When I was a young Catholic, I had no idea that perhaps the greatest immorality an adult can curse a child with is to imply to that child that intellectual or logical contradictions are acceptable or possible. In these days of thrilling progress in truly marvelous human achievements, many have concluded that
‘anything is possible.’ Not true!

Anything that does not imply a logical contradiction is perhaps eventually possible. And even if a star as popular and determined
as was Christopher Reeve titles his book Nothing Is Impossible, we still must not accept the implication that logical contradictions are
possible or acceptable. This would prepare the mind to tolerate a popular immorality that teaches that an innocent child is born in
sin, flawed, less good than he ought to be from the very beginning of his life. In a rare news conference, 7/30/03, George W. Bush
re-iterated that old Christian teaching: “We are all sinners.” Speak for yourself, George, but not for those of us who live true to our
logical consciences; and please do not be so illogical as to call an innocent newborn child a sinner in need of rebirth.

RELIGIOUS GUILT CAN UNDERMINE SELF-CONFIDENCE

As a child learning to reason, did you have that ingrained feeling of needing God, grace and forgiveness before you could be whole
or good enough? Do you recall, perhaps, as you analyzed the situation a bit later that you should not be held accountable for sins committed prior to your birth? Yet at the intuitive and emotional level, if respected elders taught the need for baptism to wash away your original sin, did you think that, well, they must know what they are doing? So if you were like me in those early evelopmental days, you likely received the imposed impressions from pre-rational youth that you were somehow guilty and in need of the saving grace and strength of God.

Perhaps other youngsters just missed, ignored or glossed over the meaning of such early Christian lessons. The sensitive, impressionable child who was paying attention could readily see himself as an inadequate and unsatisfactory person. Such a “guilty” person commonly lacks self-esteem.

Low self-esteem causes lack of self-confidence. And a person lacking self-confidence readily gives ear to the manipulative salesmen of questionable programs from drugs to deities. Feeling
insufficient and lowly, he feels the need to embrace some power higher than himself. As the naïve and guilty follower with low
self-confidence gets cleansed of his assumed sins, he joins the group of the assumed good and godly, and thereby acquires the
increased strength of the crowd.

Then, because he cares, he may join the army of those dedicated to helping others see the world as his reinforcing crowd sees it. “After all,” says the forgiven believer, “look what religion and God did for me. I was lowly and lost, but now I am found; I was weak, and now I am strong. I was blind, and now I see.”
The old feeling of personal inadequacy is replaced with a very confident trust in a Higher Power. And the last state of that man
may become worse than the first, if, as often happens, his mission now becomes helping others feel as guilty and dependent as he
felt before his being forgiven by God. Another Christian bumper sticker comes to mind: “Not perfect, just forgiven.” This brings us to the important matter of guilt and responsibility.

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
The notion of an individual taking full, personal responsibility for his actions and their consequences is not overly popular today.
Often it appears that no “reasoning” is too fuzzy, no excuse is too flimsy in attempts to duck or lessen personal responsibility for
individual decisions: “I blame the tobacco company for making me smoke their addictive carcinogens; my peers pressured me into getting drunk; the car company caused me to drive too fast; my parents gave me bad genes (I’m not really over-weight, I’m
under-tall); my teachers didn’t care for me; prejudice took away my opportunities; I belong to a disadvantaged minority group; I
didn’t know the fast food company heated their coffee hot enough to scald me; I didn’t even know their hamburgers had fat in them.”
(Those of you who do not resort to excuses like these may feel the necessity to buy insurance protection against those who do.)

Most preachers would claim that mature personal responsibility is a high virtue. Is it fair, then, to wonder why those same
preachers do not see that their teachings of guilt, prayer and reliance on the gift of free divine grace can actually help many
believers find more ways to duck personal responsibility? Many religious leaders argue strenuously that it is by faith alone, not
by good works, that man reaches salvation; they can quote Saint Paul to prove it to themselves.

Legitimately dependent persons are appropriately less responsible than independent ones. So children are not expected to be as broadly responsible as are adults. Responsibility rests with those
able to respond effectively, not with helpless little children. And yet a popular teaching of Christianity holds that “unless you be-
come as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)

This dependency attitude explains how children of God can often avoid responsibility; children dependent on the heavenly Father turn the hard stuff over to him. One of my sisters demonstrates this quite clearly. Though she is not my youngest sister,
she definitely looks the youngest. Surely her ability to convince herself that “it’s in the hands of God” has lifted a lot of big con-
cerns from her shoulders.

