From my Substack
The easiest way in the world to obtain a clear conscience is to pray to an invisible being, ask for forgiveness and based on what you’ve been told by other people throughout your life, obtain that forgiveness through those prayers.
What did it cost? Nothing. You did not have to face your accusers. You did not have to be judged by a jury of your peers. You were not punished (in this life). You simply stated your sins and you were forgiven. *poof* Objective Achieved!
Bypass therapy. Bypass apologies. Bypass other human interactions. Just between you and your creator, have a chat that no one else will hear and obtain absolution because you did what you were told to do. Pray.
I’ve been rather agnostic for most of my adult life. I come from a background of attending a church that was more of a cult than it was a religion. Yes, it was based on the bible, however, the lessons taught from that bible were cherry picked to scare people (especially kids) to the point of bowing down to the doctrine out of sheer terror. As a friend recently pointed out to me, this “church” had a school for children and on the year book cover was the threat of a paddle. Discipline above all else. Not love. Not education. Discipline. You will do thus and so or you will receive a paddling.
Over the years, I spent a lot of time researching the history of christianity, finding more and more evidence that the religion of worshipping a man, a jewish man, became more and more plausible as being a human construct without any background in actual spirituality.
Without a doubt, humanity needs moral guidance. Most of humanity is depraved. Humans in general are dark and immoral. The majority of humanity are sex fiends, power hungry and abundantly greedy, not to mention, unintelligent, ignorant and self serving. This lays the perfect ground work for a community to control the masses. The best way to obtain this control is through brain washing; such as what happens with religion.
I live with my demons, I live with the skeletons in my closet. I think about them from time to time. No amount of therapy (a brain fuck) or prayer (a cop out) will ever relieve me of my transgressions. I did what I did to survive life at that time. No amount of apologies or forgiveness will ever put my mind at ease over the things that haunt me. The thought of being able to “let it out” and it will “go away” is itself offensive to me. It’s offensive because of any pain I might have caused to someone else cannot be truly forgiven and probably should not be forgiven. One must live with one’s mistakes. Just because I feel bad about something I have done, does not make it right with someone else.
If you don’t remember things such as this, things that should haunt you, then you’ve already brain fucked yourself. Every person on this planet does things they’re ashamed of. Things that should haunt them forever. But if you’ve partaken of the communal fucking of the brain, you’ve forgiven yourselves already, without the victim of said infraction doing any of the forgiving.
A “god” doesn’t forgive us for something bad we’ve done. When we receive such “forgiveness”, it’s a mind fuck we play upon ourselves to make ourselves feel better going forward. It’s the way humanity has found to justify continuing on with our lives in a better mood, to outwardly show we’re ok, and we’re not ok. None of us are “ok”, we all live with demons and we’re all trying to play head games to fool ourselves that everything is just dandy.
Everything is not dandy.