How many saviors have been killed by the people?

What is the psychological need for and the meaning of the Crucifixion? That explanation is the job of ethics. To explain the morality of the destruction of the perfect embodiment of a particular ethical vision. In terms of the Christian morality, Jesus Christ is the supreme moral ideal, a being without sin, in whose perfect image we believe we should strive to fashion our own souls.

OK, for a moment look at  the cross on which the perfect was sacrificed to human depravity. The highest, noblest, most perfect person, a God, –was willing to sacrifice himself and die in agony for the sake of persons who are low, ignoble, sinful, evil. The morally superior chose to be immolated for the sake of the morally inferior.
The notion that such a sacrifice is in any sense right, that people may accept it, profit by it, and go on living—living at the price of the perfect man’s torture, living on the blood of the ideal —is  monstrous. A monstrous injustice, as profound a perversion of morality as the human mind can conceive.

Look at it in terms of Terrorists who willingly kill themselves to achieve paradise. That’s as crude and stupid a bargain as can be made yet it persists precisely to the extent to which one may feel love and admiration for so-called religious reasons. By that doctrine a terrorist is driven to hate this world, hate humanity, and find existence unbearable. And yet this is the symbol hanging, as moral inspiration, over our lives in the Western world.
Of course, there is another, non-Christian way the symbol of the cross can be interpreted, but it is hardly more encouraging: as a signifier that humankind has a predilection for crucifying its saviors. That helps explain the hatred of President Trump by Christians. It follows from their moral code of hatred of the good for being successful. 

In traditional moral terms the message of the crucifixion  is unequivocal: the importance of the sacrifice of the higher to the lower; the immolation of the higher in favor of the lower is intrinsic to the very idea of sacrifice.

When someone gives up that which they don’t value in order to obtain that which they value—or when they give up a lesser value in order to obtain a greater one—that’s not a sacrifice. It’s a called a deal, a bargain, a gain.

Notice we cannot give up or renounce or sacrifice what we don’t have or that we don’t value. If sacrifice is desirable  terrorists must have something to sacrifice, their life,– to achieve paradise. Pay for eternal pleasure by murdering yourself plus enemies. Sacrifice your life for the cause.

But Terrorists aren’t told murder is evil;
They’re told that virtue consists of killing enemies. 

We and they aren’t taught to see moral significance in the cultivation of intelligence, but we are encouraged to admire the surrender, the sacrifice, of intelligence to “faith.” We are not taught to attach moral significance to the nurturing of our own ability, but we are taught that virtue consists of placing our ability at the disposal of those less able than ourselves. We are not taught to find moral significance in the struggle for happiness, but instead, stupidly, .. we are wrongly taught to applaud the sacrifice of our happiness for “the good of others.”

To sacrifice our happiness is to sacrifice our desires; to sacrifice our desires is to sacrifice our values; to sacrifice our values is to sacrifice our judgment; to sacrifice our judgment is to sacrifice our mind. Self-sacrifice means—and can only mean—mind sacrifice. If our mind and judgment are to be objects of sacrifice, what sort of efficacy, control, freedom from conflict, serenity of spirit, or self-esteem will be possible to us?

To those who might find mind sacrifice an overly theatrical term, consider the following illustration taken from the untheatrical world of academic psychology.

If compliance with and conformity to the norms, expectations, and values of “the group, the collective or the faith” are regarded as the cardinal good, the mind of the individual has to be an object of sacrifice. Thus, in the above example, the person capable of principled moral reasoning needs to sacrifice his ability and his judgment to those who have not yet attained a “postconventional” level of moral reasoning: the stupid sacrifice of the higher to the lower.

From The Fountainhead, “We have never made an effort to understand what is greatness in man and how to recognize it. .. . We have come to hold, wrongly,  . . . that greatness is to be gauged by self-sacrifice. . . .

Let’s stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thought? But these are a man’s supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain.

Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious  nonsense? Self-sacrifice?

But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all.

In order for human beings to accept self-sacrifice as a moral ideal, they have to remain ignorant of the concept of rational selfishness. Moralists have commonly declared or implied that our basic alternative is to sacrifice others to ourselves (which they call “egoism”) or to sacrifice ourselves to others (“altruism”). This is equivalent to declaring that our basic choice is between being a sadist or a masochist. Just as healthy sex consists of the exchange of pleasure, not pain, so healthy relationships of any kind consist of the exchange of values, not sacrifices. 

But if one wishes to control the minds and lives of other human beings, it is imperative to maintain a kind of blackout on a nonsacrificial view of human relationships—to herd people into the pen of self-sacrifice under the threat that sacrificing others to themselves is the only alternative. In the perpetuation of this fraud, religious leaders and political leaders, wrongly, . .  have reinforced each other through many centuries.

“In the hunt for their own happiness,” wrote Adolf Hitler, “people fall all the more out of heaven into hell. “

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