4 - Religion as Toxic Pollution

Religion Doesn’t Have A Prayer - 4

Religion as Toxic Pollution

As I continue this process, with you as witnesses, I can report that with each writing session more and more of that religious poison I was brainwashed with is oozing out of me. The pain of this process brings with it a sense of release, a sense of being cleansed, as sense of having my soul run through a car wash.

That’s the nature of journaling on any subject. You begin the process and your feelings start to move. The power of owning every aspect of your Self, including those deep seated wounds, unlocks their tentacles and allows those feelings to surface. As I accept each component it gets released. Yes, it is painful. Yes, there are tears almost every day. But what are those tears? Sadness or joy? Neither! It’s a feeling of “release”.

This is what happens when I own my pain, whatever its source. As happens often with emotional pain, people want to deny it, to reject it, to distance themselves from it. That refusal to acknowledge what is true for you on the inside is what keeps you stuck.

As I engage in this process of dealing with religious abuse a few things come to mind. First off, in order to even begin this process, I had to commit to my well-being rather than holding up the rationalizations my abusers had installed as a whole series of psychological protections for their perverted nonsense. This they did, under the premise that their brand of faith required it. Talk about a double-bind?

“First we’re going to mess you up in terms of our religious position. Then we’re going to install a series of buttons which essentially forbid you to question us or the instructions we provide. These buttons are going to be laced with shame just to make sure you stay in line. Later in life you won’t know why you’re so angry anymore, you’ll just know that you can’t challenge us or what we represent”

That was the message from my abusers, the nuns. This pain that I am releasing is my pain, brought on by my exposure to their poisonous activities. I am no longer afraid of taking them on. I have abandoned the superstitious fears that they filled me with. And their pretence at piety has no grip on me anymore. When you strip away the uniforms and the constant blather about what they think God wants, you see them for what they are. A bunch of messed up women hiding from real life, immersing themselves in the addictive soup of religion which gives them all kinds of rationalizations and distractions to keep them from questioning their sexuality and what other motives that drove them to hide in this environment.

I am releasing all this garbage through this painful investigation of my religious upbringing. I am looking at a bunch of strange women who locked themselves up in a uniform and ran away from life. Yes, I agree, there are many who seek refuge in the church to abide their piety and to do God’s work in terms they understand. I did meet one such individual and she was my grade 5 teacher. My aunt, the missionary nun also qualifies. After that, of the hundreds I have met over the years, there is not one I could place into this reverent category. In statistical research, results are considered significant if 95% of the surveyed population meet the theoretical criteria. My grade 5 teacher and my missionary aunt fall into the 5% that meet the theoretical criteria of piety and good works. In other words, the sickness and dysfunction that pervades 95% of this religious population is the rule, despite their claims to the contrary.

The majority of nuns I came across did what our first category of abuse victims do on a consistent basis. They identified with their abusers and joined the party. By becoming one of the 95% dysfunctional group they could enjoy the illusion of righteousness and feel free to cast the devil outside themselves into the hearts and minds of children who were their main prey. This way the sisters didn’t have to own their pain or question the righteousness of what they had been taught.

Well my friends, their devil is their religion, pure and simple. There is no devil by the way but there is evil. So we will remove the “d” from the word and call them and their manufactured poison what it is – “evil”. Religion is the abuser. And those who subscribe to it to gain some of its authority and power become purveyors of its abuse. Now they can project their retaliatory anger and pain onto others, infecting them with the very poison they are unwilling to own. Their victims again, were children, like you and I.

These religious individuals couldn’t stand the innocence they saw in little children because they had already abandoned their own inner child. They projected their disowned anger, hurt and shame onto this new batch of innocent victims and abused them. There is no escape from self-hate. There isn’t a prayer or ritual strong enough to rid yourself of that. Only Love can heal that wound. So with all their venom and abusive strategies released during the day, they still had to live with themselves in their private moments and I have no doubt that their self-hatred manifested there as well.

In my French Canadian culture, this sickness was everywhere. There was no escaping it. You got it at home from parents who had been infected with their childhood dose and you got it at school weaved through the curriculum that was supposed to be your education. The Catholic religion is the most grotesque of all with its application of regimented, well defined, well orchestrated abuse. From my perspective today, they were no different that the TV Evangelists who claim they can rid your body of the devil’s influence. They are the strictest of the strict in their application of religious dogma, which makes them the sickest of the sick, in my view.

