It’s time for an intervention!
21 April 2007 by NaomiThis is a follow-up to my post on the much-quoted Karl Marx “…It is the opium of the people…”
I remember hearing popular psychological speaker and writer John Bradshaw say that the “high” one gets from being righteous was similar to the high of cocaine. As both a former monk and addict, he knew the feelings personally.
As the religious right pushes its anti-gay, anti-women’s reproductive rights, anti-science, pro-profit agenda nationally and in state capitals across the nation and wins, that high is a sweet fix for the addicted. It gives them a comforting feeling of relief that they’re really right, okay, worthwhile, and acceptable.
…Like all fixes, though, it doesn’t last. So, the addict is driven to seek another and another – another issue, another evil, another paranoiac threat to defeat. It can’t ever end. Like the need for heavier doses, the causes have to become bigger and more evil in the addict’s mind to provide the fix.
This mind-altering fix of righteousness covers their paranoid shame-based feelings about the internal and external dangers stalking them. The victim-role language of their dealers, right-wing religious leaders, feeds it. Like alcoholism and drug addiction, the fix numbs the religious addict against any feelings about how their addiction affects others…
If you’re an enabler or the addict yourself, the above must sound over the top. You’d prefer to deny or soften the reality of the addiction…
Addicts reinforce each other. Fundamentalist religious organizations and media are their supportive co-users. So the person who deals with someone’s addiction cannot do it alone. They must have support from others outside the addiction…
You can’t argue with an addict…
You can’t buy into the addict’s view of reality…
Never say, even to reject it or with “so-called” before it: “partial-birth abortion,” “gay rights,” “intelligent design,” “gay marriage,” etc…
Don’t let the addict get you off topic…
Never argue about whether sexual orientation is a choice…
Never argue about sex…
It’s okay to affirm that you don’t care or these aren’t the issues. You don’t need to justify your beliefs to a drunk or druggie…
Get your message on target and repeat it…
Don’t nag addicts…
Don’t accept that the addiction needs equal time…
Model what it is to be a healthy human being without the addiction. Addicts must see people living outside the addiction, happy, confident, proud, and free from the effects of the disease. In spite of the fact that we’re a nation that supports both substance and process addictions so people don’t threaten the institutions and values that pursue profits over humanity, live as if that has no ultimate control over you.
Don’t believe that you, your friends, children, relationships, hopes, and dreams, are any less valuable or legitimate because they aren’t sanctioned by a government, politicians, or religious leaders that are in a coping, rather than healing, mode of life.
Dealing with addictions takes an emotional toll on everyone. Yet, recognizing religious addiction as an addiction demystifies its dynamics and maintains our sanity.
This is an excellent primer for talking to the religious-addicted. Please link and read the complete article (which is part of a soon-to-be released book).
If you’ve ever been through addiction recovery, you’ll recognize most of the “empowering ways” to speak to the addict. If you have been lucky enough to escape the curse of addiction (chemical and otherwise), you can still appreciate how important it is to set up and maintain the conversation, and keep YOUR focus on THEIR problem. If you even once sound sympathetic and/or defensive, you’ve lost your power. End the encounter immediately. That allows you to come back later, having shown your control of the issue by walking away from it on your terms. It’s not complicated but it requires self-control.
Reminder: “Model what it is to be a healthy human being without the addiction. Addicts must see people living outside the addiction, happy, confident, proud, and free from the effects of the disease.”
(Dr. Minor is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas. Through his Fairness Project, he is an advocate for, and lecturer on, LGBT issues.)
21 April 2007, on 11:47 am
Something good from the University of Kansas! This feels very similar to Dawkins’ claim of religion as a delusion, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Perhaps I am grouping addiction and delusion together at a mental problem?
Perhaps this can also help explain some of the compartmentalization that Dawkins sees in theists that also accept evolution, as some kind of spiritual bi-polar disorder.
21 April 2007, on 12:43 pm
David, that’s some of what I meant on the “opium” post”:
21 April 2007, on 1:31 pm
I think the fact that Religion is probably the major UNRECOGNIZED addiction which, in my opinion, LEADS many people, if not all, to other addictions like alcholism and drug addiction. Alcohol, being a drug…the all time winner, for that matter…is really part of general drug addiction.
