Why religious practice/faith is best understood as a means of feeling right about the bad things you have done

A placebo makes you feel cured when you are not.  Feeling cured of your evil can be a placebo.  Evil involves deception so if you need a deception to deal with it that will be like putting petrol on a raging fire.

It is easier to pray and go to Church services and give money to priests to feel good than to actually be good. That is why very nasty and abusive people love to go to Church and say prayers all day. Every religion prefers praying and giving money and often believers go to the extreme of venerating evil people and calling them good just because they are active in the religion. A hypocrite never stands alone - hypocrites support each other. They feel supported merely by being associated with or in the presence of or by seeing the example of similar hypocrites. People prefer "good" not as it is but as they want it to be.

It is no exaggeration that the number one reason why Christianity does not have more power and declines in many places is how evil people can rule the Church, condone evil commanded by God according to their "infallible" holy books, pray and fast and go to communion as if they are holy. They are so happy in their hypocritical faith. It puts many Christians off the faith. Most of those Christians are baffled at how people can rejoice in their faith when they are mere hypocrites. They sense that the hypocrites are so arrogant that they cannot imagine that God sees their sins as sins. We all know religious gossips who terrorise the community with their tongues and who are to be found making religious sacrifices such as performing penance while having no intention of doing anything about the damage they have wreaked. It proves that they take religious practice more seriously than morality for they feel it removes their sense of sin or that the penance somehow balances things out. They do religious and good deeds and they feel that permits them to do bad ones. The malicious gossip who does penance feels better about the damage she does than the one who does not. Taking Holy Communion is agreeing to agree with what Christ teaches in and through the Church and to obey its rules for they are really his rules. This is very demanding and one rule is that religion is not about feeling good but about doing the good will of God. Few Catholics want to live up to the Church's teaching, yet they universally take communion. The ban for example on people who are divorced and remarried from taking communion is universally ignored.

The critics of such hypocrites sense that the faith can be and perhaps usually is, a placebo for evil - one can use religion to deceive themselves into thinking they are good when they are not. The hypocrites obviously sense it too!

Hypocrites like to feel they are good people - the ultimate hypocrite does prayers and superstitious rituals in order to convince herself or himself that she does the greatest work of all. It is a substitute for not even helping in the soup kitchens.

The huge majority of believers do nothing out of the ordinary for others. If you are not interested enough in helping others -

*You can preach a gospel to them that tells them to do something or believe something in order to escape eternal damnation.

*You can provide rituals such as absolution that supposedly take away their sins and heal their weaknesses towards sin.

* Priests like to think that they are doing the ultimate good works by providing sacraments, with their alleged power to change black hearts, to the people.

The Church explicitly teaches that you need God more than bread so it is better if there is a choice to send for a priest for a dying person rather than an ambulance.

*You can offer sacrifice for their sins in the form of a goat or the Mass and tell yourself that you are doing the most important thing on earth.

*You pray and go to worship services and imagine that your prayers help others. Even if Jan was going to get better from cancer anyway you tell yourself that your prayer for her cured her.

*Encourage people to believe in a God who alone ultimately matters. You say that doctors help only because God helps us through them so it is all God. All that comes in life comes from God. In other words, doctors don't matter in themselves but God and therefore faith in him does. God alone matters so it is better to let a child die in agony unless you are going to help her because God asks you to.

*You claim to have a divinely inspired faith. Some claim to be infallible or prophets.

People who are doing these things are giving themselves a righteous glow. It makes them feel like they are good people while the real good people are slaving among the lepers 24/7. The clergy is particularly into making supernatural claims in order to feel that they have done the most important thing on earth. People prefer to be good on their terms instead of practicing good as it really is. They want the version of good that serves them. Thus they end up failing to try to be real heroes. Thus they feel good about doing nothing - it is an insult to claim you have helped people supernaturally when you have not. Thus they feel superior to those who think their beliefs are nonsense. They blame those who fail to respond spiritually to their "treatments" instead of blaming the treatments and themselves. They are looked up to in their religion. The Catholic priest in Ireland for example gets more honour in society than the dedicated charity worker.

Surely though the sin placebo is not good, all placebos are not bad? They are bad!

GOD'S "FORGIVENESS" IS A PLACEBO

Christianity says that we must forgive all who have helped bring evil into our universe such as Hitler.

