1) While I surely agree from my own observation that this kind of religious upbringing can be extremely damaging, it also seems true that it used to be much more common than it is now. Or maybe not. It could be that religious upbringing in a dominantly religious culture was able to focus on religion as a kind of cultural thing in a way that's impossible now, and that's why the kids in the ethnic neighborhoods of the 1930s-50s grew up with really sticky religious practice without it (by and large) seeming to occupy their lives in unhealthy ways.
2) I've read DBH's book, and I'm a big fan of his work and writing generally. At the time I read it, which was like a year and a half ago, I also read Balthasar's Dare We Hope, and I found Balthasar to write both more beautifully and more charitably in his treatment of the historic weight of belief in Hell. (Which, mainly to my chagrin, I think you do have to give some weight to- if 'common consent' is the best argument for religious practice, it's hard to argue that the 'common consent' of Christian history-not this thread of particular theologians stretching back to the patristics that Hart identifies, but the common belief-surely includes Hell.) Have you read Balthasar's book? Of course it's anathema to trads but since you're already reading Hart I think you could pick it up after and evaluate the one against the other.
I'm sure it was more common before, but that's only because orthodoxy used to be the coin of the realm. Everything is done differently now, but as such, one can argue that it's also done inauthentically.
As for HvonB, I have not read it, and it was, as you say, anathema to me for a long time. But with my interest in this topic rapidly growing, I think it would probably be worthwhile.
What I liked about Balthasar vis a vis Hart is that, whereas Hart has a certainty that he's trying to persuade you of, Balthasar basically starts at not knowing and argues toward hope. I think it's a greater humility
I think it's totally uncontroversial to consider religious education as brainwashing. The controversy is whether or to what extent it is immoral. If I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins famously claimed that religious indoctrination is child abuse, and maybe it was the Dalai Lama who wrote an excellent article in response? I can't quite remember.
Personally, I think the traditional doctrine of hell is an abusive belief, and that it is morally wrong to teach it to children. However, I'm not so sure it is abusive per se to teach religion to children. If the parents are sincere believers, what else can they be expected to do? I also don't blame or shame parents for teaching their children about hell if they themselves believe in it, because again, what realistic choice do they have?
That said, I think hell as a concept is preposterous and self-contradictory. To be fair, I think that about almost all of Christianity though. Though raised Catholic and indoctrinated heavily myself, I am not afraid of hell at all today because I see not only hell, but heaven, god, saints, popes, churches, miracles, resurrections, and every other fantastical aspect of Christianity to be...nonsense? Silly? Absurd? Empty? Some combination of all of those I suppose.
The "gun to your head" is a finger gun pointed by feckless, dishonest, and repellant men with a long track record of utterly shameful and heinously evil behavior. I am literally unable to care what they say or think.
Are you afraid to go to Jahannam (Islamic hell)? How about the Mormon's "Outer Darkness?" Afraid you'll be reborn as a bovine rectal parasite because of your bad karma? I suppose I'm not too worried about going to Jewish hell, sounds like the maximum sentence is only 12 months!
Steve I don’t have anything insightful to add. You’ve said it all so well. I just want to keep cheering from the sideline.
Thank you for putting I to words so much of what I’ve experienced myself. Almost every article I pass around to people and say “he explains this so much better than I can myself.”
“I feel the remnants of my brainwashing every day. I feel the fear, the guilt, the worry of having deviated from the "True Faith™" every day...”
I’m ~5 years in the “deconstruction” wilderness. Far enough in that I no longer practice or profess anything. So much so that I recently married a non-Catholic in a non-Catholic ceremony because I couldn’t make Catholic vows . And despite the offer of friends, I couldn’t in good faith accept an extra-ordinary “blessing” from a priest/bishop.
But even after all that time, I STILL feel this fear. The lingering sense of “what if I’m just being hardheaded and actually walking away from Truth and toward eternal punishment?” I’ve learned to suppress that fear. But it’s still there. I suspect it will be forever.
