9 - Religious Abuse as Emotional Torture

Religion Doesn’t Have A Prayer - 9

Religious Abuse as Emotional Torture

We begin our story with a poem, one I wrote years ago, in what seems like another lifetime. My Guidance tells me I walked the earth back then and saw for myself the insidious beginnings of this thing called Religion.

People were looking for ways to control the masses. Each day some new purpose would emerge designed to enslave the existing populations and have them do the dirty work of those who saw themselves as Masters.

For the purposes of this story and the Religious Abuse Recovery Program we are launching here, we will focus our attention on the Catholic Church primarily. But this expose can be applied to other religions as well.

Man’s Folly – Religious Abuse

In the Name of the Father / How can it be? / You lied and cheated / Deceived me, I can see

No more holdouts / No more old scores / Time to return me / To my sweet amore

The one true love / That resides within / Is not without worry / But certainly without sin

The abuse of the Father / Is no folly indeed / It happened to many / Disrupted His creed

His words were spoken / In the hearts of the All / Lost and forsaken / Left in the Hall

There to be taken / By those who “knew better” / Thought they’d interpret / That unopened letter

Concealed though it was / To be opened by you / Thought they would grab it / And give it a chew

Chew, this they did / And badly as well / Hell and damnation / Had cast their spell

Long after the heartache / The evil and rhyme / The words of the Lord / Were turned into slime

Now these are retrievable / Through your own heart / Look in there now dear / You’ll find your part

No longer distorted / By those in the know / Cause you open your own mail / To start your own show

Let it be said / That God always knew better / He’d let you find / Your very own letter

He’d let you know / When you had enough / Cause His Heart is Yours / And Yours is so tough

Tougher than lies / Let that be for certain / Look inside your self / Just behind the curtain

The veil they created / With their stories untrue / The nonsense they taught / And said was about you

You know the truth / God set it there / He said: “Take a look dear / Don’t you be scared”

“I placed those words / Inside your heart / I knew you’d find / Your very own part”

“I’m glad you took charge / And set it all straight / No use pretending / I just couldn’t wait”

“Glad you could find / Your way to center / Heaven is right here, dear / Time for you to enter”

“And I love you, I do”

Signed: The Lord within You

Time to Remove that Religious Collar:

I come to you with this news because it is time to remove that religious collar from around your necks. We have suffered at the hands of our religious leaders. We adopted methods of coping that affected us adversely. These would include the great variety of addictions all designed to numb out the toxic effects of Guilt and Shame piled upon us by those who claimed to know better. This is one aspect of the insidious nature of Religious Abuse.

Let’s set the stage so we can all see where this enslavement of souls began. At the beginning of the First Millennium AD, around the time Jesus Christ was born, the Roman Empire was in a stiff decline. Their mastery and control over Europe and various regions in Africa and the Middle East were falling apart because the Roman leaders could no longer maintain the discipline necessary to keep their legions subjects in line.

As the Roman Empire continued its decline, some of its soon to be deposed leaders noticed that a rise in religious fervour was taking root, therefore, an opportunity to harness that need was now available. They realized they could transform this seeking of spiritual succour into a different form of enslavement that only required conditioning of the mind. By co-opting God as their ultimate Higher Power, they could deliver to the populace a series of edicts that could not be challenged, since they came directly from God.

An uneducated populace fell right into the trap and became supporters of this new religious movement. The Roman Empire morphed into the Roman Catholic Church and carried on their usual affairs under the guise of a new business model. Former military leaders exchanged their battle garb for priestly robes and began the transformation. They started to build churches and went to work developing their mind conditioning practices.

They saw for themselves what power religious beliefs could hold when they witnessed the effect Jesus Christ had on the population of the time. After they killed him, they jumped all over this need and began the business of converting the Empire into a large scale Religion.

They developed all kinds of methods for enticing people, methods that made good use of the technological advances of the day. For a naïve population, these acts of trickery were pure magic and served to draw them tighter within the fold. Simple mathematical formulas coupled with advances in hydraulics were converted into the miracles of crying statues, bleeding glass and speaking stones, all orchestrated behind the scenes by masters of illusion who hired themselves out to the Highest Bidders. That’s how Catholicism began, with trickery and deceit, methods that remain in existence to this very day.

This form of trickery and deceit set the stage for what was to become a systematic program of wowing potential converts with manufactured miracles. The biggest coup for the Catholic Church was when they successfully co-opted Jesus Christ’s name and enormous popularity. Once he was out of the way, it was easy, because he was no longer around to challenge them. This simply was the common business practice of stealing an idea, then getting rid of the competition that created it.

