@spendius,
In an interview published in 1982 Normal Mailer was asked to define "Violence".
He first distinguished between personal violence and social violence such as war or Gulags.
Then he added the categories of censorship, excessively organised piety and charity drives which, he said, create personal violence as an antithesis due to the "spontaneous expressions" of a person's nature which feels "cut off by institutional deadenings" of it.
"Violence is directly proportional to the power to deaden one's mood which is possessed by the environment. Threatened with the extinction of our possibilities, we react with chronic raage."
"The first reaction, the heart of the violence, is the protection of the self. The second question, the moral question, is whether the self deserves to be protected, that is to say---was it honourable to fight? was the danger true? "
It is considerations of such matters that causes the length of the theological training of the priests of the Catholic religion. Which is not always successful as we are continually reminded despite such training not always being successful in any other large institution.
When there is a separation of Church and State it opens the door to preachers who have not felt the need to undergo such a stringent training and who rely on personal charisma to justify preaching whatever it is that suits their purposes which cannot help including the purposes of the contributing congregation. A tailored religion. There is a class bias in such engineering.
The Catholic Church draws its congregation from all classes over extensive periods of time. It is a mistake to seek to undermine the Catholic Church on the basis of the activities of these cults and heretical movements which claim to be representing Christianity.
