Amy Coney Barrett’s Cult

Republicans keep accusing Democrats of attacking Trump Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s faith. It’s a kind of pre-emptive attack, since Democrats aren’t engaging in the argument at all. It’s a Wizard of Oz moment: Pay no attention to the man behind the screen.

The man behind the screen is patriarchy. I couldn’t care less about which religion Barrett ascribes to. Yes, Barrett is a cult member, but not because her specific faction of Catholicism is a cult, but because all religions are cults — Patriarchal cults.

There is a bizarre notion that a strong woman can be a feminist while enthralled by patriarchal anti-egalitarian beliefs. That ain’t feminism. The founding principle of feminism is that all people, regardless of sex and gender, are of equal value. An obvious corollary is that everyone can control their own bodies and consensual reproductive behavior. Someone who says they value the life of a zygote as much as an actualized human woman is not a feminist. A person who believes that a male god put women on Earth to serve their husbands is not a feminist, even if she also believes that God wants her to be a Supreme Court judge.

The purpose of every religion is to maintain social order, to keep societies functioning. The myths of religions can put order to people’s understanding of the universe, but the primary reason we have religion is to keep the rulers in charge, and the rulers are generally men. You may have been taught that religion exists to make people moral, that without a document saying “thou shall not kill,” people would go about killing each other every time someone is cut off in traffic. But the top-tier function of religion is to control the masses of people so that some people can have unchallenged power and jurisdiction of other people.

How can an ordinary, or even a super-super-intelligent ordinary person fall for this? How can a person of color support a white supremacist president, or a woman believe her role is to serve men? It’s called internalized oppression: Internalized racism, internalized sexism, internalized homophobia. That’s the power of culture — it indoctrinates from an early age; its toxic beliefs are passed on even unintentionally by adults to children. It can make a small fish think it’s being true to itself by serving a shark.

There are a lot of great spinoffs to religion: songs that make you feel good, bake sales…. But those are things that have been invented by the cult members to make the cult more palatable, to enhance the feeling of community and to comfort people is distress. As good as those things are, they don’t erase the fundamental fact that the congregants are members of a patriarchal cult designed to maintain the dominion of men over others.

---

Note: This article was originally posted to my OCD-Free blog on Medium (which you should all be following). However, because it doesn’t fit well with the theme of that blog, I have decided to remove it and place it here, where no one cares. If you miss Daisybrain posts, and I know you do, follow both of my Medium blogs:

The NEW DAISYBRAIN BLOG!

OCD-Free

Perfection in Flaws

If God is the creator of the universe, and the universe is not perfect, how can God be perfect? Certainly, there appear to be flaws in creation – from disease and war to Donald Trumps’s hair-thing. The question for me is, can something simultaneously be both flawed and perfect?

God and the Meaning of Life

Let’s start with the premise that the universe was created by God. If so, in the beginning there was only God. Everything, therefore, came from God; everything in creation is of God. Because God comprises all that is, we can say that God is infinite. And, since everything that exists is a piece, as it were, of the infinite source of all being, it follows that everything – from the largest system to the smallest single particle – is infinite. This means that all possibility exists within all of us, and within all things that make up the universe. If an apple tree is the universe and from itself that tree creates thousands of seeds, in each seed is the potentiality of the entire tree. In the end, we have to conclude that, as in the beginning, there is only God, and God is us.

This brings up a strange conundrum.

About God

Good news! God exists! God is an amorphous, dissipating cloud of energy. It’s true that God is immortal; God is the creative lifeforce of the universe. God initiated the Big Band with a thought. Very involved with the initial swirling around of matter and energy, God expanded with the new universe. While God’s powers diminished with this dilution, even a couple thousand years ago, God was able to have some influence over human affairs. In fact, Earth was one of God’s last great creations. After that, God created a few minor planets and asteroids, perhaps some single-celled life somewhere. Human beings came into existence just at the end of God’s ability to affect change.

Old Post Reappears on Daisybrain

Recently, the following old post reappeared at the top of the Daisybrain blog, as if it were new:

                                                                  

Woman Not As Famous As Anne Rice Changes Her Religious Views

(United States, 2010) Selma Small, a woman who is not famous, has changed her religious views. This comes in the wake of the massive shock of author Anne Rice’s announcement that she has slightly altered her own religious beliefs.

Woman Not As Famous As Anne Rice Changes Her Religious Views

(United States, 2010) Selma Small, a woman who is not famous, has changed her religious views. This comes in the wake of the massive shock of author Anne Rice’s announcement that she has slightly altered her own religious beliefs.