Fighting the ‘Paragon’ (ultimate example, epitome) of all monsters… a bit of autobio, Wendell Krossa
“Fighting a personal monster”, or “How monster theology works monstrously deforming influences on people”. A personal experience in religion, firsthand exposure to “bad religious ideas”.
Note, in particular, the quotes further below from psychologist Harold Ellens on how monstrous views of deity deform human consciousness and life, even dangerously so. Historian Richard Landes, among others, has also detailed the destructive outcomes of bad theology on entire societies, notably in the themes that drove/validated Marxism, Nazism, and are now shaping and validating environmental alarmism.
This is a bit of my experience of the dehumanizing dark side of an institution that most people across history have framed as ultimate Good. Through my struggle with the religious monster, I was motivated (survival desperation) to eventually discover the Palestinian sage’s stunning new theology- i.e. his insight that there is an inexpressible no conditions love behind reality and life.
That discovery shaped my subsequent life purpose- i.e. the “Daddy” thing I do on this site, telling everyone that its ultimately going to be alright, for everyone. There is no real ultimate monster.
Intro notes on a basic outline of common human story:
Joseph Campbell’s outline of the “hero’s journey or quest” illuminates some fundamental features and struggles of all human lives. Here is my paraphrase of that framework and how it appears to have worked throughout my personal life story.
As Campbell notes, we go out into life on an adventure, a journey of discovery to understand what it means to be human on this planet. To learn something and to work out the meaning and purpose of our lives.
And in our journey, we face a monster, an enemy (or multiple enemies/monsters). The enemy/monster should not be framed in terms of our fellow human beings. To focus our fight on differing others as “enemies/monsters” is to miss the real point of our quest.
Our monster may be a physical disability and struggle, or a mental/emotional problem, or some social issue. Something that we must struggle with, fight and conquer, something that we must “slay” in order to complete our hero’s quest and emerge on the other side “towering in stature as maturely human” (e.g. like a Nelson Mandela, who through his imprisonment and suffering learned the critical lessons of forgiveness and universal love).
In our battle with our monster, we become “wounded”. But a wise man, a mentor, gives us a weapon to slay our monster.
The point of our battle with a monster is that we learn lessons, we gain insights… to help others. It’s not just about us. Without suffering through the struggle with a monster, we would not learn what we should, we would not become the heroic people that we could possibly become. Without the intensely personal experience of suffering, we cannot understand and experience true empathy with suffering others. Empathy is central to authentic love, and, as much as we detest and try to avoid this, it only develops and matures through actual suffering with others.
(Insert: The discovery, two years ago, that I have “aggressive metastatic cancer” opened a whole new world of understanding of that form of suffering. As in things like the anxiety of waiting for the latest results from some monitoring test. With hope in such formerly mundane things as regular bloodwork now wrenched to the new level of life and death.)
(Another insert: As posted often here, I would recommend Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s good insight that the real battle of “good against evil” takes place “inside” every human heart. The real battles of life are not primarily the tribal battles of tribe or nation against other differing tribes and nations. The real battle of good against evil is the personal struggle against the inherited animal impulses inside each of us- i.e. notably our struggle to overcome the impulses to tribalism, domination, and punitive destruction of differing others.)
Qualifier: As stated repeatedly on this site, I am aware of more humane features in the theologies of religious traditions- i.e. features like love, mercy, grace, forgiveness, etc. But I affirm the point of Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy that such “diamonds/pearls” are distorted, deformed, and buried by the nastier features in the larger contexts of religious holy books. Hence, my conclusion that the mixing and merging of entirely contrary ideals/ideas, as in the grand Oxymoron of “Jesus Christ”, just does not work. It produces profound cognitive dissonance and confusion. The messages and central themes of Paul and Jesus are entirely contrary to one another. The now almost three-century “Search for Historical Jesus” affirms this (latest stage- “Jesus Seminar”, and “Q Wisdom Sayings” research).
Paul, with his Christ myth, short-circuited the potentially greatest liberation movement in all history. Liberation in the depths of human consciousness/subconscious from the monstrous curse of threat theology that has darkened and enslaved human minds from the beginning.
I felt the impacts of threat theology firsthand, intensely.
Becoming aware of the monster
My first encounter with what would become my monster was initiated when I was 3 years old. The psychologists are right that most memories before about 6-years of age are forgotten but some are burned into our memories. I dated this according to the time that we had lived in that particular house.
My father, a fundamentalist Christian, told me and my sisters to come into the kitchen of our early 1950s home to stand in front of the white enamel wood stove. He stood beside the stove, facing us. He tapped his finger on the heated black surface and stated threateningly, “Just like this burns your finger, so your whole body will burn in hell if you don’t follow God and our Christian religion”.
He repeatedly re-enforced the threat of that angry, destroying God throughout my rebellious 60s teen years as I rejected his religion and persisted in the stupidity of juvenile delinquency.
Example:
Around 1967 a group of us went to Seattle to purchase drugs to later return and sell in Canada. Naively, we trusted a man we met on the downtown streets of Seattle to get the drugs for us. However, he refused to let us accompany him into the house where he said the dealer lived. He then absconded through a back door with our money, leaving us fuming in a car out front. I sat there seething in the memory of my Dad’s persistent warnings, “God is going to get you”. The retaliatory, punitive monster hovered, ever-present to meddle and mess up life, to get me.
A few years later, tired of the uselessness of the criminal street life that I was living, and facing a prison sentence, I made a sharp and complete 180 to rejoin the productive human race and get on with growing the fuck up. That involved getting a job, doing my pilots license, attending night school to finish high school, and beginning to dream again of being a useful member of society, dreaming of perhaps a career in aviation, or even medicine. The 2-year prison sentence was imposed as “suspended” (a kind of probationary sentence).
But my father, a forceful, controlling person, declared my life-change to be a religious conversion which was not at all how I viewed it. He then moved our family to a neighboring province to an Evangelical Christian college that was in the early 1970s fever of excitement over the soon (“any day now”) apocalyptic return of Lord Jesus. The Christ would return in flaming fire to destroy this evil world, purge all unbelievers, rapture up his true believers, and then install the millennial kingdom of God on Earth.
At that Christian college, my monster was detailed more clearly in terms of the fiercely menacing features of the Christ myth of Paul. John in his Revelation (last book of the New Testament) graphically illustrated Paul’s apocalyptic destroying Christ as he fleshed out the meaning of the phrase “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” Instead of the milder “fear”, I would have used “terror”.
Bits from Revelation 19/20:
“With justice he judges and wages war… He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood… Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God….
“The (unbelievers) were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh…. Fire came down from heaven and devoured them… (they were) thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever…
“The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”
The leader of that school, L. E. Maxwell, a transplanted American Evangelical, excelled at terrorizing students with sermonic portrayals of the great final judgment by the enraged Christ, where every secret would be exposed to the world and harsh vengeful retribution meted out to sinners. Much like a raging Old Testament prophet, Maxwell pronounced the wrath of God upon our evil selves. Another visiting speaker (Roy Hession), echoing Maxwell’s emphasis on the evil human self, once told us, “You are filthy worms deserving only to be squashed under the destroying foot of God”.
The elements of threat theology in the Christ myth of Paul overwhelmed the counter features in the mix of Christian salvation- i.e. the death of Jesus as exhibiting divine mercy and love. Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy were right that the “diamonds were buried in dung”. Too hard to see and appreciate against the backdrop of that Revelation Christ trampling out “the fury of the wrath of God”.
“Lording over everything”:
The school’s instructors beat into us the demand for absolute submission to “Lord Christ”, including bringing every thought under his control.
“’Bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ’ is a phrase from the Bible, 2 Corinthians 10:5. It means to capture rebellious thoughts and make them obedient to Christ” (from a Google search).
That was insistence on mind-control beyond the harshest intrusions of totalitarian dictators.
