HOW CHRISTIANITY PREVENTS US FROM KNOWING THYSELF BY CREATING A FALSE SELF
Consider the emotional and intellectual confusion and insecurity that religion installs in the minds of children by requiring beliefs in both an undefinable word like "God" and in things like an eternal soul. This results in teaching the child they are, at least on one sense, actually immortal, and having to meet God after they die amounts to teaching them they will be sent to the principle's office when their lessons here on earth have completed, to determine if you have passed or failed. The problem with getting a passing grade, they are subsequently taught to believe, is that the immortal soul they are born with is morally defective because it is marred by the stain of "original sin." And because it is, the child must fear it is destined to fail the test of life, and will therefore have to spend the rest of eternity in hell after they die. The only way to escape this fate is if - and only if - the child is willig to surrender it's own free will and commit itself to obeying the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), so that the RCC can serve as the child's moral compass for the rest of their life. And the child must be willing to make such a commitment, regardless of whatever evils the men and women working for that church happen to get caught engaging in.
As crazy as such a "divine plan" sounds to anyone who has not chosen to simply "believe" it is the greatest plan in the history of plans, such "beliefs" nevertheless boil down to a fundamental idea that was summarized by Niccolo Machiavelli: it is better to fear God than to love God. As it says in 1 Corinthians 13:7, after all, "love forgives all things," but fear doesn't. And that means that the Christian who is convinced their God loves them will surely forgive them if they happen to burn a few witches from time to time, because even if the Christian was wrong to believe in witches in the first place, at least their heart was in the right place when they were torturing and killing those witches in defense of God and God's rules, just like God did when he treated Sodom and Gomorrah like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it is this conflicting belief, which is the epitome of moral relativism clothed in the priestly rhetoric of moral absolutism, which also contributes to traumatizing a child. It does so by telling the child they must believe that they are "loved" by this God on the one hand, but that this same God will not only judge them, but also sentence them to a fate infinitely worse than the crucifixion of Christ if they fail to pass the test of believing that God only tortured and executed his own son for the same reason he likewise threatens the child with such eternal torments: because He loves them - obviously.
Such a concept of "God" is something every rational being on the planet has a moral obligation to be suspicious of at the least, and be outright horrified by at worst. Yet according to Christianity, anyone who exercises such suspicion toward the Christian God, or feels such horror about what the Christian God so inerrantly boasts of doing so often in the Christian Bible, even to his own son, if they cannot overcome such feelings of suspicion and horror, then they fully deserve the hell the Christian God intended to throw them into for failing to do so. Christianity also requires its followers to believe that their doubts should never be applied to their own brand of religion or God as much as their own brand of religion and God requires them to apply such doubts to every other brand of religion and God. And anyone who begs the Christian to apply even half as much of the skepticism their own brand of religion requires them to apply to every other brand of religion and God, and all just to get the Christian to see that their ideas about "witches" are simply fear-based figments of their imagination that were planted there when they were children by their own brand of religion, are all seen by the Christian as being in league with Lucifer for inviting them to doubt their "faith," and therefore deserves to be treated no different than those their brand of religion has convinced them are witches.
Such a God only "loves us" as much as a monarch loves those they cast into a war to protect or expand their own wealth and power, like casting pennies into a wishing well, while threatening anyone who objects to being used as human fodder for that monarch's love of power with being burned alive as a witch for daring to put concern for their own life before a devotion to sacrificing their life in the service of their lord and master. Such service is only called "love" to mask the fact that it is designed to use human beings like robots or pawns on a chess board. Yet because this "God" promises to "save" us from the worst He is willing to do to us if we fail to obey the commands issued by his church, and all to combat the snares of a devil that God could easily step on like an ant but refuses to do so, the Christian is convinced that such a "God" deserves our love and worship, exactly as he commands. That Stalin and Saddam Hussein commanded the same kind of love and worship, for the same reasons and with the same kinds of threats, doesn't appear to matter to the Christian in the least, because Stalin and Hussein were just men, while God is a God, and the difference transforms what the Christian will be the first to describe as pure evil into what the Christian then insists is pure virtue; thus illustrating the miraculous power of a confirmation bias to transform water into wine. And according to the Christian Bible, anyone who says otherwise deserves to be thrown in God's eternal gulags. Indeed, this double standard is what allows the Christian to see a rainbow as God's promise not to waterboard humanity off the planet ever again, while for non-Christians, it is simply a reminder of God's willingness to kill us all for simply being exactly what he "intelligently designed" us to be: beings capable of thinking for ourselves who not only dare to question those who claim to know more than everyone else on the planet about an infinite abstraction based on an undefinable word like "God," but who receive as much of an endorphin reward in their brain for doing so as the Christian receives in their own brain for refusing to do so. And this God the Christian claims we are all required to "believe in" to save ourselves from his eternal torture chamber of hell, who needs humans to convince other humans that he is real because he chooses to cloak himself in the guise of something that does not exist at all, proves how much he cares about all of us by simply sitting back and watching us all kill each other in the name of peace and love.
Believing in such a "God" - one that commands us to "believe" in him under the threat of eternal tortures for failing to do so, even though He is committed to using his power to avoid all direct human detection and only ever provides us with wholly ambiguous evidence that he exists, and mostly in the form of what Christians simply choose to label as "miracles," which are always things that - let's be honest - any reasonable person can clearly see are debatable at best; a god who requires human sacrifice to be appeased for people's lack of "belief" in one brand of religion or another (even though that "God" never clearly tells us which brand he requires us to subscribe to for him to finally choose to STOP being so angry at us all the time); and who commands total belief and obedience in how you think and behave, despite having designed us with both the ability and an overwhelming desire to doubt and think for ourselves - is not only a form of emotional extortion, it is also a form of psychological and emotional abuse masquerading as "love," and the pretension that a big enough bundle of contradictions somehow makes perfect sense. Indeed, it was this very same elixir of contradictory ideas that allowed Charles Manson to convince his "family members" to go on his own private crusade for Manson in order to prove their love for him, and has only ever turned every Dr. Jekyll into a Mr. Hyde.
It apparently never occurs to someone who claims to "love" such a God that the very fact this God feels a need, or even just the desire, to command people to "love him," while threatening those who refuse to do so with being thrown into an eternal torture chamber, and promising those that do they will be rewarded with an eternal paradise of pleasures, is all the evidence you need to conclude that such a God is no different than Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot. Anyone worthy of love, after all, would certainly never feel the need to "command" people to "love them," let alone feel the need to ever threaten people with torments or promises of paradise beyond compare. Any mother or father who commanded such love from their own children through the use of such threats and bribes - let alone who used such tactics on the family dog, or their goldfish, or even their bedbugs - would be considered completely insane. Loving a God despite that God's reliance on such tactics can never ever be considered the beginning of wisdom, because it requires us to pretend our fear of such a God has nothing to do whatsoever with our claims to "love" such a God. As the famed Scoopes Monkey Trail attorney Clarence Darrow pointed out, such a fear is always "the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt (as well as curiosity, wonder, and awe), lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom." From Aristotle to Einstein and beyond, all wisdom comes from the ability and the willingness to question, while all ignorance comes from a fear of doing so, or a hope for a reward for one's obedience to those who claim that questioning their authority is a sin against God himself.
What makes such a fear so evil is that coercing conformity and obedience to a church through the threat of damnation, only serves to subordinate a person's desire or need to "know thyself," replacing it instead with a need to know only what one's religion has to say about the "God" that threatens us with eternal damnation, so that we can best learn what we need to do and how we need to think in order to avoid that damnation. But the relationship we have with ourselves, and especially with knowing and loving ourselves without fear, prejudice, or judgement, which religion makes only all the more difficult, serves as the template that we rely on for all other relationships. In fact, the judgement we lord over ourselves is what bars us more than anything else from ever actually knowing ourselves at all. That's why Aristotle said that “knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” The problem, as Thales pointed out, is that, thanks to the lens of judgements with which we are taught look at ourselves, knowing yourself is the most difficult thing a person can ever do. In fact, Jesus saying "the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), is simply his way of expressing the moral obligation one has to "know thyself." Even the idea of Jesus dying and descending into Hades for three days before rising again, can be interpreted as illustrating the importance of knowing thyself because, as Immanuel Kant observed, "only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness." Carl Jung expressed the same idea when he observed that "who looks outside, sleeps; who looks inside, awakes." And Jesus differentiated himself from those who followed the Sanhedrin because they looked to their religious leaders for guidance, while Jesus followed his own heart. To follow Jesus, as such, is to have the courage to stand against a crowd of "believers" and strive to "know thyself," and then have the courage to follow what you find. And like Jesus, so all of these men were expressing the idea that only through self knowledge can one ever be free. For as Ghilil Gibran pointed out, "Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge." And without such knowledge, a person can never truly know what governs their actions, and is therefore a slave of their own ignorance.
