Skip to main content

The Breaking Point

By Carl S ~

Is holiness sustainable? Those who really truly believe it is and therefore, really, really, try to live a holy life, are in for one hell of a lot of disappointments. The demands are too high, the road too narrow, the rewards keep backing away as one gets closer to them. We've all reaped the benefits of delayed gratification, but waiting a lifetime for rewards after we die is just asking too much, and absolutely frustrating with every bump in the roller coaster ride of our existences. The reason holiness is ignored and outright rejected is because it is anti-human. I think holiness must have a breaking point, and that if it doesn't break, something about the personality of the holy person is a strangeness nature normally aborts. I'm thinking: Just as the only type of personality which can sustain the horrors of wartime combat indefinitely without cracking up is a psychopath, so the "holy" person is also able to sustain the unending stresses of living according to religiously imposed codes of beliefs.

If there is one person who was the example of a holy person, it was my niece. Ask anyone who knew her. Self-sacrificing, generous, uncomplaining, praying and believing: the whole package. Her church must have salivated over her dedication while collecting money from her as she scrimped and saved. She found out she had the worst form of leukemia, and started going to Mass three times a day. At the time, I was myself a Catholic. Were I not, I would have recommended her remaining days be spent, just one time each day, with a lover who would give her sexual delight, rather than wasted on the bum of a husband she remained faithful to according to her faith's doctrine. She was a pretty woman who deserved loving.

After less than a year (if we are to follow her church's doctrine), she died from the disease her savior gave her. She was 44 years old. In her lifetime, any pedophile priests who she confessed her "sins" to so that she could receive Jesus in the communion wafer with a clean conscience, were anally penetrating little children. Her Catholic friends will tell you she's receiving her heavenly reward; I say the hell with that b.s. No offense meant, but martyrs bore me. As a famous psychologist once noted, "Saints belong in heaven; no one on earth can stand them."

Still, I confess, I almost became one of those sacrificial living martyrs myself. I was a teen who bought into that "give up all and follow me" propaganda. I "loved Jesus.'' Gradually, I wised up, and it really hurt. The best way I can describe this is by quoting from one of my favorite movies, "Dodsworth." I identified with the title character, whose marital situation came to mirror my own. I repeated his words to my then-wife of nearly three decades, after I found out about her sleep overs at her boyfriend's place, and came to realize she no longer cared about me. He said that love has to stop before it becomes suicide. She was not the person I always thought she was, and that made me mature faster than I ever expected to.

I should have learned from my prior experience, my "relationship with Jesus." It was about the time my oldest brother raved about a book called "This Tremendous Lover," namely, Jesus. Now I wonder about that: my brother was gay. Did those priests who created and encouraged my relationship with this "person" know it was all make-believe? I think they did, and when my abandonment by this "person" became all too obvious, they had to cold-shoulder me rather than confront that their years of dedication to "him" was wishful thinking and hope.

Hope, promoted in sentimental pop culture, is "the thing with wings." But hope is also the thing that makes chains bearable. If history teaches one lesson, it is that humans are willing to tolerate tremendous amounts of intolerance and injustice if they are constantly told what they want to hear. Slaves were told their heavenly rewards would be great. Peasants were promised the same. Humans do tolerate adulterous pastors, high clergy who exploit their worst fears, clergy who their take away their children and back-breaking labors, not only out of fear of confronting them, but because they want to hear what they want to believe. Those who rebelled found the hope promised by religion isn't just wishful thinking. Religious hope is a slow-acting poison.

Frederick Douglas wrote:
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you will have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."

Revolutions, whether social or personal, are breaking points. The poison of hope and the illusion of change have limits. No amount of hearing what they wanted to hear would keep the disillusioned from rebelling, would stop the amount of water the dam could no longer hold. Organized religion holds its power over the masses, or individuals like you, by telling them what they want to believe and what they must hope for. Like a beautiful spouse or a promising savior, it tears your heart out when its adulterous betrayals are discovered, and hope dies when the promises are revealed as lies. Sentimental pop culture tells you what you want to hear: it says, "Love, forever." Reality teaches that love too, can die. This includes love for God or Jesus, or any of the other equally imaginary gods. If you still believe in them, well then you're believing in what you prefer to believe in your mind.

But when it's over, it's over. You can pretend otherwise, but then it's like carrying around a dead fetus inside you. The rest of the world may not see the difference in your appearance or daily manners, but you know it, and it's unhealthy. I never thought about how it would be when my illusions about the love of God would die inside me, and then it happened to me. All that effort expended in loving the unseen, only to have it end in a spontaneous abortion! When it happens in a woman's pregnancy, people say, "That means it was never meant to be." They say pretty much the same about an aborted love relationship. The death of illusions is part of life experiences, useful lessons urging you to be more careful who you love the next time. I found a replacement for the one I loved, the one who disillusioned me so thoroughly, and love happened to us together. And I refuse to pretend to carry within me the stillborn god I am told exists.

Relationships change. I read a magazine article about wives discussing their husbands. What they found is that the positive "attributes" that attracted them to marry those men had become, over time, deficits, even negatives. The originally "ambitious" were described as, "He has no time for me. All he wants to do is work." The originally "attentive" is now, "A nuisance. He drives me crazy waiting on me." Over time, "Assertive" has become, "Demanding. Pushy. Selfish." Of course we're all familiar with, "he made me laugh so much...", which becomes, "If I hear that joke one more time..." And holy men are such a bore that you wonder how their spouses deal with them. (Maybe it's one reason some clerics’ wives let's them be unfaithful: it proves he's at least capable of passion.)

So, I'm going to say that the golden glow of Jesus, which attracts so many to Jesus in the first place, fades fast when there's no response from him, and one finds out what a cad he really was by reading the scriptures. Just like love dying short of suicide, keeping up even the appearance of loving him becomes an onerous burden. And listening to others praising him is such a bore after you've lived with the real him for a while. After all, you can't even rationalize that the sex is good, because there isn't any, and he isn't leaving you anything in the upcoming divorce settlement.

As a husband or wife becomes more involved with religion, does that person invest less emotionally in his or her spouse? What if this is possible? A novel by Joyce Carole Oates, "Son of the Morning," is about a couple with one son who becomes an evangelical celebrity and the effect this has on his parent's marriage. As the mother gets increasing wrapped up in her son's mission, the commitment to her husband fades away. There is almost an element of incest humming underneath it. I don't know if any studies have been done about how marital relationships are affected by high religiosity. It would be interesting if spouses would be aware of this; those spouses who don't want to play second fiddle to "God" or "Jesus."

Holiness was such a bore. And I had it pretty bad. Now I have a wife who I adore. It's even a pleasure, with her, to be sad. To love and be loved by a real flesh and blood person - that’s a relationship.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not

On Living Virtuously

By Webmdave ~  A s a Christian, living virtuously meant living in a manner that pleased God. Pleasing god (or living virtuously) was explained as: Praying for forgiveness for sins  Accepting Christ as Savior  Frequently reading the Bible  Memorizing Bible verses Being baptized (subject to church rules)  Attending church services  Partaking of the Lord’s Supper  Tithing  Resisting temptations to lie, steal, smoke, drink, party, have lustful thoughts, have sex (outside of marriage) masturbate, etc.  Boldly sharing the Gospel of Salvation with unbelievers The list of virtuous values and expectations grew over time. Once the initial foundational values were safely under the belt, “more virtues'' were introduced. Newer introductions included (among others) harsh condemnation of “worldly” music, homosexuality and abortion Eventually the list of values grew ponderous, and these ideals were not just personal for us Christians. These virtues were used to condemn and disrespect fro