Using the threat of severe judgment and hellfire, the school authorities insisted that there must be no questioning, no doubting of any syllable, any “jot or tittle”, in the divinely inspired words of the Bible. There must be no disbelief expressed toward the complex of fundamentalist Christian beliefs. The demand was for complete submission of mind, spirit, and life to God who ruled as ultimate “Lord/King”.
Few totalitarians on this planet have ever approached the all-encompassing nature of the total submission and control demanded by the omnipresent divine Dictator. That domination was to be mediated through the governing authorities of the religion- i.e. the theologians/leaders who detailed the required belief system that determined “true believer” status and hence safety from “the wrath of God” (see Paul’s letter to the Romans).
Then we were obligated, under further threat of retributive punishment, to go forth and convert others to the same system of absolute mental and emotional enslavement to the dominating Lord Christ.
What about the option of taking a more moderate stance toward this religious indoctrination?
No. The Evangelical leaders of that school stated that any compromising moderation was dangerous and damnable “lukewarmness” toward the religion. They quoted the warning of the Christ to an early Christian church in Laodicea that was threatened with hellfire for its lack of zealotry in the cause of the Christ…
“These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3).
The meaning of “spit you out of my mouth” was made clear- i.e. full “pedal to the metal” zealotry, or hellfire.
“Education” at that school was indoctrination into absolute submission to religious authority, buttressed with threatening warnings that any holdback from “total commitment” (i.e. whispers of doubt, questioning, challenge, freedom of thought, lack of zealotry) was damnable as demonic deception and cooling off (i.e. “backsliding”) that was deserving of hellfire.
The indoctrinators illustrated skillful wielding of the totalitarian’s formula- “Fear=control”. And no doubt, they were operating from the same fear of the divine that they devotedly passed on to us.
(See added notes at bottom on submission to authority, Bill Gothardism, etc.)
Violating the true nature of the human self as freedom and love….
During the years I spent at that school, something from the deepest gut level was cautioning me that the religious system that is Evangelical Christianity was not quite right (“it did not feel right”). Something was wrong but I did not have the mental tools to question what had been beaten into my consciousness from childhood. I dared not challenge the monster. The threats were overwhelmingly ultimate (beyond anything in this realm/world) and eternal.
So, I gave it a sincere try for a few years. And, though at the time I was unaware, the endless incitement to fear, anxiety, guilt, and shame, was deforming my personality and development just as psychotherapist Zenon Lotufo states in his book “Cruel God, Kind God” (he quotes psychologist Harold Ellens on these issues). Note further below, the additional comments of Ellens on how religious pathology deforms human wellbeing.
I will insert here a few of Lotufo’s comments on “the pathological nature of mainstream orthodox theology and popular religious ideation”.
He says, “One type of religiosity is entirely built around the assumption or basic belief, and correspondent fear, that God is cruel or even sadistic… The associated metaphors to this image are ‘monarch’ and ‘judge’. Its distinctive doctrine is ‘penal satisfaction’. I call it ‘Cruel God Christianity’… Its consequences are fear, guilt, shame, and impoverished personalities. All these things are fully coherent with and dependent on a cruel and vengeful God image…
“(This image results) in the inhibition of the full development of personality… The doctrine of penal satisfaction implies an image of God as wrathful and vengeful, resulting in exposing God’s followers to guilt, shame, and resentment… These ideas permeate Western culture and inevitably influence those who live in this culture…
“Beliefs do exert much more influence over our lives than simple ideas… ideas can also, in the psychological sphere, generate ‘dynamis’, or mobilize energy… (they) may result, for instance, in fanaticism and violence (i.e. a reference to eruptions of religious violence over past decades), or… may also produce anxiety and inhibitions that hinder the full manifestation of the capacities of a person…
“The image of God can be seen as a basic belief or scheme, and as such it is never questioned…
“Basic cultural beliefs are so important, especially in a dominant widespread culture, because they have the same properties as individual basic beliefs, that is, they are not perceived as questionable. The reader may object that “God”, considered a basic belief in our culture, is rejected or questioned by a large number of people today. Yet the fact is that the idea of God that those people reject is almost never questioned. In other words, their critique assumes there is no alternative way of conceiving God except the one that they perceive through the lens of their culture. So, taking into account the kind of image of God that prevails in Western culture- a ‘monster God’… such rejection is understandable…
“There is in Western culture a psychological archetype, a metaphor that has to do with the image of a violent and wrathful God (see Romans, Revelation). Crystallized in Anselm’s juridical atonement theory, this image represents God sufficiently disturbed by the sinfulness of humanity that God had only two options: destroy us or substitute a sacrifice to pay for our sins. He did the latter. He killed Christ.
“Ellens goes on by stating that the crucifixion, a hugely violent act of infanticide or child sacrifice, has been disguised by Christian conservative theologians as a ‘remarkable act of grace’. Such a metaphor of an angry God, who cannot forgive unless appeased by a bloody sacrifice, has been ‘right at the center of the Master Story of the Western world for the last 2,000 years. And the unavoidable consequence for the human mind is a strong tendency to use violence’.
“’With that kind of metaphor at our center, and associated with the essential behavior of God, how could we possibly hold, in the deep structure of our unconscious motivations, any other notion of ultimate solutions to ultimate questions or crises than violence- human solutions that are equivalent to God’s kind of violence’…
“Hence, in our culture we have a powerful element that impels us to violence, a Cruel God Image… that also contributes to guilt, shame, and the impoverishment of personality…”. (End of Lotufo/Ellens quotes.)
Note that the example above of “disguising a hugely violent act of infanticide or child sacrifice as a ‘remarkable act of grace’” illustrates a common practise throughout the Bible and the Christian religion. Another example, the sadistic demand of God for Abraham to murder his son, as a test of loyalty. That again, is disguising something pathologically barbaric as some form of remarkable goodness- i.e. Abraham honored for his “great faith”. So also, the divinely permitted torture of Job cannot, by any stretch of common sense, be reframed in terms of some form of good (i.e. a test of loyalty that honors God).
Charles Templeton adds to the exposure of religious pathology that has been presented as ultimate goodness, in stating that any person demanding to be the center of attention and praise, on threat of death for failing to do so, is an Idi Amin monster. Templeton says that such obsessive and threatening self-centeredness is how the Biblical God is portrayed (see his book “Farewell To God”).
Psychiatrist Hector Garcia in “Alpha God: The Psychology of Religious Violence and Oppression” adds further insight on how the belief in an all-powerful and dominating God has deformed human minds and played an inciting role in bloody conflicts. He, along with others, exposes the dark underbelly of what has long been presented as Ultimate Goodness.
Again, I would balance these comments with the recognition that many in religious traditions have learned to moderate their positions by focusing on the more humane elements in their systems, and by downplaying or ignoring the harsher elements of threat theology.
Moving along…
I look back on those years in fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity as some of the worst years of my life, but also as some of the best. Huh? Yes. That experience granted me the privilege of acquaintance with many people in that tradition who are still friends today, good people, loving and generous people. I can make the distinction between profound disagreement with people’s belief systems and yet appreciate them for the common goodness and love that they exhibit.
Further, my religious friends and family have been graciously generous in overlooking my “heresy, blasphemy, and infidelity” to their religion. Patiently tolerating my “backsliding” to my current state as “a child of the devil, deceived and lost, damned to hell”.
Following the years at that school, I eventually began to realize that I was just not a religiously inclined person. Not even “Homo religiosus”, as in the belief of some that “human existence is inherently religious”. No. Not me.
I would eventually recognize that the persistent sense of intense unease that I felt during my years in Evangelical Christianity arose from what I would later understand as the Classic Liberalism that best embodies what it means to be maturely human. Classic Liberalism as the tradition that protects and promotes the rights and freedoms of every individual, equally.
Classic Liberalism emerged from the Magna Carta discovery that exemplifies the highest possible expression of mature love in treating every person as a full equal (i.e. love, freedom, and equality being inseparable realities).
