extraordinary as well. If the prison reports sited are accurate, that was not the case with Dalmer. That is pretty irrelevant to us however, as we have real life problems in life such as how to handle religious leaders who have acted poorly and betrayed trust. Many return to ministry. Is that appropriate, even if their repentance is genuine? What about sexual predators?
I certainly do not have the answers, but it would be refreshing to hear that some of these abusive people felt led to repent before they were caught.
No, there is no good evidence of any brain abnormality giving rise to psychopathy. This is only an interpretration by psychiatrists and neuroscientists of the evidence seen.
They show psychopaths what would be a distressing image to other people. And they see that the psychopath has no reaction to it. They don’t feel any distress. Thus they conclude that the psychopath has a dysfunctional amygdala and so on, That is to say a brain abnormality. But this is only an interpretation of the evidence and it is an interpretation, which in my opinion, is not justified and I believe they know it.
When shown what would be a distressing image to others, a psychopath has two choices.
One choice is that they can shrug their shoulders and say “so what?”. That is they show indifference.
The other choice is to get pleasure from the image that they see. This would certainly light up the amygdala and other areas of the brain. But they see that to display this reality may expose them for who they really are. So they refrain from making this choice.
So the evidence seen is not the true picture, only a part of it. There is no brain abnormality. To call it a brain abnormality is equivalent to saying “the car runs the red lights because it’s carburetor is faulty”.
I would agree with Francis Collins that the Moral Law is evidence for the existence of God. We know right from wrong because we have a conscience or a moral compass that gives us guidance. That doesn’t mean we always get it right, but we don’t do actions that stand contrary to the Moral Law as for instance kill someone for kicks, a bit of fun. A psychopath will do so and not because they don’t know right from wrong, but because they have deadened their conscience. I have described how this is done in this post: Biggest stumbling block for me - Hell - #145 by Ani99
Yes, they do have a soul, but their soul is dark. When my late, psychopathic husband confessed who he was and exposed the actions that are done to gain power and influence over others in their lives, I became aware of sheer blackness that seemed to emanate from him. It was not something visual. It was my sudden awareness of his soul. During the talks we had, which lasted for well over two years, I had to glue candles to the table and lite them because I felt a desperate need to see light and though I had all the lights in the house and yard on it was not enough.
Where as your rejection of the unstated evidence is evidence of … what?
Once again we have your dismissal of the judgement of the experts in a field as a kind of carte blanche assumption that their intellect and/or intentions are inferior to your own.
The thing that I find most interesting, and disheartening, is how the majority of studies, experiences, and case studies seem to be those who have committed crimes or had troubling lives. The studies almost never focus on non violent people who are emotionally disconnected , but self aware of it and work through the processes logically. Such as a wife whose a psychopath but does not of drugs , abuse their kids, are faithful to their husbands and when they see their husbands sad because their mother died they know that they need to be encouraged and that physical contact with someone close often helps while sharing the message.
Then on the opposite side of the coin the same people seem to ignore the fact that prisons are full of violent evil people who still get sad watching a movie. They still have feelings, and still make choices between good or bad, but often ignores their conscience for some sort of desire. These people are not psychopaths but living lives way worse snd more cruel than the psychopathic wife I mentioned.
They hear psychopath and drum up these true crime /horror film concepts of what kind of person it is they are generalizing. It reminds me of how racists generalize African Americans as super predators and scream statistics on choices people make who grow up in inner cities and cite statistics about crime all the while ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of African Americans never commit a crime, never join a gang and ect… all the while these supremacist ignore the fact that some other whites also commit terrible crimes.
I see the same process and mentality being projected onto others who score higher on Hare’s checklist or some other type of test.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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God doesn’t judge anyone. Not against Anubis’ feather of Ma’at. He resolves the past in post-mortem, transcendent restitution, fully worked out equality of eternal opportunity. He fixes all genetic and developmental wiring issues and everything recorded on the media. He’s not the Nazi at the end of the Auschwitz line, thumbs up or down.
Below is the testimony of the Christian Apologist David Wood, a diagnosed psychopath who is now a born again Christian. Jesus can save the psychopath as well.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
56
Jesus will save everybody, that’s His job, that’s what it says on the tin. 1 in a 100 of us is a psychopath. Triple that for entrepreneurs and lawyers amongst others. 1 in 4 male prisoners is. This is human normal, i.e. well within 3 standard deviations. So it’s not surprising that as many get religion as in the non-psychopathic majority.