All religions are sick! They are closed systems, and closed systems always stagnate. Eventually they become rancid as succeeding generations are infected with the same re-digested poison and contribute to the pool. All religions are a lie, pure and simple. If they truly had a handle on the truth, they wouldn’t be defending themselves in court or blatantly trying to influence political decisions that would advantage them with new recruitment. People would beat a path to religion to savor that truth, to reaffirm the love in their hearts that is all our due directly from the Great Creator.

Let’s look at this analogy more closely to see how it works in nature. If you block up the streams that feed a pond, the latter becomes stagnant, and then rancid. If you block up an underground stream that nourished your favorite small lake, it will become stagnant and rancid as well. All systems need fresh input. Fresh water lakes rely on rivers fed by rainfall and melting snow which then cascades down mountain slopes and are cleansed through rocky filters. This cycle repeats and keeps our waters clean. When this crystal clear water is no longer available to the lake, it turns rancid and all life within it is in peril. There is no shortage of examples to support this illustration.

Now let’s look at this stagnant pond called religion. As new waters, read ideas, come pouring into the mix, the rancid waters will be shaken up. Religion can only accept a limited quantity of new ideas which their leaders, in pious hypocrisy, will then subvert so that they can quickly be absorbed into the poisonous soup and be neutralized. There comes a point however, where the new waters arrive so fast and in such large quantities that the poison in the religious pond can no longer absorb it and the waters of sanity become refreshed again. The polluted waters are returned to healthy balance and will remain so, unless a new closed system comes to the fore.

When we cleanse ourselves and rid our souls of religion’s rancid influence we become free, just as we were when we first arrived on the planet. Then we can get on with the real business of representing our God on this earth and exhibiting Her/His main qualities of kindness, acceptance, love and true compassion. No more manufactured shame, self-doubt or self-hate. That has been the training program of all religions and they are doomed to extinction. In my view, there is nothing to salvage there, except some historical references that tell our human journey from a truly un-polluted point of view, if that’s even possible after a few thousand years of poisoning the pond.

Religion is understandably concerned about their losses in adherents. They claim to be concerned about religious and family values which so many of their representatives violate on a daily basis through their abuse of children, their sexual relationships with married women, and their hidden homosexual propensities which get acted out and caught on tape.

For the Catholic Religion:

“How can you know what families are going through when you are not allowed to be married or have sexual relations of any kind? (not that this stops you) What kind of perverse logic is that? How can you know what a close, heart to heart relationship is, when your only comfort is the robes that you wear and your homosexual encounters with each other? Denial of one’s sexual being is a wholesale denial of one’s humanity. When you deny your essential nature, the door is wide open for unlimited forms of perversion. God did not create us so we could spend our lives denying parts of His creation. How can you pretend to be whole when you have sliced off these important features of your humanity? That is simply a lie! 

The religious claims to perfection are derived from their religious authorities’ own perfectionist egos. I call this stratification, the freezing of emotional layers in time. Because religious figures have abandoned their natural feelings, as a result their own religious abuse and psychological stagnation, they have assigned them to their wonderfully convenient and completely made-up default negative category. This category includes identifiers such as “Sin, Lust, the Devil, Vengeance and Hedonism”. They will even claim the label of “Insanity” to describe anything that doesn’t comply with their version of the truth.

In my view, Sarah Pallin former US vice-presidential candidate is insane. Glen Beck from Fox News is insane. Rush Limbaugh, right wing radio host, is insane. George Bush is insane. And Dick Cheney is insane. But from their perspective, you and I are insane. Those of us who pursue the truth of God’s nature and living embodiment within, are insane. When you are diagnosably insane but convinced of your “rightness”, then you have to see others as insane, based simply on the fact that they are different from you and they do not endorse your perverted values. The difference between myself and the above noted individuals is that their beliefs stem from the waters of their rancid right-wing religions. My beliefs come from Heart and are freely granted to me by the God that resides within. These beliefs emanate directly from Source and are not polluted by anyone else’s interpretations, as is the ongoing case with religion’s interpretations of Scripture and the Bible.