My own sense of these humane ideals had not yet formed into a coherent system of thought or belief. While in Evangelicalism, I was still undergoing more of a “gut feel” resistance to the tribalism, domination, and punitive retaliation presented to us in the Christian God and religion. Years later, I would acquire the proper mental tools to rethink it all through the help of a wise sage mentor (Bob Brinsmead).
With the benefit of 20/20 of hindsight, I came to see that I had been struggling from childhood to express what humanity has discovered over the past few centuries as Classic Liberalism. And that innate spirit of true liberalism was what, inside me, was butting heads with the religious God, religious conditions, and a religious lifestyle.
It was during my early teen years, that I had begun to detest more intensely being controlled by any authority, religious or other. And that too was actually a normal stage in human development- i.e. the inherently human and developing impulse of freedom for self-determination and self-control, self-determination. And, of course, subject to helpful input and influences from others as we grow and develop toward mature humanity.
The fundamental human impulse for freedom has been manifested across history in the endless commoner pushback against dominating/controlling elites fighting to maintain the elite/commoner divide. Self-determination is essential to human wellbeing and development. Classic Liberalism is the best that we have come up with to assist all of us in attaining the status of human maturity.
The detoured years into Evangelical Christianity had violated the most basic elements of normal human development and growth. What today psychiatry/psychology states as the medical condition of “retardation” (“retarded development” is a legitimate medical term). As a South African friend told me years later, “My religion (also the same Evangelicalism) would not let me be normally human.”
Lessons learned?
The years of being dragged by parents into Evangelical Christianity, provided me the useful experience of what it feels like to be a committed religious person. The “empathy” thing. For example, we were taught to feel the incited sense of religious sensitivity and offense/displeasure at unbeliever’s opposition to our religion. Also, the flush of vicarious superiority when privileged to suffer with Jesus (i.e. also “carrying our cross”) in the face of scorn/persecution from unbelievers as we promoted our religious system, confident with the assurance from our leaders that we would be rewarded in the afterlife for our zealous commitment to our religion.
We were identified as the truest of true believers on Earth and were promised the highest forms of eternal reward- i.e. we would be assigned to rule over all others, dominating with Lord Jesus who would subdue, defeat, and destroy all “enemies”, all unbelievers to Evangelical Christianity (see Paul’s statements on this in his letters to the Thessalonians- “Lord Jesus returning in flaming fire to destroy unbelievers”). There was nothing of ultimate “love your enemies” in Paul’s Christ myth.
Note these passages on sharing the totalitarian rule of Lord Christ…
https://www.cgg.org/index.cfm/library/verses/id/6134/reigning-with-jesus-christ-verses.htm
What happened to the Historical Jesus statement that true greatness was to serve, not to dominate others?
Inciting dangerous impulses…
In our particular local branch of Evangelical Christianity, we were not subjected, fortunately, to committing some form of actual violence in the name of our religion. But I get how religious commitment and loyalty to apocalyptic millennial crusades can lead susceptible people in that direction.
Religious beliefs are the most powerful and influential ideas ever beaten into human minds. That has been pointed out in regard to US Evangelical’s belief that the great final Armageddon battle must take place in Israel, and they have expressed excitement at a possible role in inciting that end-times event and thereby bringing on the end of days where God will intervene on their behalf. Much like the belief of ISIS jihadists that if they ignited violence in establishing the Caliphate in Syria, then God would intervene to finish the job of destroying enemies.
If you are skeptical that common religious beliefs can deform human minds and lives to the extent of committing violent sadism and inhumanity toward others, look again at Oct. 7, the 2014 ISIS madness, and early Christian brutality during the Crusades, and other religiously-inspired barbarism across the past two millennia. Note carefully that participants in such eruptions of violence shouted praise to their God, singing hymns, praying and thanking God that they could take part in the slaughter of God’s enemies.
Add here the Old Testament records of the Hebrew slaughter of native populations, men, women, and children, as they invaded Palestine under the command of their warrior God.
Historian Richard Landes, with his colleagues, has revealed the energizing potency of religious ideas, as ultimate ideals and authorities, to fuel mass-death crusades. That is the stunning evidence they have detailed on how Christian ideas shaped and validated Marxism, Nazism, and are now driving the apocalyptic crusade of environmental alarmism. As Zenon Lotufo has said, “Beliefs do exert much more influence over our lives than simple ideas… ideas can also, in the psychological sphere, generate ‘dynamis’, or mobilize energy… (they) may result, for instance, in fanaticism and violence”.
Who said, “The committed people aren’t civil, and the civil people aren’t committed”.
Further, as a previously young pagan I had not viewed others as fundamentally different in any way, no matter their religion or lack thereof. Then, during immersion into Christianity, I was made intensely aware of the divinely-demanded commitment to tribalism that classified people within a simple-minded dualism of extremist good versus extremist evil. We were taught to identify ourselves as the favored children of God who differed entirely from others who were dehumanizingly demonized as the children of Satan, unbelievers damned by God to hell. There is no more intense form of tribalism than religiously-defined tribalism. It is framed in terms of ultimate and eternal realities.
And oh, to feel firsthand the “Fear=control” relationship used by all totalitarians, the terror of the wrathful God hovering omni-presently over everything, critically judging everything that we thought, said, and did. The Bible college president, L. E. Maxwell, like 18th Century American revivalist Jonathan Edwards, was skilled in making his audiences tremble under the threat of judgment and damnation, as Edwards did to his audience when he preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. Apparently, his congregants clung to the pillars of his church, howling in terror for fear of slipping down into hellfire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinners_in_the_Hands_of_an_Angry_God
(Insert note: Just before he died, Maxwell broke down in tears and confessed to some staff members that he had been a too severe “law man”, unable to appreciate or communicate to his audiences the more gracious/merciful elements in his religion. My Dad was present in that group that Maxwell spoke to at a lunch table. My response when my Dad recounted that to me- Why did Maxwell, before he died, refuse to exhibit the courage to tell his wider audiences- students, staff, visitors- that he had wrongly terrorized them over the decades, and that he had come to recognize the harm that he had done in deforming the minds of so many young students with threat theology?
What does such mental/emotional suffering mean in terms of big picture reminiscing?
Joseph Campbell, while engaging later life autobiographical musing, said that when we look back across our lives, it appears as though someone has written a novel, weaving all the varied experiences together into a coherent story where all the parts fit together and make some sense. I would add the insights of those having Near-Death Experiences, that nothing in our lives is “wasted” or “meaningless”. Not even the “mistakes”.
Weaving back to my point…
In our struggle with our monster, we thereby learn lessons, and gain insights, as Campbell stated.
I had to experience fundamentalist Christianity firsthand to properly understand what religion is actually about, the intense emotions, motivations, and responses/behaviors that religious beliefs generate. I had to experience the deeply felt awareness of divine threat and what that does to the human mind and spirit, the personality-deforming potency of threat theology. I have concluded that the threat of divine judgment and hellfire takes first place as the most perverse idea ever constructed by primitive overheated religious imaginations.
Was hell mythology a concurrent insight that emerged along with the human discovery of fire? Did those early primitives burn themselves a bit too often and begin to think- Hey, I would like to do this to my enemies? This painful burning would satisfy my vengeance lust.
Then, after first being terrorized by divine wrath, we were oriented to experience the deeply-appreciated sense of relief when we were offered religious salvation schemes. Nothing more fully relieves the human survival impulse than schemes of eternal salvation following threat of eternal damnation. No matter that such schemes involved the belief in the violent murder of an innocent victim as an act of “grace or love”. Such is the cognitive dissonance of thinking and living within a religious system where the most primitive of barbaric mythical themes are framed in terms of some form of goodness.
Maxwell told an audience once that surveys showed some 70% of people convert to Christianity out of fear, so use the fear of God to drag them into the fold of “saved” little sheep.
These most primitive of religious themes have, over millennia, become deeply embedded as “archetypal” in human subconscious. Unquestionable good, right, and truth. After all, they are clothed in the sacred, immutable divinity.
