Events happened in my life the religion I was raised to believe in would not accept as a valid religious experience. Au contraire. Now, of course, as an old man, I realize those people who tried to teach me this religion were no more than children with large bodies themselves. Men who taught Sunday School because it looked good on their political resume. Shopkeepers who wanted my family to shop at their shop.
It's on the news practically every night. It's what the audience wants to view. Hypocrites. Preachers having sex with the choir of any gender. Homosexual law-makers hell-bent on eliminating people just like them. "Somebody stop me!" Rabble rousers parading against pornography with a closet full of it at home. People who seek to cover up what they had been condemned to believe was sinful behavior when they were children seem to teach religion a lot.
Hypocrites and liars. Trying to teach me not to do as they did. Humans. People who did what they were told or get shunned in a small town where people's children had to leave to find work in the big cities. The better you understood life and was able to make sense put their own children in competition with you for the few jobs that did become available in a small town. These are the kind of people I considered a threat to me when I was a kid. I was led to believe I needed their goodwill to survive, but it was actually my parents whose reputation was on the line when and if I acted up.
This particular quote Joseph Campbell attributes to Jung in The Power of Myth:
“Religion is a defense against religious experience.”
It is comments like this that have endeared Jung's writings to me in the past. Not so much his philosophy nor his logical diagnosis of what's what. He died anyway. None of his thoughts or theories provided him with immortality. That's the ring-pass-me-not I require for worshiping humans non-sexually.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