While providing guidance is a necessary part of raising a child, fostering in a child, or anyone, a need for lifelong dependence upon others, and a need to focus one's attentions on always trying to know a "God" that can never be known because such a word can never be defined in the first place, is the greatest evil of all, as Jiddhu Krishnamurti concluded. And it is, because it not only distracts a person with a fearful need to chase after an understanding of a phantasm in order to save oneself from damnation, it also robs a person of both the greatest treasure at their disposal and their own responsibility to mine that treasure for the ore of wisdom needed to understand everything and everyone else. That treasure, of course, is oneself, without false gods before us in the guise of the gods offered by institutional religions; all of which, as the theologian Paul Tillich pointed out, are inherently demonic. And they are because they are run by mere mortal men who seek god-like power over others, and do so while pretending they speak for such a God, just like the serpent did in the Garden of Eden. It is not a mere coincidence that Jesus referred to the temple elders as "vipers," after all, nor that he never felt the need to convert anyone to his brand of religion. Such vipers teach us to accept the unsubstantiated premise that people are inherently evil to begin with and need to be broken from their penchant for such evil, which means their penchant for questioning such men. It is this, and not a God, that gives those men all of their power and position. To accept that their "God" created us as sinners, however, is to accept that God created us with a greater desire to engage in evil than altruism, even though he could've designed us the other way around, and then decided to employ any number of tactics from sacraments to fear of hell and hope of heaven, to see who He could coerce into operating against how they were spiritually designed. Such a "belief" not only leads us to wonder how such a God could ever therefore be considered "good," since it equates God with being no better at creating human beings than Dr. Frankenstein, it also leads people to only strive to avoid oneself, since we are simply sinners after all, out of a preference for needing to know God instead, so He will save us from our sinful selves. Yet Christianity wants us to worship and love a God that makes us born sinners anyway, even though that God only forgives us for being what he created us to be by slaughtering his son instead of us, even though his son was innocent of the sins we are born deserving to be crucified for, while the devil continues to go Scott-free, doing his very worst whenever and wherever he likes.
When Jesus later says, 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind," is a commandment to use our mind to only strive to know God, and not ourselves. But the fact that God established a Church and a religion means that God has given the most important knowledge of Himself exclusively to the ministers of that Church and that religion, to which all others must go in order to obtain such knowledge to save themselves from being thrown into hell. But this is the very opposite of trying to "know thyself," because as the writer Charles Bukowski put it, "obedience to another is the decay of self. For though every being is similar, each being is also different, and to herd our differences under one law degrades each self." And through this degrading process, the creative process that can only be born out of striving to know thyself is crucified on a cross of obedience to those ministers whose job it is to tell us who we need to believe we are in order to be judged worthy of salvation. For a man who is purchased by another man has no freedom to be who he wants to be, because he must instead strive to be whatever and whoever it is his master bought him to be.
It is one thing to seek and follow the advice of another, but it is a wholly different thing to think one must rely on another to instruct them on what and how to think about life's biggest questions, for their whole life, especially when deferring to someone else's thinking is done out of fear that failing to do so could earn a person a trip to a torture chamber from which they can never escape. And refusing to rely on oneself to decide for oneself what one really thinks about things, and why, is to reject any desire to truly know thyself, and why someone believes what they do, and whether such beliefs are truly helping or hurting such a person. And the rejection to know thyself by thinking for oneself is a supreme form of disrespect toward whatever forces were responsible for creating us with the capacity to think for oneself so that we might enter the kingdom of God through no other door than the one that requires us to know thyself.
What most people failed to understand about the importance of the need to "know thyself" is that such a maxim is only half the story. And that's because human beings were not born to be hermits, but to be socially connected to each other. This is why the greatest gift we can give to others is to first heal ourselves, which we can only do if we are brave enough to know the child that cowers away behind the ego we have manufactured for ourselves and wear like a suit of armor. In fact, as Daniel Goleman details in his book Social Intelligence, we are even neurologically hardwired for social connection with others. And because we are, the other half of the story comes in the form of what is famously known as "the Golden Rule." Based on the universality of empathy, it is the simplest rule or definition conceivable for all moral behavior. It has been found to have been expressed as far back as ancient Egypt and India, Greece, Persia, Rome, China, Africa, basically everywhere, by everyone, for as long as anyone can remember. Jesus Christ is probably the most famous person to have uttered it, but he was by no means the first or the only one to do so. That rule was "do unto others as you would have others do unto you." But we can only know how to follow the Golden Rule after we have accessed "the beginning of all wisdom" by getting to "know thyself." For only when we know our own darkness well, as Perma Chodron put it, "can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes possible only when we recognize our shared humanity." So when Jesus said that "the kingdom of God is within you," he was simply pointing out what Chodron was explaining, and both were observing why it is so important to strive to truly "know" ourselves, and why we think and believe the things we do. He was telling us, in other words, that the door to that kingdom is ourselves. And the only way to open that door is by truly knowing thyself, since "thyself" is the only thing each of us has exclusive access to, as if we are the kings and queens of the kingdoms that is our own minds, which is both our most living gospel and our truest church, given to us from a God or whatever you wish to call whatever led us to be here at all. The problem, however, is that Christianity makes following or even understanding these rules impossible. Notice how ideas offered by the Christian religion invite us to become psychopaths for our brand of God. On the one hand, the eternal tortures Christianity teaches children to believe will be inflicted on those in hell requires a willingness of those who expect to go to heaven to have no empathy or sympathy for who God decides to torture for all eternity, even though such eternal torture is no different from the suffering inflicted by the BTK killer on his victims. The "saved" are not only saved from such suffering, they are even saved from having to listen to their shrieks of agony or think about anyone who is being tortured for all eternity by the very God they claim to "love," even if it happens to be their own children being tortured for all eternity by that very same God. Worse, the same parents who teach their own children to believe they could be roasted for all eternity think this actually makes their children feel more love for and from such a God, and is necessary for ensuring the child will be able to not only control their own sexual urges, but also finally understand what life is really all about. And what's life really all about? It is about battling a fear of hell with the hope that God loves you enough to spare you such eternal agonies, and expecting that the result of such a process will somehow dramatically improve the child in every way, shape, and form. And the only evidence the parents who teach their children such ideas have that such "beliefs" do just that is that they simply choose to believe they do, which they prove is true by devoting themselves to rejecting any evidence that says otherwise as being simply false.
On the other hand, the possibility of hell and heaven, rather than making people more moral, only teaches them that threats and bribes can be, like training a dog to fetch a stick or poop outside, incredibly effective ways of overriding a person's free will by coercing and conditioning them into engaging in desired forms of thinking and behavior. Indeed, this was the whole point of the "thought-police" in George Orwell's 1984. Like the use of torture and terror depicted in 1984, so "witch trials" and Inquisitions were also more about keeping "believers" terrified of being accused of being a witch or a heretic than actually caring if someone was, in fact, a witch or a heretic, or if such things as "witches" and "heretics" were even real things, or just useful figments of our imagination for those who like to control other people. For the atheist, doing unto others as you'd have others do unto you means letting people live their lives as they wish as long as they are not hurting others, even if they choose to be a witch or a heretic, because you only get one life and when it's over, it's over. Besides, if there IS a God, doesn't he just give everyone their just deserves when its all said and done? The fear a Christian has of God, from this perspective, is that God will punish them for NOT trying to convert others to their brand of religion. And this is because the Christian is committed to a belief that your life is most definitely NOT your own, for it belongs to their "lord and savior" Jesus Christ, purchased by his blood sacrifice, and that any "witch" therefore deserves no more mercy or acceptance from the Christian than the devil himself can expect mercy or acceptance from the Christian God. And because the Christian belongs to said God, they can only save themselves from being thrown into hell by fearing all those their religion tells them will eventually be thrown into hell.
Like a divine Oscar Schindler, Jesus was trying to "save" Christians through his bloody purchase. From what? From both God's greatest henchman in the form of the devil (the same devil that God never seems to punish or even fine, but seems instead to only ever reward), and the eternal torture chamber of a hell hotter than the ovens at Auschwitz in the afterlife that God built and maintains in tip-top working order, and all for failing to properly "obey" and "believe" what God's "church" declares you must "believe." As a result of this "belief," the Christian thinks this life is simply a proving-ground for whether someone deserves to be thrown into those ovens for their refusal to "obey," or receive eternal pleasures for their unquestioned obedience. This "belief" that these two options are the only options available to us in the next life, even though the Christian has no evidence nor any ability to demonstrate such a "belief" to be anything other than a form of paranoia and wishful thinking, is not only amounts to seeing the entire universe as designed to be nothing more than an operant environment in which God is seeing how effecting he can be at conditioning people into using their free will to voluntarily act like robots for one brand of religion over all others, it is also what convinces the Christian that it is their duty to convert the world to their way of thinking. They are also quite convinced that it is far better that they be crucified for their faith, or even burned at the stake as a witch or a heretic, than ever admit that they or their religion could ever be wrong, even though that religion has admitted it has been wrong about everything from heliocentrism to slavery. But such complete devotion to a brand of religion is the very opposite of actually exercising a responsibility to "know thyself."
For the atheist, thinking this way is pure hubris and insanity, while the Christian feels they are completely justified in feeling deeply offended by anyone interpreting their "beliefs" as anything less than infallible truth. No wonder its so difficult for these two perspectives to live together in harmony, because the latter truly believes the former deserves to burn in hell for all eternity, and is scared to death that such "sinners" may end up dragging them to hell along with them. No one in that state of mind, who truly believes that hell awaits those who fail to obey the dictates handed down by their own brand of God, church, or religion, can be truly peaceful and loving, if they believe their acceptance or even tolerance of those different from themselves could end up earning them a one way ticket to hell.
