what I believe

http://www.nospank.net/fyog19.htm#afterword

because people often cannot face the repressed pain in their own experience, they turn to drugs, alcohol, or belief in things like Sin and Salvation and Repentance, Recovery, Redemption.

What they reject are Revolution and Redress, because that would mean facing the pain.




Notice how some evangelicals use the term "rebellious". To them this is a cardinal sin, the cardinal sin, original sin. Well, the model they are using here is that the wills of children must be broken. That is, they are seeing God as an abusive parent.

Now of course no one could rebel against an all powerful and all knowing God. They wouldn't get very far.

So what they are really saying is that one must submit to the abusive parent, to the archetype of the abusive parent. Failure to do so makes one something akin to a juvenile delinquent. This is what they think.

To face the pain of how they were broken would be extremely hard for them.

So instead, they make God / Abusive Parents right, by calling for Repentance, Recovery, and Redemption.


Deleuze and Guattari speak of displacement. That is, you make a prohibition on something. Then you convince people that the reason it is prohibited is because they want to do it.

D and G are writing about Freud and Oedipus. But the larger meaning of their text is that this is the same as Original Sin.

So there is a prohibition on rejection God, revolting against God, etc. Then people are convinced that that is what they had wanted to do, and so this is why there is a prohibition.

Facing the pain inflicted by abusive parents, physical pain, emotional pain, psychological pain, and all that comes from being degraded and humiliated, is intensely difficult. So instead of facing it, people gather together like scared little sheep and worship the abusive Sky Daddy and try to earn his approval.

But in reality, no one would want to reject God. Why would they? There is no reason to reject God. The world is a scary place. Just being alive is scary. The tendency is to want all the God and/or Gods one can get. The tendency is to built up concretized belief systems, to build idols, and then to dance around and cry out to them.

The tendency is to form social groupings to promote this concretized belief system, as it lets one deny the pains caused by the abusive parents. Its easier to make the abusers right, and to believe in one's unworthiness, than it is to face the pain.

Naturally this sort of moral defect theology is very popular with people who have major histories with substance addiction. The same abuses which lead people to substance addiction as a denial system, also lead them to Sin and Salvation as a denial system.