We were not permitted to countenance any iota of skepticism or dare question the actual primitive nature of what was being taught. For example, to challenge the fundamental Christian belief in the primitive barbarity of brutal child sacrifice to appease divine rage. The protective wall around that doctrine had been fortified over two millennia by “the fury of the wrath of God” against heresy, blasphemy, and satanic unbelief (Rev. 19/20).
Outcomes of zealous commitment to religion:
I endured a couple of years of trying to sincerely practice the lifestyle of a true believer, embracing basic Christian teaching on inherent and core human sinfulness/unworthiness, acknowledging that, as one of Roy Hession’s “worthless worms deserving to be crushed under the big stomping foot of an angry God”, I deserved eternal torture in hellfire.
And that indoctrination with threat theology occurred at the time in developing youth when we are supposed to be forming an image of ourselves to define the rest of our lives (e.g. Erik Erikson’s life-span psychology- stages of psychosocial development). Evangelical Christianity, under L. E. Maxwell, beat into us, in our youth, that we were evil to the core, worthless, unworthy, despicable selves. Deserving only eternal torture in hell.
It was an education in the intensification of self-consciousness that promoted an obsession with how bad-to-the-bone we were. Self-consciousness pushed to the most harmful extreme.
The Evangelicalism of Maxwell also demanded getting on the never-ending treadmill of confessing our sin and unworthiness, beating ourselves up mentally/emotionally, on a daily basis. What Christians call “daily devotions”, like those monks in hair shirts beating themselves with barbed whips. Add the related obligation to go forth and convert others to the same madness. My problem arose from taking that madness seriously for a few years. It then worked its deforming influence on my psyche.
My devotion to Christianity and its threat theology myths finally caught up with me during a stint of overseas service, and I broke. Instantaneously and utterly. The monster finally crushed me.
Campbell says that in our battle with our monster we will become “wounded”. My wounding was overwhelmingly severe. My religion, and me taking my religion seriously, had fully deformed my consciousness, and I sank into a dark place. The instantaneous nature of my inner collapse was stunning. It occurred during a walk with friends one evening, just after crossing Taft Avenue in Manila and turning into Rizal Park. There a young lady sitting with a friend looked at me and then turned to whisper something to her friend. It could have been any other sparking event, but that one did it.
Daily life after that became an anguished struggle just to wake up, go forth, face/engage others, and go on. Fortunately, I was overseas working with some of the poorest people on the planet, who died needlessly from common maladies like infections, malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. I was obligated to get involved and help them to simply survive.
I would discover later that one of the most helpful things to alleviate and resolve one’s own problems is to get involved helping others solve their problems (explained by physician to the Queen, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his “Spiritual Depression”). That re-orientation to focus on serving others helps us to minimize and even forget our own problems, which is critical to healing and restoration of personal wellbeing. We were created to serve one another. And to love others, to express compassion, is to discover and experience our true core self as human, to realize and fulfill a primary purpose for our existence. That is essential to all healing.
My “breakdown”, or whatever it was, reminded me of the Old Testament story of Jacob wrestling with God, with the outcome that he was severely physically wounded. After his encounter with “the angel of the Lord”, he limped for the rest of his life. Paraphrasing that story, I felt that my wrestling with the religious God, and threat theology, had wounded me severely but my wounding was emotional, mental, or psychological. After that wounding, I felt very much like a defective person, having lost something good, some previous sense of normality that I could not subsequently recover or restore. The sense of defectiveness became an essential part of me, the feeling of being thoroughly “fucked up”. Permanently defective.
Like the young Evangelical man who was banned from his religion and condemned to hell for his “heresies”. He looked despondently into the camera of an interviewer and stated, “I may look OK to you on the outside, but I am so messed up inside.”
That wounding as a sense of something very basic to one’s identity being lost, and subsequently unrecoverable, may just be part of the normal/natural maturing process where exposure to the dark side of things, to the evil and suffering of life, leaves us with a sense of lost innocence, along with the psychological tendency to remember the past through rose-tinted glasses.
As this Google response notes:
“The tendency to view the past more positively than it was, is called ‘rosy retrospection’. It’s a cognitive bias that’s related to nostalgia… Rosy retrospection is a proposed psychological phenomenon of recalling the past more positively than it was actually experienced. The highly unreliable nature of human memory is well documented and accepted amongst psychologists. Some research suggests a ‘blue retrospective’ which also exaggerates negative emotions.”
Now a bit of prequel, as in “origins”…
The divine “monster” (i.e. the religious God), emerged out of the quest of ancient people to understand the “mysterious metaphysical”.
Unfortunately, while also a quest to explain the “numinous” (i.e. awe-inspiring), the earliest human theologies were created and designed by ancient tribal elites, the emerging class of shaman/priests, to function in the totalitarian formula of “fear=control”. Better stated as “threat theology=ultimate totalitarian control”.
As prehistorian John Pfeiffer has noted, the earliest elites in human societies were those who presented themselves as “special ones” who claimed to know the secrets to the invisible world. That enabled them to elevate themselves over others, to use primitive threat theologies to gain power and control over others.
Helmut Koester (“History, Culture, and Religion of the Hellenistic Age”), among others, shows how the belief in the “special person” developed, for example, in Greek history. Special people in the Greek view were believed to be divine in some manner, due to their special skills, knowledge, abilities, experiences, or great deeds. God was with them or manifest through them is some special manner not available to ordinary people. They were more “blessed by God” than any others. Divinely appointed/anointed to rule others, to dominate and control others. This Hellenistic view of the special was embraced by early Christianity to shape the Christology process that produced the later full-blown “Lord Christ” myth of Paul. Christ as a divinely blessed special person, whose divinity was attested to by many miracles, similar to the miracles that proved the divinity of special persons in Greek mythology.
We now understand the mythical nonsense of past beliefs in “the divine right of kings” and other leaders. What Historical Jesus rejected when he condemned the inhuman practice of lording over others and stated that, to the contrary, true greatness was to serve others.
The ancients, in forming the earliest versions of threat theology, were exercising their primal impulse for meaning, to understand and explain reality and life, and unfortunately, the perverting influence of our inherited impulses to tribalism, domination, and punitive vengeance infected and distorted their explanations of creating Forces/Spirits.
And from those ancient origins in prehistory (see, for example, John Pfeiffer’s “Explosion: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Art and Religion”), our ancestors created metaphysical monsters to terrorize people and thereby subject fellow tribals to manipulation by early shaman who would become the eventual dominating priesthoods of later developing religions.
Monster deities have ever since been used to crush independent spirits and bring them under the domination and control of religious authorities who would onerously detail the demanded offerings/sacrifices to appease angry gods and attain benefits to survive in life. The priesthoods, using the totalitarian formula of “Fear=control”, would leech parasitically off the work of commoners.
(Note on statement above: “Created metaphysical monsters to terrorize people”? Yes. Why else would early shaman lead fellow tribals down into the stygian darkness in the deepest reaches of those caves to scare them with “anamorphic art” that appears to move in flickering candlelight? Explain. I’m listening.)
The wise man’s sword:
Fortunately (or providentially), I was eventually introduced to a wise man who gave me a sword to slay my monster. Bob Brinsmead provided many of us with the mental tools to critically rethink religious beliefs, to understand their origin in the primitive and barbaric existence of early humanity, and to recognize their descent, through endless variations on the same themes, down through history into the world religions and even into the “secular/ideological” versions of the modern world. Religious beliefs were not, as we had been taught in Christianity, given directly by divine inspiration to specially chosen people to start uniquely new religions. The history of religion was the endless rehashing of the same old, same old. And it was very primitive and barbaric “same old”.
Someone, around 1975, sent me a copy of Bob Brinsmead’s writings (initially “Present Truth” journals that eventually became “Verdict” magazine). And then across later years Bob would put out individual summaries of his research, such as “What the Scholars are Saying” https://bobbrinsmead.com/the-historical-jesus-what-the-scholars-are-saying/ ).
