Guest post: Like shards of glass stuck in your brain
Originally a comment by iknklast on Shame and fear of damnation.
It has taken decades of therapy and hard work to overcome the intense feelings of shame and fear of damnation that she said marked her childhood.
This. So much this. I have been out of Christianity for over 40 years, and I still deal with this nearly every day. It is like shards of glass stuck in your brain. No matter how much you know on an intellectual level that these are fallacious beliefs, that you are not a bad person, you still respond to certain things in the way you have been trained to respond. I have been trying to root out those shards of glass in many years of therapy, and when I think I have gotten them all, I leave therapy, sigh with relief, and go about my business. Until a new one shows up. And the wounds fester. They become infected. They ooze pus into your whole being that can consume you if you don’t have the strength or support to resist.
In addition, people like me, like Barrett, are raised to believe everyone else is wrong. I moved past that, thanks to falling into a set in high school that helped me examine my beliefs. Barrett has not moved past that. You should not put someone on the SCOTUS if they have such a view, if they cannot listen to other arguments without having already decided they are wrong. That is dangerously dogmatic.
I would be perfectly happy if the Catholic contingent on the court decreased until it was just Sonia Sotomayor. She is one who appears to be able to keep her religion and her work separate. The rest? Not so much.
A religion by its very nature has to maintain an in-group/out-group dichotomy. ‘We are the saved and all those sinners out there who (presumably) have rejected our message are damned for eternity. We will try to bring the light of our faith to as many as we can while there is still time, but our resources are limited.’ Etc.
The Catholic Church has long had a policy of encouraging Catholics to seek temporal power, and has not been above doing deals with tyrants of all kinds.
Its clergy have no trouble coming up with scriptural justifications, or for any other policy, or its complete opposite for that matter. They are only human after all, including those who wrote the scriptures in the first place.
“A religion by its very nature has to maintain an in-group/out-group dichotomy.”
The Protestantism of Britain, and its anti-catholicism, dominated politics for about 400 years, from the reformation until about the mid to late nineteenth century. It’s still a political force in Northern Ireland and the West of Scotland. Now that Britain is a much less religious country, that past looks more and more foreign – and I think outside of most people’s conceptions of the past, which they will see in terms of imperialism, class, enfranchisement or industrialism – something that still has resonance with their own experience – but not give any weight to Protestantism.
I have just read the Croatian writer Daša Drndić’s extraordinary novel-cum-documentary, ‘Trieste’, which is about the destruction of the Italian Jews. A number of Jewish families gave their children to the Catholic Church for safe-keeping. After the defeat of Naziism & the Fascists, the Catholic Church refused to return the children to their families. Monsignor Angelo Roncall, papal nuncio to France and future Pope John XXIII was required to ensure that the Church retained supervision and guardianship over Jewish children who were baptised. Jewish children who had been baptised were on no account to be handed over to Jewish agencies with responsibility for the care of children, since these agencies could not guarantee the further Christian upbringing of these Jewish children, and could not be reunited with their families, assuming these had survived, who would not agree to continue their Christian upbringing…
This of course meant that virtually none of these Jewish children were reunited with their families. The Church used every bureaucratic obfuscation in order to prevent it.
I recommend reading pages 280-284 of ‘Trieste’ (at least – read the whole thing if you can), from which I have adapted the above.
Why? Because the Church’s first priority is ‘saving souls’. Unbaptised children’s fate after death was anomalous (though there was limbo for centuries), and the fate of children brought up in Judaism was, well… unless they were baptised and brought into the Catholic faith. Therefore the Church is permitted, in following the higher commands of God, to ignore any human law and to behave in the most dishonest and inhumane ways in order to ensure that its first priority is maintained.
The same applies to abortion, of course, so that the Church is perfectly happy that a woman should go to prison for many years for having a miscarriage or that an adolescent girl impregnated by some close relative or raped by some man should have to bear the child, as happens in El Salvador, where there is a ban on abortion in any circumstances that the Church supports. But souls are being saved! For unwanted babies or babies who will not survive outside the womb or may kill their mothers in childbirth may be christened.
