Christianity, being one of the world’s largest and most widespread religions, has also played a significant role in causing Religious Trauma Syndrome. The ways in which Christianity can cause Religious Trauma Syndrome are vast and vary widely depending on the denomination and intensity of the beliefs in question.
One of the ways in which Christianity causes Religious Trauma Syndrome is through the belief in original sin, the idea that all humans are born with sin because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden. Children are taught from a young age that they are inherently sinful and that needs to be ‘saved’ through faith in Jesus Christ.
This teaching creates an intense amount of guilt and shame within the individual, as they feel that they have done something wrong even when they have not committed any particular act. Believing that humans are inherently flawed can lead to self-loathing and negative self-talk, which can have long-lasting effects on an individual’s mental health.
Another way in which Christianity may lead to Religious Trauma Syndrome is through the concept of hell. Many Christians believe in a very literal hell, a place of eternal punishment for those who live a life of sin or do not believe in Jesus Christ. The idea of a literal hell can cause immense anxiety and fear in an individual, especially when coupled with the belief in original sin.
The fear of going to hell, not only for themselves but also for their loved ones, can cause significant psychological damage and can result in individuals living their lives in constant fear and worry about death and the afterlife.
Furthermore, Christian teachings around sex and sexuality can often cause immense harm to individuals who subscribe to them. Many denominations teach that sex is reserved for marriage, and anything outside of that context is considered sinful.
In addition, many denominations hold strict gender roles and homophobia, teaching that individuals should adhere to binary gender roles, and that same-sex relationships are morally wrong. The shaming and ostracising of individuals who explore sexual possibilities can cause deep emotional and psychological trauma, leading to feelings of self-hatred, worthlessness, and isolation.
Finally, the concept of spiritual warfare is another aspect of Christianity that can cause Religious Trauma Syndrome. Many Christians believe in a literal devil that actively seeks to deceive and ensnare individuals into sin. Actions that can be deemed as following the devil’s path range from anything from watching certain movies to exploring other religions.
Believing that spiritual warfare exists can lead to a constant state of fear and anxiety, with people struggling to feel safe in the world around them. Individuals can become paranoid about every situation in which they find themselves, never sure if they are following the right path.
In conclusion, Religious Trauma Syndrome is a real and important phenomenon that can have long-lasting effects on an individual’s mental health. Christianity, and the ways in which it is often taught, can play a significant role in causing Religious Trauma Syndrome in individuals who have had these beliefs forced on them.
If one divides the world’s major religious traditions into Dharmic, a Taoic and an Abrahamic blocs, some patterns start to appear. If one defines the Dharmic religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, and the Abrahamic religions as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, then differences from across the Mithraic Ladder become evident.
Some of the differences are entirely physical, such as the fact that the Dharmic religions originated in the Indian subcontinent, while the Abrahamic religions originated in the Middle East.
Another mundane difference exists when it comes to rituals. The Dharmic religions have many rituals, including bathing in holy rivers, prayer cycles, meditation, yoga, festivals, and pilgrimage. The Abrahamic religions also have specific practices like prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage, but not as many or complex as in Dharmic religions.
Major differences also exist when it comes to holy books. The Dharmic religions have multiple holy books like the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Tripitaka, Guru Granth Sahib, etc. The Abrahamic religions have one primary holy book, which is the Torah for Judaism, the Bible (Old and New Testaments) for Christianity, and the Quran for Islam.
The content of those holy books is also different. Abrahamic books tend to focus on hatred of outsiders, emphasising how non-believers need to be destroyed. They exalt their followers and emphasise the supremacy of Yahweh. Dharmic books tend to reveal spiritual and philosophical secrets.
Furthermore, the attitude towards those books is different. In the Dharmic religions, it’s acknowledged that wisdom can be found outside of any one particular book. In the Abrahamic religions, the one primary holy book is frequently declared to be the only valid source of wisdom. Wisdom from other books is usually dismissed as worthless.
Related to the above is the differing historical example. The Abrahamic religions spread by violence and trickery, and destroyed all other religious or spiritual traditions by murdering their priests and desecrating their holy sites. Dharmic religions were different – they tended to spread by word of mouth.
Yet another difference relates to prophets and messengers. The Dharmic religions do not necessarily believe in the concept of prophets and messengers like the Abrahamic religions. However, Buddhism acknowledges Buddha as an enlightened teacher, and the Jains have 24 Tirthankaras who are not prophets per se but rather role models.
