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In AD 33, on the road to Damascus, Paul fell to the ground, was blinded by an intense light, heard the voice of Jesus and remained sightless for three days, neither eating nor drinking throughout that time.
The medical diagnosis seems clear His fall, his blindness, his deafness, his three-day loss of the sense of small and of appetite, his tendency to hear voices .. it all reads unmistakably like a passage from a manual of psychiatry filed under Neuroses, sub-section Hysteria.
Paul was a small, thin man who provided no details on the illness he describes except to say that Satan gave him "a thorn in the flesh."
There has been endless speculation on what this might be - in fact every illness knows to man has been suggested except one - a weakening of the libido - a problem with sex - Paul was probably impotent.
Paul's pen drips with hatred, contempt and a permanent mistrust of the things of the body. His loathing of sexuality, his praise of chastity, his worship of abstinence, his approval of the widowed condition, his passion for celibacy, his appeal to his listeners to conduct themselves as he did, his reluctance to consent to marriage but only as the best of bad choices (the best being to renounce all things associated with the body) - these are all obvious symptoms of hysteria.
These conclusions are borne out of a number of undeniable facts, the foremost being Paul's failure to acknowledge any kind of deep-seated pathology whatsoever. We can quite easily admit to abdominal pain or arthritic joints. It is less easy to admit to sexual impotence, which can, however, be very obliquely hinted at under the cover of a metaphor "a thorn in the flesh."
So, life inflicts sexual impotence or a problematic libido on Paul. His response? He gave himself the illusion of freedom by believing that he had freed himself from what defined him. Celibacy was not imposed upon him; is was a choice, a decision he had made. Unable to lead a sex life worthy of the name, Paul declares null and void all forms of sexuality for himself but also for the rest of the world. A desire to be like everyone else by demanding that everyone else emulate him, whence his determination to make all mankind bow to the rule of his own constraints.
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He affirms, "for the sake of Christ I am content with weaknesses, hardships, insults, persecutions and calamities, for when I am weak, then am I strong."
His masochistic hatred of self turned into a vigorous hatred of the world and all its concerns: life, love, desire, pleasure, sensations, body, flesh, joy, freedom, independence, autonomy. There is no mystery to Paul's masochism - he saw life through the prism of his own sexual difficulties.
Paul transformed this hatred of self into hatred of the world - and the need to live with it, partly to dispel it but to keep it at a distance.
He confesses "I pummel my body and I subdue it" and he asks other men "pummel your body to subdue it. Do as I do."
This is praise for celibacy, chastity and abstinence and for over 2,000 years, millions of people all over the world have been told to deny themselves pleasure, to suffer and to live in fear of their own bodies as a direct result of the weakness and psychological problems of one man - Paul.
Unable to have women, Paul loathes them, he despises them. This provides an excellent chance to recycle the misogyny of Jewish monotheism, later bequeathed to Christianity and Islam. Genesis condemns woman as the first sinner, the source of all the world's evil - and Paul embraced this disastrous idea as his own.
Hence prohibition against women rain down in Paul's writings - fragile and evil beyond repair, women are destined to obey men is silence and submission. Eve's descendants must hold their husbands in awe and refrain from teaching or from trying to control the supposedly stronger sex. As temptresses and seductresses they may of course hope for salvation but only through being a wife and a mother.
Two thousand years of punishments visited on women simply to exorcise the neuroses of a sexually impotent weakling!
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