And this is what makes the Christian "belief" in a God and an afterlife that consists of only heaven and hell so problematic with regards to morality, and also so traumatizing for a child operating with a mind governed mostly by their emotional brain. On the one hand, if such a child ever reads the Bible itself, it is chalked full of language explicitly calling for vicious acts of violence for the Christian God, even toward children and infants. In Deuteronomy 21:20–21, for example, it says of a Rebellious Son,
18 If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, 19 his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. 20 They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” 21 Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.
In other passages, we see
Psalms 137:9 - Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
Numbers 31:17 - Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
Isaiah 13:16 - Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.
Naturally, the Christian denies that these passages mean exactly what they say. Yet even if we accept the claim that these passages mean something entirely different from what they so plainly say, that does not change the fact that any child able to read such passages for themselves would be traumatized by them, regardless of any attempt to insist that, although clearly ordered by the same "God" the child is required to love and obey on pain of eternal torments, such passages don't really matter anymore, even if a healthy and mandatory fear of hell still does.
Imposing such ideas on a child can only cause a child grave stress. This is especially true when the child feels they must believe in the very things that scare them the most just to be accepted and approved of by their own parents. Think about that: a child is taught they must "believe" in the existence of things that scare them the most - like a devil or a hell or a God that threatens to throw the child in hell for failing to obey His commands - just to feel accepted and approved of by the very parents they rely on for their survival. And this is what brings us to the other hand of how such ideas are so problematic for morality and traumatizing for a child emotional. Both wreak havoc on our two most basic needs.
As Dr. Gabor Mate pointed out, humans have basically two needs: attachment and authenticity. And we tend to form an emotional attachment most to those who give us the greatest freedom to be our most authentic selves, which we can only do by striving to truly "know thyself." Religion overrides the virtue of genuine authenticity, however, by requiring people to strive to only know God, and thereby "believe" and "behave" in ways dictated by their religion, of which heaven and hell are but a bride and a threat designed to coerce the "right" kinds of beliefs and behaviors religion desires. These bribes and rewards are necessary to alter a person's natural and thus "authentic" nature into being what their religion claims they need to become to save themselves from hell or even having their own children "dashed against the stones." As Mate further points out: "when authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity." When this happens, we end up forming an "attachment" that is more of a trauma bond in pursuit of approval. And after doing this over the course of our whole life, we can become convinced that the "behavior" and "beliefs" we are engaging in and defending are actually our "authentic" selves, even if they are simply conditioned responses to growing up in a house where our own parents conditioned us to conflate their approval with a love of God.
Watch the movie, Dead Poets Society with Robin Williams, and we see how a child's authenticity can be trumped by that child's need for attachment and approval. This occurs when a child at a boarding school is being forced by his own father to become a doctor, even though the child really wants to become an actor. Conversion Therapy, in which homosexuals are "reeducated" into wanting to be "straight for God," also operates on the premise that being approved of by God (which really means being approved of by a brand of religion that claims to be operating in God's stead) is always better, and certainly a safer bet given the option of heaven and hell, than operating according to what one may feel or "believe" to be their authentic self. For the homosexual, so Christianity has long taught its believers, what feels like authenticity is actually from the devil, deserving of hell, while approval, in contrast, comes from "God," and thus deserves to be rewarded with heaven. From this perspective, God nuking Sodom and Gomorrah is preferable than that God should simply allow the homosexuals living in those cities, even if they were the only ones bothering to take care of orphaned children or sick and elderly widows, to actually use their "free will" to live as freely as they wish only to end up in hell for all eternity by having done so. Again, this was the very same reasoning that served as the basis of burning both heretics and witches. So what the hell then is the point of "free will" if this is the case? This conflict can be summed up this way: "Do I live my life according to my own deepest truth," as Mate explains, "or in order to fulfill someone else's expectations? How much of what I have believed and done is actually my own and how much has been in the service to a self-image I originally created (or was conditioned to create) in the belief that it was necessary to please my parents (and my religion and the concepts of "God" as defined by my religion)?"
In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Mate points out that most trauma is pre-verbal. This means two things. The first is that the trauma that occurs to a child when, while they are relying on their emotional brain, are forced to choose attachment over authenticity happens long before the child is able to articulate an objection to having to sacrifice the latter on the alter of the former, and all in order to conform to the religious requirements of their parents. The second is that the trauma suffered by a child, from physical to emotional and psychological, resides in the "unconscious" non-verbal part of a child’s developing emotional brain. When Christian writer C. S. Lewis described hell as "a place where the door is locked from the inside," he may not have realized that the locked room he was referring to just happened to be our own mind. For Carl Jung, it was these unconscious experiences that needed to be dragged into the light of our consciousness, so that we could see that what we had been calling fate was really our own underlying trauma. As Jung went on to explain, in our unconscious, our traumas can then operate like an invisible Dr. Frankenstein assembling together our experiences into monsters that haunt us from the graveyard of our subconscious memories. Those monsters eventually come to life in the form of what Jung called "the shadow." (Jung's idea of "the shadow" fascinated me with how priests dress in black like a shadow, with a white collar that looks like where you would attach a leash to a dog.)
The shadow, according to Jung, is the uncivilized or primitive side of our nature. We all have a shadow self. It is generally made up of the parts of ourselves we deem unacceptable. He described it as "the unconscious part of our character or personality that does not align with the ideal version of what we're aiming for." And where do Christians get the "ideal version" of what they're aiming for? They get it from their priests, as those priests interpret the character of Jesus Christ in their version of the Bible. However subjective the priests version of both their Bible and their own interpretation of that Bible, the problem is that measuring oneself by such a character leads us to measure ourselves by the standards of a man who was also an immortal, all-powerful and all-knowing God, which is the only reason he knew fully well that he could just rise from the dead as easily as he could re-inhabit the flesh puppet he had been driving around like an avatar in a video game. Put another way, the shadow is comprised of repressed desires that often end up that way because religion leads us as children to believe that repressing our desires is the best and only way to prevent ourselves from morphing from the Dr. Jekyll religion claims to be turning us into, from the Mr. Hyde we were born to be. And however useful such a perspective may be to a child that lacks a fully formed neocortex with which to regulate their own raging hormones, it conditions that child to NOT put away such a child like dependence once they become an adult. But as John Steinbeck wrote, it is only once we have removed the need to be perfect that we can ever actually learn to be good, because we can only learn to be good by accepting that being human is enough. And when we need eternity to compensate us for how we lived this life repressing so many of our own desires, living thus in fear of our true selves for fear our true self will cost us an eternal reward, it is impossible to practice gratitude for just being alive in the finite way we are. Paradise, by comparison, is an expectation that exercising such repression is the one thing that will one day allow us to graduate from this life into an afterlife where we will finally get to be like a God and live forever.
Yet Christianity wants everyone to believe that they deserve to end up in heaven or hell because they are operating with free will. Read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van de Kolk, When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate, or any of a growing number of other books about trauma, and you quickly discover that the Christian claim to “free will,” while not always entirely false, is also nowhere near as absolute as Christians choose to "believe" it is. In fact, it is an essential part of convincing a person who is dependent upon their beliefs for their emotional security that they deserve to be compensated for continuing to always do so with eternal life. In addition to the threat of hell operating as a form of extortion and heaven operating as a bribe, however, trauma - especially prolonged trauma that can result in complex-PTSD, which highly sensitive children are more susceptible to - operates under the surface of conscious awareness, rewiring our brains and triggering our nervous system to react in ways that lead us to make choices based on emotional responses, even when we tell ourselves our choices are freely our own. And because they do, Jung explained how such underlying unconscious experiences could control us, saying "until we make the unconscious conscious, it will control our lives and we will call it fate." For the Christian child, the choices they have to choose are never perfectly free because they are always gilded with fear of hell and hope in heaven, and they are taught to trust in the efficacy of sacred stories told by their religion to save them from the former and guide them safely to the latter; where they can live happily ever after in the clouds above.
By relying on the behavioral modification techniques offered by religion to condition responses, using fear of retribution for the bad behavior of seeking one's own authenticity and reward for the "good behavior" of conformity and obedience, the unconditional “love” a parent naturally has for their child is modified (or, if such love is absent to begin with, is simply replaced) to reflect a conditional form of acceptance and approval, based on whether the child conforms to the parents religious parameters, in not just what they do but also in what they profess to “believe.” As a result, the natural bond that exists between the child and their parents at birth, which serves as the emotional umbilical cord that nurtures the child’s sense of self-love, is replaced with a trauma-bond, which acts like a spiritual leash held by religious leaders. Because the relationship a child develops with their parents often serves as the template for all other relationships the child develops, the trauma-bond that forms from the child being forced to earn approval through their behavior can lead the child to live in constant judgement of them self from then on. And the only one they are taught to believe who will accept them with all their sinful flaws is, of course, Jesus, without whom they are taught to see themselves as unloved, unaccepted, and even unworthy.
Such modification techniques not only contribute to traumatizing a child through fear, but in doing so, solidify a child in their attachment and dependence upon their religion. As Scott Kiloby pointed out, "needing to be right has more to do with emotion than thought. Being wrong feels unsafe to the nervous system." This is especially true when someone has been conditioned to "fear God" as much as fearing rejection, and to see both as a virtue. "The way out, Kiloby explains, is through the fear. The result is that the child becomes addicted to their religion in the very same way a person can become addicted to a drug or to gambling. The threat of hell keeps that addiction in place, while the idea of "free will" convinces the child they are "freely" choosing to maintain their beliefs, even if they are completely emotionally dependent upon those beliefs. Yet it is only when we feel safe enough to feel our emotions that we can begin to understand what they really are and where they really come from - not from a God who wants sycophantic devotion, but from a religion that needs an army of sycophantic "believers" who will defend that religion even with their own life. As such, the spiritual "ego" the "believer" then constructs and becomes dependent on for protection and survival is actually part of their "false self." That "false self" or "ego" becomes the thing that allows us to hide our emotional repression from childhood developmental trauma, from both ourselves and everyone else. "Emotional repression is not felt in the body as emotion. It's repressed. You'll see it in relationship as responses and reactions (or lack thereof) as you hold back or hide parts of yourself to get attention, love, approval or safety from others."