The main reason for this difference is that the Dharmic religions believe that it’s possible for any person, being an expression of the divine, to reconnect with the divine. Therefore, no prophets or messengers are necessary. The Abrahamic religions, being political in nature, believe that people must go through an intermediary in order to make such a reconnection. Truth is outside of oneself and therefore one needs guidance from religious authorities.
As such, the Abrahamic religions have numerous prophets and messengers such as Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Their teachings are considered superior to anything any one person could come up with themselves. As with holy books, anyone who questions any of these prophets is considered evil and fit to be destroyed.
The theological differences between Dharmic religions and Abrahamic religions are numerous, but there are two major ones.
The first relates to the belief in God. The Dharmic religions do not necessarily require belief in one supreme God but acknowledge multiple gods and goddesses or non-theistic philosophies like Buddhism and Jainism. Some, like Hinduism, are henotheistic, meaning that the multiple gods are both considered real and considered expressions of God (this is also similar to the Elementalists beliefs described in Elemental Elementalism).
The Abrahamic religions, on the other hand, believe in one supreme God. Anyone believing in gods is a heretic and must be destroyed. This has the ultimate effect of reducing conceptions of God down to the crudest, lowest-resolution savagery. People become afraid to even speak of God lest they attract punishment.
The second major theological difference relates to the concept of an afterlife. The Dharmic religions believe in reincarnation and karma, where one’s actions in this life determine their future lives. The Abrahamic religions believe in a judgment day when God will judge humankind based on their deeds and grant Heaven or Hell accordingly.
The doctrine that a person might have only one incarnation on this Earth – after which one earns either eternal Heaven or eternal Hell – creates an enormous amount of fear in those who believe it. But that fear is precisely the purpose. Like other Abrahamic doctrines, the purpose is to induce submission, to reduce the population to spiritual slavery.
All of these differences reflect the single largest and profoundest difference between the two religious families: the Dharmic religions are natural, while the Abrahamic religions are unnatural.
The Dharmic religions are those spiritual practices that arise naturally, inspired by the connections that people inherently have with their own souls. Being natural, they involve the use of any and all spiritual sacraments found in the nearby physical environment. This is why cannabis has been used by the Vedic and Hindu traditions, and magic mushrooms by several mystery schools, of which the Eleusinian Mysteries are the foremost.
The Abrahamic religions, by contrast, are a form of spiritual terrorism that originated in ancient Babylon, or perhaps even before then, and which have sought to separate people from their own souls. They are unnatural creations, which is why Abrahamic cultists have to put so much effort into forcing them on other people and winning converts from the spiritually lost.
When we are suffering, usually the first thing we are programmed to do as an ego is to curl up and figure out how we can be ok, and how we can look after number one. This is a very deep conditioning, which at a genetic level, precedes every other primitive psychological drive. Self-preservation underpins all of our genetic responsibilities. How this plays out on an experiential level is fear. Fear of annihilation, fear of suffering, fear of not making it. This is the deepest conditioning of the genome, conceivably going back all the way to the origin of our DNA. What if our deeply-rooted assumptions are totally upside-down, from a spiritual perspective? There are many reasons for thinking this to, in fact, be so.
The Buddhist tradition embraces a concept of compassionate service. Imagine a universe written as code. From the bottom up, you have been programmed to act in one direction, so that everything in any other direction would serve only to compromise your genetic existence. What kind of education would that be? An exceptionally challenging one, in my experience. Everything would have to be reviewed, from the very foundations up.
How it is that we are genetically programmed to insulate our suffering by withdrawing into ourselves? Picture a hedgehog rolling up into a ball when it senses danger, and you will have a workable mental image of how our genetic conditioning has encouraged us to respond. This may be perfectly fine insofar as hedgehogs are concerned, but what about us?
Why do spiritual traditions such as Buddhism subvert what we might call genetic values? Why would any spiritual tradition teach us anything even remotely different from that hedgehog’s response of curling up into a ball when in danger? Is it some kind of strange coincidence that the teachings of those who came to bear such massive spiritual influence are at loggerheads with the moral principles encoded into our genome through natural selection?
