Psychoanalyst Prof. Donald Carveth interprets Melanie Klein to develop a new kind of (post-)atheist Christianity. Following Klein, he differentiates between a schizoid-paranoid state of mind and a (depressive) or reparative state of mind. The schizoid-paranoid position is marked by a process known as splitting; someone sees something as either completely all-good or all-bad. It is associated with a superego that fuels one with devaluing or persecuting beliefs for an all-bad object and idealizations for an all-good object.¹

So one may claim to be an atheist, yet operate from a schizoid-paranoid mental state. In that case, an explicit disbelief in an all-good object as transferred onto a God, now merely has been transferred. It can be transferred onto science, which in its place now is ascribed ideal qualities: science will have all the answers, it should be the exclusionary authority in society, etc. If not science, the savior could turn out to be some technology, such as bitcoin, and even the group around famed atheist Dawkins has been described as a problematic variety of religion.

The argument for Christianity or atheism is subsequently not about what one claims to believe. It is about how a schizoid-paranoid mental state can produce mental phenomena or objects that are split into all-good and all-bad, sustained by a persecutory guilt or effort. And how instead a reparative mental state can produce mental phenomena and objects in which more of the object is seen, leading to ambivalence and the ability to put in reparative effort.

There is the fundamentalist or superegoic Christian, and likewise a fundamentalist or superegoic atheist. They both operate on a schizoid-paranoid state of the mind. The Carvethean challenge, and also interpretation of Christianity, is then to overcome such a type of christianity or atheism.

What this amounts to is a conversion to abandon persecutory guilt or effort. And to instead move to reparative effort. In reparative effort, rather than harshly blaming oneself or others, there is a movement to repairing the situation. If there is hurt, rather than persecuting myself (which may turn out to be rather narcissistically oriented around what kind of bad person someone is), there instead is an affective interest to repair from compassion. That is reparative effort.

It is through this reparative interest that also a different type of spirituality can be found. One in which there is also a sense of divinity, to be found in some ineffable, and yet more uncertain experience of nature or elsewhere. This experience may nonetheless lead to a conviction or faith that there is some fine- or immaterial goodness that can orient oneself in life.

And so it is one who has turned away from a one type of religious family and its doctrines, that has found a different type of spirituality that is more utterly ‘Christian’. It is also found with Jesus who doesn’t abide by the religious laws of a jewish community:

“You make God’s law to mean nothing so you can keep your own laws!…He said, “These people respect me with their mouth but their heart is far from me. They do not mean it in their hearts when they worship me. Their teachings are only the words of men.“ (Matthew, 15:6-9)

“And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes.”
(Mark 1:22)

In effect, both the scribes and Jesus considered each other to be non-believers. The first in the sense of not adhering to an explicit belief or script, the second as to what is happening on a deeper level. Merely adhering to some laws or rituals doesn’t mean there is some orientation towards goodness, forgiveness, reparation. It is removing the spirit from the letter.

And this really implies a dialectical synthesis refuting a supposed contradiction between atheism and theism. It is a paradigm which seeks to overcome fundamentalism and persecution through forgiveness and an intuitively nourished sense of the good. Believing or holding on really hard onto some thing we think to be, or have to defend, is what the scribes did, and it is what needs to be left behind.²

This also really goes against an approach from, for example, a Sam Harris and other exponents of reason, who seek to ground morality in reason. One of the most famous examples of this enlightenment paradigm is the work from Kant, who wanted to ground morality on the basis of reason.³ What Carveth suggests, is that morality cannot be merely rooted in reason, it has to be rooted into something else: conscience. Reason, as an instrument for science, can help in describing reality by processes of inference and deduction. This likewise can be a helpful and necessary instrument for morality: to be moral requires prudentiality, and to be prudential requires understanding dependent on what actions what consequences arise, and to then avert from or assert to that. But this implies reason as an essential instrument for the procedural realization of ethics, not the material measure of it. The measure of it has to be experiental knowledge (wisdom) intuited by an ever more strongly developed – and liberated – conscience.

Using these teachings some six to seven years ago, and practicing on it, was what eventually lead to me stumbling into the teachings of the Buddha. But ever since discovering and studying that, it seems I can’t help but owe a great deal to what I found here.

Article:
http://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth/christianity.pdf

1. There is a parralel between this and the teaching on the four bases of mindfulness. The four bases are: breathing, experience, mental state, mental phenomena or objects. The parralel is that the mental state or theatre informs what type of objects or phenomena appear. And the mental objects (such as thoughts) that are engaged with, will give shape to the mental state. Like all sense data does to their respective sense base, thoughts provide stimuli that impinge on the mental sense base. If there is a distressing thought, and that is engaged with, this activity can bring the mental state into a downwards spiral. If, instead, there is an experience of something wholesome, and it is engaged with to the exclusion of other impingements, this leads to a mental state that is going to turn itself wholesome. Beth Upton can see with wisdom a lot of dhamma and talks with delicate detail about this process. ↩︎
2. In the teachings of the Buddha, there is gross-materiality, fine-materiality and immateriality. Right view is understanding that there is goodness and there is the stressful. There is generosity (towards mother and father), the fruits of wholesome actions and the fruits of unwholesome actions. The right intention or inclination is: good-will, harmlessness, and renouncing or distancing. If there is harm, one can use intentions of goodwill and harmlessness to cultivate an intention of distancing. ↩︎
3. Kant. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. 1785. ↩︎