Reading Brinsmead, back in the mid-70s, sparked a glimmering light in my consciousness, a re-emerging of common sense and hope. Just a flicker at first but it grew steadily over time. It would still be several decades of more complete re-evaluation of basic themes in my personal worldview, the re-examination and replacing of core ideas, and ultimately a radical and complete transformation of narrative and worldview that would involve what mythologists term the “shamanic experience of disintegration of the old and then re-integration around the new”. I would undergo a fundamental death to the old religious narratives and rebirth to something entirely new.
For me that meant the rejection and abandonment of my religion to embrace the process of rebuilding a personal worldview with entirely new themes, especially an entirely new reframing or re-imaging of the cohering center of narratives that is Ultimate Reality/deity.
In the transition out of religion I was more fully engaging the process of becoming what I would later understand as “a mutable self” (Louis Zurcher), a self that exists in an open process of ongoing change and development, as contrasted with an immutable self, that locates one’s identity on unchanging things like a religious belief system, an ideology, a nationality or ethnic/racial tribe, an occupation, or similar immutable realities.
Bob, like a good “John the Baptist” companion, prepared my mind to eventually see and understand what Historical Jesus had actually taught in his core message- i.e. that there was no threatening God behind life, no retaliatory deity threatening judgment, tribal exclusion, and punishment. “No hell beneath us” (Lennon).
Bob exercised his wise sage or mentor role, for example, through a series of articles on “The Scandal of Joshua Ben Adam”. That series prepared me to see something new and unique in all the history of human thought- i.e. what James Robinson calls “Jesus’ greatest contribution to the history of human ideas”. And it’s a biggie. “Yuge.”
I saw the actual nature of the central Jesus discovery, or insight, when I recognized that he had used the “behavior based on similar belief” model in Matthew 5:38-48.
Years earlier, I had cottoned on to this “behavior/belief” relationship from an Asian Studies course where we read the research of anthropologist Clifford Geertz who did fieldwork in Bali, Indonesia. Geertz had discovered that the Balinese modelled their houses, villages, and lives according to what they believed to be the divine model or pattern (archetype). So also, the Hebrews in the Old Testament followed, in the details of their daily lives, what they believed was the revealed Law, Will, or Word of their God. They ordered their behavior, lives, and communities according to their beliefs.
Eventually, I recognized an entirely new and different view of deity in the statements of Jesus as recorded in books like Matthew’s gospel. Luke offers a better version of this same message of Jesus because his wrap-up ending gets the spirit of Jesus right- i.e. “Be unconditionally merciful as your Father is unconditionally merciful”. Whereas Matthew, to the contrary, messes up by contradicting the very core of Jesus’ message with his ending statement of “Be perfect as your Father is perfect”. No Matty, Jesus had just clearly stated in the statements of his, that you quoted, that God unconditionally included the bad guys with the good guys.
Jesus had said (my paraphrase to clarify), “Let there be no more eye for eye retaliation but instead love your enemies because God does. How so? God gives sun and rain, the two critical gifts for agrarian survival, to both good and bad people alike. So be unconditionally loving just as your God is unconditionally loving.” That sums the entire message of Historical Jesus. And not a whisper of threat theology.
In that stunning new theology of Jesus there was no tribal exclusion of unbelievers, no discrimination between good and bad people, no threat of retaliation, no judgment, no threat of damnation or eternal destruction in hell. In the stunning new theology of Jesus there was only love, stunningly inexpressible, transcendent love as “no conditions”. None at all. None. No religious salvation conditions, no demand for religious lifestyle, no demand for loyalty to some religious tradition or institution. Just love all, including enemies, and thereby be just like God.
That insight of Jesus was the potent weapon to slay the old monster Gods that had darkened and enslaved human minds across the millennia and still do today in both religious and “secular/ideological” belief systems.
Again, try to get some sense of how profoundly transformative the insight of Jesus is. It is so entirely contrary to the entire previous history of mythology and religion, entirely opposite to all human theology from previous millennia. “Theology” as the human project to create views of Ultimate Reality/deity.
Many “scientists” engage this same project today, crossing the science/philosophy boundary to speculate on the nature of Ultimate Reality. Its that primal impulse in all of us to meaning and purpose.
With the God of Jesus there was only love, stunningly inexpressible, transcendent love as “no conditions”. Meaning no religious salvation conditions. No demand to embrace a religious lifestyle. No demand for loyalty to some religious tradition. Just join the human race and freely create your own life story in some fresh unique way. As the Chinese leader Mao used to say (my paraphrase), “Let (8 billion) flowers bloom.”
My initial grasp of the stunning new theology of Jesus was then further filled out with the research from the “Search for Hist. Jesus”, the “Jesus seminar”, and more specifically “Q Wisdom Sayings” research.
It became clear that there were two entirely contrary messages within Christianity and its New Testament- the message of Jesus that the gospel writers had to include because it was too well known to ignore (an oral tradition). But that message was then distorted and buried within the entirely opposite message of Paul and his Christ visions. Jefferson and Tolstoy had nailed the problem in stating that the “diamonds of Jesus” had been buried in the NT gospel of Paul’s Christ.
The contradictions were huge.
Here is a reposting…
Main contradictions between Jesus and Christ
The main contradictions that highlight the oxymoronically opposite themes in the messages of Historical Jesus and Paul’s Christ mythology. The point that I draw from this? The themes of Paul have shaped Western consciousness, narratives, and overall societies for the past two millennia. The Jesus themes have influenced us to a lesser extent, mainly moderating the harsher features of Paul’s New Testament message.
Note first these statements from historian/theologian James Tabor.
Tabor in “Paul and Jesus”:
“There was a version of ‘Christianity before Paul’, affirmed by both Jesus and his original followers, with tenets and affirmations quite opposite to these of Paul… the message of Paul, which created Christianity as we know it, and the message of historical Jesus and his earliest followers, were not the same. In fact, they were sharply opposed to one another with little in common beyond the name Jesus itself” (p.xv1).
“Paul is the most influential person in human history and realize it or not, he has shaped practically all we think about everything… the West in particular… the foundations of Western civilization- from our assumptions about reality to our societal and personal ethics- rest in a singular way upon the heavenly visions and apparitions of the apostle Paul. We are all cultural heirs of Paul, with the well-established doctrines and traditions of mainstream Christianity deeply entrenched in our culture. In contrast, Jesus as a historical figure… has been largely lost to our culture” (p. xv11).
“Paul operated with a strongly apocalyptic perspective that influenced all he said or did” (p.15).
“The entire New Testament canon is largely a post-Paul and pro-Paul production…” (p.19).
“The ‘Jesus’ who most influenced history was the ‘Jesus-Christ’ of Paul, not the historical figure of Jesus… Paul transformed Jesus himself (and) his message of a… kingdom of justice and peace on earth, to the symbol of a religion of otherworldly salvation in a heavenly world”, (21).
“The form of Christianity… (that thrived in the late Roman Empire)… was heavily based upon the ecstatic and visionary experiences of Paul. Christianity as we came to know it, is Paul and Paul is Christianity. The bulk of the New Testament is dominated by his theological vision”, p.24)…
“The Q source is the earliest collection of the teachings and sayings of Jesus… the most striking characteristic of the Q source in terms of reconstructing Christian origins is that it has nothing of Paul’s theology, particularly his Christology or view of Christ”, (41).
My list highlighting some of the main contradictions between the messages of Paul and Jesus:
(1) Jesus taught that God was “unconditional” love. In Jesus’ original message- i.e. the “Q Wisdom Sayings” gospel- no sacrifice is demanded because there is no angry God demanding conditions of payment/punishment. That is contrasted with the highly conditional atonement religion of Paul (i.e. the supreme condition of the sacrifice of a cosmic godman- the Christ- to appease the wrathful deity presented by Paul in letters like Romans, Thessalonians).