In his 1960 book The Divided Self, psychiatrist R. D. Laing explored ideas about how the process of creating a "false self" that seeks attachment results in part of us breaking away from a true self that seeks to find authenticity. This results in the mind becoming a "divided house" that cannot stand without the crutch of a religion. For Laing, this divided self can only resut in fostering psychosis, because it creates a tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, 'sane' self that we present to the world in our search for approval to maintain a precarious hold on attachment. The outsider, estranged from himself and society, cannot experience either himself or others as ‘real,’ rendering it impossible to ever therefore "know theyself," or access the kingdom of God that dwells with us. Instead, we invent a false self and with it we confronts both the outside world and our own despair. And we then equate our despair with our cross, and that of our savior, Jesus on the cross. The disintegration of our real self then keeps pace with the growing unreality of our false self until, in the extremes of schizophrenic breakdown, the whole personality disintegrates, and we return to be like newborn infants who are fully dependent upon our mother and father, or our nuns and priests. In his book 1956 book, Primitive Christianity, German theologian Rudolf Buitmann gives an excellent short account of the Gnostic ideal of this divorce between what he calls our soul (the real self) and our body (the false-self, or what Stephen King called in his in book The Shining the "false face"), or between who it is we see ourselves to be and who we think others expect us to be. Buitmann describes the "false self" as the "coffin we drag around with ourselves inside of it." Jung described overcoming this by first recognizing that "the adversary is none other than ‘the other in me.’” For the Gnostics, as Buitmann explains, redemption was conceived of as a total union of these two opposing faces, one of soul (our inner child and true face) and the other of body (our outer adult and “false-face”). Ironically, the "believers" who seek to gaslight others into believing they are born with and suffer from a spiritual cancer known as "the stain of original sin" actually split the atom of a person's soul in tow, creating thse warring camps. They then conclude that anyone who suggests the "believer" is actually suffering from repressed developmental trauma that has addicted them to their brand of religion as a form of approval seeking being conflated for a love of their God, is in fact trying to gaslight the believer with "stories" dreamed up by the devil, with the "devil" in this case being scientific investigation into the soul that frees us from a dependence upon a religion. Like religion rejecting the scientific findings of the solar system, as well as ideas about slavery, when science reveals something about the soul/mind of humans that conflicts with what religion claims to have to only authority to speak about, religion naturally claims such a perspective could only come from the "devil." Jesus, of course, was the devil to the institutional religion of his own time.
TRAUMA BONDING or STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
Trauma bonding, which is also known as Stockholm Syndrome, describes a deep bond which forms between a victim and their abuser. Victims of abuse often develop a strong sense of loyalty towards their abuser, despite the fact that the bond is damaging to them. St. Augustine discovered this was true after implementing torture of those who did not believe in his extremely intolerable brand of Catholicism as he required. The strong bond such victims later developed for Augustine’s Roman brand of Catholicism led Augustine to prefer using torture as the most effective means of converting people to his brand of religion.
According to Wikipedia, “trauma bonds (also referred to as traumatic bonds) is a term developed by Patrick Carnes to describe emotional bonds with an individual (and sometimes, with a group) that arise from a recurring, cyclical pattern of abuse perpetuated by intermittent reinforcement through rewards and punishments. The process of forming trauma bonds is referred to as trauma bonding or traumatic bonding. A trauma bond usually involves a victim and a perpetrator in a uni-directional relationship wherein the victim forms an emotional bond with the perpetrator. This can also be conceptualized as a dominated-dominator or an abused-abuser dynamic. Two main factors are involved in the establishment of a trauma bond: a power imbalance and intermittent reinforcement of good and bad treatment, or reward and punishment. Trauma bonding can occur in the realms of romantic relationships, platonic friendships, parent-child relationships, incestuous relationships, cults, hostage situations, manager vs their direct reports, sex trafficking (especially that of minors), or tours of duty among military personnel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding)
Because the child is subject to a power imbalance and intermittent reinforcement of good and bad treatment, reward and punishment, and all long before that child’s brain ever develops its rational brain with which to defend itself, Christianity cultivates a form of trauma bonding, in both the parent-child relationship and in the child’s relationship to their religion. Clearly, the God of the Christian faith, who requires the bloody human sacrifice of his own son to assuage his desire to cast humanity on the whole into the eternal fires of Hades, constitutes a form of dominated-dominator or an abused-abuser dynamic. For Christians, this would only apply to a cult, which they insist their own religion is not. But the only difference between a cult and a religion is time. A religion is simply an old cult, while a cult is a new religion or religious movement within an old religion. Jesus and his apostles were simply a cult within the Judaism of their day, no different than Branch Davidians or Heaven’s Gate.
Unbeknownst to a child, the emotional reaction they are conditioned to have toward ideas that their religion equates with grave sins against God, like having sex outside of wedlock (which sounds like a prison door being locked behind a person after they enter), are not evidence of objective truths about whether sex outside of wedlock is an even more sinful and unnatural act than a man who devotes himself to an immaterial "logos" (i.e., idea) by living his life like a eunuch. Instead, far from being something any child is born with, such reactions are conditioned responses to a religious programing that teaches the child to equate such an idea with eternal rejection and eternal suffering. By doing this, the child becomes addicted to an “emotional truth,” while the religion conflates this emotional truth with being an intellectual truth. Religion does this by mixing the child’s emotional truth with the fact that, if they fail to continue to “believe” such a truth, they will be rejected and cast down into that group of sodomites known as "one of them." God forbid.
So, from birth, the butterfly of the belief that we are guilty of original sin grows into a hurricane of self-doubts that can leave the child, decades later, suffering from a condition known as Religious Trauma Syndrome, or RTS. As Marlene Winell explains on her webpage,https://www.journeyfree.org/rts/, RTS "is the condition experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination. They may be going through the shattering of a personally meaningful faith and/or breaking away from a controlling community and lifestyle. It can be compared to a combination of PTSD and Complex PTSD (C-PTSD.)"Such trauma becomes the "invisible hand" in our unconscious mind that repeatedly stabs our desires in the back with a long blade of self-doubt, like Norman Bates stabbing Janet Leigh in "Psycho." And to disarm that doubt, we have to pluck out the thorny seed of that self doubt which was planted there when we were taught to believe were we born sinners. For only then can we rise above what our brand of "faith" requires us to believe is simply the hand of fate, but ain't.
In a reply on Quora.com, Doug Robertson does a masterful job of deconstructing how the fostering of this kind of emotional manipulation is used to create a feedback-loop inside of which a "believer" becomes, like Danny Torrance with the Grady Twins in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," trapped in a repeating pattern "forever and ever and ever." As Robertson points out, "The entire process is not what you think it is. It is specifically designed to be uncomfortable for the other person because it isn’t about converting them to your religion. It is about manipulating you so you can’t leave yours. If this tactic was about converting people it would be considered a horrible failure. It recruits almost no one who isn’t already willing to join. Bake sales are more effective recruiting tools." He goes on to explain how the process is designed to make the person feel increasingly alienated from society, enabling that person to increasingly identify their social rejection with the protagonist of the Christian story, while also allowing the loneliness such rejection produces to strengthen a need for, and thus bond with, the "us" group who "understands" what it feels like to be as rejected as Jesus Christ himself.
As he continues here: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-get-angry-when-I-try-to-share-the-word-of-God-with-them-I-only-do-it-because-I-care-about-them-deeply-and-don-t-want-them-to-end-up-in-hell-I-feel-like-some-people-avoid-me-because-of-this-Is-there-any/answer/Doug-Robertson-3?ch=10&share=db2c299f&srid=Iifl
On the other hand, it is extremely effective at creating a deep tribal feeling among its own members. The rejection they receive is actually more important than the few people they convert. It causes them to feel a level of discomfort around the people they attempt to talk to. These become the “others”. These uncomfortable feelings go away when they come back to their congregation, the “Tribe”. If you take a good look at the process it becomes fairly clear. In most cases, the religious person starts out from their own group, who is encouraging and supportive. They are then sent out into the harsh world where people repeatedly reject them. Mainly because they are trained to be so annoying. These brave witnesses then return from the cruel world to their congregation where they are treated like returning heroes. They are now safe. They bond as they share their experiences of reaching out to the godless people to bring them the truth. They share the otherness they experience. Once again they will learn that the only place they are accepted is with the people who think as they do. It isn’t safe to leave the group. The world is your enemy, but we love you. This is a pain reward cycle that is a common brainwashing technique. The participants become more and more reliant on the “Tribe” because they know that “others” reject them. Mix in some ritualized chanting, possibly a bit of monotonous repetition of instructions, add a dash of fear of judgment by an unseen, but all-powerful entity who loves you if you do as you are told and you get a pretty powerful mix.
And Christians do all of this because, as the song goes, and as they are convinced about themselves, "No body knows, the trouble I've seen, ..."