Here are some of the common threads of these spiritual teachings: unconditional compassion and love for others, including all animals – compassion given even when no material or genetic return could possibly accrue. Unconditional forgiveness, acceptance and understanding: even though people may be our physical adversaries, ideological enemies, or simply those that intend to visit harm upon us.
Why does the moral calculus of material considerations, including genetic fitness and resource-hoarding, function to close the spiritual heart, causing us to contract into an existential foetal position, while spiritual practices of compassion open the heart? How could becoming more vulnerable be any kind of answer to the threat of pain and suffering? Why should these worlds be at such great odds, the material or biological world, and the spiritual world? What can these ancient traditions, mere thousands of years old, tell us that could be more materially valuable than genetic systems that may have been operating for billions of years from the first cells through to primitive burrow-dwelling mammals, and now us?
Are our spiritual insights an aberration, a kind of warped illusion of freedom from the forces of nature? Or could it be the material world is where falsehood always lay? Do these two facets work side by side as educational tools? These are weighty philosophical questions. I want to put these aside in favour of the here and now, and look at what immediate human involvements are relevant to the discoveries of traditional teachings such as Buddhism.
Whereas many traditional religious systems emphasise moral purity and categorical rejection of evil, Buddhism focuses upon wholeness, skilful living, compassion and wisdom. Seeing the bigger picture in a philosophical or theological sense is nowhere near as important in Buddhism as what we choose to do here and now. Buddhism teaches that our intentions, from our merest thoughts to our most fleeting actions in the world matter supremely. We are either making these decisions skilfully, from a space of what Buddhism calls ‘right view’, or we are perpetuating delusion that was born of the push-and-pull conflicts of the material world, the ‘maya’, which Buddhism views as rooted in illusion.
This Maya, this ingrained system of delusion, incidentally, is a precise reflection of the genetic morality, the unspoken code which promotes striving for power, resources, knowledge, experiences, reproductive leverage over others, warring with others, and outcompeting other groups. This Buddhism identifies this activity as an illusion rooted in fear, the origin of all psychic human suffering. Because all fear activity is based upon a premise of separation, being that you are distinctly separate from the world around you, it becomes a self-reinforcing hypothesis, as well as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This suffering is set to last at least as long as the power of the illusion holds sway over the mind.
How does this impact our life here and now? What are we to do with this insight, how are we to translate this insight when we are actually in the very midst of suffering? When we are in suffering, we are not experiencing the realm of the theoretical. None of our ideas, however advanced, lofty or comforting, may be applied. This is something I have seen from experience. As a long-time meditator, I have observed that when I am in a state of suffering or imbalance, the most pertinent lesson is not that I have failed to understand something intellectually, nor is it that I am being punished because I have done something wrong, but that there is an element of something present that is outside of my immediate control.
It just is. It is a brute, present fact. I have often learned the most in meditation when I have come face to face with what I do not have the power to move. Every meditator eventually meets this phenomenon. The reason we have an entire cultural history of saints, sages, gurus and mystics is testament to the presence and power of suffering. They demonstrate the hunger of humanity, the deep drive to transcend that which torments us at our human level. Without suffering, we would have none of these teachers, nor would a single one of their timeless lessons be relevant to us.
What I have discovered personally in my own lifetime is that following the directives of self-interest is often harmful in very immediate and direct ways. Self-centredness is a compassion-inhibitor. An attitude of selfishness has never produced anything for me other than misery, even when I managed to get exactly what I thought I wanted. Amazingly, the opposite has been true. When I looked after the well-being and interests of others, I never had to take thought for myself, and even when I didn’t get what I thought I wanted or needed, everything turned out just fine.
So why would it be the case that what should, at least on paper, get us more of what we want lead to even less well-being for us personally? Why doesn’t it feel wholesome, why doesn’t it feel like a good fit for our inner life? I have experienced many miseries that were the result of selfishness, but I cannot think of one single episode of caring and giving in which I experienced forlornness or regret. This may be symptomatic of the fact that in this state, others are visible to us and welcomed within our world, while we ourselves remain almost invisible actors, like God’s unseen hand. This may be why Nisargadatta said: “Wisdom tells me I am nothing; Love tells me I am everything – and between the two, my life flows.”
In the same way that we all share in an eternal divine nature, we also share in a universal, human brokenness. There are not the pure among us who have somehow got it perfectly right and have escaped all suffering, and there are not the evil among us who have got it wrong and eternally bound themselves to suffering. We all meet somewhere on the spectrum as humans, because to incarnate into a biological form means to court some degree of suffering. What systems such as Buddhism offer is medicine for this suffering.
