The binary opposition should be guilt versus pride. Guilt is the pain of our past deeds, pride the joy of our past deeds. Pride is healthy, guilt is sick. But guilt also has its appropriate use. Guilt is to inspire us to change our future action. Thus all guilt rightly ends in pride.

This is not the typical view of religion. Pride is evil because is is love of self. Guilt is good because it is awareness of our perpetual sin. Why this schema?

Guilt is a means to ownership. One owes his life to the guilt because he is indebted for his sins. The word originally meant the lender owned your body for your guilt. As the paritioners say to their God (but really the church) by Onus you own us. Religions own their members by implicating them in the system. Morality is the golden ring in the bull’s nose—by which you bring him to his knees. Religion, therefore, uses conscience and duty and morality not for the sake of life, but for the sake of power. Insofar as religion can escape morality, it does, and despises it. The Christians call it works and say it is of this world. For a good Buddhist or a good Hindu is prettier to look at then the Christian, but the Christian only does good deeds to win converts, and beyond this, hates virtue.

Remember the pretty bait put on the fishing hook called Crucifix: the simultaneous lure of pity/guilt called Jesus. By this hook did he make his disciples fishers of men.

And what is their greatest tool for guilt? It is to damn the whole of mankind as naturally deserving eternal torture. Only by an UNDESERVED gift, so that nobody could brag, can we ever enter heaven. We must believe the unbelievable with a faith which does not doubt, because we are all sinners. Thus the guilt system is based on eternal torture, by a greatly exagerrated threat. As the cowards wager has it: it is wiser to pretend there is a hell just in case there is.

Daniel June

All that is the divine protection rackett! Add to that ritual canniballism and vampirism of the Eurcharist or Communion. Gee, isn’t the rackett a joy? How people revel in that tom-foolery!

Come now.

First, ‘religion’ doesn’t do squat. people do, using religion. (Nuclear bombs aren’t bad *just because* people use them to murder people, or dynamite would be wicked to produce as well; of course nuclear bombs may be bad for other reasons.) Same with ‘science’; some guy in a lab gave you penicillin, not ‘science’.

Second, it’s stretching the meaning of ‘racket’ much too far. Griggs is obviously having a bit of fun; in only a few, cultish religious groups is there actual collusion among the higher-ups to dupe the faithful (the Scientolgists spring to mind). So ‘racket’ is really just not the right term, if we’re being faithful to the meanings of words. Typically, the leaders of a religious group are as varied a group in their levels of belief as their flocks. IN fact, it’s past a miracle that any organization could last as a society of dupes and con-artists for very long. the recent history of the soviet union is a perfect case in point. Grigg’s second jpoint, about religion being tom foolery, is a better start. (a racket is diff from tom foolery; scientologists tend to emphasize the self-help aspects of their religion to draw people in, not the weird science fiction garbage. Since they openly charge fees to help people acheive enlightenment, this makes them in fact guilty of selling salvation, which most religions consider a deep crime.)

kirk

inthegobi - 13 August 2007 08:50 PM

Come now.

First, ‘religion’ doesn’t do squat. people do, using religion.

On a vaguely similar note…

A few months ago I was teaching a Christian youth class (I’m a pretty incognito freethinker), and the subject of the week was “guilt.” When I asked them if guilt was good or bad, as a discussion starter, we came to the conclusion that it’s good, because it’s what drive you to better yourself.

Maybe this is just a more anti-dogmatic post-modern age of people we’re dealing with, but their response was truly a far cry from the Indian quasi-Christian spiritualist I’d met in Minnesota a few weeks before that.  He gave me a thick book, titled “A Course in Miracles,” which (Among all sorts of etherial, almost pantheist doctrine) was anti-guilt alltogether.  “All guilt is bad,” he would have told me, “because it’s the result of sin, and sin is an illusion.”

He also told me, looking me full in the eye, that “you don’t exist, you see.” It was quite a surreal experience, and very mind expanding.

In my area, there sure it a lot of “guilt as mind control” going on, but not in the blunt, straight forward sort of way you would expect to end up in political speeches.  Conspiracy theory is far less importance to me than the simple fact that what the people around me believe (And there are dogmatic people in all countries and creeds) affects me tremendously.  Their opinion matters, because I always want to be able to defend myself against whatever holes/pseudo-holes they would point out in my logic (If they knew what was going on in my head).  Their voice becomes part of me, and so inside me the two voices argue it out.

A friend and I were just talking tonight, when he said he’d “heard you’re some what of a rebel.” It took me a minute to realize that he meant philosophically.  We discussed a lot of things, but one thing we touched on was the concept of forming a secret society of sorts for freethinkers on our campus—just someplace we can relax and not worry about what we say.  We don’t want to make social ripples, or rock the boat, per say—all of us agree that relationships, in short, are more important than our beliefs about God’s [non]existence.  Heck, we’re in our late teens/early twenties—we’re doing good to have broken from the religious bubble we were raised in on a mostly intellectual basis (Read: Not emotional teenage rebellion and family fight)—being convicted enough to be vocal about atheism is hardly the point we’re at.  Neither do we try to pull Dawkins’ “they’re wrong for judging us, so we’ll be audacious and say ‘screw them.’”