“What the hell, I thought. So I had the scans. You go to the imaging place. You lay in the machine for a very long time and they show you images. Words, pictures, it depends on what they are looking for I suppose. They measure your brains response to neutral, negative, and positive images or words. In psychopathy there is no response when the word is negative, but a neurotypical’s brain lights up like the fourth of July. So, the scans take a good while, they look them over, and the doctor calls you with the result.
Diminished activity in the frontal lobe, small amygdala, and I stopped listening because I didn’t know much about the brain to begin with, so he was just saying words to me. He concluded by telling me that I had the brain that they have seen in psychopaths. Weirdly, he seemed a little excited by it."
Clearly if the person makes no response, there isn’t going to be any brain activity. I don’t think you need to be a neuroscientist to get that.
So maybe you can explain how it is that interpreting no response as “diminished activity” and how indeed a diminished brain structure can explain a psychopath’s actions. So I will give you the actions of my late husband, who was a psychopath and recognized as such by a psychiatrist.
He was a senior scientist, a chemist, well respected and head of school of chemistry for some years. One of the perks of being head of school was that he or she was given a chance to have their secretary remain their personal secretary after they retired from the position. Ah, but, only if the secretary agreed. So he wasn’t going to ask her. He said “I wanted to be sure she would continue on as my secretary right from the start”. So what did he do?
He chatted her up over the years before his retirement from the position of head of school and discovered various details about her and her movements. One was that she walked through a lonely park on her way home because it was the shortest distance between the bus stop and her house. And we are talking about a migrant woman, divorced, with 4 children under 12 years of age and no supporting family in Australia. She was a migrant.
So he arranged to have her raped. She of course was distraught and as she had no family and my late husband had shown her some “kindness” and “consideration” at work, she rang him for support. Of course he went to see her and took her some fruit and he said he gave her words of comfort. He said “you always give a carrot with a stick”
She felt indebted to him, so when the time came for her to say yah or nah, of course she agreed to be his secretary until his retirement from the university. And I should say here that he spoke in a totally matter-of-fact manner, as if he was discussing how you could cut up some wood and joint them together to make a chair.
So now, is a diminished prefrontal lobe, because they don’t think anything of what they do or what images they look at, and diminished amygdala because they couldn’t care less, a justified assessment of the scans? Do their interpretation of the scans give a justified explanation how the psychopath operates? My late husband:
planned over time,
took actions to make the woman feel he was her friend,
arranged for the criminals to rape her in the lonely park and then
to “give comfort”
and all because of a variant brain structure, particularly in having diminished activity and smaller structures or whatever! And you think we should not question the… “the experts”. We have every right to do so, and indeed have a duty to do so because there is a lot wrong that won’t be righted if we don’t.
This is romanticizing psychopathy. It seeks to put them next to humane people. All of them are masked. I was married to a psychopath for 24 years before he confessed who he was. Before that I had no idea that he was psychopathic. I never once guess the darkness that characterized him. Every psychopath is violent but in the vast majority of cases the violence is not done openly. It is underhanded. And if the victim complains based on a bad gut feeling, the victim is found to be at fault by the psychiatrists and the general population. You shouldn’t blame others for your misfortune. It just happened.
This is demonizing it and confusing it based off of your one single experience. It’s not everyone’s experience and it’s not what the data says.
“ In my experience, every single Muslim man I met abused his wife or girlfriend , had racial tendencies , and joked about 9/11. They force their daughters to wear these ridiculously hot body and face coverings even while at the beach the women just set on the shore hot watching kids while the men run around shirtless playing in cold water. The only exceptions are Muslims from Indonesia and that’s because they were saved from the backwards middle eastern cultures. “
Now I don’t really believe that. Everything in the quotations though are things I’ve routinely heard from others when talking about Muslims. Though it has been my experience. Everything I said are things that also fit my experiences and despite that I know it’s not true. I’ve met others who had the same experiences and believe those things. That’s essentially the same thing you did.
I know what you are trying to say. I too had a similar experience when I went to Greece on holidays and found that there were a lot of American soldiers and navy personnel and they did a lot of awful things, rape children, dump sump oil into the ocean so wildlife died and one got full of oil if we went into the beach for a swim. I came away hating Americans. Then I went to Hawaii to do some Zen Buddhist retreats and met a lot of Americans from all over the States. I found they were nice people. So my perceptions changed.
With psychopaths however it is not just one experience. Unfortunately I know a huge number of them as they are trying to stop me from discussing them and the ways that they operate. All of them are harmful and all of them pass off as nice people to anyone who doesn’t know them.
