Ooze 𓁟Dogmatic religion is a bitch. It destroys the very core of people.
Humans are social creatures. So when our cherished others share with us that it is possible to know the love of a perfect being, to be enfolded in the bliss of union with it, if only we follow some rules, we naturally strive to seek this perfection. But the rules are the thing. When we submit to rules we want to know that they are justified. That they will be efficacious. But dogma, the insistence on unquestioning faith, does not give us such reassurance.
Any dogmatic set of rules is functionally unattainable in the long term because of the power of doubt. Dogmatism is not a natural part of what it is to be human. We thirst for understanding. And, while there is a great truth in not being a slave to the why of things, in sometimes accepting things as they are even though we cannot yet understand them, we will never cease completely to ask why.
Whenever there are rules they are broken. Always. If there is a rule, someone is breaking it. But with dogmatic religion it is always the rules held in the highest regard that are broken. Not just broken, smashed. The most proscribed precepts serving only to indicate the nature of the depravity of the oppressors. Our tender bliss seeking hearts recoil from this hypocrisy. And we instantly see the deception that these others have perpetrated upon us. And we hate them for it.
And if we are hurt enough, we defensively reject the entire possibility of the blissful union ever existing at all. We want our money back, because the thing they sold us does not exist. Or so we think. We think this because the hypocrites who taught us are hooked on the idea that there is only one way to characterize the perfect thing, and it is their characterization. All the other ones are evil. The god of Abraham boldly declares that all other gods are evil and untrue, false and deceiving, or even, the big lie, simply nonexistent. Like a spoiled toddler, his every utterance an insistent cry of There Can Be Only One.
This is often the first clue to us that the god of love they say they are recommending might not be quite as loving as they make him out to be. Even though we reject them once we see their hypocrisy rear its so, so ugly head, we have been so traumatically conditioned by the purveyors of the One True God™ that we can’t easily escape from the bounds of monotheism. Once we have found that particular god lacking we fall back on that conditioning and we believe that there must be no gods at all.
But the blissful union with the perfect thing is still there! If we continue to be prisoners of the conditioning foisted upon us by the damaged peddlers of the one single truth lie we shall be forever beholden to their conceptualizations. Forever locked in a trap of their design. Forever believing that it is their way or nothing...
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