(2) Jesus taught non-retaliation. We are urged to not engage ‘eye for eye’ punitive justice but instead to “love our enemies” because God does not retaliate but loves and includes enemies. Jesus illustrated his theology of non-retaliatory, universal, unconditional love in stating that “sun and rain are given generously by God to all alike”, to both good and bad people.
That contrasts with the divine retaliation to be enacted by Paul’s Christ- i.e. retaliation in apocalypse and hell. Note Paul’s statement of belief in a supremely retaliatory God- “’Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord” (Romans 12). Also, Paul affirmed divine retaliation with the promise that “Lord Jesus will return in blazing fire to destroy all who don’t believe Paul’s Christ myth” (Thessalonians).
(3) Restorative justice (unlimited forgiveness, love your enemy, “no more eye for eye”) versus Paul’s highly punitive, destroying justice.
(4) Nonviolent resolution of problems (again, no violent retaliation against enemies) versus the violent destruction epitomized in the myths of apocalypse and hell, and the violent pacification of deity by blood sacrifice for atonement.
(5) Jesus taught the nontribal inclusion of all humanity (again, “sun and rain given freely to both bad and good people”). That contrasts with Paul’s tribal God who favors and includes true believers, but discriminatorily excludes unbelievers. Note also the ultimate tribal divide illustrated in Revelation in the eternal division of humanity- i.e. with people assigned either to heaven or to hell, as per the cosmic dualism of Zoroaster.
(6) Nondomination in relationships (“If you want to be great then serve others”), versus Paul’s message of ultimate eternal domination by Lord Christ, ruling with a rod of iron totalitarianism (“every knee shall bow… He will rule them with an iron scepter”).
(7) Non-dualism (God as the Oneness of Ultimate Reality that is love), versus eternal dualism (i.e. again, the cosmic dualism of “God and Satan”, “heaven and hell”).
And so on…
You cannot mix and merge such opposites in the one and same person- i.e. “Jesus Christ”- as that supremely oxymoronic combination creates such profound cognitive dissonance that you are left with a mental state akin to insanity or madness. And the egregious thing in the mix is that the good elements (i.e. the Jesus insights) are distorted and buried by the primitive and darkening elements in the Christology of Paul.
Applying Christology to Jesus (i.e. the divinizing of a common man over the first few centuries of Christianity) has effectively buried the potency of his liberating insights, notably his stunning new theology of a non-retaliatory, non-apocalyptic God. That truth of in his entirely new view of deity, though still present there in summaries of his statements (see Matthew 5, Luke 6), that “stunning new theology” is no longer clearly visible to most people’s minds because the larger New Testament context emphasizes Paul’s retaliatory, apocalyptic Christ. Paul intent on straightening Jesus out. His “secret wisdom of the Christ” correcting the ignorant/foolish worldly wisdom of Jesus and his followers, like Apollos.
Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy both nailed the contradiction between Jesus and Paul in the bluntest terms and no one has been as clear and direct since, perhaps because their comments are so offensive to true believer’s sensibilities. Few since have paid attention to their clarifying the stark contrast between Jesus and Paul, preferring instead the religious reformism that tinkers around the edges and gets nothing done, that avoids the central issue of theology- how Paul’s Christology deformed Jesus and his message.
Outcome of my quest- Some wrap-up comments… Wendell Krossa
This site is a project that contributes to “slaying” the monster God that has dominated human meta-narratives for millennia. There is no greater monster that has darkened human consciousness and enslaved humanity with fear and terror across the millennia, shapeshifting from primitive mythological Gods to mainstream religious God, now even to secular deities like “angry Mother Earth/Planet, punitive Universe, payback karma, vengeful Gaia”.
The defining features of monster deity? Such deity is tribal (divides humanity, favors true believers, damns unbelievers), dominating (Lord/King that affirms domination/submission forms of relating, people submitting to religious authorities and traditions), and punitive Destroyer via apocalypse and hell. That deity is the cohering center of complexes of religious myths- i.e. the complex of primitive themes developed by our ancestors to subsequently enslave human minds. These themes just below frame the basic belief structures of world religions, both Western and Eastern.
Summary complex of primitive mythical themes:
“An original paradise that was ruined by early humans who became corrupted by exercising freedom (i.e. Adam exercising freedom to curiously probe the nature of good and evil, Enki exercising freedom to taste the forbidden plants, etc.). Paradise was then lost. Life subsequently declines toward a worsening state (i.e. life is cursed by the angry perfectionist God pissed at the ruin of his perfect creation). Life declines toward the threat of entire collapse and ending in apocalypse. Angry deity then demands sacrifice/payment and suffering for redemption/salvation. Further to salvation, deity demands that true believers purge evil from the world, that believers engage a righteous war against evil enemies that must be exterminated, whether here or in the world to come. Then, appeased by the violence and bloodshed, the angry deity consummates salvation in a millennial communal paradise.”
See fuller versions of this complex posted in sections further below on this site.
The potent weapon to slay this monstrous complex of ideas and slay the monster God who functions as the cohering center of the complex, is Jesus’ insight that God is an unconditional reality. The key feature of “unconditional” is most critical to go right to the heart of the conditional theology and conditional nature of religious traditions. No other insight is as critical as this unconditional feature.
This site is committed to the project of helping others slay their monsters (the big background meta-narrative, metaphysical ones) and find freedom in the love that Historical Jesus presented. This project is about the final liberation movement of humanity, freedom in the depths of human subconscious from archetypes that have long embodied and maintained the primitive features of the old monster and its supporting cast of mythical, religious themes.
First, and most critical to confront, there are the main or archetypal features of the monster itself- i.e. tribalism, domination, punitive destruction. And then the related complex of archetypal themes that the monster deity uses to maintain domination and control of human minds across millennia- i.e. original paradise that is ruined and lost, corrupt humans (ruiners of paradise) deserving of divine wrath and punishment, life declining toward apocalyptic ending as ultimate divine punishment, demanded sacrifice/payment and demanded purge of evil enemies (engage a righteous war to eliminate evil enemies), then the promised communal paradise.
This “lost paradise/apocalyptic/millennial salvation” complex still dominates world religions, as well as varied secular/ideological versions today (i.e. Marxism, Nazism, environmental alarmism). The dark themes of the complex are contributing factors to the widespread anxiety, depression, and nihilism of the many who believe, against evidence to the contrary, that the “world is becoming worse”.
Historical Jesus presented a non-religious alternative to this psychopathology that has shaped human narratives and consciousness from the beginning. He offered the new understanding of love taken to its highest reach as “no conditions”. And he buttressed that stunning insight with the re-assurance that such love is behind everything. It explains the God who gives sun and rain to both good and bad people. That big background reality of unconditional love enables me to state with assurance that it’s going to be alright for everyone, ultimately.
And, necessary qualifier, this truth of ultimate unconditional reality does not automatically orient us to advocacy for pacifism in the face of evil in this world. Any common-sense love will hold all responsible for behavior and consequences as basic to human development.
Quotes from Harold Ellen’s book “Honest Faith for Our Time”. How a sick “monster God” makes for sick people, and how to counter this influence of bad theology on human personality.
Ellens first notes the contrary images of God presented in both the Old Testament and New Testament. The prophets presented a God who hated sacrifice and instead required only mercy, compassion, and kindness. Where the priesthood, to the contrary, preached an angry deity who demanded blood sacrifice and the vengeful slaughter of his enemies- men, women, and children. A deity who threatened violent retribution.
So also, in the NT, Jesus took up the anti-sacrifice deity of the prophets, and reaching even further beyond the prophets, presented a stunning new view of God of as radically universal and unconditional love. But Paul then retreated to re-enforce the angry deity of the priests who demanded blood sacrifice and threatened violent retaliation in apocalypse and hellfire.
Ellens is as blunt as Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy in his evaluation of the God of religious traditions- i.e. bad theology that buries the entirely contrary “diamond” insights of Historical Jesus.