It is easier for the Christian Scientist to pray for God to cure a child’s deadly disease than to admit God’s impotence or lack of
caring by responsibly buying appropriate professional help. It is easier, short term, to pray for a “wayward” or learning impaired
child than to work patiently oneself or to purchase appropriate help of others. To those who choose to pray as if everything depends on God and work as if everything depends on themselves I say that one of the efforts is mostly wasted; thinking (conscientious) people do not tolerate such implied contradictions. I would encourage
more confidence in oneself and more reliance on personal efforts and the help of trustworthy human beings.

A big portion of modern society still believes that God will save man from himself, wash away his sins and personal inadequacies, cleanse his guilt and deliver him into endless happiness. “All you have to do is believe in the healing grace of your Redeemer!”
What a deal! In fact, the very common tendency to wish fulfillment makes it difficult for those who feel personally inadequate
to resist such a Santa Claus type deal.

The reality is that a responsible or morally upright human being is neither as low and sinful (without redemption) nor as high
and superhuman (with redemption) as common religious doctrine would have us believe. A person is not guilty or lowly just because he is a mere human born in someone’s assumed “original sin”; nor
is he at the other extreme of being supernatural. Being neither devil nor divinity, every human should find his true, responsible
position in nature between those two extreme imagined positions of sinner and saint; a complete human is a rational animal who
enjoys living responsibly, morally—exercising both his mind (rationality) and his body (animality) vigorously while allowing others
to do the same. Those guilt-inducing preachers who may or may not have studied theology should recall a central tenet in Moral
Theology: guilt, personal immorality, comes from violating one’s conscience. And classic moral theology textbooks properly define
conscience as “right reason (not emotion nor tradition) deciding what is appropriate or inappropriate for the moral or responsible
person in his real, current circumstances.”

As a rational animal, a human being is able to respond to, that is, he is responsible for, what he can control. You and I are responsible for what we can control and only what we can control. The responsibility and guilt problems that religions cause (yes, cause) for society have a twofold basis: religion encourages de-
pendency and inadequate reliance on self or one’s own conscience (as defined above);

and religion too generally convinces believers
that this natural world is not really adequate for complete human happiness. I think that it is in this general area that religion or
faith in the supernatural does its greatest and most basic psychological damage.

Even though thoughtful persons can go ecstatic at the natural beauties revealed by microscope and telescope, even though per-
ceptive observers can create infinite beauty out of the pollution in a sunset, even though helping one’s neighbor brings deep joy to the
human heart, supernatural religions still imply that human beings are incapable of creating their own lasting or adequate human
happiness. Can you now begin to think differently as you become able to question their gratuitously asserted basic assumption?

Of course, man cannot attain the mysterious, promised absolute happiness of heaven; it’s not real, so it cannot possibly be attained by anyone. But neither is hell real, so it cannot be attained either. The carrot and stick, heaven and hell, are groundless assumptions imagined into existence by storytellers, boasters, hero-worshippers and manipulators of the human spirit. You already know what anyone can reasonably do with groundless or gratuitous assumptions. While the balling dung beetle may feel that warm, comforting bullshit is heaven, the rational, moral, self-responsible person may conclude the converse. Reality is right here right now;
enjoy it. Carpe diem! Use your time morally, productively, helpfully! This life is not a dress rehearsal for anything later. Nor is it a punishment for anything earlier!

As you allow yourself to get free of guilt for things you cannot control, you will enjoy being more adequately responsible for the things you can control. Your resulting freedom will set you apart from those timid souls who insist “Thou shalt not…” “Thou shalt not eat of the Tree of Knowledge or you will be banished with the other brutes.” By the way, the Torah, or Pentateuch, the first five
books of the Bible, contains 613 commandments or laws; 365 or 60% of these commands are negative. That’s a lot of prohibitions to fuel tremendous guilt down through the Judeo-Christian centuries. But what fantastic control and power those prohibitions give to the rabbis and preachers of the scriptures.

