Why is this so important?
T
he reason that we are spending all this time focusing on how abusive tendencies come about is because it is essential to understand the genesis of the mythologies that separate us from each other.
When we look at the interaction between Wendy and Sally, we can understand that Wendy’s bad behaviour
predated her justifications for that bad behaviour
.
Due to her rejection
of her own history, Wendy ended up attacking her daughter.
This shameful action produced a great stress in Wendy, because she wants to be – and believes herself to be – a good, fair and just person.
However, continually snapping at a child, or verbally abusing her in some other manner scarcely sits well with a benevolent and virtuous self-image.
Self–Mythology
When we perform actions that we cannot justify to ourselves, we have one of two choices. We can either recognize that we have a significant moral flaw and go through the painful work of starting to correct it, or we can say that our actions resulted from a significant moral flaw in someone
else
, and go through the far
less
painful work of starting to “correct” the
other
person’s flaws.
In other words, if I am angry at you, and I cannot believe that I am unjustly or abusively angry at you – which would be the case if you did nothing to provoke my anger – then I must convince myself that my anger is a
just
response to injustice or abuse from
you
.
As mentioned earlier, this shifting of moral
blame is called
projection
, which is a wonderful word on many levels – not only does it connote the shining of an image onto a blank surface, but it also invokes a “movie” metaphor, which includes the artistic fiction that it so often actually represents.
The Crossroads
When Wendy stands over her child, her voice hoarse and her hands shaking, looking down into Sally’s bewildered and frightened eyes, it is a moment of truth for her very soul.
If Wendy recognizes that she has just attacked a helpless and dependent child – which can never be justified in any terms – then she can begin to take the necessary and humbling steps of learning how to control her temper and hopefully, over time, win back the trust of her child.
However, the majority of parents feel the terror and vulnerability within their own hearts when looking into the horrified eyes of their children – and then take the terrible step of inventing a fiction wherein the
children
are the perpetrators – and they, the parents, are the
victims
.
Remember, in the religious approach we are always taught to create sinners to blame for our mistakes – and the more immoral our errors, the worse the sinner must be.
“
Look what you made me do!
” is the brutal and vengeful cry that erupts from the tortured souls of the parents.
“
Only a bad child would turn me into
this
!
”
Religion and Mythology
Why is it that we are so invariably drawn to making up self-justifying stories, rather than accepting the truth about our own capacity for doing harm?
Child abuse
is just one of the many, many destructive fallouts that result from our addiction to the superstitions of religion.
Religion completely externalizes the moral
– and immoral – decisions of mankind. “Virtue” is obedience to the whimsical dictates of a self-contradictory deity, while “vice” is surrender to the whimsical temptations of a self-contradictory devil.
“
The devil made me do it,” (often supplemented with “I was weak!”) is a constant cry among the religious – while these cultists often believe that they have the choice to reject temptation, the devil is very strong, and human flesh is invariably weak.
Furthermore, children
are not only born un-abused, they are also born fundamentally anti-religious. (If you doubt this, try taking away a four-year-old’s Halloween candy and saying he will get 100 times more candy after he is dead!)
Children are empirical, secular, rational and fundamentally scientific. In fact, the progression of competence in a child’s mind directly follows the scientific method
. For instance, in the first few years a child develops the recognition of causality, by tracking an object with his eyes or turning his head at a sound, followed by “object permanence,” such as recognizing that a ball placed under a blanket still exists, which then develops into basic problem solving with these objects. As the child continues to develop, these basic problem solving skills are refined by more formal use of logic in every aspect of life: identity, language, values, etc.
Just as it takes an enormous amount of statist propaganda
to turn a child into a dogmatic Soviet Marxist, it takes an endless amount of
religious
propaganda to turn a child into a dazed “worshiper” of imaginary ghosts.
Children are not even naturally agnostic. To test this proposition, simply give a child an empty box as a birthday present and tell him that there
may
be an iPod in it, but there’s just no way to know for sure, so he cannot really tell you that there is
no
iPod in there!
See if he thanks you for this
“gift” or not.
Thus, the subjugation
of children in terms of religion is based on the subjugation of children to
stories
– exploitive, abusive, ghastly, disorienting and manipulative
stories
.
In reality
, of course, it is impossible for a child to obey the Bible or the Koran or the Torah, because they are simply dead books with no capacity to reward or punish.
No, the subjugation
of children is fundamentally the enslavement of children to storytellers – their obedience to the whims of others, presented as absolute moral and metaphysical
facts
.
Enslavement to the idea that the stories
of others are absolute facts is a crushing blow to a child’s capacity to process objective reality – and, to the great benefit of those in authority, to criticize or question the errors of those who “teach” them.
Thus, since children
are trained to automatically obey “stories,” when an abusive parent aggressively tells a new “story,” which is that the aggression of the parent was directly caused by the actions of the child, the child can only nod numbly and blame himself.
For a more detailed explanation of this, listen to podcast 70 at http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traffic_Jams/how_to_control_a_human_soul.mp3 .
VIRTUE AND LOVE