Very much reminds me of my religious upbringing where we were taught to only trust folks in church authority, no matter how unchristlike they became, and dismiss anything that went contrary to their view of the world as heretical with cherry picked verses. Found out while trying to keep my faith that if I pressed any of the verses by citing context or with a conflicting clobber passage, there usually wasn’t much thought beyond “I was taught this, anything else is ‘controversial’ and should not be considered”.
My favourite quote that’s been sadly relevant lately:
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”
- Mark Twain/Jonathan Swift
In some ways, I am finding prostration to authorities we don't understand to be inherent in Christianity. I'm starting seminary and taking a course first on pastoral care, and the books were fascinatingly *almost* revolutionary, and belied a deep sense of actualization but very little self-actualization or actualization-in-others and a LOT of actualization-in-divinity.
Almost revolutionary: there was such great discussion on reauthoring the myths of one's life to reframe your own existence if life isn't serving you, but the author seemed to only be able to imagine *restructuring one's life within specific, divine bounds*. The author talked at length about adjusting and altering beliefs about gender norms and expectations of partners, but wasn't ever able to jump the discussion to things like queerness or non-monogamy as ways of experiencing the world to better serve one. There was value in the case studies presented that looked at how one's life experiences can create mythologies around what we expect of the people in our life, but there was never a point where the author took it to the next logical step: expanding our understanding of *systems to meet our needs* rather than just expanding our understanding of *getting needs met in a given system*. I can partly blame this on when the book was written ('90's), but I do think there is something underlying in faith that exists at the expense of all others which necessitates staying within the systems that we know and inhibits our ability to imagine there could be something else. Like, if God made men and women, we are expected to act within those systems, whereas if *humans* made men and women, then we can escape the narrow bounds of a crappy binary system in the first place. If God creates the universe, we are only capable of observing it and moving within it, but if *our collective consciousness* creates a series of constructs that we interpret as reality, then we can build entire new realities at a moment's notice.
Actualization: If you fundamentally believe that you are nothing before a higher power, and that you have no agency but that which He has given you, and you can only discover meaning that was created by someone Else, then it becomes much easier to doubt your own experiences or the experiences of others. When you are drawing meaning from something that ultimately is beyond you, it can feel great! You have a purpose, and something greater than you gave you that purpose, and all you have to do is try to live out that purpose to the best of your abilities. And when you falter as humans do to live up to the expectations you place on yourself, you can blame yourself for not being Godly enough, for not being Christlike enough, for not being enough period. You can find meaning without ever needing to evaluate your relationship to other humans and the world around you, which means you can justify doing basically anything because it isn't really you doing it--you are just the vessel through which Eternity is enacting its will. You always find strength and comfort in God, and God is infallible so failure to find that strength is a personal problem. It is actualization coming from a Supremacy we cannot hope to understand, meaning you never have to delevope a sense of actualization from anything that is fallible or human, and you live this constant life of wondering whether you are measuring up without being able to even set the terms of what you are trying to live up to.
Also, thanks for introducing me to that song Rät!