If this question were brought up for public discussion, who would be the final arbiter in such a dispute? The God in All of Us, that’s who. The God that teaches us every day that we are sane and our feeling insane at times is a by-product of removing the legitimate insanity that has poisoned our lives – religious insanity.

Religious insanity comes from claiming one thing and doing the opposite. Religious adherents claim to believe one thing, such as God is Perfection, then denounce His creations (including themselves) as imperfect, vile and flawed. Religious authority figures have affairs. They have homosexual encounters. They abuse children and shame them into believing they are defective, all the while claiming that God loves them. They have political agendas designed to advance their recruitment drives and their power base within their larger social context. Their “believers” are believers in the cultural insanity that comes with any religion.

The world is now taking a close look at these religious caricatures and is seeing what is plainly there: Insanity! Blatant, Foolish, Diagnosable Insanity. That’s “The Plain Truth” contrary to their past missives containing their perverted version of the truth. Even their so-called tolerance for non-believers is just a shell game, to show how nice they are. Meanwhile, in back rooms everywhere, religious authorities are plotting what moves can be made to rein in a population who, daily, is getting away from them.

At this point, those of us in recovery are getting quite a show. We started out suspecting insanity on the part of our native religion and its leaders. We were scared to say so out loud because that meant taking on these power brokers. But as I work through this process I see light at the end of the tunnel. I see my true connection with God (My god Self) emerging and growing stronger within, and that makes this whole process worthwhile. Why would I want to spend another moment on this planet disconnected from my own source of truth in favor of religious lies?

As I poke around in my religious history, I find a huge bag of pain and sorrow, born from my encounters with childhood religious authorities. I feel this hurt and it scares me. It is so powerful and so deep. It does not look anything like the devil they projected onto to it when they taught me to deny my feelings and listen only to their rhetoric. It looks and feels like exactly what it is – pain, hurt, heartache and abandonment, all feelings related to Grief and Loss, the loss of connection to Source, the loss of fragile self-esteem, the loss of God’s loving embrace over a child’s heart. These are the earmarks of a traumatized child who has had “the devil pounded into him/her.”

My inner child is not as insane as I once believed. He is as healthy as a bee, ready to grow and evolve, ready to get busy with God’s bidding. Informed by that pulsating God within, this vibration of love, acceptance and generosity makes its way to surface and radiates out of that beautiful innocence that is no longer polluted by religious disinformation. My Inner Child has waited years for this rescue, wanting to be acknowledged for who he truly is – a good boy who loves to play and dance and celebrate the life his Lord has given. This is a beautiful soul who God has imbued with grace, purpose, creativity and the will to action. Once of a kind, he is simply not the stamped out caricature that his religion tried desperately to mould him into – a truly remarkable individual, as is your own Inner Child.

My inner child is now benefiting from my pouring of fresh waters of truth, openness, exhilaration and positivity over him, washing away the fabrications and lies of the polluted religion he was born into. He and I have now become friends, and that makes us a threat to organized religion, because we have been through the juggernaut of their malicious lies and refuse to believe any of it.

Worse for religion is this. As we abuse victims shine our light on their past applications of insult and injury, their claims of being unifiers and representatives of the Godhead get blown right out of the water. They still live in the polluted waters of religion from which we have now extricated ourselves. They are desperate to get us back for several reasons. The obvious one is loss of numbers. But the real reason is this. As individuals vacate religion’s polluted sphere of influence they will begin to feel the tugs of self-examination. This is what religious authorities have been running from all their lives as they endorsed the power position of abuser and acquired it for themselves. Self-examination for religious leaders is like throwing garlic at a vampire!

Lies are not self-sustaining. They are always under threat of exposure from the real truth. Groups that live in a lie need adherents to support their ongoing affirmation that what they are doing is right. As the population bails out of religion’s collective insanity these nut cases will have to look at themselves. What is more likely is that they will have a collective nervous breakdown and collapse under the weight of centuries of lies that no one is willing to endorse or support anymore. Their house of cards is about to come tumbling down. Yeah, Yahoo, Whoopee!