“The dominant stream of reports on God that make up the theology of most faith traditions indicates that God operates with the psychotic notion that he is caught in a cosmic battle with another ‘god’ who threatens to thwart, corrupt, and undo his work. This is classic psychotic syndrome… there is no empirical… evidence to indicate that any such conflict or evil reality exists… In such faith traditions, God’s notion of reality has no actual reality to which it corresponds. When we find it in humans, we call it insanity… (paranoia) forces out there to get him… these notions are figments of God’s sick imagination. Such a God is insane. The God of ancient Israelite religion, described in the Old Testament, from which came Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is diagnosably ill.”
Then this obvious conclusion:
“Sick Gods make for sick people… sick Gods make people sick… individuals and communities of humans create themselves in the images of their gods. Sick Gods provide sick models which produce sick persons and sick communities.”
To readers who may feel that his evaluation of biblical deity is too severe, he adds more psychological analysis, “a more palpable panoply of symptoms (that constitute) the syndrome of God’s clinical disorder”. He notes that the biblical God suffers the obsessive compulsive need to have the world and people carefully conform to a proscribed set of thought forms and behavior that is contrary to healthy growth and development.
The biblical God is so pathologically obsessed with such conformity that he responds thus, “God is so ticked off about human nature and behavior, human exploration and experimentation, that he simply cannot get his head screwed back on right until he has literally killed somebody”. Examples offered by Ellens are the drowning of Egyptians at the Red Sea, the threatened genocide of Israelites at Mt. Sinai, the actual genocide of Canaanites by Israel, including permission for mass-rape of captive women, the murder of a man trying to protect the Ark of the Covenant from falling, and the incineration of Sodom and Gomorrah, etc.
Ellens explains the consummate narcissism in such behavior- “sadistic vindictiveness, impulsiveness, and ‘Obsessive Compulsive Disorder’, depressive and irrational rage, being out of touch with reality and reacting in ways that are out of proportion to the actual problematic events at hand… the behavioral syndrome… of flagrant psychosis”.
He continues, noting that in the New Testament God’s fury was so intense toward us that he had to either exterminate us or slaughter his innocent son. Ellens concludes that “this God is one sick puppy, and dangerous. He solves all his ultimate impasses with ultimate violence. Don’t you think that is sick? Any God is a monster if he cannot behave at least as well as the average human in his or h er better moments would like to behave. Monster gods make monster people.”
He adds that these dominant images of God in the Bible “produce unconscious psychological archetypes in human beings. These get acted out unsuspectingly in behavior that is justified by those metaphors. If God solves all his ultimate problems by quick resort to ultimate violence, how is it possible that we can expect humans to do significantly differently? Sick gods make sick people.”
Ellens wisely cautions about the outcomes of holding such deformed images of God. He says that a deity that believes he is caught in a cosmic battle with evil and that this battle takes place in human history produces the inevitable outcome that believers, whether consciously or unconsciously, will want to help this God out, “to be on his side in war, to undertake God’s cause against the infidel, to fight the bad guys, to exterminate our enemies, as apparently God tries to do with his enemies”. This was true of the Christian crusades just as it is true of ISIS violence today. Again, a sick God produces sick people. Ellens asks, “How shall we achieve wellbeing if our God is so sick?”
He acknowledges that these sick images of God have nothing at all to do with God but are “instead the sick projection of a lot of untutored human imaginations- projected by people scared to death of the unknown and the unpredictable in life. Such view of God are mere projections of human terrors upon the human idealized mental image of the imagined mentor those people thought was God”.
I would add that the elements of tribal rage at enemies (disagreeing, different others), lust to vengefully destroy enemies, and resort to violent extermination of enemies are all similarly projections of sick people.
Ellens proceeds to recognize other entirely contrary ways of imaging God that have to do with unconditional grace and love. He notes the case of Carl Rogers who believed that humans could exercise such unconditional regard for one another, but not God. Too many people, says Ellens, are just like Rogers and cannot imagine that God is not a God of terror and threat. Ellens says that God the warrior, the vindictive judge, the impulsive slayer, the genocidal maniac is a monster and makes us all sick.
In another chapter Ellens moves on to show that human wellbeing depends on God’s wellbeing, the problem of God’s Health and Human Health. He wants to counter the “universally dominant lie that (God) is a monster”. He refers to the ancient Hebrews who had a monster God and were lost because of that image. “They assumed the dominant story about a threatening God was the true model of reality”. He adds that we must counter such images with “the report of God as a God of grace that is unconditional, radical, and universal”. The metaphors of a healthy God, and the archetypes they produce, will inspire healthy people. This he says, is “clinically operational fact”.
“Human wellbeing depends upon good theology and sound psychology producing wholesome and whole spirituality”.
“(The) outlook and style of unconditional positive regard for one another needs to be carried out against the backdrop of the conviction that such an unconditional grace posture is the real model in God as well”. Human meaning and wellbeing depends profoundly on the issue of whether God is sick or well.
The outcome of a healthy image of God will lead to a variety of suggested outcomes in human development and relationships, listed by Ellens:
“A new initiative of unconditional acceptance of the adversary or diverse other… a profound empathy (of the diverse or alienated other as family)… a new sense of self-worth (in the alienated other) based on a healthy God-story…”
He further adds outcomes like mutuality in the quest for wellbeing, acknowledgment of our own imperfections similar to our alienated “enemies”, an ambition for the wholeness of the entire human family, the possibility for mutual growth, how human wellbeing depends on our visions of the health of God, the evoking of security and trust that sets aside defensive patterns on all sides that are obstructions to mutual growth and wellbeing, and measuring criteria for the journey into “unconditional positive regard”, etc.
Ellens then cautions that many contemporary issues “continue to violate and erode human wellbeing because our unconscious and conscious psycho-spiritual models and archetypes are largely formed along the axis of the sick side of the message of the Hebrew Bible. That message is one of vindictiveness, quid-pro-quo strategies of settling scores, imposing arbitrary boundaries upon persons and communities by forcing discipline upon them, meeting force with force, … making sure, under the doctrine of preemptive defense, that we do it to them first.
“These archetypes of fighting fire with fire are products of unconscious metaphors that contend the world is wired this way, God is wired this way. Everything is wired for a cosmic conflict. Have you got a major problem, (then) resort to ultimate force, God does. Why should not we?” He repeats his earlier point that God was so ticked off at us that he could not get his head screwed back on right until he killed somebody, his son. That’s the way familiar things are set up.
He then lists the names of varied psychologists who proposed modifying the inner life of people by “reframing the models of external behavior, by restructuring the human moral framework” with traditional biblical theology and laws, thereby rechanneling unconscious archetypes. While some of this may be useful, says Ellens, “(these proposals) do not reach the deep structure challenges where the real work needs to be done”, meaning that they do not challenge and radically change the nature of traditional religious Gods. People wanting to continue using violence against enemies will find still validation in the beliefs of their religious traditions with their “warrior God”.
He concludes a chapter arguing again that we don’t achieve human wellbeing until “God gets well in our theological constructs. A world culture of wellbeing implies a world of psycho-spiritual metaphors that produce healthful unconscious archetypes. To achieve that we must destroy the sick monster God that reigns unconsciously in all our hearts… We must train our children for that in every new generation. The programs of psychological and moral reframing are worth the trouble… It is the monster God that sometimes appears in the Hebrew Bible that must be exorcised and killed, if we are to achieve some gains toward the world of wellbeing…”
“Judaism, Christianity, and Islam must rediscover the God of grace… Sick gods make sick people. Healthy theology has a chance to make humans wholesome and healthy.”
Added notes:
I suspect that a significant element in Jesus’ healing ministry was his telling people the good news of an unconditional loving God. That freed people from psychosomatic illnesses (like the insanity of “demon possession”) that arose from minds tormented by threatening deity. Hence, Jesus could tell ill people, “Your faith has healed you”. Meaning, your letting go of threat theology and your belief in this new insight on unconditional deity has freed you from the enslaving, darkening curse of that threat theology that made you psychosomatically sick. The stunning new understanding of God as unconditional love is what freed you from the sick God who made sick people.
