From the book: WHEN GOD BECOMES A DRUG http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0874777038/cultawareinforce 

When God Becomes a Drug – part 3/5

EXPLORING THE SYMPTOMS

Uncompromising judgmental attitudes.

The need to control, to be perfect, and to feel superior often lead to religious addiction. Religion offers a new sense of identity and feelings of control and self-worth. Yet it is a false sense of self-worth based on putting down, humiliating, or even persecuting others who do not share your beliefs or follow rules as rigidly. In this symptom, the black-and-white and magical thinking, the inability to question, and the rigid rules merge to create increasingly destructive behavior and beliefs.

So much of religious addiction is built on fantasy — on beliefs that God will fix whatever is wrong or that being religious makes you a better person. By extension, Dr. Xavier says, religious addicts must create the fantasy that others are somehow bad, inferior, or evil in order to maintain a sense of superiority. So they fear anything that poses a threat to this fantasy- driven sense of self-respect. They preach bigotry and hatred based on race, religion, or political persuasion, unable to recognize the abusiveness and hypocrisy. Some even feel justified in killing people they consider evil. This is the rationale behind anti-Semitism and behind apartheid in South Africa; it gives birth to Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan. More recently, we have seen it in the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein as they used religious hatred to feed their holy wars against each other and against the United States and Israel. As religious addiction progresses, the range of people whom you fear, who threaten your religious fantasies, grows wider — they may include your parents, siblings, spouse, or children. Projecting all of your self-hatred onto others, you judge them as harshly as you judge yourself — always pronouncing on others the same guilty verdict you secretly impose on yourself.

This extreme judgmentalness causes deep and lasting emotional scarring. I’ve heard people in Twelve Step meetings share how their religious addiction or abuse left them with an intense Fear of being judged, which keeps them from taking risks and/or expressing their needs and feelings. When you have been judged mercilessly or have done it to others, you end up people-pleasing, avoiding responsibilities, or hearing shame and condemnation where it may not exist.

Compulsive praying, going to church or crusades, quoting scripture. These are the so-called using behaviors, the paraphernalia religious addicts use to get their fix. These behaviors do for religious addicts what snorting cocaine or swilling vodka do for substance abusers. When you hear religious addicts quoting scripture nonstop, imagine seeing heroin addicts shooting up. The praying, crusading, and witnessing are used to create a high. They also create a wall that separates religious addicts from other people, and from God. These behaviors are also a means of control. With them come the elements of brainwashing and mind-control that often accompany religious addiction and abuse. They are the tools used by the unscrupulous to gain and maintain power. They utilize black-and-white thinking via simplistic dogmas and slogans, strengthened by injunctions against doubting and questioning, with a dash of charlatanism and magic to keep people hooked.

They also lead to avoidance of responsibility. ……… chronic tardiness and absenteeism, and because of friction with co-workers created by his incessant proselytizing. Other symptoms include paying bills late or not at all, parents missing their childrens’ school functions and other events, young people skipping school and failing to turn in assignments. The tragedy is that often these people are told that God will provide, take care of them, fix it. When God doesn’t pay the rent, get the job, make the teacher accept the excuse, you either blame yourself for not being good enough or blame others for heing sinful and so not heeding God’s wishes. This distorted thinking is partly what drives religious addicts into insane acts of brutality or murder, just as it can fuel a kind of paranoid voice that tells them the Devil has possessed family members or others. These addicts perceive these people as standing between them and the so-called rewards of heaven.

………….When you feel compelled to force your family and friends to follow your beliefs — and become angry and hostile when they choose not to accept them — you are not practicing healthy religion. You are being religiously abusive. When you resent anything that interferes with your religious practices, that is not healthy. When you flee from all other beliefs but your own, you shut yourself away from God. We can see what Erich Fromm meant when he said religion allows those in control to ease their consciences about their abusiveness. In fact, most are so deeply in denial that they cannot even see how they are abusive.
Believing that sex is dirty — that our bodies and physical pleasures are evil. Listening to religious addicts’ views of sex, we could easily get the impression that God created sex and then rather regretted it.

It all comes back to the dynamics of religion, morality, power, and control. Erich Fromm observes that the taboos against sex are a subtle way to break our will without our knowing it. He says that the system of “indoctrination, rewards, punishments and fitting ideology solves this task so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.”

So it is with sex. No other human impulse carries with it such intertwined power and surrender. I submit to you; you submit to me. I have power over you, or is it that you have power over me? Sex is scary. We become vulnerable, opening our physical selves to one another. Sex requires trust: I allow you to invade me; I place part of myself in you. There is so much mythology, mysticism, and fear bound up in the simple act of human coupling. It’s easy to see how those who seek power can abuse it.

But the disadvantage of creating a taboo is that, once something is forbidden, it immediately becomes attractive. This taboo against sex has caused incredible cruelty. Time after time I hear of religious addicts who brutalize their children or abuse their spouses, all the while quoting scripture.

“It was the silence that was so maddening. Everybody knew that the biblical texts were selected as an excuse for the weekly punishments. I knew my father enjoyed giving us a whipping but he read from the scriptures to make it okay. And my mother knew it. I think I am more angry at her because she knew he enjoyed it and yet she said nothing.” Tom, age forty-two

If you are excluded from ordination and active pastorhood because you are a woman, that is religious sexual abuse. If your religiously addicted husband is battering you and your infant child, and your pastor tells you to stay in the marriage because of the wedding vows, that is religious sexual abuse. Women are said to be given away in marriage; men are not. That is religious sexual abuse. This belief also provides justification for a great deal of the physical abuse some religious addicts heap on their families. One man wrote to me: “Mother would keep on beating me… literally trying to beat the Devil out of me, I guess. She’d scream scriptures at me all the time she was hitting me. 1 never understood how my own mother could think I was evil.”

to be continued