The Psychology of Religion, the Experience of Exile

Not long ago I was listening to the liturgy of the Episcopalian church and I came to the conclusion that Episcopalians must be a somber people, full of the dreadful reverence of God. One feature of Episcopalian liturgy that is common to Catholic liturgy is the repeated singing of the mournful phrase, ‘Oh, God, have mercy.' There is a strong ‘pietist' tradition in many denominations, which is somber, serious and no nonsense in its approach, regarding, as it does, all the many things of God to be a source of a fearsome dread.

All these things are the product of the experience of exile, wherein, because God was so fiercely angered by their ancestors, church people found themselves wanderers who traveled through life under a sky which was like a vault made of solid iron. No prayer could ever penetrate that vault and they served a harshly severe God who did not speak to them, and whose face was kept hidden from them, and who made austere demands upon them that they seek their God in the midst of a desert waste land. Their God was remote, inaccessible, and as a consequence their liturgies became elaborate and ever more ornate as their personalities became ever more somber and their conduct ever more harsh and severe.

The remoteness of their God and the suffering of life when combined with the silence of their God has often given rise to the theology of ‘mystery' and one feature of the ornate liturgies of some denominations is the ‘celebration of ' or the ‘entering into' this marvelous ‘divine mystery of Christ' as it is sometimes called. What is alleged to have been this great spiritual mystery is the seemingly incomprehensible relationship that must exist between the goodness and the holiness of their God and the shocking ruthlessness and suffering of life on this planet.

There is a simple solution to this particular mystery, and it is the case that the simple solution is the correct solution. It was never the intention of God that they seek God in the midst of suffering under the harshness of desert like conditions. It was never the will of God that the sky above be like an impenetrable vault of iron. Rather what happened is that God was very angry with your ancestors, and so your ancestors where cut off like a dead branch, which was then tossed aside and left to wither. Religion and its ornate rituals and its many mysteries is the product of the psychological reaction to this particular experience as it developed over long ages of time.

Given that religious people have been left with the sour taste in their mouths (left over after their ancestors ate the rotten grapes) it then follows that religious people become trapped in a deadly snare from which they seldom if ever escape. Religious people are stubborn and defiant. Everything in the world tells them that there is no God, and indeed when you see such horrors as the Holocaust consuming six million of what were allegedly ‘God's chosen people', as just one of so many examples, it is most logical to conclude that there is no God. This conclusion causes a reaction in religious people (mortality salience, which is the rejection of death) and in dealing with this reaction religious people become dogmatic and very stubborn.

Now it was true that their ancestors invented dogma and doctrine which greatly angered YAHWEH, so much so that they were ruthlessly expelled and sent into exile in a world which is as dark as death itself. The deadly snare can be seen when you consider how it was the case that religious people who came after and who had to live with the consequences of their ancestors deeds, developed mortality salience and then in reaction became ever more dogmatic and stubborn about those same doctrines which were the original cause of their exile and thus the true cause of the problem of mortality salience. Therefore it logically follows from this that religious people today would run the risk of once again kindling the wrath of God, just as their ancestors did before them.

My experience with religious people leads me to conclude that due to the intractable and stubborn nature of that problem, and given how religious people have been left trapped in their ancestors sins, religious people will indeed kindle the wrath of God once again, as their ancestors did, but at the same time it must be acknowledged that there are these mitigating circumstances, which would indicate that religious people bring down wrath upon themselves not to their destruction but rather as a form of disciplinary punishment.

The appearance of God results in the destruction of religion. For this reason religious people, who have mortality salience, which is the consequence of the exile of which the root cause was religion itself, must therefore regard God as their mortal enemy. The same must have been true of their ancestors, who were ruthlessly expelled, and what this tells us is that while there are these mitigating circumstances, in that religious people cannot be anything but what they are (they must be stubborn and dogmatic in reaction to this world and its poisonous environment), when the mitigating circumstances are included in the judgment it has been judged, in the past, that those mitigating circumstances are not, on balance, enough to forgo judgment entirely. For this reason your ancestors were severely punished, and their punishment has become your punishment, and if things continue as it has been, this would then become your children's punishment and then the punishment of their children ad infinitum.

