Denzel Washington associates religious believers with sociopaths (and murderers)

[Jim__]

56. Did you scan the book for the word "God"?

How about "religion", "spirituality", "faith"? I find it difficult to limit the possible interpretations of a book based on scanning for a word. I did, however, scan for the word "God". It's there, a number of times. An excerpt from page 212 - 213:

...

Though less conspicuously, a belief in oneness is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition as well. In 1939, as yet another shattering attempt at world domination rumbled in Europe, Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber address the National Conference of Palestinian Teachers in Tel-Aviv. He concluded his address by saying, "Nothing remains but what rises above the abyss of today's monstrous problems, as above every abyss of every time: the wing-beat of the spirit and the creative word. But he who can see and hear out of unity will also behold and discern again what can be beheld and discerned eternally. The educator who helps to bring man back to his own unity will help to put him again face to face with God."

In whatever tradition they occur, spiritual practices focused on an awareness of interbeing tend to have the intriguing psychological side effect of bringing significant earthly happiness to their most devoted practitioners, almost regardless of external circumstances. In a book that is a collaboration between psychologist Daniel Goleman and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, entitled Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama, Goleman writes, "The very act of concern for others' well-being, it seems, creates a greater state of well-being within oneself" In recent years, increasing numbers of scientists have echoed this impression. At a 2002 conference on science and the mind attended by the Dalai Lama, distinguished Australian neurobiologist Jack Pettigrew remarked, "If you go to Dharamsala [Indian home of the Tibetan community in exile], you go up through the fog in mid-winter and you come out in the bright sunshine, it's like going to heaven. What strikes you immediately is the happy smiling faces of the Tibetans, who don't have much, have been terribly deprived, and yet they are happy. Well, why are they happy?"

The Dalai Lama himself is interested in answering this question scientifically and finding a secular way to creat the compassionate sense of interbeing that is achieved by devour practitioners of Tibetan Bhuddist meditation. To this end, he has launched an international series of dialoques between scientists and Bhuddist scholars, the most recent of which, in 2003, was cosponsored by the Mind and Life Institute in Colorado and the McGovern Institute of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. He intends these dialogues to yield practical solutions to the destructive states of mind that both the Bhuddists and the scientists view as the root of human confilct and suffering.

As a psychologist, I am particularly taken with the Dalai Lama's description of those whom I might refer to as sociopaths, or as people devoid of an intervening sense of obligation based in connectedness to others. He refers to such people as "people who don't have well developed human lives." More specifically, the Dalai Lama said of the World Trade Center attacks, "Technology is a good thing but the use of technology in the hands of people who don't have well developed human lives can be disastrous."

...

Now, do I think this chapter says that sociopaths are usually atheists? No. Do I think that Denzel Washington, looking back at the book and after having played his character as a sociopath and atheist could remember it that way? Yes. I've done enough checking of my recollections to know that they are not exact. I've read that is normal for human memory. Denzel plays the character, apparently a character under threat of immediate death as an atheist. Do I think the character's atheism is important to how Denzel plays him? Yes. IOW, I think this is much ado about nothing.

After all, I could start a thread that claims Denzel Washington associates winners with sociopaths - but, that would be silly.