The sacred
The tendency to reach decisions without considering the facts and interests of people

November 12, 2005
iranian.com

Sacred is a holy person, animal, object, or idea, whose rationality and originality cannot be proved. Therefore religions, sects, cults, and even dictatorial systems abundantly use the concept of sacred to compensate for their irrationality. From this point of view, the concept has root in very primitive human behaviours. It has been a justification of many acts, ideas, and relations whose rationality could not be explained, and people were not aware and did not feel free to ask.

The Sacred as such is necessarily not a classified custom of religion. Prior to religion, the Sacred had been a primitive phenomenon inspiring ancient rituals. For example sacrificing something worthy for the sake of something sacred.

The package of Sacred/sacrifice was mostly accompanied by bloody and ceremonial acts of rituals such as abominable amputation, genital severing, cannibalism, and many other types of bestial acts that have been discovered in archaeological works.

Later in various religions sacred figures, objects, places, or concepts, in a complete lack of request on the vital question of rationality, are believed by followers to be intimately connected with the supernatural, or the divine, and are thus greatly revered with a deep respect and veneration for some person, place, or thing regarded as having a sacred or exalted character.

Of course, a small number of phenomenons can be promoted to the status of Sacred. This status is not evidently God’s will, but instead the People’s need to find the meaning of life in a most sacred interpretation. By becoming followers of the Sacred, people are the only source of its creation.  

The Sacred can be or become anything: an object like a Holy Book, a place like a shrine, an animal like a sacred cow or, even worse, a person who can be dangerous, like a Khomeini committing sacred crimes.

The Sacred’s help is not intended to increase people’s welfare without expecting blind submission in return. The followers’ submissiveness is the reward for the Sacred’s help; a form of help in which the ultimate goal of the helper is to increase his own sacredness.

The Sacred has no feeling of solidarity with his people; otherwise Khomeini would not surprise a whole nation by saying: "I have no feeling on my return to Iran!" in his flight to Iran after 15 years in exile.  

The Sacred’s authoritarian personality is masked by his docile followers. Otherwise his rigid adherence to divine values, and prejudice toward anything unsacred can turn into atrocities.   

In the best case, his role as shepherd can be to guide his sheep, but when the sheep are not docile, the Sacred becomes a vicious wolf; so a Khomeini can send thousands of his undefended prisoners into a Fatwa-death.

The Sacred is neither a competent person nor is he a hero on any occasion.The Sacred is like a Hollywood picture; his inner emptiness is compensatedfor by hisfollowers´ submissiveness. The Sacred’s status is either a maladapted emptiness for psycho-criminology or a sacred guide for his blind followers. 

The Sacred is believed to be morally and spiritually excellent. But his best quality is his skill to provide role models of what some others would like to be.

Almost all Sacreds were solitary children, and experienced a time of personal crisis, often induced by isolation, eventually leading to a breakdown. This was resolved by a personal revelation, often arrived at in privacy after a long inner conflict.

They display certain common characteristics after emerging from personal crisis. They are convinced the answer to their problems is the answer to everyone else’s. Their lack of friends can lead them to seek disciples as proof of their own superiority.

The Sacred overwhelms with rhetoric and a compelling presence because of his own self-belief. His preaching is opium for his followers. The Sacred is a crowned pattern of increased hostility toward other thinkers (non-believers) accompanied by increased loyalty to one's sacred values. 

The Sacred´s faith is more worthy than the lives of people and only so he can achieve the status of Sacred, a sacred model to be followed through the blind acceptance of a nation which becomes an Ummah, whose martyrdom is its best deed.   

The Sacred’s message is: whatever your problem, there is a divine solution for it. And the divine solution is all that is permitted like the IRI Sacred-based constitution.

The message does not have to be explained, but instead ordered. It must emphasize a fear derived through the divine power to punish.Here the main goal is thatthe divine order should exert more control over the lives of the followers than they do themselves—it is in deed an apocalypse of  Velayat-e-Faghih.