Some people can love God in good faith without that fear of hell. I am not one of those people. I respect (and envy) their seemingly pure-hearted faith. I just ask they show that same respect in return
I understand where you're coming from. Sometimes life feels like a trap. No matter what you choose to believe someone is there to tell you that you are hell bound. Evangelicals say I am not saved because I'm Catholic, but if I leave the RCC then they tell me I have committed apostasy and will be damned. Militant Atheists mock all of this and say I'm wasting my precious and limited time before shuffling off this mortal coil into nothing. I really don't know what's true, I just wish God would answer with something other than silence.
We’re all headed straight for at least half a dozen religions’ “hells” due to circumstances outside of our control, and yet this bothers few to none of us because we don’t take these religious claims seriously.
Muslims do not care whatsoever that they are headed straight for Presbyterian hell. Why? Well, if you want a full discussion, I’d recommend William James’ lectures entitled “The Varieties of Religious Experience” published in 1902.
I think Steve has touched on one of the main explanations: childhood indoctrination. You and I don’t see the vicious threats of Islam as having any power or gravity because we weren’t indoctrinated into Islam as young, vulnerable children. Fully rational adults are incredibly resistant to fantastical beliefs. Though there are of course exceptions, the overwhelming majority of healthy adults cannot be convinced of unfamiliar religious claims. Yes, small numbers of people join cults or scam religions like Scientology…but there are vanishingly few actual adult converts to any religious traditions. And yet, most adults are religious. Why? Childhood indoctrination, absolutely.
I apologize if anything I’ve said here comes across as mocking. While I don’t consider myself a militant atheist, I do certainly think Catholicism is seriously misguided at best and actively disbelieve the Catholic God exists. I don’t think that thinking about religion is a total waste of time, because it is a lens or frame by which we can ponder the deepest questions of human life and experience. Good religious discussions can evolve into explorations of epistemology, ethics, history, politics, language, mind, science, etc.
No offense taken on my side at all my friend, thank you for replying. I think your points make sense, religion has had a huge impact on the world no matter where you live. We happen to be in the western part of the world which Christianity influenced, so it's in our heads whether we practice the faith or not. I'm just curious, from where you stand do you see any form or any tradition of Christianity that makes sense, or seems to make the most sense? Since you don't seem to have a dog in the fight, I think your answer might be more dispassionate and objective.
I can't pretend to truly have "no dog in the fight" since I was raised Catholic. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "make sense." If you mean, what tradition do I think is on the least shaky ground historically? I really, truly cannot say. I think Mormonism is far and away the most nonsensical, though I guess many Christians would argue that Mormonism isn't really Christianity.
If we're talking about which forms of Christianity are the most sane or the most compatible with human flourishing or the good life? Maybe Orthodoxy or Quakerism? I think most Christians would agree that Russian or Greek Orthodoxy is Christianity, but I would guess a lot of Christians wouldn't really count the Quakers as among their brethren. Dostoevsky's Christianity is something I can take seriously, even if I can't get past the issues surrounding the historicity of the Bible or the coherence of "tradition."
I think Catholicism is certainly not the most absurd or harmful form of Christianity. All the TULIP sects are insufferable and utterly bleak in my view. Pentecostalism seems goofy and psychologically harmful. The slick nondenoms and prosperity gospel clowns make me laugh, but the scale of harm they perpetrate on so many people is certainly frustrating and angering. The fake miracle people (Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar, Kenneth Copeland, etc) are gross.
The Catholic church has many deep problems but at least they're not outright, unsophisticated hucksters praying on the ill, vulnerable, and helpless. I mean...they certainly have done more than their fair share of preying and deceiving and abusing and torturing over the centuries, but at least we got some amazing architecture, art, and music out of it. What will the Joel Osteens and Pat Robertsons leave behind? Crappy, low-budget TV shows on DVDs? lol
I appreciate the thorough response. I think you covered it all LOL. I'm a cradle Catholic too, so it's really hard for me to be completely objective. That's why I love these conversations, I can get out of my head and hear another voice. And I'm 100% with you on the TULIP crowd, there is no way I could join that. If heaven is full of that I'm cutting a deal and hanging out in Limbo.
