Emotions: can't live with them, can't live without them...

Because emotions are partly physical, we cannot lead a spiritually satisfactory mortal life. 

This statement sounds startling (or just plain false!) but it derives from the nature and properties of emotions; and their role in this mortal life. 

Emotions derive, significantly, from the state of our physical bodies - our body state (including especially the hormone and neural activity) as sensed and interpreted by our brains. This is not the whole story, but there is a sense in which we cannot get away from the physical when it comes to emotions. 

There have been many attempts through history to train people to become spiritually independent of the emotions - i.e. the tradition of religious asceticism. 

But all valid authorities agree that humans can never be wholly free of the passions: the spirit can never become independent of the body. The tyranny of emotions may be diminished, but this lessening is never more than a quantitative change; a reduction of the causative drive; but never an elimination of our subjection to emotion. 

Furthermore, when asceticism works and there is a successful diminution of the strength of emotions - this has bad effects as well as the desired good ones. There is some degree of demotivation, and of disengagement from life; because it is emotions that link us to the world, other people, other beings. 

For instance, the technical word for a person who lacks sympathy or empathy - which means the capacity to feel the emotions of another - is psychopath. A psychopath is one who lacks the automatic and innate response to resonate emotionally with others. 

It is this unemotionality which (to some degree) underpins cold, selfish cruelty without remorse.  

Thus on the one hand we are (to an extent) slaves to our emotions, hence our bodies - and bodies are subject to the entropic changes of degeneration, disease and death; and also to the temptations of evil. 

Yet if it was possible to reduce or eliminate emotionality; we would also thereby lessen vital aspects of our basic humanity. 

For me, this emphasizes that our mortal life is not the kind of thing that can be perfected; and that even the scope for improvement is limited, since there is a "swings and roundabouts" quality to many basic human changes. 

And, in turn, this brings me back to the fact that when Jesus offered Mankind the chance of resurrected eternal life in Heaven - a life in which we remain our-selves, and retain our emotional nature but perfected by love; He was offering the greatest gift that it was possible for us to receive - and exactly the best response to this fundamental problem of human existence. 

 

"Psychopath" is a materialist reduction of "innately evil"

Perhaps the term “psychopath” (when used accurately) is nowadays serving as a materialistic pseudo-medical description of what is actually a spiritual situation: that is, a person with an innately evil nature. 

That is, a true "psychopath" would be someone who, by nature, is incapable of love. 

Such people have always been known through history - variously conceptualized. Psychopathy was at one time called “moral insanity”. 

At a psychological level, psychopathy shows as a lack of empathy, or ‘sympathy’; coldness, insensitivity, hardness of personality – the inability to experience emotions appropriate to social relationships. 

But from a spiritual and Christian perspective, such ‘medicalizations’ seem like evasions of a profound spiritual deficit. Qualitative/ total psychopaths are probably rare (although probably more common in some places than others, and more common now than in the past). But it seems there are larger numbers of people whose capacity for love is weak and easily overcome by expedience, or whose capacity for love is only very intermittent. 

Such people are natural allies of the powers of evil, and are capable of serving any agenda, and doing anything – so long as it provides them with personal gratification, or enables them to avoid suffering. 

Spiritually speaking; if someone was a full, "qualitative", total psychopath For Sure; then he would certainly be damned, because he would not want and would reject salvation. A psychopath would not repent his sins; would not be prepared to discard and leave-behind all that was incompatible with Love. Or, from the inverse perspective: Heaven is a state and place of Love - so than any Being incapable of living wholly by Love cannot inhabit Heaven. 

However, (in absolute spiritual terms) because of the reality of free will/ agency; Men's minds and motivations are not transparent, so the status of love-less-ness can be inferred indirectly, but not known with certainty. 

I presume that this lack of certainty is why psychopathic souls – apparently incapable of love, and therefore very probably self-damned – are nonetheless sometimes incarnated. Maybe such souls will, after all, have sufficient capacity for love to choose to follow Jesus? 

Why - spiritually speaking - are there more ‘psychopaths’ nowadays (if that is indeed true) – aside from the obvious biological cause that psychopaths out-reproduce normies under modern social conditions? 

Spiritually speaking; I wonder if the ‘supply’ of pre-mortal human souls that are overall pretty good by-nature is in practice finite, has been mostly used-up; and is therefore recently becoming depleted? 

So modern societies are, in effect, scraping the barrel, because God is perhaps currently incarnating a lot of the dregs!…

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The above derives from a comment to a post by Richard Cocks over at the Orthosphere that rather got "out of hand" and off-the-point...