Recall how the same Bible says the same God the Father had his only son killed, crucified, according to his own divine design,
then held humankind responsible for Christ’s death? This scenario, by the way, does not show God to be a sadist. Rather, it shows
that the many Judaic, Israelitic, and Christian writers, translators, transcribers, re-translators and interpreters of the Bible had poor historical records, faulty memories, incomplete linguistic knowledge and greatly creative abilities to improvise, moralize and
manipulate. (By the way, if you think the above statement is an exaggeration, just Google the phrase “bible versions.” In about 0.01 second you get 3.4 million references! This is BIG business!)

Five decades ago, I sat passively in the pews and classrooms and tolerated bible-based attribution of responsibility. In the mid1950s, I was not yet ready to deny some responsibility for killing Christ on the cross, even though Christ was the rabble rousing rebel who blatantly resisted the power of the Roman Empire too vigorously for his own good. So, according to Roman law, he received the quite standard punishment of crucifixion for his rebellion. Modern man taking any responsibility for Christ’s act of rebellion 20 centuries ago is even more bizarre than a person of today blaming himself for the now obvious immorality of American Negro slavery two centuries ago.

Let’s just take full responsibility for our own acts for which we are, indeed, accountable before the bar of reason. These responsible acts and attitudes of ours include respectfully getting along with fellow human beings; this demands, yes, demands that we apply The Golden Rule in our responsible, guilt free dealings with others. (We will deal more fully with The Golden Rule in a later chapter.)

NO GUILT, NO SHAME, NO BLAME, JUST RESPONSIBILITY

When I was making my living as a psychologist, I enjoyed teaching my clients how they could live responsible lives without guilt, shame or blame. Of course, they brought in problems of real guilt and irresponsibility at times. But in the religious suburban area of
my clientele, a disproportionate amount of the guilt was imaginary and not really based on their irresponsibility. Too often their
problems were based on clashes of their reason and their faith. So in such cases I confided the details of my clerical background and how I had set aside childhood superstitions; it then seemed a lot easier for them to shuck their felt guilt and make rapid progress toward total self-responsibility.

I never tired of helping these clients develop the personal strength to live reasonably with “no guilt, no shame, no blame—just responsibility.” Over the years those phrases became almost a mantra. And I thoroughly enjoyed watching my clients rise from
their self-defeating postures of helpless guilt and irresponsibility to take rational responsibility for all the things they themselves could really control, but only for the things they could control. The joy of their newly found rational freedom brought me joy
also.

If all of us who care, parents, teachers, bosses, preachers, were to help the young take reasoned responsibility with only reasoned consequences for their own actions without any supernaturally based guilt, shame or blame, I think fewer of our youth would
be angry, rebellious or cynical. When authority figures assume a divine or superhuman backing for their authority, most maturing
youngsters intuitively recognize there’s something seriously wrong with the picture even before they can identify the contradiction
involved.

These youngsters may not be articulate or experienced enough to put it in words, but they commonly recognize the hypocrisy
of such authority figures and some sort of unfair fallacy in their lives. The fallacy or hypocrisy may anger or confuse them. Then
they are more likely to rebel, or, what is worse and much more common, they surrender and allow themselves to accept contra-
dictions without adequate skepticism.

I think the greatest immorality and abuse an authority figure can inflict on a learning mind is the fallacy that it should be able
to accept perceived contradictions on faith and without checking the assumptions that produced the contradictions. The maturing,
independently thinking adolescent will quite naturally tend to rebel, push the envelope and become skeptical of old ways and beliefs. The credulous one, on the other hand, is more likely to relinquish his or her precious logical reason, remain quite docile and accept the possibility of logical contradictions as part of mental life. What a crime!

Then the easy excuses for ducking personal responsibility can be created; logic has already been set aside and implicitly denied as the superior arbiter of morality or personal responsibility; logic be damned. “Yes, I know I’m overweight, but I wanna watch another
hour of TV; I don’t like to exercise, and I don’t have time now anyway.” “Yes, I know The Golden Rule says I should be considerate, but this guy is such a stupid, sinful jerk!” “Yes, I know I should quit smoking, but it’s too hard; I’m addicted to whatever the tobacco company put in these cigarettes.” “Yes, … but …” can easily become the mantra of such deeply wounded thinkers. These find it easier to blame outside circumstances beyond their
control than to accept reasoned responsibility for life’s control-lable details—the responsibility that obviates guilt and gives birth to mature self-esteem, legitimate self-confidence and responsible self-control.

(Excerpt from pp. 81 – 89 of Imagine No Superstion)

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