Vague reflections on religious cults and historic amphetamine experiments

was decades later that the first Jewish member of the KCCC was the founder of H and R Block. Unable to afford membership in the single all Jewish country club of the region, | practiced for my high school golf team on Armour Hills Public Golf Course, where, at the time, mostly white working class golfers played. How can it be that spiritual states include both personal humbleness and loving mercy toward some of mankind and judgmentalness, nonacceptance and commitment to seduction, threat and even violence in the service of invoking changes in the beliefs of others. How can the high energy calm of being home at last in the born again condition with its new freedom from self assaults about sin, most importantly that of disbelief, but also peccadilloes such as drunkenness, promiscuity and familial abuse, be associated with readiness to judge, harass even persecute others. Psychoanalysts would say that it is a riddance mechanism, the projection of unwanted personal traits onto others. From the standpoint of rational thought, this seems more like non-Aristotelian cognition, two, not either-or, countervailing orientations toward mankind held simultaneously. The newborn parishioners of these charismatic amphetamine churches express their fealty to God with strongly held beliefs that diagram logically as contradictions. The perception of the world’s peoples into believers and infidels, good and evil, our people and your people, ourselves and the others. It is generally believed among social psychologists that it is the perceived nonpersonness of others, which allows the cruelty that empathic identification with them would never permit. Splitting feels like resolution, its stereotypy reducing the complexity of spiritual thought as well as true to life perception. A concrete laboratory example of amphetamine conversion, the sudden transition to a high energy, fixated, and delusional state called amphetamine psychosis, is supplied by experiments in humans conducted by Professor John Griffith at Vanderbilt University in the 1960’s. These experiments would not be allowed by today’s human research committees or medical ethicists. Each one of a group of psychologically screened-as-normal graduate student volunteers, at an individually unique amphetamine dose, developed suddenly a personally unique and peculiar system of new beliefs, obsessionally held as rational thoughts. Ten 150 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013650