What this pattern of behavior suggests is that punishable offence has been judged to outweigh on the balance scales the mitigating factors, or so it was true for your ancestors. For if the mitigating factors outweighed the punishable offense then we would expect your ancestors to be treated with a healing balm rather than punished with a rod of iron, which is what happened to them.

It is characteristic of religion to reject ‘objective reality' in favor of reality as defined by some dogma (the consequence of mortality salience). Therefore it is typical for religion to insist, quite stubbornly, that ‘God IS' when the objective truth reveals that ‘God IS NOT'. Religion, having become very stubborn and reactionary as the consequence of its struggle in exile, then worships the IS NOT rather than the I AM, and the consequences are predictable. What IS NOT is nothing, and therefore the sky becomes a vault of solid iron, which no prayer can ever penetrate. The objective reality is that the sky is not a vault of iron, but rather the IS NOT is nothing at all, and therefore cannot acknowledge prayers or entreaties. The Law states that those who worship the IS NOT must suffer the consequences of nothingness, and this then results in mortality salience, which results in dogmatism and further increasingly stubborn worship of the IS NOT, which then leads back to the beginning of the process, creating an endless vicious circle from which it has proved to be impossible to rescue the human race for many thousands of years.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the past it would be put this way : "Do not be like your ancestors who lived long ago, for God was very angry with your ancestors, for they stubbornly turned their backs and refused to listen, and returned again and again to the worship of some idol or another that somehow was introduced and then proved impossible to eradicate." We can discern when it is the case that one of these idols is present, and God is absent, by the presence of the ‘divine mystery' in the liturgy, for this so called great mystery of life is just the cloak behind which hides the truth about the idol being worshiped. We can discern the presence of an idol when people say, ‘why does God not answer.' God does not answer because God was not sought, but rather the one being sought was not God, but rather an idol. If God were to answer the appeal being made to an idol then this would validate the idol, and given that it is already almost impossible to get people to stop the worship of idols, that would make the problem impossible to solve in the absolute sense of the meaning of the word impossible. Therefore God, the Living God, becomes ruthless, because what else can be done for these people? To answer them or acknowledge their cries would destroy them completely, for then they would never learn to stop the worship of idols.

Now as bad as this problem is I remain optimistic that in this generation there is a good possibility that a successful transition will take place, and that enough water has flowed under that same bridge enough times over the course of thousands of years that perhaps today people might be ready to acknowledge the simple truth by acknowledging that God is what God is and that there is no substitute for objective reality. (Can God not speak? Have the arms of God grown weary with old age?)

However, in spite of the mitigating factors, I conclude that religious people will be punished and they will endure the wrath of God, for what else can be done for these people? All my accumulated experience has convinced me that there is nothing that can be done for them. They are trapped within a deadly snare, and they have become very stubborn. Can they now be pastured like little lambs in a broad meadow? In the not to distant future events will bear me out on this one, and this will be confirmation that there was no other solution to this intractable problem other than the shocking and very sudden, and I am sure totally unexpected, eruption of the wrath of God, the prophecy of which is now my concluding prophecy, and the last prophecy I intend to deliver (for what good would it do to prophecy endlessly to these people...it finally reaches the point where all you can do is repeat yourself over and over again, to no avail). There is no nice way to save these people.

When we consider the mitigating factors we conclude that they are to experience wrath not to their destruction but rather as the required disciplinary correction (for what else can be done for these people?) On that day it could be said, ‘Where was your God?' The answer to that question is that your God was always there, and that it only seemed logical to conclude that there was no God because you were in exile and were suffering under banishment, which is the only way to avoid giving validation to the worship of what was an idol which was created by your ancestors. That there is no God is the conclusion drawn by more and more people as the centuries have passed and the exile has dragged on endlessly and remorselessly, the ruthlessness of the exile being the exact match for the stubbornness of religion (which is itself the prod uct of the struggle with the mortality salience which is the result of the experience of exile).

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