Consider the emotional and intellectual confusion and insecurity that religion installs in the minds of children by requiring beliefs in both an undefinable word like "God" and in things like an eternal soul. This results in teaching the child they are, at least on one sense, actually immortal, and having to meet God after they die amounts to teaching them they will be sent to the principle's office when their lessons here on earth have completed, to determine if you have passed or failed. The problem with getting a passing grade, they are subsequently taught to believe, is that the immortal soul they are born with is morally defective because it is marred by the stain of "original sin." And because it is, the child must fear it is destined to fail the test of life, and will therefore have to spend the rest of eternity in hell after they die. The only way to escape this fate is if - and only if - the child is willig to surrender it's own free will and commit itself to obeying the Roman Catholic Church (RCC), so that the RCC can serve as the child's moral compass for the rest of their life. And the child must be willing to make such a commitment, regardless of whatever evils the men and women working for that church happen to get caught engaging in.
As crazy as such a "divine plan" sounds to anyone who has not chosen to simply "believe" it is the greatest plan in the history of plans, such "beliefs" nevertheless boil down to a fundamental idea that was summarized by Niccolo Machiavelli: it is better to fear God than to love God. As it says in 1 Corinthians 13:7, after all, "love forgives all things," but fear doesn't. And that means that the Christian who is convinced their God loves them will surely forgive them if they happen to burn a few witches from time to time, because even if the Christian was wrong to believe in witches in the first place, at least their heart was in the right place when they were torturing and killing those witches in defense of God and God's rules, just like God did when he treated Sodom and Gomorrah like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it is this conflicting belief, which is the epitome of moral relativism clothed in the priestly rhetoric of moral absolutism, which also contributes to traumatizing a child. It does so by telling the child they must believe that they are "loved" by this God on the one hand, but that this same God will not only judge them, but also sentence them to a fate infinitely worse than the crucifixion of Christ if they fail to pass the test of believing that God only tortured and executed his own son for the same reason he likewise threatens the child with such eternal torments: because He loves them - obviously.
Such a concept of "God" is something every rational being on the planet has a moral obligation to be suspicious of at the least, and be outright horrified by at worst. Yet according to Christianity, anyone who exercises such suspicion toward the Christian God, or feels such horror about what the Christian God so inerrantly boasts of doing so often in the Christian Bible, even to his own son, if they cannot overcome such feelings of suspicion and horror, then they fully deserve the hell the Christian God intended to throw them into for failing to do so. Christianity also requires its followers to believe that their doubts should never be applied to their own brand of religion or God as much as their own brand of religion and God requires them to apply such doubts to every other brand of religion and God. And anyone who begs the Christian to apply even half as much of the skepticism their own brand of religion requires them to apply to every other brand of religion and God, and all just to get the Christian to see that their ideas about "witches" are simply fear-based figments of their imagination that were planted there when they were children by their own brand of religion, are all seen by the Christian as being in league with Lucifer for inviting them to doubt their "faith," and therefore deserves to be treated no different than those their brand of religion has convinced them are witches.
Such a God only "loves us" as much as a monarch loves those they cast into a war to protect or expand their own wealth and power, like casting pennies into a wishing well, while threatening anyone who objects to being used as human fodder for that monarch's love of power with being burned alive as a witch for daring to put concern for their own life before a devotion to sacrificing their life in the service of their lord and master. Such service is only called "love" to mask the fact that it is designed to use human beings like robots or pawns on a chess board. Yet because this "God" promises to "save" us from the worst He is willing to do to us if we fail to obey the commands issued by his church, and all to combat the snares of a devil that God could easily step on like an ant but refuses to do so, the Christian is convinced that such a "God" deserves our love and worship, exactly as he commands. That Stalin and Saddam Hussein commanded the same kind of love and worship, for the same reasons and with the same kinds of threats, doesn't appear to matter to the Christian in the least, because Stalin and Hussein were just men, while God is a God, and the difference transforms what the Christian will be the first to describe as pure evil into what the Christian then insists is pure virtue; thus illustrating the miraculous power of a confirmation bias to transform water into wine. And according to the Christian Bible, anyone who says otherwise deserves to be thrown in God's eternal gulags. Indeed, this double standard is what allows the Christian to see a rainbow as God's promise not to waterboard humanity off the planet ever again, while for non-Christians, it is simply a reminder of God's willingness to kill us all for simply being exactly what he "intelligently designed" us to be: beings capable of thinking for ourselves who not only dare to question those who claim to know more than everyone else on the planet about an infinite abstraction based on an undefinable word like "God," but who receive as much of an endorphin reward in their brain for doing so as the Christian receives in their own brain for refusing to do so. And this God the Christian claims we are all required to "believe in" to save ourselves from his eternal torture chamber of hell, who needs humans to convince other humans that he is real because he chooses to cloak himself in the guise of something that does not exist at all, proves how much he cares about all of us by simply sitting back and watching us all kill each other in the name of peace and love.
Believing in such a "God" - one that commands us to "believe" in him under the threat of eternal tortures for failing to do so, even though He is committed to using his power to avoid all direct human detection and only ever provides us with wholly ambiguous evidence that he exists, and mostly in the form of what Christians simply choose to label as "miracles," which are always things that - let's be honest - any reasonable person can clearly see are debatable at best; a god who requires human sacrifice to be appeased for people's lack of "belief" in one brand of religion or another (even though that "God" never clearly tells us which brand he requires us to subscribe to for him to finally choose to STOP being so angry at us all the time); and who commands total belief and obedience in how you think and behave, despite having designed us with both the ability and an overwhelming desire to doubt and think for ourselves - is not only a form of emotional extortion, it is also a form of psychological and emotional abuse masquerading as "love," and the pretension that a big enough bundle of contradictions somehow makes perfect sense. Indeed, it was this very same elixir of contradictory ideas that allowed Charles Manson to convince his "family members" to go on his own private crusade for Manson in order to prove their love for him, and has only ever turned every Dr. Jekyll into a Mr. Hyde.
It apparently never occurs to someone who claims to "love" such a God that the very fact this God feels a need, or even just the desire, to command people to "love him," while threatening those who refuse to do so with being thrown into an eternal torture chamber, and promising those that do they will be rewarded with an eternal paradise of pleasures, is all the evidence you need to conclude that such a God is no different than Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot. Anyone worthy of love, after all, would certainly never feel the need to "command" people to "love them," let alone feel the need to ever threaten people with torments or promises of paradise beyond compare. Any mother or father who commanded such love from their own children through the use of such threats and bribes - let alone who used such tactics on the family dog, or their goldfish, or even their bedbugs - would be considered completely insane. Loving a God despite that God's reliance on such tactics can never ever be considered the beginning of wisdom, because it requires us to pretend our fear of such a God has nothing to do whatsoever with our claims to "love" such a God. As the famed Scoopes Monkey Trail attorney Clarence Darrow pointed out, such a fear is always "the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt (as well as curiosity, wonder, and awe), lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom." From Aristotle to Einstein and beyond, all wisdom comes from the ability and the willingness to question, while all ignorance comes from a fear of doing so, or a hope for a reward for one's obedience to those who claim that questioning their authority is a sin against God himself.
What makes such a fear so evil is that coercing conformity and obedience to a church through the threat of damnation, only serves to subordinate a person's desire or need to "know thyself," replacing it instead with a need to know only what one's religion has to say about the "God" that threatens us with eternal damnation, so that we can best learn what we need to do and how we need to think in order to avoid that damnation. But the relationship we have with ourselves, and especially with knowing and loving ourselves without fear, prejudice, or judgement, which religion makes only all the more difficult, serves as the template that we rely on for all other relationships. In fact, the judgement we lord over ourselves is what bars us more than anything else from ever actually knowing ourselves at all. That's why Aristotle said that “knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” The problem, as Thales pointed out, is that, thanks to the lens of judgements with which we are taught look at ourselves, knowing yourself is the most difficult thing a person can ever do. In fact, Jesus saying "the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), is simply his way of expressing the moral obligation one has to "know thyself." Even the idea of Jesus dying and descending into Hades for three days before rising again, can be interpreted as illustrating the importance of knowing thyself because, as Immanuel Kant observed, "only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness." Carl Jung expressed the same idea when he observed that "who looks outside, sleeps; who looks inside, awakes." And Jesus differentiated himself from those who followed the Sanhedrin because they looked to their religious leaders for guidance, while Jesus followed his own heart. To follow Jesus, as such, is to have the courage to stand against a crowd of "believers" and strive to "know thyself," and then have the courage to follow what you find. And like Jesus, so all of these men were expressing the idea that only through self knowledge can one ever be free. For as Ghilil Gibran pointed out, "Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge." And without such knowledge, a person can never truly know what governs their actions, and is therefore a slave of their own ignorance.
