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CHAPTER 7:

AMPHETAMINE ROLL-UP AND SPLITTING

We try to understand the metaphysics and inner dynamical life of the committed, judgmental, fundamentalist believer. In these sacerdotaly rigid and faithful, disenfranchisement and righteous intolerance toward other denominations are simultaneous with spiritual compassion, mercy and forgiveness for the members of their own. This splitting between the good people and latent evil doers is seen by psychoanalysts and dynamically oriented brain scientists as an all too common, sometimes psychopathological, solution to the inevitable ambiguities of living. I am certainly not alone in being fearful of Fundamentalists: Jewish, Christian, Moslem and Hindu. From the overpass above the freeway, bearded Jewish Orthodox men rained rocks onto the roof of my rented car because I was driving on Sabbath. A research project had taken me to Jerusalem Mental Health Center’s neurochemical laboratories for collaborative work with mostly secular Jewish scientists. Halachic considerations, those of Jewish lawfulness, comparable to the constraints of Muslim shirah, forbids working, even driving, on the Sabbath. Orthodox Jews live walking distance from synagogues or benefit from a rabbinicaly blessed, network of symbolically covered walkways for going longer distances on the Sabbath. This

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