Your argument is based on the conceit that you are being honest about your past experience, that you have had a sincere struggle and have been forced to admit an "uncomfortable truth". Now you stand disillusioned, but in a position of noble honesty and openness to the truth. Well if you're really so disinterested and open to the truth you won't mind me saying the following... I think this is all a conceit and nothing more. I think you're lying to yourself, and by extension to the rest of us. So the very core of your argument — that you are being honest with yourself and with us all, and now stand a reluctant prophet of disillusionment — is an illusion. I'm not saying this in defence of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. I used to believe that too, and I have rejected it as you have. I'm not saying it because I think you should be browbeaten back into a position of cringing fear and subservience to ecclesiastical tradition; on the contrary, Christ gives us a spirit of peace and freedom, not fear and bondage; the spirit of scrupulosity, legalism, dishonest defence of the doctrines of men, self-loathing, etc., is an evil spirit that I've struggled with also — it's an evil spirit that pretends to be the true spirit of religion, but turns religion into something unbearable and detestable to God and men. I'm saying that you're being dishonest because you have all the signs of hating God and not being willing to admit you hate God, so that you conceal your hatred of God behind a mask of piety: before it was the pious mask of Catholic orthodoxy, and now it's the pious mask of the truth-seeking skeptic; both of these are masks of wretched deceit. (Your new mask is hardly any different from your old mask; you think we should disbelieve Catholic dogma, yet now we should believe naively in all this pious bullshit of "examining the evidence" and "not forcing your beliefs on others" and "questioning one's own assumptions" and "being open to correction", and so on and so on — all these bullshit pieties of the well-indoctrinated skeptic? Bowing to secular pontiffs like Peterson and Krauss? There is more self-deceit and intellectual hubris here than in Catholic ultramontanism even, which at least has the excuse of not being powerful or popular in the world). I've hated God for years too, perhaps even more than you hate him now. I came to the Catholic Church with all the pious intentions of being a devout believer and obedient ecclesiastical Christian, but what I didn't know, what I refused to know, is that all this outward piety and obedience could never cover over the deep-seated anger, the rage I felt towards God because—years before I entered the Church—God had allowed me to go through a nightmarish experience of pain, loneliness, and humiliation, and I blamed him and hated him for it with nine tenths of my heart; but I couldn't bring myself to recognise all that darkness and anger burying itself away within me. Likewise, it's easy for me to tell that you hold God to blame for your personal humiliations, frustrations, and pain. The real core of your rhetoric is when you speak of God as a bad, neglectful Father who abandons his children. That is pain and anger speaking, not the disinterested reasoning of the enlightened skeptic, which is mere conceitednes. Your real enemies are not God and the Church, but, as the scriptures say, the world, the flesh, and the devil. The devil has subverted your faith, first by making you hate God for your personal tragedies and frustrations (how many times he let you down, ignored your pleas, didn't give you the dignity or position you deserve, etc.), then by concealing your hatred behind false and fearful obedience, then by accusing you of sin constantly and making you scrupulous and self-loathing, then by intensifying your hatred of God by accusing him not only of being a neglectful Father who let's you suffer, but an oppressive tyrant who constantly accuses you of faults and forces you to weary yourself in religious slavery. All you had to do was pick up a Bible and realise that it was the devil who persecuted you, humiliated you, gave you an image of a neglectful Father, accused you constantly of sin, made you fearful of the doctrines and traditions of men, wearied your mind and body with false obedience — and that God has been constantly offering you wisdom, peace, reconciliation, love, forgiveness, and eternal life... But that would require you to go back and admit in the first place that you've hated God in your heart, and to repent of that hatred, yet.... It feels good to hate God, it feels good to have sympathy with the devil, to wallow in one's own darkness and to harbour a secret strain of rebellion, to blame God and curse him to his face for all of life's horrors and to rise up against him in self-righteous defiance.... all that feels good to sinful humanity, especially if you can hide the ugly parts behind a pious mask like "skepticism"! This is how, as St. Paul puts it, mankind "suppresses the knowledge of the truth" and refuses to "give God thanks". It might seem like pride and accusativeness on my part to say this, but in my defence you are daring to accuse God himself, and are prideful enough to pretend to be a pious unbeliever, rather than doing the honest thing and cursing God with an open blasphemy. There was a blogger I read a few years ago who did just that. He was scandalised by Pope Francis and the state of the Church, so he posted a recantation of the faith, declared himself an atheist, blasphemed Jesus and Mary by name, and cursed the whole thing. At least he didn't pretend to be a disinterested skeptic or a reluctant prophet of disillusionment; he cursed the Catholic Church openly and didn't ask snide, passive aggressive questions like "is a religious upbringing a form of indoctrination?" For my part, I said from the start I would worship God or the devil, no in-between. That's why for as long as I hated God, the devil kept sending me open offers. I would have gone straight to the devil himself rather than to his mediocre prophets like Jordan Peterson, with his watered-down Nietzscheanism. You shouldn't treat your soul cheaply. Both God and the devil are willing to pay a high price for it, so don't sell it to cheapskates like Peterson, Krauss, or Hart.