But that was not enough. They needed a founder, someone who was loyal to Jesus Christ, and that was his right hand man, Peter. They claimed Peter as the founder of Jesus Christ’s church, even though they had killed him as well, crucified him upside down, if you recall. So today you have St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City and St. Peter’s Basilica within that square all contained within a small piece of real estate that reports to no one but itself, exempt from taxes and exempt from scrutiny, the wealthiest religious organization on the planet.

In the meantime, Roman Empire soldiers became Christian Mercenaries and led the charge against Heathens everywhere. A heathen was simply a person or group that did not endorse Christianity. For this failure to comply they were killed, with Holy Swords and in God’s name. A few centuries back, during the time of the Crusades, a Christian mercenary leader reportedly asked his Pope, Pope Innocent II, how he should differentiate between believers and heathens, so as not to smite the faithful. And the Pope replied: “Kill them all. We’ll let God determine which are His.” There you have another piece of the foundation of the Roman Catholic Church.

Historians may dispute these claims as too simplistic and not factual enough, because I offer no accounting of dates or other specifics. The accuracy of these claims can be determined when you Google any of the key words listed above. For the purposes of your Religious Abuse Recovery, such details are unnecessary. What the church did or didn’t do, and who were the main players at the times of various atrocities will have no effect on what you need to recover from Religious Abuse. All we are showing you here are the corrupt beginnings of a Religion that claimed to have your best interests in mind, while its priests and nuns were busy berating you, sexually abusing you, shaming you and reducing you to puddles of tears, as successfully conditioned you to hate your self. This is spiritual blasphemy of the highest order

The Roman Catholic Church has become a massive and perverse institution whose main weapons include psychological controls, de-humanizing physical and sexual abuses and constant condemnation of your value as a person, as a true son / daughter of God. This is how they started and where they remain to this day, keeping all of us as children dependent on them, and continuing their program of mental and emotional enslavement through psychological torture and conditioning.

You need to see this for yourself, so you can come out of the trance they have put you in. All of their messages are what we psychologists call “double-binds”. For example: “God loves you, but you’re a Sinner.” “If you do as we say, you will go to Heaven. If you don’t, you will go to Hell.” There was no Hell until they invented it. There was no Purgatory until they invented that.

All of these machinations are fictions, all part of the Big Lie to keep you enslaved. None of it is true. They made it all up. And they continue to promote these ideas to this day because now they can rely on unquestioned history and their 2,000 years in business as validation of their eternal righteousness and authority.

This is where the Roman Catholic Church started. They discovered that Guilt and Shame, coupled with the fear of rejection by God, were stronger weapons than arrows and swords for bringing populations to their knees. It was easy back then to dupe so many people, because there was no education system to speak of, except for the elites who were already behind this fictional creation, and are still there to this day.

Jesus Christ did not launch the Catholic Church and neither did his close friend and disciple, Peter. They were setting the stage for a spiritual revolution however, and that is why they were killed. They were a threat to the ruling authorities of the day. Once these two were out of the way, the elites of the time seized the opportunity to capitalize on the authentic search for truth and wholeness, and used this natural human desire to enslave people in a whole new manner. With the fear of God duly installed, they could do pretty much whatever they wanted.

They successfully utilized the power of belief and the natural urge to meld with one’s God as a tool for conscripting millions into their fold while installing themselves as the only legitimate intermediary between man and God.

That’s where our experiences of religious abuse began. These perverse psychological tactics have been in operation for 2,000 years and they will not be going away quietly. The perversions of Christ’s original message are still going on, as are the abuses inflicted on countless children all over the world. We have only seen the tip of the iceberg where these abuses are concerned. The Catholic Church has successfully silenced many dissenting and complaining voices by simply paying them off under gag order conditions.

In the meantime they continue to manage their business as usual. Who is the next potential Saint in their line-up of fake ascenders? Let’s condemn abortion one more time. Let’s continue to deny poor people in third world countries the use of condoms to keep family sizes manageable. Let’s release another edict against homosexuality while tour own ranks are filled with them. Let’s publicly condemn priest pedophiles while we continue to shift them from parish to parish as complaints are laid.

Lies, hypocrisy and more lies are the true foundations of the Catholic Church. You need to see this to begin your recovery. You need to know that you placed your trust in the lowest of the low, that your parents were duped as were the thousands of generations before them. You need to see how badly and perversely you’ve been lied to so that you can contemplate the idea that you are not so bad after all. When we reject our abuse experiences as determiners of who we are and put these back onto the shoulders of our abusers where they belong, we begin to see that their practices are clear testimony of their perverse nature.