While providing guidance is a necessary part of raising a child, fostering in a child, or anyone, a need for lifelong dependence upon others, and a need to focus one's attentions on always trying to know a "God" that can never be known because such a word can never be defined in the first place, is the greatest evil of all, as Jiddhu Krishnamurti concluded. And it is, because it not only distracts a person with a fearful need to chase after an understanding of a phantasm in order to save oneself from damnation, it also robs a person of both the greatest treasure at their disposal and their own responsibility to mine that treasure for the ore of wisdom needed to understand everything and everyone else. That treasure, of course, is oneself, without false gods before us in the guise of the gods offered by institutional religions; all of which, as the theologian Paul Tillich pointed out, are inherently demonic. And they are because they are run by mere mortal men who seek god-like power over others, and do so while pretending they speak for such a God, just like the serpent did in the Garden of Eden. It is not a mere coincidence that Jesus referred to the temple elders as "vipers," after all, nor that he never felt the need to convert anyone to his brand of religion. Such vipers teach us to accept the unsubstantiated premise that people are inherently evil to begin with and need to be broken from their penchant for such evil, which means their penchant for questioning such men. It is this, and not a God, that gives those men all of their power and position. To accept that their "God" created us as sinners, however, is to accept that God created us with a greater desire to engage in evil than altruism, even though he could've designed us the other way around, and then decided to employ any number of tactics from sacraments to fear of hell and hope of heaven, to see who He could coerce into operating against how they were spiritually designed. Such a "belief" not only leads us to wonder how such a God could ever therefore be considered "good," since it equates God with being no better at creating human beings than Dr. Frankenstein, it also leads people to only strive to avoid oneself, since we are simply sinners after all, out of a preference for needing to know God instead, so He will save us from our sinful selves. Yet Christianity wants us to worship and love a God that makes us born sinners anyway, even though that God only forgives us for being what he created us to be by slaughtering his son instead of us, even though his son was innocent of the sins we are born deserving to be crucified for, while the devil continues to go Scott-free, doing his very worst whenever and wherever he likes.
When Jesus later says, 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind," is a commandment to use our mind to only strive to know God, and not ourselves. But the fact that God established a Church and a religion means that God has given the most important knowledge of Himself exclusively to the ministers of that Church and that religion, to which all others must go in order to obtain such knowledge to save themselves from being thrown into hell. But this is the very opposite of trying to "know thyself," because as the writer Charles Bukowski put it, "obedience to another is the decay of self. For though every being is similar, each being is also different, and to herd our differences under one law degrades each self." And through this degrading process, the creative process that can only be born out of striving to know thyself is crucified on a cross of obedience to those ministers whose job it is to tell us who we need to believe we are in order to be judged worthy of salvation. For a man who is purchased by another man has no freedom to be who he wants to be, because he must instead strive to be whatever and whoever it is his master bought him to be.
It is one thing to seek and follow the advice of another, but it is a wholly different thing to think one must rely on another to instruct them on what and how to think about life's biggest questions, for their whole life, especially when deferring to someone else's thinking is done out of fear that failing to do so could earn a person a trip to a torture chamber from which they can never escape. And refusing to rely on oneself to decide for oneself what one really thinks about things, and why, is to reject any desire to truly know thyself, and why someone believes what they do, and whether such beliefs are truly helping or hurting such a person. And the rejection to know thyself by thinking for oneself is a supreme form of disrespect toward whatever forces were responsible for creating us with the capacity to think for oneself so that we might enter the kingdom of God through no other door than the one that requires us to know thyself.
What most people failed to understand about the importance of the need to "know thyself" is that such a maxim is only half the story. And that's because human beings were not born to be hermits, but to be socially connected to each other. This is why the greatest gift we can give to others is to first heal ourselves, which we can only do if we are brave enough to know the child that cowers away behind the ego we have manufactured for ourselves and wear like a suit of armor. In fact, as Daniel Goleman details in his book Social Intelligence, we are even neurologically hardwired for social connection with others. And because we are, the other half of the story comes in the form of what is famously known as "the Golden Rule." Based on the universality of empathy, it is the simplest rule or definition conceivable for all moral behavior. It has been found to have been expressed as far back as ancient Egypt and India, Greece, Persia, Rome, China, Africa, basically everywhere, by everyone, for as long as anyone can remember. Jesus Christ is probably the most famous person to have uttered it, but he was by no means the first or the only one to do so. That rule was "do unto others as you would have others do unto you." But we can only know how to follow the Golden Rule after we have accessed "the beginning of all wisdom" by getting to "know thyself." For only when we know our own darkness well, as Perma Chodron put it, "can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes possible only when we recognize our shared humanity." So when Jesus said that "the kingdom of God is within you," he was simply pointing out what Chodron was explaining, and both were observing why it is so important to strive to truly "know" ourselves, and why we think and believe the things we do. He was telling us, in other words, that the door to that kingdom is ourselves. And the only way to open that door is by truly knowing thyself, since "thyself" is the only thing each of us has exclusive access to, as if we are the kings and queens of the kingdoms that is our own minds, which is both our most living gospel and our truest church, given to us from a God or whatever you wish to call whatever led us to be here at all. The problem, however, is that Christianity makes following or even understanding these rules impossible. Notice how ideas offered by the Christian religion invite us to become psychopaths for our brand of God. On the one hand, the eternal tortures Christianity teaches children to believe will be inflicted on those in hell requires a willingness of those who expect to go to heaven to have no empathy or sympathy for who God decides to torture for all eternity, even though such eternal torture is no different from the suffering inflicted by the BTK killer on his victims. The "saved" are not only saved from such suffering, they are even saved from having to listen to their shrieks of agony or think about anyone who is being tortured for all eternity by the very God they claim to "love," even if it happens to be their own children being tortured for all eternity by that very same God. Worse, the same parents who teach their own children to believe they could be roasted for all eternity think this actually makes their children feel more love for and from such a God, and is necessary for ensuring the child will be able to not only control their own sexual urges, but also finally understand what life is really all about. And what's life really all about? It is about battling a fear of hell with the hope that God loves you enough to spare you such eternal agonies, and expecting that the result of such a process will somehow dramatically improve the child in every way, shape, and form. And the only evidence the parents who teach their children such ideas have that such "beliefs" do just that is that they simply choose to believe they do, which they prove is true by devoting themselves to rejecting any evidence that says otherwise as being simply false.
On the other hand, the possibility of hell and heaven, rather than making people more moral, only teaches them that threats and bribes can be, like training a dog to fetch a stick or poop outside, incredibly effective ways of overriding a person's free will by coercing and conditioning them into engaging in desired forms of thinking and behavior. Indeed, this was the whole point of the "thought-police" in George Orwell's 1984. Like the use of torture and terror depicted in 1984, so "witch trials" and Inquisitions were also more about keeping "believers" terrified of being accused of being a witch or a heretic than actually caring if someone was, in fact, a witch or a heretic, or if such things as "witches" and "heretics" were even real things, or just useful figments of our imagination for those who like to control other people. For the atheist, doing unto others as you'd have others do unto you means letting people live their lives as they wish as long as they are not hurting others, even if they choose to be a witch or a heretic, because you only get one life and when it's over, it's over. Besides, if there IS a God, doesn't he just give everyone their just deserves when its all said and done? The fear a Christian has of God, from this perspective, is that God will punish them for NOT trying to convert others to their brand of religion. And this is because the Christian is committed to a belief that your life is most definitely NOT your own, for it belongs to their "lord and savior" Jesus Christ, purchased by his blood sacrifice, and that any "witch" therefore deserves no more mercy or acceptance from the Christian than the devil himself can expect mercy or acceptance from the Christian God. And because the Christian belongs to said God, they can only save themselves from being thrown into hell by fearing all those their religion tells them will eventually be thrown into hell.
Like a divine Oscar Schindler, Jesus was trying to "save" Christians through his bloody purchase. From what? From both God's greatest henchman in the form of the devil (the same devil that God never seems to punish or even fine, but seems instead to only ever reward), and the eternal torture chamber of a hell hotter than the ovens at Auschwitz in the afterlife that God built and maintains in tip-top working order, and all for failing to properly "obey" and "believe" what God's "church" declares you must "believe." As a result of this "belief," the Christian thinks this life is simply a proving-ground for whether someone deserves to be thrown into those ovens for their refusal to "obey," or receive eternal pleasures for their unquestioned obedience. This "belief" that these two options are the only options available to us in the next life, even though the Christian has no evidence nor any ability to demonstrate such a "belief" to be anything other than a form of paranoia and wishful thinking, is not only amounts to seeing the entire universe as designed to be nothing more than an operant environment in which God is seeing how effecting he can be at conditioning people into using their free will to voluntarily act like robots for one brand of religion over all others, it is also what convinces the Christian that it is their duty to convert the world to their way of thinking. They are also quite convinced that it is far better that they be crucified for their faith, or even burned at the stake as a witch or a heretic, than ever admit that they or their religion could ever be wrong, even though that religion has admitted it has been wrong about everything from heliocentrism to slavery. But such complete devotion to a brand of religion is the very opposite of actually exercising a responsibility to "know thyself."
For the atheist, thinking this way is pure hubris and insanity, while the Christian feels they are completely justified in feeling deeply offended by anyone interpreting their "beliefs" as anything less than infallible truth. No wonder its so difficult for these two perspectives to live together in harmony, because the latter truly believes the former deserves to burn in hell for all eternity, and is scared to death that such "sinners" may end up dragging them to hell along with them. No one in that state of mind, who truly believes that hell awaits those who fail to obey the dictates handed down by their own brand of God, church, or religion, can be truly peaceful and loving, if they believe their acceptance or even tolerance of those different from themselves could end up earning them a one way ticket to hell.
And this is what makes the Christian "belief" in a God and an afterlife that consists of only heaven and hell so problematic with regards to morality, and also so traumatizing for a child operating with a mind governed mostly by their emotional brain. On the one hand, if such a child ever reads the Bible itself, it is chalked full of language explicitly calling for vicious acts of violence for the Christian God, even toward children and infants. In Deuteronomy 21:20–21, for example, it says of a Rebellious Son,
18 If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, 19 his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. 20 They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” 21 Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.
