PEOPLE ARE LIVING VICARIOUSLY THROUGH GOD AND RELIGION

People living vicariously through others is quite common.  Social media and television prove that and prove that we are experts at it. 

Vicarious living risks the neglecting of people who need help while you live in a fantasy.  It risks neglecting yourself.  It leads to lies and truth and untruth all being blurred.  Vicarious living is always connected to how you think those around you and who help you are not good enough for you.

Vicarious living is everywhere in society.  Is religion a form of it? Is the religious person trying to live vicariously through an alleged God? If so then God does not matter to you. What you can use him for does. You are in effect saying you are better than God even if you are a dot in comparison. That is breathtaking arrogance.

Vanity is at play when you use a tool to live a life that is not yours.

Everybody has some level of dissociation from themselves and their lives.  Often when it goes beyond a certain level, it is a response to some real or perceived trauma. 

Some religious people report a sense of being abandoned by God and reaching some kind of existential dark hole.  They may respond by manufacturing a fake relationship with God. They tend to keep this to themselves for in a "fallen" world who is going to understand or want to hear it?  It is very personal anyway and those who experience that dark night of the soul may not have much in common.  They just know they are in agony and that is that.  They bear it alone. 

[Imagining the real you is something that is non-physical can be a form of internalised vicarious living.  It is very noticeable how people reach a sense of peace and comfort and security by telling themselves that they are actually a spirit and that is your real life.]

Even if God is real, you may still be doing what a person does when a relationship on their part is all in their heads. It does not follow that if what you perceive matches the truth about God that this is about it being true and not just a coincidence.  The man who thinks his wife is honest may believe that for the wrong reasons and be right by chance.  He will think he knows her just because he happens to be right.  It is not the same thing.

Religion says you must not live your own will but make God’s will your own so that you live for him. Jesus advocated that in his prayer, “Thy will be done.” But that union means if you will what God wills you get the advantage of being God without actually being God. You look at a terrible plague and reason, “If I were God I’d permit it to happen too.”  That way you feel you have power when you do not.  The billionaire is doing the same thing.  Their money gives them the illusion of power too but they cannot stop that cash from burning.

Faith in God says nothing about God but all about you and what you are like. In other words, a psychologist would say this is projection.

Human nature is prone to the seven deadly sins.  I deny they are sins but they include pride, anger, laziness and so on.

Is God a projection of the seven deadly sins?

If you can think of a being as great as God, or if he is prompting you, then you are like an ant that claims it knows a mammoth. Knowing a person means knowing enough about what they are involved in and what they think about it. But God has a vast universe to run.

So God is a projection of your pride. God is produced by pride and you are telling yourself he wants you to dedicate every moment of your life to him fully. See how prideful that is? If he asks for that knowing what human nature is like he is definitely prideful if he really exists.

In Christian theology, pride is seen as a lie. You wrongly think you are greater than you are. Yet the faith allows rewards for excellence and praises it.

Why is this lie so bad then? It does not seem to be like the kind of lie that gets somebody put to death. Thinking you excel does mean you dislike others on some level for not being as good as you. But it does not mean you will necessarily despise them.  Your intention is to fool yourself and bad things happen.  But it does nto follow that you intend the bad things.  If you misjudge the motorway you can cause a smash and little things can cause huge disasters.  The Christian is judging you as in blaming you for the bad results as if you engineered them.  They condemn pride and they bring this smug intolerant pride back in in a new guise.

Just to be clear, in religion, pride means a lot more than being self-important. Secularists and atheists and religionists all oppose and avoid people who think only their opinion counts and that they can ignore anybody who they consider to be inferior to them.

In religion, simply failing to admit that all you have belongs to God and comes from him and you are not self-made is self-importance of the worst kind. You may be good socially and seem self-effacing. But for religion just because you hurt people with your pride does not mean you are the worst for it is about God. God matters and you are declaring yourself independent of him instead of acknowledging him and showing gratitude. So while you are good with people you are terrible with the one who really matters, God. So your behaviour is no marker of how good or bad you are. Your attitude to God is.

The person with no belief in God is accused of pride.

The person who is not far from going agnostic is half as bad. One who is not very sure God exists but who believes is being accused of this attitude, “Maybe all my gifts are from me and not God?” They pray with one eye on God and the other on themselves.

Bertrand Russell claimed that kindly people tend to believe in a kindly God. But real kindness means owning it as coming from you not a God. Why would you want to distance yourself from the good deed you do for another? It is a passive-aggressive way to be an example.  Are you about attributing the kindness in others to a God or a source that is not them? If so that is far from kind.  To deny your kindness is made by you and not infused and sent by a god is to imply that everybody else is the same.  You can talk about humility, diligence, patience - the reverse of the seven deadly sins - instead of kindness and the same thing happens.  You end up failing to appreciate the other person and yourself.

Faith in God is not an answer to the problem of human pride.  It makes the problem look different but it is the same problem.  We wish to point out, whatever about arrogant pride that you may see say among rich or educated people, belief in God goes with a more hidden and crafty and yet more extreme version.  God = pride.

That will do for pride.  God is a creation of your own pride and paradoxically faith in God is against a real God if there is one. 

What of the other sins?

As you cannot really see God without human ideas it follows that when you say he destroys people for not obeying him this is the deadly sin of wrath.

And he cannot endure any other concept of God but his own, no other God, this is envy. Even if those other gods are distortions of him there should be enough good in that if it is true that he is bigger than our mistakes. A religion refusing to honour idols even just to be social is denying how God can be at work when it does not look like it.  That religion is more interested in theological ideas about God than in real faith. So much for the doctrine that you may sin and think you are free from God but in fact you are completely wrong for in him you live and move and have your being.

And despite you saying God has a reason for letting tragedies and scandals that fuel “sin” happen, in your heart you are trying to rationalise how you feel that he is letting them happen when he is too slothful to do anything.

He has all he wants so that is you projecting how you would like your gluttony to be. The whole world stares and you worship that indulged god.

God asks his followers to spend money promoting his “word” and his religions and keep leaders in a cushy lifestyle. That is greed.

And no matter how much a pair love each other, a part of that is about using the other person sexually for gratification.  That is lust.  If God has set that up even if he does not have lusts, he is still a validation of lust. He might as well be a lecher.  The doctrine that God can become man or woman means you can think God's spirit is inspiring you to lust for one of those incarnations.  Some paedophiles think they are inspired to desire a God-incarnate child that faith tells them exists somewhere.  They tell themselves that child if he or she came to them, that they would be able to validly consent to sexual activity.

The person of virtue is in fact living out the vices vicariously through God.

God supposedly forgives sin if you ask for mercy and renounce the sin and vow to not let it happen again.

Real forgiveness needs a clear and definite statement of pardon and a two-way conversation. None of that happens when you say God forgives you so this is not forgiveness. And you cannot learn from it the way you can another person. It is really a pretence.  If you need a document from the state that you are pardoned from the state then if you say, "I got a pardon but maybe it was lost in the post or not sent to me and I know this by faith" it would be clear that you are trying to feel you have gotten away with your crime and expecting others to concede that.  You are cloaking this injustice as "mercy" and "forgiveness" and a "fresh start".

Are you “forgiving” yourself and projecting it to God and others?  The fact that God's forgiveness is a lie and a placebo would suggest that it is about you for it is in your head. 

Divine mercy is the simplest proof that we are projecting.

God is a tool and you are more self-serving than you want others to think.  You use the doctrine to facilitate that.  Your selfishness or self-centredness will rub off on others so if they do antisocial things as a result you are partly the cause.  Once you inspire a person to be selfish there is no telling how they will do it.

 

No Copyright