"The devil has subverted your faith, first by making you hate God for your personal tragedies and frustrations (how many times he let you down, ignored your pleas, didn't give you the dignity or position you deserve, etc.), then by concealing your hatred behind false and fearful obedience, then by accusing you of sin constantly and making you scrupulous and self-loathing, then by intensifying your hatred of God by accusing him not only of being a neglectful Father who let's you suffer, but an oppressive tyrant who constantly accuses you of faults and forces you to weary yourself in religious slavery."
And even if you were correct in all of this, where was God? Why was the devil able to do all of this, unhindered, when it wasn't him I was calling on for help?
If you want me to admit I'm angry and resentful at a God I'm not sure I believe in, it's no great revelation for me to say yes. Of course I am. But part of why I don't know that I believe in him is because he shouldn't be the kind of being who is so hateable. It makes me wonder if he's real. He's certainly not the loving paradigm of goodness the Church claims he is, at least, not if their other teaching about him is correct.
There is no way to surgically remove the influence of an all-encompassing theology from my psyche or my soul. There is a God-shaped hole there. There is an emptiness I speak with, still, asking him to penetrate the darkness if he's really there and really loves me. There is never any response.
I am angry at the idea of God I was raised with, and yes, I hate it. But I also recognize that perhaps this idea of God isn't and couldn't be real. Perhaps he's something entirely other than what I've been told. And perhaps he's not there at all.
I don't claim to have peeled back every layer of my psychology here. There's a lot of hurt, and a lot of anger, and a lot of sorting to do. It feels stupid to be angry at a God I can't confidently say I believe in; it feels equally stupid to believe in a God I can't have confidence in. I'm stuck in between. And, as I said, I'm still afraid. Perhaps he's really John Calvin's God, with no pretense of mercy or benevolence. Perhaps he's like Odin or Zeus, capricious and ready to smite me for my anger. Perhaps he's like my own father - volatile, condescending, wrathful, unpredictable, and silent, with moments of sincere and inexplicable love and generosity. I don't know how to appease the wrath of a God I do not know, but I am counting on either his non-existence, his indifference to mere mortals like me, or his benevolence. If he is an angry and capricious God, I will certainly pay the price for it. In a way, I suppose that's part of what I'm testing.
But I'll do this the only way I can, which is to do my best to explain, without showing the worst moments of my rage, frustration, and existential angst, what I think and why I think it. I'm not going to act like a petulant child and curse God and then sit in the mud refusing to think about any of this. I'm going to take the time to sort out the versions of him that people believe in, my own understanding and experiences, and pain that is intertwined with all of it.
I have the sense that you want to be helpful here, but that you're still to angry to know how. I hope that's the case, because I suspect that all sounded more persuasive in your head.
Paragraphs are your friends, at least if you intend anyone to read what you write. I got lost in the middle of this massive lump of stone. It has the texture of granite.
Wow. You know, you could have saved yourself a lot of pointless typing by simply saying "God bless" or "I'll pray for you" as a passive aggressive signal of your true intention (something like "fuck you" or "shut the fuck up") since your omni-benelovent and loving God will torture you forever for being directly hostile by saying bad words and being a meanie. LOL
Pretty Lamb: This sounds like a lot of condemnation on your part, and not more “honest” than Steve’s wrestling with his trauma regarding his experience of the Catholic Church.