I haven’t explored the whole of your links, Naomi; but my first reaction to the subject matter comes from my own experience regarding the link of Religion to the problem of addiction in general.
A bit of blabbing, here…which is SO easy to get into on this topic…
As I’ve mention several times here on GifS; I was raised Catholic with the usual childhood programming about being a wretched sinner, just by being born a human being…with no choice in the matter, no participation in the origin of the unjust system of blame, if you will. Yeah…those two Gawd conceived, fabricated fuckheads in that silly garden of ‘Eden’…What!…
Quoth the lion…: “AARGH”!…needless to say; scaring the shit out of the nearby ‘lamb’!
To continue…
[Warning: Beware of some long sentence structure!...
As a musician, I'm tempted to start using breath marks...ala... ^ ]
The implantation of guilt, layered with the fear of eternal punishment on a young mind; with the addition of outrageous, un-achievable perfectionism, wreaks unrecognized havoc on an evolving mind. For many, who eventually question the dogmas they’ve been indoctrinated with, and attempt to escape by rejecting that embryonic, unrecognized…NON-CATEGORIZED addiction…they’re ripe for falling under the charm of using alcohol, drugs…even sex…as an alternative addiction. Hmmm…so says the SOOTHsayer?
In my case, when I reached my college years, and my longtime, mostly suppressed questions about the truth value of the indocrinated religious dogmas became more consciously evident; alcohol, in particular, became the elixir for acheiving ‘instant freedom’ from the gnawing guilt I was feeling. When I encountered courses in Philosophy, I immediately discovered the intellectual, rational ‘tools’ of logical, albeit, critical thinking; which inevitably led me to becoming an agnostic, and eventially falling away completely from organized religion. It took me more than half a decade to really accept my exit from that heavy duty childhood programming…but by then, I was addicted to my daily doses of alcohol…and looking forward to adding tobacco in the mix.
I won’t go much further with my personal tale, here. It took me from about 1976 to 1986, with participation in AA to finally kick the alcohol addiction…followed by the stopping of cigarettes [I had added tobacco in 1964] in August, 1989.
I gradually stopped AA meetings; which I finally concluded was another religious,’God’ oriented, addiction. I was never a daily participant, unlike many in that program. By the way…almost all older alcholics, are ‘duly addicted’ to cigarettes. In my opinion, cigarettes are harder to quit…and some, as y’all know, never manage to kick the tobacco habit…even confronted with emphysema!
My main conclusions?
Here’s two:
1) Addictions are usually interlinked; i.e. people are generally MULTI-addicted; and unaware of it!
2) It’s perhaps impossible for any human being to be totally NON-addicted to something. Even radio, TV, cell phones, iPods, flogging, ‘masterwanking’?…you name it…become addictions.
Lest we forget…FOOD?
Needless to say, as animals…we’re all in one way or another addicted to something! It’s perhaps inevitable, in the nature of physical existence, to be addicted.
Hmmm…Is Existence itself, an addiction? Yeah…Ad Infinitum!
OK…Sex, anyone?
What’s that, you say?…NOOOOOO!!!…???
21 April 2007, on 6:05 pm
ChuckA, you are a wretched sinner, but there is now hope for your unbaptized babies. According to the AP, the pope has reversed centuries of tradition in not allowing our unbaptized babies into heaven. Presto chango, the little original sinners can now get in to that lovely fairyland in the sky.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0420pope-limbo0420-ON.html
This catholic bullshit never ceases to amaze me, how long will it be until the believers tell themselves that it has always been this way? We should get a pool going.
21 April 2007, on 6:40 pm
Nathan, now that they have admitted that Limbo is a mythical place, how many centuries will it take for them to admit that heaven and hell are only mythical places invented by human imagination?
21 April 2007, on 6:51 pm
ChuckA, I am a fellow musician, and due to my what I play solo, I often play in churches. You are quite right. The addiction connection is quite apt.