The waters of their self-created, rancid defensive moat will simply become more polluted and unable to sustain any life at all. All closed systems eventually collapse. Throughout history religion has received some minor challenges, but nothing that prevailed over the long term. In those days religious authorities simply hired mercenaries and had you killed off, or, they publicly humiliated you and threatened ex-communication. That’s how they controlled their populations; they effectively utilized a well developed methodology that is always based in fear. This from a religion that claims to be loving! What a laugh! Organized religion has no room for the truth. Their self-erected bastions of lies and misrepresentations could not tolerate the fresh waters of truth. Rather than witness and behold the great advances in science proffered by Copernicus, Galileo and numerous others, they condemned them and labeled them insane and of the devil.

“My dear religious authorities,

Have you heard about the psychological effect called “projection”? It is simply this. Whatever you attribute to others in a negative context and then proceed to condemn them for, describes you to a “T”. All those negative attributes you project on to others originate from you and your deliberate perversion of the truth. They are simply another fine example of your inability to see yourselves in the condemnations you so freely deliver. Look it up!” The truth of your perverted approach has been well documented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric and Psychological Disorders(DSM VII)!

That is the nature of a closed system. Everyone else is to blame.

Religion's Operating Mantra

“We do not allow in anything that challenges the Status Quo. We shall never grow and we will only rarely revise what we already have. Our truth is in the scriptures and nowhere else. We will keep interpreting these scriptures, as we have from the beginning, to advance our just causes which include taking you prisoner, both psychologically and emotionally, while holding you in contempt. We will never grow. We will never seek out so-called “fresh waters” that may Un-Pollute the beautiful rancid swamp in which we have thrived for thousands of years. We will stay true to our purposes which include lying if we must, to keep you, our fervent and naive followers, in line. That is God’s mandate for us, as we have construed it and continue to support it, despite regularly emerging alternatives and challenges.”

And there you have it – a celebration of rampant, deeply-rooted, all encompassing stupidity that is never up for reconsideration and will be defended to the death. They, the religious authorities that support this mantra, will keep peddling their stupidity until their deaths, claiming that their corrupted version of spirituality will be vindicated on the “other side.” They will continue to do so until we have had enough and say “No More!” Mere silence, which the majority of non-practicing Catholics engage in, is simply license for them to continue with their folly. They need to be confronted.

“Speak your truth people and give religion and its representatives what they deserve – The Boot!”

An interesting aside here that I can pull out of my practice days goes something like this. Women would come to me and complain that they had a terrible time getting rid of ex-boyfriends. No amount of saying the word “No” seemed to penetrate the stubborn ex’s refusal to let go. So, I used to jokingly recommend that they keep a 4 foot piece of 2x4 lumber at their door and “use as required.” That was before I offered the more practical solution of getting a “Restraining Order” through the courts. The Catholic Church, among other religions, will need a 2x4 across their collective BS before they get the message that they are no longer welcome in our lives.

Back to the church authorities’ claim of vindication on the “other side”, it may have to wait until all these earth-bound criminal indictments are settled. These continue to come to the forefront in larger numbers as more and more abuse victims take a stand and demand satisfaction. These are the little leaks which are fast becoming the big cracks you can walk through that their closed systems can no longer defend against. Their vain attempts at plugging the “dykes” are as effective as the levies were in New Orleans after the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina. The walls around their closed system are beginning to collapse under the strain of continuous challenges to their previously unassailable position of “trusted authority”.

Religion Doesn’t Have a Prayer

Religion, as we have come to know it, is finished! The above caption is the Title of this emerging work which has now taken on the proportions of a book. Religion does not have a prayer – it’s over for them. That’s why we see them engaging in a massive retrenchment to the old ways. That’s why the Rigid Religious Laws of 3,000 years ago are being held up by Islam’s religious zealots. That’s why “male authority” is rearing its ugly head again, especially against women. That’s why the Catholic Church in North America is pining for open borders in the Southern United States. Because of advancing educational standards in Canada and the United States, less and less of their relative populations are ripe for pollution. A stupid system requires an uneducated and, therefore, vulnerable population to absorb their pollution. It seems the Bush administration in its 8 year celebration of stupidity did their best to help religion out, by making it more difficult for US citizens to receive a higher education.

