PUBLIC SERVICE ESSAY
“IN GOD WE TRUST”… A PROMISE AND THE THREAT
“The scientific method is forever insightful, cross-validating, predictive and ‘eternally’
trustworthy. Any truth is empirical, rational and sets us free–it’s never imposed.”
Joseph W. Ferrara, EdD
www.soundmentalhealth.com
INTRODUCTION
With final deliberation, their only child quietly bought the standard sized, compact folding, lock-back utility knife for $5.32, including its sales tax. On its package read the promotional remarks “textured, nonslip usage handle with a quick and easy opening blade”. With moist eyes and cascading tears, she tightened her right-handed grip on the nonslip shaft of the life-time warranty utility blade making swift, but deep screaming left to right slashing cuts across her voluptuous breasts, Grecian hips and genitalia. In a hypnogogic, agitated self- depreciating trance, he set in sad silence on his royal blue carpeted bedroom floor with his back straight against the beige-colored wall using a flip-down light-weight aluminum locking blade utility knife with a pocket-clip which he quietly but quickly removed and slashed deeply into his sixteen year-old left hand wrist for a second time. She, in profound mental disillusionment, emotionally withdrawn and socially isolated, threw her lush, enviable brunette head of coiffured hair forcefully back consuming a lethal dosage of her psychiatrically prescribed depression medication. From birth, each of these conditioned patients and others before and after them reported clerics of their respective ”religious denominations” meticulously taught them from childhood “God is great, God is good and trustworthy” but they, themselves, “sinned in both their conscious and unconscious thoughts and were offensive, detestable and unworthy, deserving just everlasting punishment in an eternal fiery hell”. If they just thought of it, it was as if they had consented to and actually done it requiring the common, obsessive-compulsive and controlling recitation of
“O my God, I am heartfully sorry for having offended thee and I detest all my sins
because of thy just punishments, but most of all because I am wicked, wretched and
sinful for offending thee, my god, who art all wise, good, loving and most deserving of
all my affection and devotion. I firmly resolve with the help of thy benevolent grace,
to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin.”
What do you suppose this erroneous shocking, consistently assertive condemnatory pronouncement and obsessive-compulsive prayer or chant did to what they both thought and felt towards and about themselves, i.e., the value, worth and importance they placed on both themselves and their lives? Their clerics’ promissory teachings of “in God we trust” did absolutely nothing to prevent but allowed and permitted the action these powerless patients were acutely compelled and driven to take and unconsciously took. Such traumatic but symptomatic declarations of condemnations seriously threatened the traits of the multiple growth-areas of their developing covert and overt degrees of self-esteem and thus the very life of their sense of self. We, all being raised and living daily in a “Christian nation”, shockingly experience clerics’ slandering condemnations and imprinted threats of endless torture and then re-experience them hourly, to a greater or less degree, as introjected post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) until they are fully therapeutically extinguished or fortuitously repressed. In an attempt to fill-in the unknown, clerics thought-up and imposed religions. All religions are imaginary, fictions and a hoax.
RELEVANT DYNAMICS
The most important value-judgment we will ever make is the actual value and worth we first place on ourselves and, subsequently, others, which is determined by the prevailing conditions of our background. We cannot genuinely treat others any better than the way we both think and feel towards and about our conditioned self-actualizing selves. Threatening our life, freedom and sense of independent self, clerics of our infancy, childhood and current adult life dogmatically and arrogantly declare publically “give us a child until they are seven and they are ours for the rest of their life”. Either directly or indirectly, we, too, have been “legally” but criminally:
I. slandered by defamatory condemnations of being depraved, i.e., “evil, wicked and sinful”,
II. threatened with eternal torture in a tormenting, fiery hell as being just punishment,
III. and extorted for significant, timely monetary contributions to finance their religious empires and opulent lifestyles.
Thus, from our most relevant susceptible birth, clerics have characterized our innocent personhood, our vulnerable individual sense of self as “offensive, detestable and wicked” in “the sight of their almighty God”, with each one of us “deserving eternal torture as just punishment”. Their slanderous condemnations, terrorizing threats of eternal hell and compulsory monetary demands have horrifically and acutely intensified global:
A. fears/anxiety,
B. suicides,
C. sadness/grief–bi-polar depression,
D. psychosis/schizophrenia,
E. homicides and wars,
F. drug use/medications,
G. alcoholism,
H. misdemeanors and
I. felons.
Clerics make moralizing, scathing rebukes of our lifestyle of television, movies, clothing, vacations, card playing, popular magazines, sports events, cheerleader uniforms, mixed-race marriages and opposing ”churches”, Disney (since it came on Sunday night), dancing, social drinking, smoking, food, pre and post marital sex except for “just having babies in marriage”, anything and everything, just name it. Between condemnations, clerics proclaim the “Holy Spirit” appears and talks to them and their devoted members. Wednesday, May 17, 2017, the Sarasota Herald Tribune reported “a juror dismissed during deliberations in former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown’s thousands of dollars ‘One Door’ fraud trial”. The circumspect juror stated he was “getting information directly from my father in heaven” about Brown’s guilt while deliberating the cases outcome. “Did you say the words, ‘a higher being told me that Corrine Brown was not guilty on all charges’?”, Judge Timothy Corrigan asked the moralizing juror. “I said the Holy Spirit told me that”, the virtuous juror replied. With Brown’s attorney James Smith’s objection, Judge Timothy Corrigan dismissed the juror and restarted the trial and deliberations which resulted in Rep. Corrine Brown’s honest and just conviction.
