Original sin

The loathing of Evangelicals for gay people is not some add-on which can easily be amputated leaving creative service of God. It sits at the heart of all that is wrong with their Christianity.

Consider the comments here. Michelle Lesley summarises her doctrine beautifully: You’ve [sinned]. So have I. So has everybody else. The issue is that we are all -homosexual and heterosexual- sinners who must admit that we have offended a holy God, realize that there is no way we can appease Him on our own, and throw ourselves on His mercy for the forgiveness of our sin. We all sin, God must punish us, God sacrifices Jesus to himself for our sin. To benefit from that sacrifice, we turn to Christ. We are then justified. We then fit ourselves to God’s commands, including that most important one about no gay sex. If we do not so fit ourselves, then we obviously did not really turn to Christ or get saved in the first place.

It is not just Love that is perverted in us, in her view. It is all human instincts, which lead us to sin. We are, unsaved, monstrous Ids, with no superego to hold us back. But that does not fit with human beings as we observe them. Atheists and Hindus are good people.

It is more horrifying that she does not know whether she was saved or regenerated when she was 12, though she went to church. She thinks it does not matter, but it does, for it matters to other children like she was- is there a mean God with a get-out clause- “No, not committed enough- damn her” or not? Again, that does not fit with the God we observe: loving and creative. Of course you can ascribe other characteristics to God, as Michelle would- righteous, or wrathful- but that takes away from the Love.

(Doesn’t. Does. Does Not. Does Too. I doubt I would persuade her.)

She could cite screeds of St Paul to justify her position, before she turns sorrowfully from me, and I cite just one verse: by their fruits shall ye know them. The fruits of Michelle’s way are voluntary commitment to the torture of ex-gay programmes, rejection, bullying, despair and suicide: and people leaving the Church.

I commented on some ridiculous priest’s blog, and he said my striving for the Organismic Self showed I was far from the Gospel. So the Catholics are as bad as the Evangelicals. I wonder what experience they have of conscience, or the promptings of love and truth in their hearts. I seek a Biblical Christianity which recognises the goodness of creation. Only then can anyone believe in a Loving God.

Id

My understanding of the Id comes not from Freud, Freudians or even Freud-popularisers, but from Forbidden Planet.

The Id-monster contains all the Bad emotions boiling away, held down by the Ego, the conscious being, and the Superego, or parent-figure. Or, the man is the Ego, the angel on one shoulder the Superego, the demon on the other the Id. I culled this quote from Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis from Wikipedia:

It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learned from our study of the Dreamwork and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations…. It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.

Against that was Carl Rogers’ image of the potato, in a cellar, putting out a shoot towards the tiny, spiderwebbed window- trying to be the best potato it could be.

It makes no sense that we should have an Id, roiling away, needing held down, though Freud was a scientist by intention, he did not merely make up his observations. It makes a sort of sense in a created world with Original Sin inherited from our First Father, but not in a world where we evolved. And- that is what it feels like, sometimes, an Id, a monster, an enemy.

Unless the suppression makes the id into a monster, where unsuppressed it would serve our needs. So where would the Suppression, the real monster, come from? The conditional love, the negative love, the tyranny of the Normal which makes us need to pretend to be other than we are- so that we can live together without killing each other, so that we can work together obeying orders. So that my father could obey orders, and fly over Germany as the rear gunner of a Lancaster, in order to bomb it.

And now our myths free us from the suppression. Max goes where the wild things are, and becomes their King.

The inner child

Why, “Inner child”? Why should my emotional being not be adult, and be seen to be adult?

Because it has such a perfect clarity about what it wants, what makes it happy, that it seems like a child, as children often have that clarity. This is what Matthew 18:3 means:

unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Ha, and again Ha! Not “Mild, obedient, good as He” but in touch with their desires, and bent on carrying them out. Knowing that those desires are constructive and creative for learning and exploration, and that there is no failure, until you stop working towards something. One may be that child and be fully mature, with all the wisdom of your years. Possibly one cannot be fully mature without being that child.

Perhaps, also, we talk of the “inner child” because we fear it, and want to disrespect it, and call it less than the mature intellectual adult.

People fear the emotional being so much, and repress it, and because our parents in their thankless task of civilising us as they themselves were civilised, feared and repressed it. Repressed, it gains the energy of the repression, and becomes the Id monster, because it claims freedom. That hurts. Possibly, when I suppress my emotional being I stop it maturing properly, so it really needs to undergo stages of development which ideally it would pass through before physical maturity. And I think the work I am doing in my ritual space, loving and caring for the baby Clare, is necessary work, gentling and reassuring my emotional being like a frightened horse or dog, so that she may take her rightful place beside my intellect, working together, each doing the work appropriate to herself and not intruding on the other’s realm.

I have a room in my heart for Baby Clare, which is quite unspecific at the moment- red, soft, warm- because it is she who gets to decide how it will be. I cuddle the baby there- I am my own guardian angel, my own highest self, and my own most vulnerable self- and if at any time she decides she would like to get about, crawling, walking, she will learn to do that there, surrounded at all times with my own unconditional Love.

Does this make any sense to you at all? I am writing it here, rather than in my journal, to prove to myself that I am sufficiently unashamed of it, and sufficiently convinced of its rational value to show it off. Yes, I do want external validation. I imagine that would make me feel more comfortable. And yet I know myself sufficiently well to know that I will go my own way, whatever anyone else thinks.

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Jesus as a child, from the infancy gospel of Thomas:

And when Jesus was five years old, there fell a great rain upon the earth, and the boy Jesus walked up and down through it. And there was a terrible rain, and He collected it into a fish-pond, and ordered it by His word to become clear. And immediately it became so. Again He took of the clay which was of that fish-pond, and made of it to the number of twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath when Jesus did this among the boys of the Jews. And the boys of the Jews went away, and said to Joseph His father: Behold, thy son was playing along with us, and he took clay and made sparrows, which it was not lawful to do on the Sabbath; and he has broken it. And Joseph went away to the boy Jesus, and said to Him: Why hast thou done this, which it was not lawful to do on the Sabbath? And Jesus opened His hands, and ordered the sparrows, saying: Go up into the air, and fly; nobody shall kill you. And they flew, and began to cry out, and praise God Almighty.

No, I don’t believe it: but if Jesus was God, and a human child, would he not play games like that? That he would not is the doctrine of Kenosis.

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I look at the Tag surfer quite a lot, all posts with a particular tag shown in one place. Recently Lexie Cannes, a trans activist, wrote about Mischa Popoff, a campaigner against trans rights, whom she called “hardly worth mentioning”.  At least she answered the rubbish he wrote. Dr Eowyn mostly quotes, to spread anger and resentment among her conservative readers about the Transsexual Menace to our Children. I prefer posts where people write on what pleases them. I do not want to be depressed. There are positive stories about. Popoff opposes the introduction of education on trans issues in Canada. Hooray! That means it is a live issue, and other people are working for that education.

I recommend Dr Eowyn’s post, because it contains a great deal of useful information on how to bring up healthy, well-adjusted children with a wide spectrum of behaviours traditionally more associated with one gender than the other. I am grateful to her for introducing me to Gender Spectrum. She will not be pleased at giving such aid and comfort to her adversaries.