Several thoughts come to mind
1) While I surely agree from my own observation that this kind of religious upbringing can be extremely damaging, it also seems true that it used to be much more common than it is now. Or maybe not. It could be that religious upbringing in a dominantly religious culture was able to focus on religion as a kind of cultural thing in a way that's impossible now, and that's why the kids in the ethnic neighborhoods of the 1930s-50s grew up with really sticky religious practice without it (by and large) seeming to occupy their lives in unhealthy ways.
2) I've read DBH's book, and I'm a big fan of his work and writing generally. At the time I read it, which was like a year and a half ago, I also read Balthasar's Dare We Hope, and I found Balthasar to write both more beautifully and more charitably in his treatment of the historic weight of belief in Hell. (Which, mainly to my chagrin, I think you do have to give some weight to- if 'common consent' is the best argument for religious practice, it's hard to argue that the 'common consent' of Christian history-not this thread of particular theologians stretching back to the patristics that Hart identifies, but the common belief-surely includes Hell.) Have you read Balthasar's book? Of course it's anathema to trads but since you're already reading Hart I think you could pick it up after and evaluate the one against the other.
I'm sure it was more common before, but that's only because orthodoxy used to be the coin of the realm. Everything is done differently now, but as such, one can argue that it's also done inauthentically.
As for HvonB, I have not read it, and it was, as you say, anathema to me for a long time. But with my interest in this topic rapidly growing, I think it would probably be worthwhile.
What I liked about Balthasar vis a vis Hart is that, whereas Hart has a certainty that he's trying to persuade you of, Balthasar basically starts at not knowing and argues toward hope. I think it's a greater humility
I think it's totally uncontroversial to consider religious education as brainwashing. The controversy is whether or to what extent it is immoral. If I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins famously claimed that religious indoctrination is child abuse, and maybe it was the Dalai Lama who wrote an excellent article in response? I can't quite remember.
Personally, I think the traditional doctrine of hell is an abusive belief, and that it is morally wrong to teach it to children. However, I'm not so sure it is abusive per se to teach religion to children. If the parents are sincere believers, what else can they be expected to do? I also don't blame or shame parents for teaching their children about hell if they themselves believe in it, because again, what realistic choice do they have?
That said, I think hell as a concept is preposterous and self-contradictory. To be fair, I think that about almost all of Christianity though. Though raised Catholic and indoctrinated heavily myself, I am not afraid of hell at all today because I see not only hell, but heaven, god, saints, popes, churches, miracles, resurrections, and every other fantastical aspect of Christianity to be...nonsense? Silly? Absurd? Empty? Some combination of all of those I suppose.
The "gun to your head" is a finger gun pointed by feckless, dishonest, and repellant men with a long track record of utterly shameful and heinously evil behavior. I am literally unable to care what they say or think.
Are you afraid to go to Jahannam (Islamic hell)? How about the Mormon's "Outer Darkness?" Afraid you'll be reborn as a bovine rectal parasite because of your bad karma? I suppose I'm not too worried about going to Jewish hell, sounds like the maximum sentence is only 12 months!
Steve I don’t have anything insightful to add. You’ve said it all so well. I just want to keep cheering from the sideline.
Thank you for putting I to words so much of what I’ve experienced myself. Almost every article I pass around to people and say “he explains this so much better than I can myself.”
“I feel the remnants of my brainwashing every day. I feel the fear, the guilt, the worry of having deviated from the "True Faith™" every day...”
I’m ~5 years in the “deconstruction” wilderness. Far enough in that I no longer practice or profess anything. So much so that I recently married a non-Catholic in a non-Catholic ceremony because I couldn’t make Catholic vows . And despite the offer of friends, I couldn’t in good faith accept an extra-ordinary “blessing” from a priest/bishop.
But even after all that time, I STILL feel this fear. The lingering sense of “what if I’m just being hardheaded and actually walking away from Truth and toward eternal punishment?” I’ve learned to suppress that fear. But it’s still there. I suspect it will be forever.