RELATED DYNAMICS
Meanwhile, the warp and woof of our nation’s diverse ethnicity and mighty historical fabric is woven into each and every American citizen’s heart and mind. From our writhing beginnings, as both a civilization and a government “for the people and by the people”, our trusted, elected or appointed civil servants have pursued and provided our nation’s most significant endeavor…liberty. Sewn into every red, white and blue stripe is our noble heritage to “faithfully” affirm and protect “eternally” equal human worth, freedom, equal opportunity and honest justice. Every steadfast stitch of each and every seam is our justifiable pride to both remember and honor our courageous heroic brave. Embroidered into every glistening star is our valor to bravely explore life’s future with its maturational but intriguing unknown. The scientific method is forever insightful, cross-validating, predictive and “eternally” trustworthy. It will intelligently and rationally guide us in solving global:
1.) poverty,
2.) hunger and illiteracy,
3.) physical diseases, deformities,
4.) mental/emotional dysfunctions and disabilities while
5.) managing climate disasters and
6.) providing potable water.
Clerics’ “almighty God” claims to be in the know and all powerful, so why has “He” recklessly and with abandonment allowed and permitted life-threatening and destructive conditions to exist without any prevention, protection or rehabilitation ever taking place in any civilization or time? Comparatively, the scientific method is truly life-giving and will always take care of us, protect and keep us safe, healthy and secure because it is rational and sane, and its results can be publically and empirically verified, replicated, cross-validated and trusted without any worrisome doubts.
CONCLUSION
“In God we trust” implies the existence of a benign supernatural loving “almighty”, who is allegedly provident, compassionate, kind, curative, trustworthy, understanding, preventative, protective and forgiving who promises “a place of paradise in our spiritual afterlife”. The creation and original appearance of “God” in human history was truly actuated by clerics’ ancient Paleolithic, monoamine, histrionic reactionary personhood. i.e., a dramatic, psychotic and criminal mental and emotional breakdown, however. Clerics’ exploitative claim of an “almighty God” exclusively “choosing” them, appearing only to them, talking only to them and giving only them miraculous powers and only “His almighty, orthodox word” for all of humanity to obey or risk excruciating eternal torture is a form of psychosis. The existence of this life-threatening, militant, violent “almighty God” at anytime, anywhere, is based originally and today on clerics’ psychiatric self-proclaimed exclusionary delusions of grandeur, omniscience and their admitted visual, auditory and kinesthetic hallucinations indicating the presence of a psychiatric diagnosis of ambulatory schizophrenic reaction, paranoid mind and personality type. Consequently, their made-up mythological Abrahamic militant “God” or violent“Yahweh” was just one of the seventy folklore sons of the mythological El and Athirat, the legendary father and mother of all deities in the extant Canaanite pantheon. Joshua or “Jesus” in Greek/”Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ”, was just the mythological hero of the Jewish mystery religion declared as the son of the mythological “Yahweh”. The claim “Divine Truth” is as much a myth as the existence of a benign “God”. There isn’t any “God with Divine Truth” to be discovered and obeyed. While this fabricated and mythological militant, violent “almighty God” claims to be omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, “He” does not prevent but permits and allows globally:
a.) horrifying climate disasters destroying lives and property,
b.) terrorizing physical diseases and disfiguring amputations,
c.) heartbreaking suicides/homicides and global wars,
d.) repulsive, shocking physical deformities,
e.) tragic mental, emotional and relationship dysfunctions,
f.) abject poverty and
g.) ravenous hunger and thirst
to exist in suffering individual’s lives as well as the collective world at large. We are forever free of living with the horror, the shock, the agony and the sheer madness of clerics’ commands, promises and/or threats of a living, loving militant, violent “almighty God”. Consequently, any “afterlife” is truly our distinctive children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and any occupational, professional, scientific, educational contributions or societal graces we might leave as a legacy bequeathed to both our immediate family and/or our civilization. A wholesome and healthy civilization is built on beliefs of equal human worth, representation, protection, opportunity, fairness and honest justice and that all citizens are equally protected from the corrupt, the violent and the forces of restriction and exclusion in the enactment and enforcement of any law.
The content of this essay is formulated on and supported by the empirical research findings of the drop-down articles on my website entitled “The ABC’s of Covert and Overt Self-Esteem, Our Self-Evaluative Mechanism” and “Superstitions or Religions in Human History”, section number 9, see Chart No. 3 demonstrating how clerics have evolved, tailored and crafted superstitions into the slandering, condemning, threatening, extorting and horrifying/shocking militant religions of today. Kindly visit website www.soundmentalhealth.com for a complete review to remind us all of this part of our most unfortunate and egregious heritage.