Forgiving Hitler is impossible for you are not able to take what he did personally. You were not a victim.  Forgiving trivialises what he did because you really forgiving would entail experimenting how people suffered and were degraded by him and then letting it go. The forgiveness eats away at your empathy and is a major example of the religious placebo at work and developing and growing.  To forgive everybody is to forgive nobody.  It may feel good but comes at a price - for others not you.  To sanctify your fake forgiveness as a gift from God is incredibly evil.

Being too generous with forgiveness is foolish. If two people are enemies because one person hurt the other, they will heal and learn and grow more by the slow process through which forgiveness is developed and given. Forgiveness should be gradual. With God, forgiveness is just given and promised and is in fact taken for granted. It is too cheap. Nature has made it hard to forgive and that is actually not always a bad thing.

It is terrible to ask God for forgiveness just like that and even worse to pray that the likes of Hitler should just be forgiven. It shows no real concern for the victims.

Unsurprisingly, the Catholics hurt people and instead of apologising to them and making amends go to confession to get forgiven by God and the priest.

Other religions often have their people saying sorry to God and not the victims.

The Church tells you that if you have “Catholic” guilt go to confession and get the sin forgiven and it will go. That is clear statement that the religion is trying to function as a placebo. Trying to make amends sincerely should lift the guilt not that.

All such religions agree that saying sorry to God matters more than saying it to the victims for God comes first. If it has to be one or the other, then they want you to apologise to God. That implication is why you should be offended when the person who hits you in the face runs off to God.

Going to God instead of making amends to the victims is cheap grace and a further insult to the victims. It adds on to the original insult.

Even if hypothetically going to God was not necessarily a way of feeling good about the evil you did and about putting feeling good before correcting the evil, the fact remains a lot of people - it could be nearly all - will be saying sorry to God for they want a placebo for their conscience. It is too easily abused and something too open to abuse is not a good thing.

But the fact remains if you are really a good person and really sorry you will go to the victim FIRST. You will care about the victim FIRST. God cannot literally be hurt or offended anyway so why would you give him any importance? It is easy to imagine you are good and have reformed when you are not facing the victim.

Many have repented their sins in tears before God and you would swear and they would swear they were sincere and yet ten minutes later they resumed the sins.

The Christian faith has people apologising to God for hurting others. The fact that John was hurt has nothing to do with God for God is not John. The fact is that God’s handwork was damaged but that is a separate issue. You can’t go to God and say, “I confess that I hit John and I want you to forgive me”.

What you say is, “I confess and ask forgiveness not for hurting John but for not respecting your rights when I hurt him”. The Christians have been conditioned to go to God for relief when their consciences condemn them but in fact they can’t do that. It doesn’t make sense. This is really about them using religion to feel better. It is evil to apologise to God for John's suffering. Go to John. The matter is not over until you forget God and do that. In so far as you prioritise saying sorry to John's mother for hurting him over saying it to John you are not sorry for hurting him. So it is with God who the Church says comes first. Only crafty people would worship a God who they say sorry to as if it were him they hurt. Who do they think they are trying to fool? For them, God is a fantasy playmate not a God. A real God cannot be fooled.

There is something horrible about you asking for forgiveness when in fact you ignore what a person or institution has done to other people.  This is about you wanting to see yourself as good.  If evil is evil, you will not just forget say the Catholic inquisition.  Making evil about you as something you righteously turn away from is making this about you when evil is not about you.  Guilt is selfish.  It does not seem to be for it torments you and condemns you for doing wrong.  But why do you not feel guilt about supporting a religion that murdered millions in the past? Your membership is your choice so you are part of the problem.   Why is guilt selective?  Guilt is you tormenting yourself for the problem is not evil but you doing something that makes you bad in you own eyes.  It is about your standing not the evil as such.  Forgiveness from God validates your selfishness here.  It agrees you are so great you should feel guilty and now you need restoration.
 
CONCLUSION

The placebo works when we believe something will make us feel better and when we try it.  Even if you do grave evil and you feel that prayers and sacraments and priests make you feel better even if you don't really regret it.  Human nature puts its feelings first and the Church must take responsibility when it knows that everybody will abuse its "services" to feel good about the evil they have done.  When you feel good about doing bad you are in fact probably going to make people happier (feeling good automatically makes you nicer to others) which makes you deceive yourself even more that the harm you have done does not matter for you are so great now. The religious placebo is about making people feel good about their sins and trivialising the sins. It is a reward for evil.

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