So where is this uneducated, ripe for pollution population to be found? In Central America and Mexico, that’s where. And that’s why the church wants open borders! They certainly don’t want any more of the educated and challenging individuals to come into their closed system as the “fresh waters” of modern sensible thinking. They need their adherents to be kept in “the dark”. It’s the only way they can carry on. But those fresh waters of “sensible thinking” and “questioning of authority” are everywhere these days, and those innocents from impoverished (read uneducated) countries will soon see their way through the nonsense as well. Religion, namely the Catholic Church, is doomed.

The staunch right-wing advocates of the polluted waters of religion are throwing everything they have against the threat of sensible thinking. Lying, cheating, undermining, swift boating, whatever they can muster is being thrown against this Advancing Light.

George Bush did his country a favor. He showed the US, and the world for that matter, how rancid the waters of right-wing politics and religion were. He took stupidity and its ensuing polluting effects to new levels of abuse and outright criminal miscarriages of justice. He brought the pollution of stupidity to the White House and was valiantly supported by his henchman in the eXecutive Branch of the time. Their form of pollution and stupidity has cost America the lives of over 4000 young men and women, for a war that was without foundation, and that was supported by the right-wing of religion who had the audacity to believe they could follow up and bring Christianity to Iraq. Funny how the latter changed their minds when they saw the effect Suicide Bombers were having on every dimension of Iraqi life.

How did the Iraq war begin? Like all things that become polluted by the limited thinking of so-called pious individuals, the real tragedy of 9/11 was converted into an opportunity to go to war against a people who had nothing to do with it. An innocent, albeit trapped in dictatorship, nation was ripe for the picking. In my opinion, George Bush is a war criminal. So is Dick Cheney. Both should be prosecuted under the authority of an International Tribunal for the hundreds of thousands of lives that their illegal, uninformed and blatantly stupid war has cost. They should also be prosecuted for the murder of nearly 5,000 of their own citizens they sent off to die unnecessarily on the basis of a pack of lies, the same kinds of lies The Catholic Religion used over the centuries to go to war against other religious groups.

“Let us celebrate the stupid and inane” they said. “Let us conquer all peoples we don’t like, especially those Arabs and Muslims who practice such sinful religions. Let us smote them with all our might, so religious leaders back home can go in and convert them to our truth, while we engage in our real mission, which is to take over their oil riches and set up a military presence we can then use to threaten nearby nations such as Iran.”

I know these little dialogues come from my creativity and inspiration. They are also based in real world facts. There were Christian groups in the US ready to go to Iraq, once the worst was over, to bring them the American right-wing version of Christian truth. “We shall be greeted as liberators” was the call from Dick Cheney, which they took to mean liberation from their heathen religion. Talk about a perverted projection, that is again, made up, and without foundation! At any rate, the mission to save the Iraqi soul was put on hold because of those pesky suicide bombers.

“Don’t they realize we have come to save them?”

Sadly, Iraqis, in their insane adherence to their own undying heresy, were prepared to blow themselves up and take the Christian missionaries with them.

Remember this language coming to us from the Muslim faithful? Hard core Muslims refer to Westerners as “polluters.” They actually use that very term. The Muslim religious authorities, like their Christian counterparts, view each other as “polluters.” Both are closed systems. Both suffer from the ensuing rancid pollution that permeates their thinking and religious stance. Both accuse each other of heresy. That is the clearest example of psychological projection I could offer you. In this case, projection is a two way street and, They Are Both Right!

Their message to each other: “Your religion is polluted.” “No, your religion is polluted.” “We are right and you are wrong.”

And on it goes. Most religions, having suffered great losses in the past, know better than to go fishing in each other’s waters. Religions are very territorial. The West likes to pretend they have “the softer, kinder religion” that doesn’t want to kill anybody even individuals like us reject them and give them the proverbial “Boot.”

Summary

That’s it for this episode. To sum up, religion as a closed system, always delivers a rancid, putrefied and polluted theology. No earthly system, in nature or as a set of ideas, can be sustained without the input of fresh water, fresh ideas and fresh thinking informed by Source. All systems benefit from fresh new blood, brimming with the Creative Energy of our Original, Unpolluted, Primary Life Force, the God within, All-That-Is, The Great Creator. Connect with your Source and find out for yourself!