Some people can love God in good faith without that fear of hell. I am not one of those people. I respect (and envy) their seemingly pure-hearted faith. I just ask they show that same respect in return
I understand where you're coming from. Sometimes life feels like a trap. No matter what you choose to believe someone is there to tell you that you are hell bound. Evangelicals say I am not saved because I'm Catholic, but if I leave the RCC then they tell me I have committed apostasy and will be damned. Militant Atheists mock all of this and say I'm wasting my precious and limited time before shuffling off this mortal coil into nothing. I really don't know what's true, I just wish God would answer with something other than silence.
We’re all headed straight for at least half a dozen religions’ “hells” due to circumstances outside of our control, and yet this bothers few to none of us because we don’t take these religious claims seriously.
Muslims do not care whatsoever that they are headed straight for Presbyterian hell. Why? Well, if you want a full discussion, I’d recommend William James’ lectures entitled “The Varieties of Religious Experience” published in 1902.
I think Steve has touched on one of the main explanations: childhood indoctrination. You and I don’t see the vicious threats of Islam as having any power or gravity because we weren’t indoctrinated into Islam as young, vulnerable children. Fully rational adults are incredibly resistant to fantastical beliefs. Though there are of course exceptions, the overwhelming majority of healthy adults cannot be convinced of unfamiliar religious claims. Yes, small numbers of people join cults or scam religions like Scientology…but there are vanishingly few actual adult converts to any religious traditions. And yet, most adults are religious. Why? Childhood indoctrination, absolutely.
I apologize if anything I’ve said here comes across as mocking. While I don’t consider myself a militant atheist, I do certainly think Catholicism is seriously misguided at best and actively disbelieve the Catholic God exists. I don’t think that thinking about religion is a total waste of time, because it is a lens or frame by which we can ponder the deepest questions of human life and experience. Good religious discussions can evolve into explorations of epistemology, ethics, history, politics, language, mind, science, etc.
No offense taken on my side at all my friend, thank you for replying. I think your points make sense, religion has had a huge impact on the world no matter where you live. We happen to be in the western part of the world which Christianity influenced, so it's in our heads whether we practice the faith or not. I'm just curious, from where you stand do you see any form or any tradition of Christianity that makes sense, or seems to make the most sense? Since you don't seem to have a dog in the fight, I think your answer might be more dispassionate and objective.
I can't pretend to truly have "no dog in the fight" since I was raised Catholic. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "make sense." If you mean, what tradition do I think is on the least shaky ground historically? I really, truly cannot say. I think Mormonism is far and away the most nonsensical, though I guess many Christians would argue that Mormonism isn't really Christianity.
If we're talking about which forms of Christianity are the most sane or the most compatible with human flourishing or the good life? Maybe Orthodoxy or Quakerism? I think most Christians would agree that Russian or Greek Orthodoxy is Christianity, but I would guess a lot of Christians wouldn't really count the Quakers as among their brethren. Dostoevsky's Christianity is something I can take seriously, even if I can't get past the issues surrounding the historicity of the Bible or the coherence of "tradition."
I think Catholicism is certainly not the most absurd or harmful form of Christianity. All the TULIP sects are insufferable and utterly bleak in my view. Pentecostalism seems goofy and psychologically harmful. The slick nondenoms and prosperity gospel clowns make me laugh, but the scale of harm they perpetrate on so many people is certainly frustrating and angering. The fake miracle people (Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar, Kenneth Copeland, etc) are gross.
The Catholic church has many deep problems but at least they're not outright, unsophisticated hucksters praying on the ill, vulnerable, and helpless. I mean...they certainly have done more than their fair share of preying and deceiving and abusing and torturing over the centuries, but at least we got some amazing architecture, art, and music out of it. What will the Joel Osteens and Pat Robertsons leave behind? Crappy, low-budget TV shows on DVDs? lol
I appreciate the thorough response. I think you covered it all LOL. I'm a cradle Catholic too, so it's really hard for me to be completely objective. That's why I love these conversations, I can get out of my head and hear another voice. And I'm 100% with you on the TULIP crowd, there is no way I could join that. If heaven is full of that I'm cutting a deal and hanging out in Limbo.