They are the abusers and we are the victims. The abuse that we suffered is about “what happened to us.” It is not about who we are. But it most certainly is about who and what they are. And they are everything they ever accused us of. They are the perverse and the psychologically sick. Their actions, thoughts and behaviors toward innocent children are what need to be condemned. They are the purveyors of abuse.

The Catholic Church’s entire program began with a series of lies and that remains as their foundation to this day. These people are murderers, liars, child abusers, sexual abusers and emotional abusers. They live in a hollowed out world where the only truth that matters is what will help perpetuate their power and control for another day, week or year.

They have piles and piles of money that they keep to themselves while they shame us into giving to the poor and disenfranchised, loathsome conditions that they help perpetuate with their antiquated but controlling messages about sin, sexual activity and birth control. In their world, it’s all about counting the cash, keeping the business humming along and silencing the victims of their various abuses through murder or payoff. Yes, there are bodies buried around residential schools in North America, children that were killed by their priest caretakers. Those who survived these experiences and witnessed the murders, have been bought off by those pesky gag orders, so that the Catholic Church can continue to pretend it is wholesome and clean.

This church, and many like it, is as political as any government and as corrupt as the worst you and I have ever seen. They are befuddled by the fact that they continue to be sued and called to account for their misdeeds. After all, shouldn’t they be above the law? Meanwhile, children abused at their hands, grow into adults who have multiple problems with self-trust, self-worth, self-esteem, self-condemnation and even self-abuse. These are the childhood religious abuse victims who as adults turn to alcohol and drugs to mollify their experiences of abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church. These people are you and I, victims of abuse at the hands of tyrannical nuns and priests who clubbed us into submission by conditioning us to fear God, the same God they claim is always loving and welcoming – another double-bind.

Their Pope is a big fat joke. They have elevated him to Rock Star status and sent him around the world to mingle with the common people. He’s just a father figure who goes around the world making a sign of the cross over the heads of thousands who are starved for parental approval and affection.

The Catholic Church’s leaders have positioned themselves as parent authorities who, while working for God, are allegedly immune to scrutiny or prosecution. They have successfully used the same tactic as rapists and similar abusers when confronted with charges of abuse – blame the victim and re-victimize them all over again.

The Catholic Church Authorities are the real heathens. They are the abusers of God’s just words. They are the liars and psychological enslavers of today. They are as good at running their religion as other enslavers’ of whole populations – Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin and most recently, Saddam Hussein. Comparisons can be made to a number of Western Leaders as well, but we will save that for another day. For now, the Catholic Church’s leaders are well in tune with the petty despots that we’ve seen come and go down through the ages.

Petty despots and religious abusers are all cut from the same cloth. They are elitist. They see themselves as privileged. And they truly believe they have the right to “Lord it” over the rest of us. We, the general population, continue to be their slaves as long as we endorse their program, or, more accurately, fail to stand up for ourselves and put these abuses and condemnations back onto them, where they belong.

This is the end of the road for the Catholic Church and all religions that practice psychological enslavement of their adherents. Those of us who have been abused are now saying:

Enough! I will no longer suffer at your hands! I am done with you forever! And I will heal myself of all your toxic effects.

Let that be the beginning of your Religious Abuse Recovery process. Let that phrase now become your Mantra. Say it to yourself everyday and prepare to heal from the lifetime of abuses you have suffered at their hands. The problem was never you. They problem has always been in the hands of your abusers. They are the ones who are sick and misguided. They are the ones who have perverted and corrupted Christ’s message to us. They are the ones who pretend to be God’s emissaries when they are in fact perverts of the truth.

In the next instalment we will lay out a profile of religious abuse victims. You will see yourself there and know you have been accurately described. With that template in hand you will begin your own recovery process using the guidance and methods provided here.

Yes you can recover from Religious Abuse, Religious Sexual Abuse, Religious Mental Abuse and Religious Emotional Abuse using the very same psychological tools they used to condemn you. Properly applied, these tools will lead you out of the spiritual wilderness they cast you into, and help you find your way Home to your True Heart, your True Self, and then make good your Personal Connection with the Living God within. Then you will know the true freedom of being “Connected to Source”, which simply means you will never need another religion again for the rest of your natural life.

How’s that for a promise? You, connected with You, and with the Great Creator! No more middle man. No more lies - just your own permanent connection to the Almighty.