The Insanity of the Knee-Jerk "Anti-Religious" People

 

The two craziest types of people are the hard-core religious fanatics and the knee-jerk anti-religious fanatics.

And when I say “crazy,” I mean it in the literal sense.  It’s a well-known and poorly-kept secret that religions tend to attract people who are clinically insane.  A lot of hard-core adherents are either clinically insane or hanging by a thread.  I’ve seen it personally.  I have a family member who was a hard-core religious adherent, and clinically insane.  I’ve been to temples where someone goes on and on about Buddha without any awareness of his or her audience. 

Strapping a bomb to yourself and blowing up unarmed people, or shooting them, or firing rockets at them, is clinically crazy.  Supporting that behavior is also clinically crazy.  So if the people chanting BS about how Hamas is right seem like lunatics, it’s because they are.

Religion has the same problem as society – it has a serious mental illness problem. 

The other side of that is the knee-jerk “anti-religion” people who can’t stop themselves from going off the rails every time religion is mentioned.  It’s the same clinical insanity manifesting itself.  When I was at school in Berkeley, it wasn’t unusual to see the bat-shit-crazy bums arguing over religion, both the adherents and opponents, shouting crazy talk at each other.  We had a guy in my neighborhood who spent his whole life homeless, driving a van plastered with “Jesus” all over it.  In both cases, people treated the mentally ill as objects of amusement and cheered on their mental illness.  (I’m going to withhold my rant about what I think of those bastards who celebrated people exhibiting serious mental illness, but let’s just say there are a lot of people who desperately need God in their lives.)

Leaving aside the mental illness, which is disturbing in and of itself for a lot of reasons, I find the knee-jerk “anti-religion” people to be particularly annoying.  The annoying lack of self-awareness in how they’re exhibiting the same negative traits they claim to see in religious people.  The idiotic-while-acting-superior-and-rational jackassery of cherry-picking of facts and theology.  But the most annoying feature is the damage they do to innocent people’s relationship with God.

What do I mean by a lack of self-awareness?  When you boil it down to the essence, you find the anti-religion people aren’t really concerned about where religion fails and helping it to be better and more aligned with the true nature of God.  They simply want to present *just enough* evidence to make themselves feel comfortable in rejecting religion, but not go deep enough in their inquiry to allow for the possibility of anything other than a knee-jerk reaction.

They experienced a bad reaction to religion – usually a family issue but sometimes other people did something wrong to them or someone they care about.  And instead of dealing directly with the issue, they’ve projected their wounds onto religion – religion is the enemy, so now I don’t have to do the work of healing this messy wound. 

Or they’ve just made a lot of mistakes and instead of facing and owing up to them, they’d rather get rid of the whole “right-wrong” thing and imagine that disavowing religion can be their reset button.

They’re entire energy is based on some version of a deep-seeded belief that they’ve hopelessly failed and, were religion to be accurate, they’d be going to hell.  So the entire philosophy of anti-religious people comes down to shame and limiting beliefs about themselves.  (And a false interpretation of the religions they believe they’ve hopelessly crossed.)

And I’m saying this with compassion and love.  Most people exhibiting mental illness are hurting.  Some aren’t – a lot of clinically insane people attest that their insanity is euphoric and like a drug, but the people exhibiting these intense negative feelings toward a loving God that gave them life, they’re really hurting inside.  And they don’t see a way out. 

But compassion for suffering doesn’t change the fact that knee-jerk anti-religious expression is an expression of mental illness, not an inspired religious viewpoint.

I’m also not minimizing the damage people do to others in the name of God.  There are a lot of abusive people who misuse God (especially the “going to Hell” part) to do some really horrible things to other people.  The Crusades, the Inquisition, many wars, but also on an individual level – lots of child abuse, spousal abuse, and generally shitty interpersonal behavior (up to and including murder) is committed in the name of God. 

As I said, the mentally ill are attracted to religion, and for too many it’s a way to avoid actually dealing with the issues.  Are you hearing voices or hearing the voice of God?  Are you speaking jibberish or speaking in tongues?  Are you autistic or an enthusiastic proselytizer?  Are you abusive and treating people as less than human or being a loyal follower of the literal word of God?  It’s easy to hide your neurosis, psychosis, or straight-up evil behavior, behind a religious facade, and nobody can question you because “freedom of religion.”

And I agree that healthy religions need to allow space for this conversation.  Because the overwhelming majority of religious people really and truly are good people who want to be better people.  And they’re as appalled with these abuses as I am, and as those who imagine religion is out to hurt them believe.  More and more religions are opening up to this important process and working to clean out the festering infections in their families.  This is difficult but good and will make us all better people.

And I get that this is difficult and some aren’t there yet.  We want to give some space for people to find their way through the healing process. Some try to find alternate religions, or make their own.  The whole “I am God, you are God, everyone’s a god-god,” “divinity in everything” BS is part of that “choose your own religion” mentality.  It’s another flavor of  rejectionism: If I can’t succeed by following an established religion, I’ll make my own where I’m guaranteed to win.

And I know I’ll get the questions – well weren’t all religions created by “crazy people” who downloaded some stuff that turned out to be aligned with God?  Well, yeah, probably.  Not all the stuff that comes out of crazy people is nonsense.  Some is pretty inspired stuff. 

So what’s the difference between your drug-induced “enlightenment” in the jungle and Buddha’s Sutras?  Who am I to say that you aren’t adding the next Sutra to the canon instead of spouting off crazy bullshit?  Well, first of all, I’m not dismissive of every insight.  Some I test as accurate, at least in part, but many don’t hold up to that test.  And by many I mean 99.99+% of the “insight” out there.

And within that very large percentage of BS religious insight, there are big patterns.  One of which is that the “insight” conveniently aligns to the, well, convenience, of the person conveying the insight.  That’s a big red flag.  The ones God has chosen to convey his message have to suffer tremendously, and usually the message is one the person really doesn’t want to hear.  At best the message is neutral.  But in the huge majority of cases, God wants the messenger to throw away their entire life up to that point, embrace a life of poverty as a social outcast, and likely be murdered by an angry mob or die in abject poverty.  So if God is telling you “you’re God, keep fucking around, doing drugs and playing in the desert and giving crappy spiritual advice to people who pay you,” …yeah… no… no.  No.  That ain’t God talking.

God isn’t going to waste his time telling you “you’re doing just great.”  He *might* encourage you to keep going through really bad shit, but why would God go out of his way to say “You’re awesome, Dave!  Rock on, dude!” 

That’s not to say you aren’t awesome and don’t rock on, but don’t confuse yourself and spiritually vulnerable people by claiming it’s the voice of God saying that.  Positive self-talk is important and a healthy self-esteem, but don’t go crazy.

And if this triggers you – “Are you saying that I’m crazy?!?  You’re not qualified to say that!!!  You don’t know me!!!!” Consider that trigger is yet another of probably many, many signals you’ve been getting that you need to attend to your mental health and seek professional help.

Because seeing a religious statement doesn’t trigger an emotionally healthy person to respond.  And challenges to one’s mental health also don’t trigger a response in people who are emotionally healthy.  People who are not mentally ill can handle opposing viewpoints or challenging questions and don’t feel compelled to react or respond to everything.  And if the thought of religion compels you to create an alternate fantasy religion to escape, well, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it isn’t an alligator.  And the damage you’re doing to vulnerable people is real and uncalled for, you need to stop that shit.