This putting of ‘God’s law’ above any human law, so that the latter may be broken or twisted with impunity in the name of the former, runs through Catholicism, whose priests are really mages, able to perform the powerfully magical act, conferred by God, of turning wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ. One need only read Chesterton, whom I now loathe with a passion though I enjoyed his Father Brown stories in youth when I didn’t recognise their implications. There is a fascination in them with the immense power conferred by God on ministering priests, who are therefore quite within their rights to break mere human law. Father Brown, being God’s representative on earth, is able to act as a god, and he and Chesterton rejoice in it.
[…] a comment by Tim Harris on Like shards of glass stuck in your […]
So Father Brown is a mage? The actor who plays him in the recent BBC series (Mark Williams) also played Arthur Weasley in the Harry Potter films.
Catholic priests also have the magical authority ‘to convey forgiveness’ in the confessional – a power which comes, according to Catholic doctrine, from Christ. What happens in the confessional cannot be reported to others, including of course secular authorities. And once having confessed and received absolution, the slate is clear (though there are no doubt theological niceties as to the sincerity with which confessions are made, but that can only be known to God). As Philipe Sandys’ excellent book ‘The Ratline’, which is about the Nazi Governor-General of Galicia, and his attempt to escape to Argentina, makes clear, important people at the Vatican such as Bishop Hudal were involved in giving Nazi fugitives access to the ‘ratline’. One may also think of the sexual abuse of children, as well as the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland for unmarried mothers as well as their children, who seem to have been regarded as having a double dose of original sin because of their unlawful conception, and the way priests and nuns got away with it for so long, and doubtless still get away with it to a less extent than was possible before in countries that are not like El Salvador.
For the Christian, there are two levels of existence, as in:
“Heavenly realms is a term we use for speaking about spiritual realities in spiritual dimensions. The term heavenly denotes a place higher or more perfect that our earthly one and the term realm contextualizes this place as being under the rule and reign of God. Though we understand that these heavenly realms are in another dimension it’s a mistake to believe that they are irrelevant to earthly matters. On the contrary, the Bible teaches that what happens in these spiritual realms has a direct bearing to what happens on earth. What’s more these realms are not remote and inaccessible to us, but closer than we often imagine.”
https://spiritlifestyle.com/heavenly-realms/
In this perspective, human knowledge can only be gained through study of earthly reality plus such revelation of the heavenly as God has permitted us to know. The rest of it is unknowable to us, and known only to God, and perhaps also to the angels and spirits in Heaven.
Students of religion have traced the origins of this back to the oldest documentation of it: in the Bronze Age, as I understand.
But postulating the spiritual realm opens something of a can of worms. It sets the stage for the existence of a third realm, above and unknown to the other two; unknown to the god of the second realm. That third realm could have its own god, known to the god of the second realm only through revelation, as is held to be the case with the human denizens of the earthly realm. The God of the Second Realm could broadcast his omnipotence and omniscience to all and sundry as he saw fitted his interests to do so, without letting on about the Third Realm: only the God of the Third Realm might overrule him and decide otherwise.
But wait! There’s more!
Just as the existence of the Second Realm makes possible a third, so the existence of the third makes possible a fourth, and then a fifth and so on to infinity. We would live in the innermost of a series of universes, nested in space and time like Russian dolls. And all because some Bronze Age prophet dreamed up a second realm.
You’ve got to be joking, Mr Einstein.
Omar, that sounds suspiciously like turtles all the way down.
iknklast: Turtles all the way down? As good as…!!!!!!!!! (And !!!!!!!!’s off into the sunset and all the way to the horizon.)
;-)
As recently as the 1950s in England (not Northern Ireland or the West of Scotland) I think my mother, who was Irish from a Church of Ireland (Anglican) background, would have be horrified by the thought that her son might marry a Roman Catholic. By the time I did marry a (nominal) Roman Catholic in 1982 I think such feelings had entirely disappeared.