Does One's Familiar Replace The Need For A Family?

*
Sometime I sense that many people's only religion is trying to prove their parents, priests, and preachers weren't just out and out liars. They know they are lying, but that's okay, they're just human. They don't expect much out of themselves, they just don't want the precious people who taught them to lie to be liars themselves. 

*
I composed the paragraph above in order to express a thought I woke up with this morning. I'm pretty sure this theory springs from one of the saying in the Gospel of Thomas, an ancient gnostic text that was found in Egypt in 1945 in a large ceramic jar along with many other Gnostic texts. They were written in the Coptic language. It seems to be logically presumed that the literature in that era was buried to keep the Catholics from burning it. Gnosticism developed from people having a direct experience of God. The more I learn about it, the more it reminds me of the practice of going on a vision quest used by the American Indians and the Australian aborigines.

Going on a vision quest during the ancient days any where on Earth seemed to have a similar ritual. The initiate going on a quest left their home and went alone out into the wilderness without enough provisions to get back without divine intervention. There was a documentary on PBS about cave paintings and how they were a lot alike all over the world. The documentary makers speculated that whoever painted on the cave walls existed in a state of ecstasy induced by various herbal hallucinogens. That was supposedly part of the initiation process.

The initiate went looking for a spirit guide. Some were animals. Once they found their spirit guide they went to these caves and holy sites and painted a picture to prove they had been there. Then, they had to get back to their home even though they had used up their provisions and manifest the gifts their spirit guide had provided them with. That gave them enough moxie to fool most of the people most of the time. Then, they symbolically got run outta town by the dominant alpha shaman, because they couldn't be healers or prophets in their home town.

That one principle that was operant even before the written word was invented still holds true today. Some people are more believable than others, but nobody ever really believes somebody they grew up with from childhood can actually prophecy or heal.

I woke up with this image and didn't compose it well. You know how it is with dreams. I have to at least get something down in writing that I can try to make sense (manifest in the sensory dimension) of later.

I was trying to write that each of us as individuals might accept that we ourselves are liars. We know ourselves too well to pretend otherwise. For a while I tried to pretend that my parents were better than that, and in that sense, that they weren't actually human. That way, I wouldn't have to forgive them for being human when and if they erred. I didn't want them to be human like I was, because mere humans couldn't forgive me for what I did to them in order to fulfill the prophecy in this saying:

55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
Which makes me wonder. Is creating a defense against the experience of God not the sa-me process used to create one's own identity during puberty by rejecting the ways of the natal family? Isn't this the sa-me principle inherent in going on a vision quest to find one's familiar to put on an altar in the family's place?