The subtitle reads “How Religion Poisons Everything.” This will be a rather discursive blog, so hold on as I cherry pick ideas as we go along. Psychotherapy if decently and competently practiced and if openly and willingly entered into can shake a client to the roots of his or her being. To be de-conditioned of societal and parental calculus worse than the plaque that adheres to our teeth is not an easy task, to say the very least. To surrender personal and interpersonal “truths” as accepted from childhood on can leave one alone on a windswept moor. To be free of certain fears, to be more aware than you have ever been is a most difficult psychological, perhaps spiritual, search. To arrive at a self-awareness free of society’s mores, religious injunctions and personal fear is a gritty and heady experience. To learn that most of what you have learned from the elders of your own family, your ethnicity, your nation is organized bullshit can be terribly frightening, ultimately moving and then considerably bracing. I learned to give up a considerable amount of society’s do’s and dont’s within therapy and mostly by my own readings of Krishnamurti, a spiritual master who forced me to take a good look at myself and to engage in further growth, which I did. I consider myself still conditioned but very much free inwardly. I will work on that until I croak: I see through a glass darkly what I need do. I do savor endearingly what I have attained and I am very grateful for all that. The pain was worth it, believe me.
The consequences are clear: I have a very good crap detector; I see through others who have no idea how conditioned they are — you know it is a kind of slavery! Take Sean Hannity — Please! Here is intelligence indoctrinated by church learnings. As I watch him perform as an inquisitor I can’t but wonder what kind of man he might be if he were free of his religious beliefs. I know that Sean sincerely believes he is a better man, father, son and all the rest because of his religious rearing. Well, Sean doesn’t trust himself. Alas. If he were free of 2,000 years of utter nonsense — original sin; sin in general (an amazingly and astoundingly ridiculous concept); strictures against masturbation; idols of the mind; clergy; abstinence; rituals and rites — Sean might collapse into tears sensing how much of him is denied because of how much of him believes in a myth and a mythology. The bravest of us all are those who do not need systems — fascism, to wit — nor religions or cults– Mormonism (Mark Twain famously referred to the Mormon “Bible” as “chloroform in print.”) You don’t have to be an atheist to be free or a freethinker. I suppose I meet the requirements for being an atheist. And if so, I have led a relatively good life without being a pedophile (the priests of Ireland raped the children of that island for centuries), or criminal. I am a decent, good man and I am free of all that religious cant. I revel in the sweet, intoxicating essence of that. How did I do it? Serendipity has been the queen of my dominion. By accident.
Hitchens’ book has made me think about all this, once again. He takes no prisoners, nor should he. I hear his acute criticism about my own Judaism. Before I rise to defend it I say to myself that is exactly what a Hindu or Moslem or Christian might do about his own creed. I let his waters bathe me and I come to terms with the defects and deficits of Judaism. I’d rather hear this from a freethinker than from a Christian. Obviously. Christianity is on its way out. Moslems are as retrogade as the first stone knife cutting away a prepuce. Until humanity evolves to a point in which the dragons at the gate are slain we will persevere in our genocidal behaviors. Freud went after religion in his The Future of an Illusion and explained it, in part, if I recall, as an infant’s wish. A man rises, a man comes down, a man rises again, the old human wish to fly. if you look up Homer Smith’s Man and His Gods you’ll get a very intelligible survey of man’s relationship to his gods, “his” is the operative word here. We make our gods and we raise them high over ourselves and we have done that since humanity has begun; it is a brainpain or cortex problem, in our very make-up. Well, time to grow up. Don’t we internalize our parents and create within ourselves parental injunctions, “shoulds”and “should nots.” Hopefully we can master ourselves and separate out and still love our fathers and mothers. We can remove religion as well and in the same arduous way for it does not allow us to be ourselves, keeps us in a straitjacket of sexual strictures, restrains our expressivity, deadens our thinking processes with a given template to use for all instances and conditions and sours our minds and selves so we are bereft of real awareness and flexibility. The intimate relationship between Pius XII and the Third Reich should be enough for any rational human being to move away from all that. And the old come back that men are weak but that the truth is still vital and alive is apologistic crap, for children to believe in. Recently my new Mormon dentist used that crapola with me when I mentioned the Mountain Meadows Massacre, an infamous horror. He had no real and honest answer so he gave me the party line.
Hitchens repeatedly makes the telling comment — and obvious one, at that –that all religions are man made. Once you creep into that, see its merit, you then can see that religion is the cause of crusades, jihads, circumcision, resurrection, the three Magi, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed flying away on his horse, the Conquistadores, ghettoes, and forever more. I once had a conversation with a close friend at the time who I connected to because he was open and fairly liberal. We spoke about religion. I felt free to do that with him. I asked if he believed in ghouls. No response required. He chuckled. I went on. How about vampires? witches? flying carpets? dragons? ghosts? Finally, he asked me to get to the point. I did. And yet, I told him, you believe that a preacher about 2,000 years ago who most likely is a conflation of myths and never existed, actually rose and was resurrected. He stared at me, not angry, still the same man, and he did not have to answer. He still believed in the fable. Imagine telling a patient he is paranoid. It is a question of the relationship and of timing. The patient takes it in. He considers it. He goes off to reflect about that. And let us suppose the therapist, based on his expertise, is dead on. It is now a question of how much the patient or client can metabolize it, how much he is willing to accept, or to realize; if he does absorb a glimmer of the truth about his self, it may lead to better consequences — or it may not. After all, dear blog reader, what does it take in you to accept a very hard truth about yourself. I’ll be coy — it requires a belief in your own person, that you will survive, that you will grope with these truths. It does not require you to be conditioned; it demands that you learn to de-condition yourself.
OK. My back is against the wall. Can I say to you everything I have been writing about in a sentence or two. Yes!
The task of each one of us is to be free of the other and ultimately free of one’s own inner constraints. All else follows.
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