In other passages, we see
Psalms 137:9 - Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
Numbers 31:17 - Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
Isaiah 13:16 - Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.
Naturally, the Christian denies that these passages mean exactly what they say. Yet even if we accept the claim that these passages mean something entirely different from what they so plainly say, that does not change the fact that any child able to read such passages for themselves would be traumatized by them, regardless of any attempt to insist that, although clearly ordered by the same "God" the child is required to love and obey on pain of eternal torments, such passages don't really matter anymore, even if a healthy and mandatory fear of hell still does.
Imposing such ideas on a child can only cause a child grave stress. This is especially true when the child feels they must believe in the very things that scare them the most just to be accepted and approved of by their own parents. Think about that: a child is taught they must "believe" in the existence of things that scare them the most - like a devil or a hell or a God that threatens to throw the child in hell for failing to obey His commands - just to feel accepted and approved of by the very parents they rely on for their survival. And this is what brings us to the other hand of how such ideas are so problematic for morality and traumatizing for a child emotional. Both wreak havoc on our two most basic needs.
As Dr. Gabor Mate pointed out, humans have basically two needs: attachment and authenticity. And we tend to form an emotional attachment most to those who give us the greatest freedom to be our most authentic selves, which we can only do by striving to truly "know thyself." Religion overrides the virtue of genuine authenticity, however, by requiring people to strive to only know God, and thereby "believe" and "behave" in ways dictated by their religion, of which heaven and hell are but a bride and a threat designed to coerce the "right" kinds of beliefs and behaviors religion desires. These bribes and rewards are necessary to alter a person's natural and thus "authentic" nature into being what their religion claims they need to become to save themselves from hell or even having their own children "dashed against the stones." As Mate further points out: "when authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity." When this happens, we end up forming an "attachment" that is more of a trauma bond in pursuit of approval. And after doing this over the course of our whole life, we can become convinced that the "behavior" and "beliefs" we are engaging in and defending are actually our "authentic" selves, even if they are simply conditioned responses to growing up in a house where our own parents conditioned us to conflate their approval with a love of God.
Watch the movie, Dead Poets Society with Robin Williams, and we see how a child's authenticity can be trumped by that child's need for attachment and approval. This occurs when a child at a boarding school is being forced by his own father to become a doctor, even though the child really wants to become an actor. Conversion Therapy, in which homosexuals are "reeducated" into wanting to be "straight for God," also operates on the premise that being approved of by God (which really means being approved of by a brand of religion that claims to be operating in God's stead) is always better, and certainly a safer bet given the option of heaven and hell, than operating according to what one may feel or "believe" to be their authentic self. For the homosexual, so Christianity has long taught its believers, what feels like authenticity is actually from the devil, deserving of hell, while approval, in contrast, comes from "God," and thus deserves to be rewarded with heaven. From this perspective, God nuking Sodom and Gomorrah is preferable than that God should simply allow the homosexuals living in those cities, even if they were the only ones bothering to take care of orphaned children or sick and elderly widows, to actually use their "free will" to live as freely as they wish only to end up in hell for all eternity by having done so. Again, this was the very same reasoning that served as the basis of burning both heretics and witches. So what the hell then is the point of "free will" if this is the case? This conflict can be summed up this way: "Do I live my life according to my own deepest truth," as Mate explains, "or in order to fulfill someone else's expectations? How much of what I have believed and done is actually my own and how much has been in the service to a self-image I originally created (or was conditioned to create) in the belief that it was necessary to please my parents (and my religion and the concepts of "God" as defined by my religion)?"
In The Myth of Normal, Gabor Mate points out that most trauma is pre-verbal. This means two things. The first is that the trauma that occurs to a child when, while they are relying on their emotional brain, are forced to choose attachment over authenticity happens long before the child is able to articulate an objection to having to sacrifice the latter on the alter of the former, and all in order to conform to the religious requirements of their parents. The second is that the trauma suffered by a child, from physical to emotional and psychological, resides in the "unconscious" non-verbal part of a child’s developing emotional brain. When Christian writer C. S. Lewis described hell as "a place where the door is locked from the inside," he may not have realized that the locked room he was referring to just happened to be our own mind. For Carl Jung, it was these unconscious experiences that needed to be dragged into the light of our consciousness, so that we could see that what we had been calling fate was really our own underlying trauma. As Jung went on to explain, in our unconscious, our traumas can then operate like an invisible Dr. Frankenstein assembling together our experiences into monsters that haunt us from the graveyard of our subconscious memories. Those monsters eventually come to life in the form of what Jung called "the shadow." (Jung's idea of "the shadow" fascinated me with how priests dress in black like a shadow, with a white collar that looks like where you would attach a leash to a dog.)
The shadow, according to Jung, is the uncivilized or primitive side of our nature. We all have a shadow self. It is generally made up of the parts of ourselves we deem unacceptable. He described it as "the unconscious part of our character or personality that does not align with the ideal version of what we're aiming for." And where do Christians get the "ideal version" of what they're aiming for? They get it from their priests, as those priests interpret the character of Jesus Christ in their version of the Bible. However subjective the priests version of both their Bible and their own interpretation of that Bible, the problem is that measuring oneself by such a character leads us to measure ourselves by the standards of a man who was also an immortal, all-powerful and all-knowing God, which is the only reason he knew fully well that he could just rise from the dead as easily as he could re-inhabit the flesh puppet he had been driving around like an avatar in a video game. Put another way, the shadow is comprised of repressed desires that often end up that way because religion leads us as children to believe that repressing our desires is the best and only way to prevent ourselves from morphing from the Dr. Jekyll religion claims to be turning us into, from the Mr. Hyde we were born to be. And however useful such a perspective may be to a child that lacks a fully formed neocortex with which to regulate their own raging hormones, it conditions that child to NOT put away such a child like dependence once they become an adult. But as John Steinbeck wrote, it is only once we have removed the need to be perfect that we can ever actually learn to be good, because we can only learn to be good by accepting that being human is enough. And when we need eternity to compensate us for how we lived this life repressing so many of our own desires, living thus in fear of our true selves for fear our true self will cost us an eternal reward, it is impossible to practice gratitude for just being alive in the finite way we are. Paradise, by comparison, is an expectation that exercising such repression is the one thing that will one day allow us to graduate from this life into an afterlife where we will finally get to be like a God and live forever.
Yet Christianity wants everyone to believe that they deserve to end up in heaven or hell because they are operating with free will. Read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van de Kolk, When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate, or any of a growing number of other books about trauma, and you quickly discover that the Christian claim to “free will,” while not always entirely false, is also nowhere near as absolute as Christians choose to "believe" it is. In fact, it is an essential part of convincing a person who is dependent upon their beliefs for their emotional security that they deserve to be compensated for continuing to always do so with eternal life. In addition to the threat of hell operating as a form of extortion and heaven operating as a bribe, however, trauma - especially prolonged trauma that can result in complex-PTSD, which highly sensitive children are more susceptible to - operates under the surface of conscious awareness, rewiring our brains and triggering our nervous system to react in ways that lead us to make choices based on emotional responses, even when we tell ourselves our choices are freely our own. And because they do, Jung explained how such underlying unconscious experiences could control us, saying "until we make the unconscious conscious, it will control our lives and we will call it fate." For the Christian child, the choices they have to choose are never perfectly free because they are always gilded with fear of hell and hope in heaven, and they are taught to trust in the efficacy of sacred stories told by their religion to save them from the former and guide them safely to the latter; where they can live happily ever after in the clouds above.
By relying on the behavioral modification techniques offered by religion to condition responses, using fear of retribution for the bad behavior of seeking one's own authenticity and reward for the "good behavior" of conformity and obedience, the unconditional “love” a parent naturally has for their child is modified (or, if such love is absent to begin with, is simply replaced) to reflect a conditional form of acceptance and approval, based on whether the child conforms to the parents religious parameters, in not just what they do but also in what they profess to “believe.” As a result, the natural bond that exists between the child and their parents at birth, which serves as the emotional umbilical cord that nurtures the child’s sense of self-love, is replaced with a trauma-bond, which acts like a spiritual leash held by religious leaders. Because the relationship a child develops with their parents often serves as the template for all other relationships the child develops, the trauma-bond that forms from the child being forced to earn approval through their behavior can lead the child to live in constant judgement of them self from then on. And the only one they are taught to believe who will accept them with all their sinful flaws is, of course, Jesus, without whom they are taught to see themselves as unloved, unaccepted, and even unworthy.
Such modification techniques not only contribute to traumatizing a child through fear, but in doing so, solidify a child in their attachment and dependence upon their religion. As Scott Kiloby pointed out, "needing to be right has more to do with emotion than thought. Being wrong feels unsafe to the nervous system." This is especially true when someone has been conditioned to "fear God" as much as fearing rejection, and to see both as a virtue. "The way out, Kiloby explains, is through the fear. The result is that the child becomes addicted to their religion in the very same way a person can become addicted to a drug or to gambling. The threat of hell keeps that addiction in place, while the idea of "free will" convinces the child they are "freely" choosing to maintain their beliefs, even if they are completely emotionally dependent upon those beliefs. Yet it is only when we feel safe enough to feel our emotions that we can begin to understand what they really are and where they really come from - not from a God who wants sycophantic devotion, but from a religion that needs an army of sycophantic "believers" who will defend that religion even with their own life. As such, the spiritual "ego" the "believer" then constructs and becomes dependent on for protection and survival is actually part of their "false self." That "false self" or "ego" becomes the thing that allows us to hide our emotional repression from childhood developmental trauma, from both ourselves and everyone else. "Emotional repression is not felt in the body as emotion. It's repressed. You'll see it in relationship as responses and reactions (or lack thereof) as you hold back or hide parts of yourself to get attention, love, approval or safety from others."
