HOW FAITH ALWAYS BLAMES THE VICTIM

Faith to be a source of strength and comfort needs to curb our tendency to judge others and hold on to the grudge too long.  Nobody can prove that they would be nearly as well off if not better without it.  Telling you, "Only God can judge your rapist" is actually refusing to hear your pain.  If course you can judge that person for you are the victim and you do know.  To be told that only God has all the information and that there is a chance that the person might be demonised or not culpable for some reason and therefore not a "real" rapist is twisted.  Don't let yourself be defiled again by listening to do-gooder condescending rubbish.

Faith comes in a secular form and religious form.  Religious faith is really a vague idea for it has overlaps with other kinds of faith.  It is a complicated mixture and no two persons can be the same.  Both claim that if you don't have enough faith then you are significantly to blame for how you feel when life and people hurt you.  They promise support but the support has a but side.  It has a toxic side.

Victim blaming is very rife and popular.  A person may help you but if they see you as a victim who is causing their own victimhood then that help is not about you but them.  They are being condescending.  They just need to act.  They don't even need to show any obvious superiority. 

You will be told by the religious that a bird on the tree never fears the branch breaking for she has her wings. We are told that our prayers are our wings. The secular version is that she has to trust in herself not her branch and must always put self-belief first. Now this is enraging. Its wings and feathers are things so it has to worry about them breaking. Self-help and religious circles must think we are stupid. They have an underlying assumption that we are happier if we are stupid and they are looking after us. And having the power to help yourself does not mean that you will be so confident that you have no fear.

And what about the notion that if they break and God sees that he is letting it happen for a good reason?  The wings argument is meaningless. "I need my wings" means, "I only need them if it is God's plan so it is God I really need."  Religious circles mess around with language and meaning to suck people in.  They want to sound like friends of commonsense and to have a world side.  In fact, if everybody said say, "Medicine is only an instrument of God and it is his power and his choice that makes it work" while that would fit Jesus' command to always put God first and acknowledge him at all times, it is off-putting.  Talking about God not the science of the medicine in fact takes attention off the science.  No sane person thinks that would be a helpful or good approach.

There is a belief that if you try to do something a force that is unknown will help bring it to you, you use a power to manifest it. This is telling you that you can get anything you need and want by trying hard enough and by trusting this power. It is like making an effort doesn’t really do anything but invokes some kind of unknown energy that propels you along. You see religious people who went to huge lengths to get something done and they say all they did was co operate with some power, some god perhaps. They denied that effort was effort and that some power propelled them to success.

That accuses the person who has little of being responsible for it. It is judgmental and leads to cruel disregard of the unfortunate. It risks keeping them where they are. They reason, “It is somehow my fault.” And, “Others make me feel it is my fault and I don’t have the confidence to help myself now over them.” Those become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Jesus’ teaching that faith moves mountains and that forgiving your enemy is a faith affirmation that God is in the situation offering healing and transformation. The idea is that God is bigger than anybody’s sin so the focus must be on God more than the sin. This is a theological argument for becoming a pushover.  It blames the sinner if they suffer guilt over what they did.  If God is bigger than your sin then he is bigger than your suffering.  This leads to blaming our perception when we suffer.  The hint is that most of the suffering is in our response to what we endure and face.  It blames the person who suffers.  That is particularly disgusting if say somebody is a concentration camp survivor.

Every believer has to admit that even if prayer works, it does not look like it works a lot. Some insanely plead with their kindly God to convince him to help them and others. There is a form of virtue-signaller that pretends to think of the evil and the useless person as good. It is down to wanting to be seen as so good that you cannot see the bad or uselessness in anybody. This becomes such a habit that they end up seeming to be really thinking it. Some think that as all goodness belongs to God and not us, that praying for him to help others means asking him to make you a good help to them. So he acts by making you his instrument. If so by praying you are denying your own benevolence. That is anything but inspiring. It shows a passive-aggressive underlying negativity about human nature in particular – yourself and in general. Your respect for the person then that you pray for is not real.

It seems capricious how we can thank God for our religion, food and drink when others have to go without regardless of how kind or nice they are. Religion says that it may look like God acts on a whim but it says we need to believe he does not. But even if that is true, we then are the ones who are likely to act on a whim. Our praising him for what we have is us reasoning, “If it is whim or not we do not care and we hope he takes out whatever whims he has on others and leaves us in peace”.

