Follow up to https://intothevoid.us/2005/07/09/talking-to-dog/
There is this thing called the religious experience. This is where you feel the presence of something larger than yourself, and know your place in the grand scheme. Sometimes you only get a glimpse of it, but it’s enough to change your opinions completely. Uh, epiphany, that’s what it’s called. Epiphanies are associated with the amygdala and certain brain chemicals which I don’t care to look up right this instant.
Organized religions cannot allow their laypeople to have religious epiphanies. Why? Because they are exploiting that divine revelations to exert power over us. What if Dog told one of us to stop following the kosher laws or to take down the graven images in the church, or whatever your particular religion requires?
I can hear the Elders now: “What’s that? Dog told you that the church must allow rape victims to obtain abortions if they want so that they aren’t troubled by the life-long trigger of a child with the face of their rapist? Hmmm, he didn’t tell us about it! Heresy! BURN THE WITCH!!!”
I seem to burn a lot of witches in this blog. Apologies to my Wiccan friends. I am not condoning witch hunts, I am raling against them.
There’s another problem. In certain mental disorders the patient finds change very distressing. In the case where the patient is incapable of seeing others’ points of view, and is in a position of power, it can get very ugly. Since the patient doesn’t acknowledge other points of view, he perceives that his own dysfunctional ideas fill the entire universe – are intrinsic to it, are the Word of Dog. This has a lot of useful side-effects. One of them is that the patient, in externalizing his own faults, can deny them and even project them onto others! If another opinion ever impinged up the patient, he would believe that it threatens his very existance, that it threatens the order of his universe, that it is Blasphemy. He will label other opinions as Evil and then try to destroy them.
I believe that this is precisely why so many people in power use organized religion to control the populace.
Anyone who foists their particular flavor of religion on another person is, by definition, trying to control them. It has absolutely nothing to do with “saving” them or helping them “attain enlightenment” whatever the Big Idea in their particular religion might be. It is all about pathology and projection and POWER.
So don’t even think about proselytizing. Why should I follow instructions that were meant only for you? If I want to talk to Dog I’ll do it myself, thankyouverymuch.
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