In his 1960 book The Divided Self, psychiatrist R. D. Laing explored ideas about how the process of creating a "false self" that seeks attachment results in part of us breaking away from a true self that seeks to find authenticity. This results in the mind becoming a "divided house" that cannot stand without the crutch of a religion. For Laing, this divided self can only resut in fostering psychosis, because it creates a tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, 'sane' self that we present to the world in our search for approval to maintain a precarious hold on attachment. The outsider, estranged from himself and society, cannot experience either himself or others as ‘real,’ rendering it impossible to ever therefore "know theyself," or access the kingdom of God that dwells with us. Instead, we invent a false self and with it we confronts both the outside world and our own despair. And we then equate our despair with our cross, and that of our savior, Jesus on the cross. The disintegration of our real self then keeps pace with the growing unreality of our false self until, in the extremes of schizophrenic breakdown, the whole personality disintegrates, and we return to be like newborn infants who are fully dependent upon our mother and father, or our nuns and priests. In his book 1956 book, Primitive Christianity, German theologian Rudolf Buitmann gives an excellent short account of the Gnostic ideal of this divorce between what he calls our soul (the real self) and our body (the false-self, or what Stephen King called in his in book The Shining the "false face"), or between who it is we see ourselves to be and who we think others expect us to be. Buitmann describes the "false self" as the "coffin we drag around with ourselves inside of it." Jung described overcoming this by first recognizing that "the adversary is none other than ‘the other in me.’” For the Gnostics, as Buitmann explains, redemption was conceived of as a total union of these two opposing faces, one of soul (our inner child and true face) and the other of body (our outer adult and “false-face”). Ironically, the "believers" who seek to gaslight others into believing they are born with and suffer from a spiritual cancer known as "the stain of original sin" actually split the atom of a person's soul in tow, creating thse warring camps. They then conclude that anyone who suggests the "believer" is actually suffering from repressed developmental trauma that has addicted them to their brand of religion as a form of approval seeking being conflated for a love of their God, is in fact trying to gaslight the believer with "stories" dreamed up by the devil, with the "devil" in this case being scientific investigation into the soul that frees us from a dependence upon a religion. Like religion rejecting the scientific findings of the solar system, as well as ideas about slavery, when science reveals something about the soul/mind of humans that conflicts with what religion claims to have to only authority to speak about, religion naturally claims such a perspective could only come from the "devil." Jesus, of course, was the devil to the institutional religion of his own time.
TRAUMA BONDING or STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
Trauma bonding, which is also known as Stockholm Syndrome, describes a deep bond which forms between a victim and their abuser. Victims of abuse often develop a strong sense of loyalty towards their abuser, despite the fact that the bond is damaging to them. St. Augustine discovered this was true after implementing torture of those who did not believe in his extremely intolerable brand of Catholicism as he required. The strong bond such victims later developed for Augustine’s Roman brand of Catholicism led Augustine to prefer using torture as the most effective means of converting people to his brand of religion.
According to Wikipedia, “trauma bonds (also referred to as traumatic bonds) is a term developed by Patrick Carnes to describe emotional bonds with an individual (and sometimes, with a group) that arise from a recurring, cyclical pattern of abuse perpetuated by intermittent reinforcement through rewards and punishments. The process of forming trauma bonds is referred to as trauma bonding or traumatic bonding. A trauma bond usually involves a victim and a perpetrator in a uni-directional relationship wherein the victim forms an emotional bond with the perpetrator. This can also be conceptualized as a dominated-dominator or an abused-abuser dynamic. Two main factors are involved in the establishment of a trauma bond: a power imbalance and intermittent reinforcement of good and bad treatment, or reward and punishment. Trauma bonding can occur in the realms of romantic relationships, platonic friendships, parent-child relationships, incestuous relationships, cults, hostage situations, manager vs their direct reports, sex trafficking (especially that of minors), or tours of duty among military personnel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding)
Because the child is subject to a power imbalance and intermittent reinforcement of good and bad treatment, reward and punishment, and all long before that child’s brain ever develops its rational brain with which to defend itself, Christianity cultivates a form of trauma bonding, in both the parent-child relationship and in the child’s relationship to their religion. Clearly, the God of the Christian faith, who requires the bloody human sacrifice of his own son to assuage his desire to cast humanity on the whole into the eternal fires of Hades, constitutes a form of dominated-dominator or an abused-abuser dynamic. For Christians, this would only apply to a cult, which they insist their own religion is not. But the only difference between a cult and a religion is time. A religion is simply an old cult, while a cult is a new religion or religious movement within an old religion. Jesus and his apostles were simply a cult within the Judaism of their day, no different than Branch Davidians or Heaven’s Gate.
Unbeknownst to a child, the emotional reaction they are conditioned to have toward ideas that their religion equates with grave sins against God, like having sex outside of wedlock (which sounds like a prison door being locked behind a person after they enter), are not evidence of objective truths about whether sex outside of wedlock is an even more sinful and unnatural act than a man who devotes himself to an immaterial "logos" (i.e., idea) by living his life like a eunuch. Instead, far from being something any child is born with, such reactions are conditioned responses to a religious programing that teaches the child to equate such an idea with eternal rejection and eternal suffering. By doing this, the child becomes addicted to an “emotional truth,” while the religion conflates this emotional truth with being an intellectual truth. Religion does this by mixing the child’s emotional truth with the fact that, if they fail to continue to “believe” such a truth, they will be rejected and cast down into that group of sodomites known as "one of them." God forbid.
So, from birth, the butterfly of the belief that we are guilty of original sin grows into a hurricane of self-doubts that can leave the child, decades later, suffering from a condition known as Religious Trauma Syndrome, or RTS. As Marlene Winell explains on her webpage,https://www.journeyfree.org/rts/, RTS "is the condition experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination. They may be going through the shattering of a personally meaningful faith and/or breaking away from a controlling community and lifestyle. It can be compared to a combination of PTSD and Complex PTSD (C-PTSD.)"Such trauma becomes the "invisible hand" in our unconscious mind that repeatedly stabs our desires in the back with a long blade of self-doubt, like Norman Bates stabbing Janet Leigh in "Psycho." And to disarm that doubt, we have to pluck out the thorny seed of that self doubt which was planted there when we were taught to believe were we born sinners. For only then can we rise above what our brand of "faith" requires us to believe is simply the hand of fate, but ain't.
In a reply on Quora.com, Doug Robertson does a masterful job of deconstructing how the fostering of this kind of emotional manipulation is used to create a feedback-loop inside of which a "believer" becomes, like Danny Torrance with the Grady Twins in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," trapped in a repeating pattern "forever and ever and ever." As Robertson points out, "The entire process is not what you think it is. It is specifically designed to be uncomfortable for the other person because it isn’t about converting them to your religion. It is about manipulating you so you can’t leave yours. If this tactic was about converting people it would be considered a horrible failure. It recruits almost no one who isn’t already willing to join. Bake sales are more effective recruiting tools." He goes on to explain how the process is designed to make the person feel increasingly alienated from society, enabling that person to increasingly identify their social rejection with the protagonist of the Christian story, while also allowing the loneliness such rejection produces to strengthen a need for, and thus bond with, the "us" group who "understands" what it feels like to be as rejected as Jesus Christ himself.
As he continues here: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-get-angry-when-I-try-to-share-the-word-of-God-with-them-I-only-do-it-because-I-care-about-them-deeply-and-don-t-want-them-to-end-up-in-hell-I-feel-like-some-people-avoid-me-because-of-this-Is-there-any/answer/Doug-Robertson-3?ch=10&share=db2c299f&srid=Iifl
On the other hand, it is extremely effective at creating a deep tribal feeling among its own members. The rejection they receive is actually more important than the few people they convert. It causes them to feel a level of discomfort around the people they attempt to talk to. These become the “others”. These uncomfortable feelings go away when they come back to their congregation, the “Tribe”. If you take a good look at the process it becomes fairly clear. In most cases, the religious person starts out from their own group, who is encouraging and supportive. They are then sent out into the harsh world where people repeatedly reject them. Mainly because they are trained to be so annoying. These brave witnesses then return from the cruel world to their congregation where they are treated like returning heroes. They are now safe. They bond as they share their experiences of reaching out to the godless people to bring them the truth. They share the otherness they experience. Once again they will learn that the only place they are accepted is with the people who think as they do. It isn’t safe to leave the group. The world is your enemy, but we love you. This is a pain reward cycle that is a common brainwashing technique. The participants become more and more reliant on the “Tribe” because they know that “others” reject them. Mix in some ritualized chanting, possibly a bit of monotonous repetition of instructions, add a dash of fear of judgment by an unseen, but all-powerful entity who loves you if you do as you are told and you get a pretty powerful mix.
And Christians do all of this because, as the song goes, and as they are convinced about themselves, "No body knows, the trouble I've seen, ..."
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