Somehow the Sacred knows that the impoverished followers desire to acquire a balance in their thoughts, feelings, and social relationships. All that the Sacred needs to do is to recognise the imbalance in order to work out a solution for the followers. The followers should be led to adapt to a personality which is more attached to the Sacred’s values than to any other values.

The immediate problem is that the members of such a cohesive group make extreme decisions due to the elimination of opposing views.

The Sacred´s tendency is to reach decisions without considering the facts and the interests of people --as is the present case in Iran.

The Sacred’s decision however is not the solution, but the Sacred’s power to communicate before it fades back in its original obscurity.

The Sacred is not however a monopoly of some “messengers”.  Anybody can become the Sacred. One should have a powerful conviction and the ability to preach beliefs with authority in order to achieve his goal of convincing the people.  Then his words will be the precious pearls of wisdom, the purest truths, and the non-judgemental revelations that even a Khomeini’s imbecilic phraseology can stand above.

Through the effect of the Sacred, the entire lifestyle of followers, including all the ideas, symbols, preferences, physical appearances and material objects can be changed until the followers arrive into a clash of identity with their own past. A principle stating that whatever can possibly be causal explanations for a particular event, tend to be much more likely to attribute to the effect of the Sacred’s divine power, even if his world is nothing but an apocalyptical hell, this must be however regarded as a paradise.

All these conditions can radically cause changes in thoughts, emotions, and behaviour as a result of extended stress and unrewarded repetition of duties, extreme dissatisfaction, pessimism, inequality, and a desire to quit.

What the Sacred knows better than all his followers is that the human race seems to need God-like figures based on the views of a particular society or culture. The Sacred uses this to fulfil the need solely through religion, sect or cult.

The Sacred can benefit when the social problems, in all fields, are enormous.

The level of the Sacred’s acceptance within a given society is correlated with the individual and social problems. The deeper these problems are, the more the Sacred is accepted.

The individual must be convinced to believe that the Sacred has more control over circumstances in life than the individual himself does.  In another words, the individual must be so frustrated that all his feelings, thoughts, and behaviours cannot be associated to achieve a particular goal in his life and prefers to become a blind follower.

Normally either such a frustrated individual reacts aggressively or follows a sect or religion in order to find an accepted identity, by which the reduction in the aggression drives the religious tendency; although his underlying aggression can be reactive in some ritual violence. For example circumcision is a ritual violence, typically focused on the genital organs of male or female victims or the traditional Shiite mourning rituals seem as the ideal of sacred suffering. Its excessive displays of grief and self-flagellation is a type of self-harm

The idea of sacredness is like a lucid dream that puts a trance over the follower who is aware of its ambivalence, but meanwhile tries to manipulate his dream; a very consequent factor which is not effective because of persuasive acceptance, but due to an unconscious follower’s need to be similar to the Sacred.

This factor, on the other hand, also serves to encourage the Sacred to continue to be “his” Sacred.

The Sacred can be a guru or prophet or even a legend like Jesus, Noah, or Adam,  all whose existences are even controversial.

Pathologically, the Sacred might have a mental disorder like hallucination, which causes a false perception of reality (e.g., hearing voices or revelations that aren't there or seeing people or angels or fees that do not exist). 

The Sacred can be, for many others, a maladapted person with a strong tendency to focus only on his or her own perspective of a specific object or cause and a failure to understand that others may see things differently. Here the Sacred for some non-believers can be similar to a child who tries to persuade others to see the world from his perspective.

The Sacred can be a Holy Book allegedly written or inspired by God.

Although ancient civilisations have produced handmade texts for thousand of years, many religious and spiritual movements believe that their sacred texts (or scriptures) are the “Word of God”, often feeling that the texts are wholly divine or spiritually inspired in origin.

Even non-believers often capitalise the names of sacred scriptures as a mark of respect or tradition or as a reminder of the fear of being labeled as profane.

The Sacred has been an important historical phenomenom in the course of history and has had an important role in the social evolution of human personality traits.  The Sacred accompanied with a political state is today´s example of the Islamic Republic of Iran which is a whole other topic to be discussed.  However, it is wise to know the entire concept of Sacred in order to understand the framework of any religious dictatorship.