WE PROJECT OUR EVIL ONTO OTHERS AND RELIGION MAKES US WORSE

Bad and evil are short-hand for "I hate this and I forbid it even if there is or will be more good happening because of it than harm.  I don't want to see it.  I don't wish to hear it justified.  It is inexcusable."  That is one reason why we read personal attacks into even valid accusations of being cruel and unfair.  We know a lot of it is about wanting to condemn rather than condemning for the right reasons.  We know the moralists who point the finger at us are making it more about themselves and what they want than they would ever admit.

In psychology, you talk about splitting, projection and projective identification. This refers to how you do not recognise the hate, cruelty, destructiveness in you and indeed the level of capacity you have to hate, be cruel or destructive. To be blind to this, you will project the badness in you into others, specific others.  You make yourself and others think the evil you see in another is in them when in fact it is in you.  Why this other person and not another? You want a target. The victims' attempts to defend themselves are seen as attempts to hoodwink you. You don't want to know the truth about them or yourself. Thus you think they need to be destroyed some way and the justification is you are defending yourself or something. Worse, you will not see the damage this defending does for you are blinded with regard to yourself and also them. It is like stabbing others in the dark.

This is a vile human trait.  It is in us all to a degree.

That is why anything with more moral rules than needed should be abolished.  For example, the rule to go to pray on a Sunday or to pray to Jesus.

That is why anything that is harder on certain moral failures than it needs to be should be abolished.  The notion that murder and adultery if unrepented deserve eternal retribution.

The trait does not need any encouraging and will grow when it gets it.

Religion by telling you that you offend God when you hit a child is leaving you with two people you have supposedly degraded.  The child yes and also God.  That is dangerous if it is really only the child who you have done wrong to.  Don't lose sight of what you did to the child by including God if God is not real.  You are losing sight a bit if you do.  You need a firm grip on reality and truth about what you did.  Worse, remember that religion says that God alone matters, he is the source of all good and love, and the child is nothing compared to him.

Religion makes you resolve to create a revolution when you see evil.  It may be a mini one but it is still a revolution.  A small revolution is made bigger when you bring God into it.  Or the threat of eternal Hell.

Evil and revolution go together and evil is always an attempt at a revolution. Ideology is the most common and perhaps deadly form of revolution.  There is no such thing as a rapid revolution. It's a process that takes time. The goal is for it to be unstoppable before anyone realises what is and has been happening.  Violence has to come for ideology works to smooth the way for it.

Suffering in empathy with your people can cause you to try to harm and kill those who you perceive as persecuting them.  If you can try to put yourself in the victim – be the victim's mind - it is hard to be cruel to them. But because you cannot do this with everybody you will not do it with those perceived as enemies or oppressors. Religion is us and not them in some form or another so it is intrinsically inconsistent with treating all people the same.

Religion needs to be humane and intelligent.  Superstitious religion leads inevitably to cognitive dissonance.  We all have that problem but religion compounds it and becomes another reason for it.

Elliott Aronson says that cognitive dissonance is the strongest when you feel your concept of yourself as a good person is being challenged. So if you believe you are a good productive person and you hurt somebody else you will try to dehumanise them in some way. They don’t deserve good treatment so you are still a good fair person if you hurt them. This is a dangerous thing for you are using the idea of deserving which goes with the idea of being a person to make them not much better than rodents.  You are well aware that you cannot really guarantee getting the consequences you want.  Outside factors let that happen which means God cooperates with you. So your revenge when it works is not all down to you.  Believers in God are saying, perhaps without realising it, that what they do is more God's responsibility than theirs.  It sanctifies evil.  Also, if God is important to you that will trigger dissonance when you do something to offend him.

Christians are clear that you are to see your neighbour as another you. If you see others as another self then you will abuse them like you do yourself. We all are our own worst enemy. Seeing a person as yourself at the mirror is a way of objectifying them. You see you not them. You insult them for you want it to be about you. You hurt them when you see they are not you.

There is a conviction in psychology that human desire is mimetic. That every desire a person has is borrowed from somebody else. For religious people, they think they get their desire for God from Jesus. Human desire is not always mimetic. If it were then where did the first desire come from?  A child does not inherit his or her first desire that they are aware of from anybody else.  It just arises.  Religionists however want their desire to be mimetic.  They want it to come from God or Jesus.  That is what the idea of grace is about.  It is gross arrogance to imagine your desires are virtually God.  And it can go either way, it can get you to affirm good or bad desires.  It is the luck of the draw.  It is like praising a knife for cutting bread or cutting throats when chance rules the day.  That something like that is divinised is a bad sign and it is no wonder there are terrible consequences.

The mimetic thing does not help either if you battle the toxic doctrine of original sin.  The doctrine definitely says we got our will to sin from Adam and Eve who first rebelled against God.

Mimentic thinking appeals to those who like to project and who project.

If a person honours Satan by thinking too much about him and fearing him, thus letting him live rent free in the head, then is that projection? It is worship albeit reverse worship. The worship of God indicates it is about you more than you want anybody to realise so this high place you give Satan would do that too. God or Satan gets the most projecting. The scales will vary for every person. Also, as you get it wrong about what is morally good and what is not, it follows that there may even be a blend. Your God will have traits more suited to Satan and Satan will have traits more suited to a God.

On the internet, a meme about God being a construct to make you feel your needs are looked after even if at the present time it feels they are not, is clearly calling God your fantasy friend or your fantasy crutch.  God would be about your needs not his.  His do not matter to you.  They say that one sign that this is what you are doing when your version of God hates or disadvantages the same people as you do.  If you need God and faith to be that toxic before you can know, then how good is faith in the first place?  A good person who falls too easily is not really good in the first place.  Same principle here.

Faith in God includes faith that people sin and do evil.  It is faith that they break with God and evilly turn their backs on him.   That is bad enough and it means we are not surprised at how much projecting faith in God hides.  We only hear about how faith gives us hope but we are not told that we also have faith that there may be no point in having faith that a person will change or change when it matters.  Wanting a murderer to stop is pointless if the murders are happening at this time.

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