Some groups I play in have had the “twice born” among their number, and if we were on the road on a Sunday, they “missed church” or Sunday school they displayed all sorts of anxiety. They were jonseing on religion like I would for a cup of coffee (which is about the only jones I have left).
I wonder if you ever can actually be quit of an addiction. I had my last cigarette thirty years ago next month, haven’t slipped once. Yet every time I dream I have a cigarette and am smoking. Something is still going on with that.
I have observed the complexity of this from childhood on, and I think that religion has so many cross currents that “the truth” about it is pretty much unviewable as a whole. I often think people actually believe more in the act of believing than belief’s object.
There is a need fulfulled, though. Fear, desperation, feeling inadequate. Feeling betrayed by society and not trusting anyone anymore. Comfort. And basic immaturity and rigidity. I played in a church a while back, it was, um, consevative. But they had a speaker who was anti evolution. He was livid that someone would compare him a child of god, to a base, smelly, monkey.If you saw their expressions, heard the noises they were making in support of his thesis, actually if THEY could have seen their own behavior next to a film of belligerant baboons or chimps, I swear the only difference would have been tonsorial and sartorial.
Try watching a televangelist with no sound on the TV. Highly instructive. They are enraged.
21 April 2007, on 7:04 pm
Time for some song lyrics:
“I want a new drug
One that won’t make me sick
One that won’t make me crash my car
Or make me feel three feet thick
“I want a new drug
One that won’t hurt my head
One that won’t make my mouth too dry
Or make my eyes too red”
I note that lots of former substance abusers tend to go the religious route. Co-ink-ee-deenk? I think not.
21 April 2007, on 8:20 pm
Check this out…
High on Jesus
21 April 2007, on 8:39 pm
I agree with the idea that religion is just another addiction. How many drug/drink/food addicts exchange one addiction for another. (I’m not taking the moral high road here, I’ve got my own food issues)
My first wife came from a family of druggies and drinkers. She didn’t do any of that, but her addiction was church and Jesus. She didn’t really want to know what the Bible said, it was all about going to church and playing the part. That was the addiction.
21 April 2007, on 8:59 pm
Humans seem to have a propensity towards ritual. Religion may just be an example of ritualized addiction. The issue is for me, when do our personal or our cultural rituals instead of being considered the solution to problems, actually become the problem rather than the supposed solution.
21 April 2007, on 11:32 pm
BBIM: when it is turned outward, instead of being a private matter.
And when there is a movement to impose their beliefs on us, it’s more than problem/solution — it’s Treason! Our Constitution provides bulwarks against that very eventuality. UNLESS the president just happens to be complicit, and has the assistance of more than half the Congress. AND when the Press sides with them and against us, rather than doing what Jefferson believed the Press should do: independent reporting on our government…
22 April 2007, on 12:52 am
naomi:
RE: ” when it is turned outward, instead of being a private matter.”
I agree. In the words of Thomas Jefferson
“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” -
-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782
(But if my neighbour INSISTS that the only “true god” is the one he/she follows and that we all must follow it; will pockets remain unpicked and legs unbroken? )
22 April 2007, on 2:27 am
Nathan RE kids…I didn’t spawn any in my younger days…at least no one has leaped out of the bushes to yell “Daddy!” at me! I think my spawning days are long over.
However the Catholic revision of their old Limbo dogma makes me think that…IF…their notion were true; it would seem to be much better to be an abortion or miscarriage (Natural abortion…erm…”Gawd’s?).
In other words; skip all the testing and travails of actually living an earthbound bodily life; instead, get “Blissed out” with absolutely no “Dues paying”?
“Halloweenja”?
What a crock, irrational Theology is!
Sarge…RE “I wonder if you ever can actually be quit of an addiction.”
In my rather long overview of that subject; I think the subconcious “tape” (or now, maybe ‘digital’) recording which was imbedded early on in the theoretical unconscious; is never really erased. It’s been said that one can only kind of ‘overdub’ a correction…sorta like a software update?…which has, so to speak, the newer, ‘reality’ or maybe ‘problem recognition/solution’ data necessary to override the compulsion. In other words…the mind (brain) still has the original bullshit buried in the ‘archives’; which, given the correct trigger mechanism, may return to one’s dream (alpha?) or even concious (Beta?) mind.
