135 The godhood of real peope 7 May 2022

Learning good

Bad and good are easily distinguished. For example, acts of hurting people and lying are negative; they frustrate learning. On the other hand, science, the habit of truth, is positive. It promotes learning. Choosing good develops the power of creation, that is, godhood.

 Unlimited learning takes us from failure and leads us ultimately to the ability to create new worlds. We practice on the present one by making it new. This requires doing the work of freeing ourselves from progress-limiting ignorance.

 Pristine learning is unfettered by concepts called sin and guilt. Those categories are artificial marketing ploys invented to make religion appear necessary. Their purpose is to inculcate self-limiting beliefs that require expiation by religious adherence. Brainwashing convinces people of their sinful nature from which they must be freed by some external power.

The problem

This mind binding process is best explained by Plato's cave where captive victims of ignorance view shadows imitating the world outside the cave. Individuals who try to break free and approach the light are restrained by their companions in the cave.

 Foot binding cripples people for life. Victims endure unbearable pain during the malforming process. In adulthood they are unable to correct the condition--to escape the cave.

The solution

The above two paragraphs describe the mind binding inflicted by the Bible in opposition to the pristine learning (habit of truth) acknowledged in Ernstraudian philosophy, where there is freedom from the injurious concepts of sin and guilt and from the Bogeyman “God.” In contrast to mind binding, godhood is the natural fruit of unlimited, unfettered learning the good.

 In my upbringing, godhood was associated with creating new worlds in the astrophysical sense. Ernstraudian philosophy challenges us to create diverse new worlds here and now in the sociological sense. We do this without the Old Testament fear technique of exterminating those who are not on the same page with us.

Autobiographical Epilogue

My mental journey to freedom is presented metaphorically throughout this blog. This is a good place to be specific about some of the details.

Self-limiting beliefs

In childhood my anxiety expressed itself in temper tantrums which mostly subsided by early school years. Much later, the mind binding described in this article afflicted me with severe imposter syndrome that forced me out of graduate school. I am very sad about that. Nearly a decade later I graduated from a good law school with high honors. Then imposter syndrome was the inability to gain any financial reward for my efforts. I am not sad about that, because by nature I cannot bring myself to do the things for which lawyers are paid.

American jurisprudence, I learned too late, is an adversarial model and I cannot work in adversarial environment. That is just as well, because law is the most flexible academic degree, and thinking like a lawyer (the true goal at my law school) has guided and enriched my life.

Until well after law school, I was plagued by serious nightmares. While dropping out of graduate school, I had experienced ten sessions with a psychiatrist. Over the years, autodidactic psychoanalysis gradually reduced my symptoms. One morning, at age 57.5, I correctly announced to my wife that I had hit bedrock and the nightmares were over.

The journey

That epiphany did not end all discomforts. Recording my spiritual journey in this blog has been therapeutic, and after my wife explained the word gaslighting to me last night, the current article emerged with some effort. Now, having laid the egg, I sense relief. The light outside the cave is no longer painfully blinding.

The gaslighting

Religionists might immediately declare that I must cure my delusion by faithfully reading scripture. The retort to that gaslighting is quick and easy, supplied by Albert Einstein:

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Image Freedom from Pixabay

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Cover email:

Sometimes freedom is reached by breaking barriers. This article identifies religious barriers, including the fallen-man perspective of the Bible, that hold back enlightenment. The epilogue traces one person’s bombshell spiritual journey to freedom.   

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