Ebonmuse has raised an intriguing point at his site, Daylight Atheism. [1] He suggests that unrealistic expectations promulgated by many churches throw many people into disorienting existential spirals. Instead of acknowledging the limitations of human animals up front, many church-goers (with the encouragement of their religious leaders), conceive of their journeys through life as a constant series of personal failures. Unable to account for their inabilities to live up to unreasonable expectations, they become vulnerable to cults of forgiveness.
By imposing unrealistic, impossible-to-follow strictures on its followers, Christianity sets them up for failure. And when that failure inevitably happens, it produces guilt and shame among those followers, reinforcing the teaching that all human beings are incorrigible sinners and encouraging them to cling even harder to Christianity for salvation . . .
If . . . we try to deny human nature and suppress these instincts altogether, pressure builds up until they explode. This is what happened to [Ted] Haggard, just as it happened to many other famous fundamentalist hypocrites. But instead of taking the right lesson from this, Christianity assumes the answer is to try even harder next time. As part of this, many Christian groups attempt to take away people’s access to the information they need to make responsible decisions – abstinence-only sex education being a prime example – making the likelihood of a poor outcome even greater.
This is a very effective and insidious tactic. As I’ve written before, it’s like convincing people that they are sick in order to sell them the cure. But in this case, the cure makes you feel even sicker and sets up a vicious cycle of dependency. Taught by Christianity that they are sinners in need of forgiveness, believers perpetually return to Christianity for the forgiveness they believe only it can give them. Believers can become “addicted to forgiveness”. This is a very common theme in deconversion stories, where former Christians testify how their terror of damnation led them to repeatedly ask Jesus for salvation, out of fear that they hadn’t done it right the last time or had committed some grave sin since then. Religious authorities who promise forgiveness for a price are the pushers in this scheme, and like Haggard, some of them use their own product. (The price need not be monetary – it often includes contributing to a religious leader’s preferred political causes.) And over time, as with all drugs, the effectiveness of the forgiveness “drug” wanes, impelling believers to become even more rigid and dogmatic in their devotions to win the same feeling of relief.
I wholehearted agree with Ebonmuse on this point. I can’t think of a better way to convince people to take on an unrealistic “solution” than to convince them that there is a fake “problem” in the first place (why am I thinking of Iraq?).
What’s the “problem” sold by so many churches? It’s that we are constantly screwing up. We are bad children, naughty children. Those of us who are really bad must go to hell. Most of us, though, can be reformed through those church-sanctioned Sunday morning “time-outs.”
The key, though, is that we are defective semi-ethereal beings, rather than clever animals. We are “failures,” not simply feeling our way though life by employing hit-and-miss heuristics. We are “sinful,” thus requiring forgiveness by people and gods less defective than ourselves. Many churches teach that ensouled being should strive for “perfection,” as though we aren’t comprised of (sophisticated) animal instincts. The fact that churches convince us of an alleged battle between a body and a soul requires a spiritual prescription dispensed by a specially trained person of the cloth. We are helpless to heal ourselves. Even when we are healed, we are still sinful and, therefore, defective.
If we could only get past this con job offered by many churches (that we are “bad”), we could start learning how to get along, rather than spending so much time and energy being competitively judgmental. We could work together to seek a reasonable homeostasis for our vast human collective, rather than employing dysfunctional nomadic or Dark Ages techniques. We could start thinking in terms of ecology rather than morality.
Print this post [2]
[3]