mosez wrote:
I believe in God, but not in the religious systems created by man. Looks to me that they have a few goals, namely; money, control and power...
I agree with the above. But lately I've been thinking about something else... the meaning of "forgiveness" and "faith."
I know, in both a rational and intuitive way, that I will eventually have to learn to "forgive" those who mistreated and damaged me, and regain "faith" in how the world works again. No one had to tell me that, and I can clearly see that is necessary for emotional and mental health after a bad trauma that shake your faith in the word and your place in it. But those kinds of concepts are quite alien to me in their mystical vagueness. They don't come naturally to my literal mind.
I keep looking for some kind of cognitive-behavior type algorithms for how to construct "forgiveness" and how to restore "faith" in your life. While that might seem to be an absurd thing to do, I've think I've found it. If you look in the religious works, a lot of what goes on in the stories are a kind of coding of experience that encapsulates wisdom (as well as their explicit messages). Kind of like the Da Vinci code (but in obviously different ways), you can decipher what the topology and warp and woof of the cognitive spaces are, and the algorithms of classes of cognitive behavior that act in those spaces. And so I have developed a highly literal and mathematical kind of way of looking at really, really complex social cognitive behavior (like "forgiveness" and "faith"), from what was once my very simple if-then-else set of rules for thought behavior. So my problem-solving is now that of constructing within myself the proper cognitive spaces and semantics to support that kind of thought behavior. Teaching myself to think mystically and faithfully by laying the right spaces and building the groundwork for that kind of social mind. But enough of the technical talk.
Religion teaches us how to be things beyond our capacity, personally. I was taught what "hate" was by a poisonous sociopath who bullied me and unloaded her sociopathic hatreds and Machiavellian ideas into me. All "hatred" is and must be taught. IMO it is a learned behavior, at least for AS people, who are by nature drawn to coherent (functional) systems and learning. I don't mean to imply that AS people are morally superior to NTs, but the very act of submerging your ego in learning and experiencing a topic that you love requires humility, optimism and joy, and it is pathologically unhealthy, in my opinion, for an AS to feel hatred or contempt because it is corrosive to your natural mind's existence and this is more vital to AS functioning than NT. So I didn't know "hate" but I do know it now, and what is worse, I don't have the natural constructs in my mind to compartmentalize and "forget" it (if I had the ability to compartmentalize, I could lie and do other things that I can't do). So it is beyond my personal capacity, or my natural mind, to unlearn how to hate.
Religion is where I have found the really rich subject material on how to construct "forgiveness" and reconstruct "faith". And for myself, as presumably for other people, learning these things will help me recover from my traumas.
In other words, religion contains that which helps you become more than what you are, as a person. It has the material which, if you learn to read it and understand it, helps your social consciousness to recover from bad exposure ("evil") and become a richer, more wise and resilient social consciousness. It is good for your mind when it has been corrupted by bad input, so to speak, by helping you develop a better social mind in order to absorb and integrate the damage into a larger and more holistic world view.
Religion is no replacement for suitable therapy, if you've been traumatized. But depending on the nature of the trauma, it can be an essential part of it, at least for the purposes of being good source material for guidance.
13 Dec 2008, 4:58 am