Your argument is based on the conceit that you are being honest about your past experience, that you have had a sincere struggle and have been forced to admit an "uncomfortable truth". Now you stand disillusioned, but in a position of noble honesty and openness to the truth. Well if you're really so disinterested and open to the truth you won't mind me saying the following... I think this is all a conceit and nothing more. I think you're lying to yourself, and by extension to the rest of us. So the very core of your argument — that you are being honest with yourself and with us all, and now stand a reluctant prophet of disillusionment — is an illusion. I'm not saying this in defence of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. I used to believe that too, and I have rejected it as you have. I'm not saying it because I think you should be browbeaten back into a position of cringing fear and subservience to ecclesiastical tradition; on the contrary, Christ gives us a spirit of peace and freedom, not fear and bondage; the spirit of scrupulosity, legalism, dishonest defence of the doctrines of men, self-loathing, etc., is an evil spirit that I've struggled with also — it's an evil spirit that pretends to be the true spirit of religion, but turns religion into something unbearable and detestable to God and men. I'm saying that you're being dishonest because you have all the signs of hating God and not being willing to admit you hate God, so that you conceal your hatred of God behind a mask of piety: before it was the pious mask of Catholic orthodoxy, and now it's the pious mask of the truth-seeking skeptic; both of these are masks of wretched deceit. (Your new mask is hardly any different from your old mask; you think we should disbelieve Catholic dogma, yet now we should believe naively in all this pious bullshit of "examining the evidence" and "not forcing your beliefs on others" and "questioning one's own assumptions" and "being open to correction", and so on and so on — all these bullshit pieties of the well-indoctrinated skeptic? Bowing to secular pontiffs like Peterson and Krauss? There is more self-deceit and intellectual hubris here than in Catholic ultramontanism even, which at least has the excuse of not being powerful or popular in the world). I've hated God for years too, perhaps even more than you hate him now. I came to the Catholic Church with all the pious intentions of being a devout believer and obedient ecclesiastical Christian, but what I didn't know, what I refused to know, is that all this outward piety and obedience could never cover over the deep-seated anger, the rage I felt towards God because—years before I entered the Church—God had allowed me to go through a nightmarish experience of pain, loneliness, and humiliation, and I blamed him and hated him for it with nine tenths of my heart; but I couldn't bring myself to recognise all that darkness and anger burying itself away within me. Likewise, it's easy for me to tell that you hold God to blame for your personal humiliations, frustrations, and pain. The real core of your rhetoric is when you speak of God as a bad, neglectful Father who abandons his children. That is pain and anger speaking, not the disinterested reasoning of the enlightened skeptic, which is mere conceitednes. Your real enemies are not God and the Church, but, as the scriptures say, the world, the flesh, and the devil. The devil has subverted your faith, first by making you hate God for your personal tragedies and frustrations (how many times he let you down, ignored your pleas, didn't give you the dignity or position you deserve, etc.), then by concealing your hatred behind false and fearful obedience, then by accusing you of sin constantly and making you scrupulous and self-loathing, then by intensifying your hatred of God by accusing him not only of being a neglectful Father who let's you suffer, but an oppressive tyrant who constantly accuses you of faults and forces you to weary yourself in religious slavery. All you had to do was pick up a Bible and realise that it was the devil who persecuted you, humiliated you, gave you an image of a neglectful Father, accused you constantly of sin, made you fearful of the doctrines and traditions of men, wearied your mind and body with false obedience — and that God has been constantly offering you wisdom, peace, reconciliation, love, forgiveness, and eternal life... But that would require you to go back and admit in the first place that you've hated God in your heart, and to repent of that hatred, yet.... It feels good to hate God, it feels good to have sympathy with the devil, to wallow in one's own darkness and to harbour a secret strain of rebellion, to blame God and curse him to his face for all of life's horrors and to rise up against him in self-righteous defiance.... all that feels good to sinful humanity, especially if you can hide the ugly parts behind a pious mask like "skepticism"! This is how, as St. Paul puts it, mankind "suppresses the knowledge of the truth" and refuses to "give God thanks". It might seem like pride and accusativeness on my part to say this, but in my defence you are daring to accuse God himself, and are prideful enough to pretend to be a pious unbeliever, rather than doing the honest thing and cursing God with an open blasphemy. There was a blogger I read a few years ago who did just that. He was scandalised by Pope Francis and the state of the Church, so he posted a recantation of the faith, declared himself an atheist, blasphemed Jesus and Mary by name, and cursed the whole thing. At least he didn't pretend to be a disinterested skeptic or a reluctant prophet of disillusionment; he cursed the Catholic Church openly and didn't ask snide, passive aggressive questions like "is a religious upbringing a form of indoctrination?" For my part, I said from the start I would worship God or the devil, no in-between. That's why for as long as I hated God, the devil kept sending me open offers. I would have gone straight to the devil himself rather than to his mediocre prophets like Jordan Peterson, with his watered-down Nietzscheanism. You shouldn't treat your soul cheaply. Both God and the devil are willing to pay a high price for it, so don't sell it to cheapskates like Peterson, Krauss, or Hart.