And alarmingly, if you think you are getting good things from God while your kindly neighbour gets nothing you will reason that they are in God's care and he must be offering them what is right for them.  So in that case they are not taking it or their situation is the best for them after all.  Sometimes the best can be a frightful thing. So they deserve misery or the misery is all they can expect so they must learn resignation.  Either way you are victim blaming.

The non-judgemental say that "everybody does their best" and "we always do our best and even when we think we do not we can see that we do". That in fact makes them enablers of the damage done to children and vulnerable people. Their "wisdom" assumes their pain does not matter for all that matters is believing those who hurt them meant well. It is much better to listen to those people and affirm their pain. Say to them, "I wish they had done better for you." Now telling you to argue that those who hurt you are doing their best no matter how it looks is telling you that you have no business trying to get this problem forgiven and healed. It blames you for feeling you are wronged.

As we are told the priority is to see each person as the image of God, and as God is good, we are pressured to see only good where there may be bad in a person.  As religion says God never makes evil and evil is simply a twisted good and good depicts and represents God it happens that even cruelty and hate are in the image of God albeit in a distorted form.  In time your perception of the badness of cruelty is going to diminish.

These cruel spiritual attitudes arise from the view that God is love and wants us to see the best in everyone. Yet no faith has the right to say that God has sufficient reason for letting evil and suffering happen. Even if God had the right to say it, the reason we say it is because prelates and theologians in our religion are saying it and that is wrong and they do not care.  Who authorised them?  It is easy for them to say it for they are not most people, and many of those people are in agony.

And each one’s faith though meant to be that shared with a wider church or group is actually their own. You are the one declaring God has the right and that your leaders have the right to say he is right to stand by with the world in the state it is in. In reality the voice of the church is a collection of individual voices so it is you saying it.  The organisation cannot say it unless the people in some way say it even tacitly. 

You simply do not have the right to say that a tyrant may have good reasons for killing a family simply because you are guessing and you do not have the right to treat something so serious an occasion for guessing. Guessing is dangerous and flippant. Saying the divine thinks he has good reasons is no better for it says his intentions are for the best.

Darwinism talks about the survival of the fittest and the most adaptable. Religion however says the sick and the poor are the fittest and the most adaptable. It says it does not seem that way but God sees how it works. There is a spirit world that is involved and impacted so it must count too in assessing. We however only guess what it is like. Even those with a firm belief in the afterlife don’t detail it and advise against that. So only God knows how evolution really works.

So while scientific evolution says that life is in competition for material things, religion makes this a conversation about struggling for spiritual things such as a prayer life, good feelings, being with God and so on. It denies that the development that comes from evolution counts or is development for the spiritual and unseen development is what matters. The observation that religion accepting evolution is cosmetic and that it does not understand it or care about it at all is correct. Religious evolution is as related to scientific evolution as much as a table is to a chair. They only have some features in common but they are not the same thing.

Notice how their version of Darwinism plainly says that a person’s suffering is not an accurate guide to how bad their situation is. They are better off than what you think. This comes close to victim-blaming and refusing to hear those who suffer.

What about this?

"It is not true that your action solves your needs. Most of the answers are there so you just need to let them into your life. You have to walk to the bread when you are hungry. It is already there. So if there is a need for action it is simply a matter of asking and walking.  That is the action.  Luck and chance does most if not nearly all of the work. You need to be lucky enough to have others let you have what you need. Biology, which you cannot control, has a lot to do with how you are to be helped. It is luck if you can even digest bread. It is luck that lets time help you. You don’t even know if you will be here in two minutes.  So for that reason you are lucky if you have time on your hands, if you have a future.  To sum up time and luck/chance do vastly more for you than you ever can or will. And your mind does not like that truth and filters it out."

We have just uncovered the lies and narcissism involved in thinking God gives you what you have and demands your action and cooperation like an adult.

These teachings imply that when you see through all this, your own nature is conspiring against you.  God belief is the ultimate conspiracy theory - it gaslights.  It makes victims and censures the person for seeing the truth.  At best we are blamed tacitly.  But that is toxic and must be stopped.