It’s just that…especially over a long period of time…the update takes precedence.
Does that make any sense to you?
Like you, I once in a great while have a dream in which I seem to be drinking, VERY rarely smoking (I never had as much fun with that!), and only remember vaguely the relevant situation. In my New Age days, before I really quit drinking booze entirely…I occasionaly kept an intermittent dream journal; and seemed to have more addiction oriented dreams. I was always enrolled in some college courses that I had forgotten to attend classes for; and worried that I had a failure grade on my record. Could I still drop the course, and make it up? And, I seemed older than everyone else; and always had another year to go…Yada, yada.
Curiously, when I seriously stopped the drinking in 1986…I had a later dream that I finally had ‘graduated’! It had nothing to do, of course, with my ‘real’ college education…I had graduated with a BA in 1963. It was symbolic to me, that I had corrected something important in my behavior.
‘Nough said…on that very interesting subject matter…DREAMS!
What’s that, Eve?
Yeah, Sarge…
MY musical experience, as a professional, was ALMOST totally secular.
Starting, more like, in the 1970s, my only ‘gigs’ involving religion were a few singing chores at Jewish weddings (usually in Hotels & Banquet halls); also associated with playing in the reception’s dance orchestra, afterwards.
One time, I actually had to sing “Ave Maria” at a Catholic Church wedding. I REALLY felt weird, after not having been in a Catholic church since my falling away, some 20+ years previous to that. It also was strange, because my dad had been a ligit trained professional, who ended up, by default, becoming a sort of “jobbing”, mostly Catholic church singer and choir director. Of course, his niche was really in the days of the Latin language masses, with all the great composer type ’shtick’! [Yeah...Before the 'Guitar Masses'!]
To me, HE was a REAL singer…I was just a Sinatra/Bennett type, improvising, jazz singer/MUSICIAN. If you get my drift?
Involving anything religious…I was a fish…completely out of water!
Maybe, a ala “A Fish called Wanda”…
I was…”A Fish called What-the___?”
[Gasping fish 'smiley' here?]
Sorry for babbling on…
I’m enjoying everybody’s comments, by the way, on this very relevant topic.
22 April 2007, on 4:05 pm
BBIM said:
Legs may not be broken — but we can depend on arms being twisted! And our wallets wrung dry! It has been ever thus…
22 April 2007, on 5:42 pm
As long as people keep paying the dealers, there will be enablers. Stop the money, stop the dealers.
23 April 2007, on 2:58 am
I.m not sure addiction per se is the real problem — I would have said the real problem is the denial that often accompanies addiction. Trouble is, the two phenomena are about as tightly-interlinked as dirt and germs.
Many people smoke tobacco and aren’t all that dysfunctional (nicotine stains and bad breath apart). You might not want to get in their way if they haven’t had a fag for awhile (when the addiction really shows), but generally, cigarette smokers aren’t that bad a bunch.
I’ve also met heroin addicts who manage to hold down responsible jobs. They don’t steal to fund their habits, they earn a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, they are discreet about using and their usage level is not spiralling out of control. Whatever the government propaganda may say, it is possible! They aren’t “clean” but they’re certainly the next best thing, in that they have managed to live with their habit.
The most dysfunctional addicts are always the ones who are in denial about their addiction.
I don’t think the problem is that theists are addicted to worshipping imaginary gods, nor that monotheists are addicted to the idea of just one god. Rather, it is that they are in denial of the reality that there is no god.
23 April 2007, on 7:54 am
You have it pretty well, AJS. Most people have some ‘castle in the air’ that they care about, but the fundies turn around and expect you to move in, help with the rent, to paint the place, and mow the lawn.
24 April 2007, on 3:23 pm
[...] If this it true, and it seems plausible to me, coupled with “opium of the people” and the “addiction model“, there is a low probability they will budge on the faith part and only slightly higher odds on the religion part. [...]
26 April 2007, on 11:03 pm
[...] If this is true, and it seems plausible to me, coupled with “opium of the people” and the “addiction model“, there is a low probability they will budge on the faith part and only slightly higher odds on the religion part. [...]