"The devil has subverted your faith, first by making you hate God for your personal tragedies and frustrations (how many times he let you down, ignored your pleas, didn't give you the dignity or position you deserve, etc.), then by concealing your hatred behind false and fearful obedience, then by accusing you of sin constantly and making you scrupulous and self-loathing, then by intensifying your hatred of God by accusing him not only of being a neglectful Father who let's you suffer, but an oppressive tyrant who constantly accuses you of faults and forces you to weary yourself in religious slavery."
And even if you were correct in all of this, where was God? Why was the devil able to do all of this, unhindered, when it wasn't him I was calling on for help?
If you want me to admit I'm angry and resentful at a God I'm not sure I believe in, it's no great revelation for me to say yes. Of course I am. But part of why I don't know that I believe in him is because he shouldn't be the kind of being who is so hateable. It makes me wonder if he's real. He's certainly not the loving paradigm of goodness the Church claims he is, at least, not if their other teaching about him is correct.
There is no way to surgically remove the influence of an all-encompassing theology from my psyche or my soul. There is a God-shaped hole there. There is an emptiness I speak with, still, asking him to penetrate the darkness if he's really there and really loves me. There is never any response.
I am angry at the idea of God I was raised with, and yes, I hate it. But I also recognize that perhaps this idea of God isn't and couldn't be real. Perhaps he's something entirely other than what I've been told. And perhaps he's not there at all.
I don't claim to have peeled back every layer of my psychology here. There's a lot of hurt, and a lot of anger, and a lot of sorting to do. It feels stupid to be angry at a God I can't confidently say I believe in; it feels equally stupid to believe in a God I can't have confidence in. I'm stuck in between. And, as I said, I'm still afraid. Perhaps he's really John Calvin's God, with no pretense of mercy or benevolence. Perhaps he's like Odin or Zeus, capricious and ready to smite me for my anger. Perhaps he's like my own father - volatile, condescending, wrathful, unpredictable, and silent, with moments of sincere and inexplicable love and generosity. I don't know how to appease the wrath of a God I do not know, but I am counting on either his non-existence, his indifference to mere mortals like me, or his benevolence. If he is an angry and capricious God, I will certainly pay the price for it. In a way, I suppose that's part of what I'm testing.
But I'll do this the only way I can, which is to do my best to explain, without showing the worst moments of my rage, frustration, and existential angst, what I think and why I think it. I'm not going to act like a petulant child and curse God and then sit in the mud refusing to think about any of this. I'm going to take the time to sort out the versions of him that people believe in, my own understanding and experiences, and pain that is intertwined with all of it.
I have the sense that you want to be helpful here, but that you're still to angry to know how. I hope that's the case, because I suspect that all sounded more persuasive in your head.
Paragraphs are your friends, at least if you intend anyone to read what you write. I got lost in the middle of this massive lump of stone. It has the texture of granite.
Wow. You know, you could have saved yourself a lot of pointless typing by simply saying "God bless" or "I'll pray for you" as a passive aggressive signal of your true intention (something like "fuck you" or "shut the fuck up") since your omni-benelovent and loving God will torture you forever for being directly hostile by saying bad words and being a meanie. LOL
SMH. Physician heal thyself. This comment telegraphs a lot. Suffice it to say, it seems you’ve traded one form of fundamentalism for another.
Pretty Lamb: This sounds like a lot of condemnation on your part, and not more “honest” than Steve’s wrestling with his trauma regarding his experience of the Catholic Church.