Another:
Recovery from that dark hole of whatever that breakdown was about? It took decades of still feeling disabled, wounded and walking with a limp like Jacob after wrestling with a monster God. Feeling quite, according to the best of psychological definitions, entirely “fucked up”. Or as that young discarded and damned Evangelical said, “Really messed up inside”. There were no quick answers to prayers for restoration of a previous more innocent state of felt “normality”, but just a long slow process of figuring it all out, constructing an entirely new worldview, and learning to function as human again, like after a serious accident learning to talk or walk again. Doing, as Bob Brinsmead told someone who asked him- “Where to next, after leaving religion?” Bob responded, “Just go join the human race”.
Another:
Do not discount how multiple millennia of beating the themes of “apocalyptic millennialism” into human minds and subconscious, to become deeply embedded archetypes, has impacted human wellbeing and still emanates damage and destruction from that background, darkening and enslaving human consciousness, and inciting the worst of our inherited animal drives to tribalism, domination, and punitive destruction of differing others.
Like the “Alien” monster that forces its way into a host and then destructively erupts to cause further damage. So this complex of apocalyptic millennial themes with the threatening deity at core keeps infecting contemporary “ideological” versions of religions that incite fear, anxiety, despair, depression, nihilism, and violence.
And this note on Lotufo’s inclusion of “violence” in the list of pathologies from “cruel God” ideas: “Violence” from true believers feeling obligated to heroically engage righteous wars to save the world from threatening evil enemies.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886923004294
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-terrorism
Notably, climate alarmism has resulted in majorities believing that the world is becoming worse, it is heading toward climate apocalypse. The result is anxious and depressed young people afraid to have children, and with their survival impulses heightened by apocalyptic threat, they are even willing to engage radically destructive actions to “save the world” (i.e. society destroying “de-growth, de-development, decarbonization”). Do not ignore the destructive impact of these beliefs on human wellbeing, still dominant in human narratives and subconscious archetypes.
Add here the research of Landes on Christian ideas shaping and validation the mass-death of Marxism, Nazism, and environmental alarmism.
Another:
One of most damaging elements in the fundamentalist Christian denomination that I was dragged into, was the intense orientation to “being right with God”. Meaning, oriented inward to focus on the loathsome “sinful self” that Christians believed was our core nature and true self. We were taught to despise ourselves because at the core of our being we were abhorrently sinful. We were something that incited the “fury of the wrath of God.” Our Daddy hated us for what we were. And that was apparently true since Adam blew it long ago with that apple, that abominable sin of being curious to know right from wrong. Sheesh, eh.
After being made aware of the foul rot that we were at core, we were taught to search constantly for sins to confess (incessant navel gazing). If we did not confess all our sins, and Jesus suddenly returned, then we would be on the outs with God and seriously in trouble- i.e. the threat of damnation again. So search and confess, confess, confess. As Maxwell urged us, when asked what is the most important thing in life, “Always keep short accounts with God.” Stay on the treadmill.
One annual conference speaker, Alan Redpath, intensified the obsession with personal sin when he scowled at the audience and barked harshly, “Have you been selfish? Have you entertained lustful thoughts? Then you have offended the spirit of God, and he has abandoned you to the devil. You will not be blessed by God.”
It was the feared threat of being abandoned by the Creator, cursed, and perhaps even ultimately rejected for eternity. Damned. So get on the endless treadmill of searching for personal imperfections that were impossible to eradicate entirely and finally. Hence, depending on the level of personal sensitivity, that obsessive soul-searching resulted in disillusionment, discouragement, even despair, because there was no escape or end in view.
Maxwell, in pushing obsessive introspection on imperfection, was training students to engage the worst form of rumination, on how vile we were. His harsh doctrine of original and inherited sinfulness, that damned every person born to hell aside from faith in Paul’s Christ myth, led him to obsess over sin as the most critically important thing every person should do in life.
Excessive introspection will acidly erode your spirit. The obsessive searching and confessing was an unhealthy introspection that resulted in the worst form of rumination- i.e. on how evil we were.
One thing I had to learn, coming out of that obsessive religion, was to not beat up on myself for imperfection. Yes, continue to practice healthy responsibility for behavior and consequences as part of normal human development. But don’t obsessively ruminate over personal imperfections and failures as that can too easily slip over into unhealthy rumination and distortion. Ah, the critical balances to maintain in life, eh.
Insert: Some helpful books on countering negative self-talk (we all get it), books offering insights on how to develop more healthy self-appreciation, are Jeffrey Schwartz’s “You Are Not Your Brain” and Martin Seligman’s “Learned Optimism”, and “The Optimistic Child”. Learn not to beat yourself up, especially after failures. You are something far better than you can imagine at your core, incarnated with Ultimate Love and Goodness that is inseparable from your human spirit. That is your true self. What sages and NDErs refer to as Oneness or union with God.
And as a wise sage once counselled, go out and get involved in helping others with their problems and that will lessen your concerns over your own problems.
Further, lasering in a bit more on the point above, excessive introspection intensifies “self-consciousness” till it can become debilitatingly unhealthy, especially when coupled with the dehumanizing push of religion to view yourself in the harshest negative manner as evil at core, as inherently evil.
As I stated earlier- “It was an education in the intensification of self-consciousness that promoted an obsession with how bad-to-the-bone we were. Self-consciousness pushed to the most harmful extreme- harsh self-focused negativity.”
Another note:
The counter point to the above focus of religion on human badness/sinfulness- There are no inherently evil people, born in sin, defined most essentially by inherited sinfulness. As Julian Simon says, “we are more creators than destroyers” and our overall improvement across history shows our inherent goodness maturing, developing, and expressing itself through our ongoing improvement of the world, making life ever better. See, for example, the evidence of ongoing human betterment in the decline of violence across history, as detailed in James Payne’s “History of Force”, and Stephen Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature”. Also, the overall improvement of life as detailed in Simon’s “Ultimate Resource”.
Our human spirit is the presence of the God that is love who has incarnated in all humanity, equally. Meaning, there are no special people more favored by God or more specially incarnated than any others.
God as love, incarnated in all humanity, means that our essential spirit, our core nature, our true self, is the same love as the unconditional God who indwells us. That inseparable God/human union is the “better angels of our nature”, as contrasted with the inherited animal impulses of our brain. And as Jeffrey Schwartz has titled his book, “We are not our brains.”
As Bob Brinsmead has said, there are no really bad people just people led astray by bad ideas, notably, bad religious ideas.
You would have to believe the great fallacy of “Declinism” (Arthur Herman’s “The Idea of Decline in Western History”) in order to find support for the lie of essential human badness, because amassed evidence shows both long-term ongoing improvement in humanity and consequent improvement in overall life. See, for example, “Humanprogress.org”. They are good on general trends in life but, unfortunately, horrible in affirming climate alarmism. Ah, always a fly in the ointment, eh.
The overall trend of improving humanity is seen in billions of individual human stories showing improvement over their lifespan. The 8 billion flowers blooming.
Another:
Love is a non-religious ideal and practice. Every human person, whether religious or non-religious, possesses the same primal impulse to love emanating from the core of their human self, their consciousness.
“Unconditional” love is even more profoundly nonreligious, contrasting entirely with religion as humanity’s premier creation of a highly conditional institution, presenting countless burdensome conditions to appease and please the pettiness of angry, retaliatory deity.
Learning what love actually is, and how to love, is the central purpose of our existence and life story.
Love is the epitome identity marker of what it means to be human. And there is a form of love that is a magnitude of reach beyond what many of us assume love to be (i.e. love of family, lovers and friends, neighbors). What the wisdom sage urged in his statement to reject retaliatory, punitive justice and to “love the enemy”. And in doing that, he said, you become just like God.