“What do you think about philosophical diversity?” my friend asked the Provost last year after a big speech she gave in front of the school (We’re proud to be the 6th most diverse University in the nation, so she must have mentioned something about it).  “It’s a good thing,” she said, but quickly added “within certain limits.” I imagine those limits are pretty tight—and they should be, as this is a religious University with a religious mission.

It’s hard to know how to handle one’s self in such an environment.

SigmaX

The great philosopher Timothy Leary said that it is our secrets that hold society back. 

We are afraid to be ourselves because pressure from society is so strong.  And even those of us who persue our passions, we all have things about ourself that we feel guilty about or feel we have to hide from people.  And so we never shine.  And those of us who aren’t open about ourselves only continue to make other people feel like they have to hide themselves. 

Only a few people are brave enough to publicly admit:

They smoke weed.

They wack off.  They cheat.  (insert any sexual taboo here).

They don’t believe in God.

They support gay rights but aren’t gay.

Or they are.  Whatever.  The point Leary made was that wherever we cross the line of who we are and what we don’t want society to hate us for is our weakness.  More people fall into above categories than you’d realize.  Only no one wants to be the first to admit any of it.  That guilt we feel when we are different - is a conflict between your true self and society.  You just have to decide who you trust more - yourself or the “normal” people around you.  It’s an interesting choice at times.

I like his perspective.  Though in truth, I don’t live up to it.  (I have some good secrets, lol).

”That guilt we feel when we are different - is a conflict between your true self and society. You just have to decide who you trust more - yourself or the “normal” people around you. It’s an interesting choice at times.

I like his perspective. Though in truth, I don’t live up to it. (I have some good secrets, lol).”

I don’t feel guilt for being different or not saying what I truly believe but at the same time, I can see how the religious guilt of others manipulate how I’m forced to inter-act in our christian society. I cannot step forward in defiance of the established conformist standards. How dare I not conform? I’ve never walked on water, I’m not credited with any miracles and no one has stepped forward to pay me an advance to write “The New Bible.” 95% of the population are conformists, their strongest instinct is to conform / fit-in with the established standards of their given society. Like sheep following the herd off the edge of a cliff, they just follow each other without much factual research. Guilt from a religious perspective is encoded into their conformist’s DNA and their guilt manipulates the society in which we live. The other 5% who should stand up and say, “don’t follow the crowd,” “there is no life after death,” “there are no miracles, “the King has no cloths,” will be black-balled, ridiculed and have our heretic behinds rejected from “normal” conformist society. We can’t step forward and speak our minds, in this Christian Society, because we want to climb that corporate ladder, we want to feed our families, pay our mortgages, put money away for our retirement and our children’s education. We can’t teach our children to speak up with strong conviction against common belief. We must resort to making them aware of the available facts but caution them not to make too many waves or they’ll be rejected from their social economic group. We all want our children to fit in, to be accepted, to have a lot of friends and a happy childhood / life. We are forced into a balance between the conflict that we will create by truly speaking our minds and the need to keep the peace, to fit-in by keeping our mouths shut and going along just to get along. We’re forced to stay in the shadows with our true beliefs and wait for an opportunity to shine when the moment is right. We’re like Truth Soldiers waiting for the right opportunity to join the ideological War. I don’t feel guilty but I do feel manipulated.

Luckily I don’t have any of the other vices noted above, yeh right!

that weird writer chick - 22 August 2007 02:28 PM

The great philosopher Timothy Leary said that it is our secrets that hold society back. 

Timothy Leary… the LSD guy?  Haven’t read any of his stuff, I’ll admit, but I’m skeptical.

that weird writer chick - 22 August 2007 02:28 PM

We are afraid to be ourselves because pressure from society is so strong.  And even those of us who persue our passions, we all have things about ourself that we feel guilty about or feel we have to hide from people.  And so we never shine.  And those of us who aren’t open about ourselves only continue to make other people feel like they have to hide themselves. 

Only a few people are brave enough to publicly admit… They don’t believe in God…

The point Leary made was that wherever we cross the line of who we are and what we don’t want society to hate us for is our weakness… That guilt we feel when we are different - is a conflict between your true self and society.  You just have to decide who you trust more - yourself or the “normal” people around you.  It’s an interesting choice at times.

Okay, it’s probably mostly my personality, but that doesn’t sit right with me.  “Be yourself.” What the blazes is “yourself?” I’m more social construct than anything else to begin with.  Pure independence is an illusion, though it’s good to be aware of social influences and at least try to keep your head on straight.  I’m not Christian because I had the depth of perspective to see the world as it is: a gray and confusing morass, not the black and white that everyone seems to pretend it is.  That means I didn’t dismiss atheists as stupid just to make my world simpler and to feel righteous—but it also means that now that I’ve made the paradigm shift to a skeptical atheism, I’m not going to turn around and dismiss Christians or Buddhist or anybody else as idiots either, just to make myself feel more secure and righteous.

I dunno.  I’m beginning to feel like “how do I carry myself and my thoughts” is the much more complicated question over “what is the truth.”

SigmaX