Let’s go back to my original example of the way a hedgehog reacts to a dangerous situation. While this might be totally normal and practical for a hedgehog, it isn’t normal and practical for a human mind. Natural selection may even have developed minds to react this way, but natural selection has no stake in your mental and spiritual well-being. The only variable being considered is differential genetic success. Evolution applies these pressures to other people and groups as well, and it couldn’t care less which survives. Like a mother squid with thousands of offspring, it has no favourites. There is not a shred of evidence that your genetic success, or lack thereof, has anything to do with your soul – which is to say, your psyche, or your True Self.
We will come across suffering in this life, we will meet with challenge – this much is certain. What I have discovered, as a very slow learner who has historically been very prone to over-intellectualise, is that compassion is the single most vital emergency medicine of the soul. Buddhism cultivates practises of loving compassion for this very reason, for ourselves, even for our enemies. Why? Because it actually works. If you want to see how, try it out for yourself.
Moving from the hedgehog to ourselves, when we suffer, the worst thing I have discovered we could ever do is to close down. We revert to an almost reptilian state of self-obsession in which we are in a kind of genetic first-aid mode. We do anything we can to make sure number one is taken care of – ourselves. We obsess over how every tiny thing that could help us matters, or any way in which we could feel even slightly better. This is not only a magnification of suffering, this is the closest to hell I have been, experientially.
As I mentioned before, selfishness is a compassion-inhibitor. Armouring ourselves is the same movement as shutting down our connection to others. Buddhism shows us how this orientation of shutting down in self-protection and self-armouring actually harms us spiritually. Nothing will make you more miserable than focusing on yourself when you are deeply suffering, distressed or upset. All spiritual teachings have acknowledged this in some form. What is also understood is that this presents a double-bind – how can I look after myself and making sure I am going to be ok when self-consciousness is the one thing that will worsen my condition?
Again, the answer is the practice of compassion. Have you ever wondered why prominent Buddhists such as Thich Nhat Hahn or the Dalai Lama go to such extraordinary lengths to ensure the comfort, happiness and well-being of others instead of focusing on themselves? Recall that these are both men who have lived through the devastating effects of loss, war, political adversity and being driven far from their homes. Why do they choose outgoing compassion, ceaselessly?
They understand. They have suffered enough to understand and witness the truth of the Buddha’s teachings. We cannot merely look after ourselves – there is service to others in a field of compassion that includes us. This is the very medicine by which Buddhism offers the means to transcend the dreaded double-bind of self-consciousness, and thereby, the knot of suffering.
Another way to say this is: try to focus on the well-being of others, then see what happens. Your own situation will change quite without effort on your part. Remember, Buddhism prescribes medicine, not miracles – though these have certainly been known to happen from time to time. We all have the means to direct compassion outward. We do this by opening our heart to whether others are really ok. This could be as simple as giving our full attention to someone who is expressing themselves, or brushing the fur of a pet.
There is infinite creative potential available in how we attend to others compassionately, even if it is only in thought. If you want to know whether it really works, I can tell you from experience that it does. I can also point to the testimony of many others, including Tibetans held captive as political prisoners who ceaselessly share love and compassion with their prisoners and torturers. They testify that this practice has served as the one thing that has kept them from being sucked into a vortex of despair.
The same conditions may be present to us as traumatic personal history, mental illness, grief or loss. Making sure that others are alright should not be seen primarily as a moral prescription put forward by Buddhism so much as it is an invitation to wisdom, an entry point to experiencing the relief of suffering in our ordinary, daily lives, right here and now. This compassion then becomes a living example for others, showing them how their helping others also relieves their own suffering. Where else could we apply such wisdom but here and now?
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, a brilliant collection of weird fiction stories.
With the release of Andrew Torba’s book titled ‘Christian Nationalism’, the subject is now prominent in the popular consciousness. Kanye West’s recent appearances in the alternative media, with assistance from Nick Fuentes’s America First channel, boosted the concept. But Christian Nationalism is nonsensical, an oxymoron.
To begin with, Christianity and nationalism are direct contradictions.
Nationalism is all about bonds of blood and soil. The word ‘nationalism’ shares a root with the words ‘Nature’ and ‘natural’. Nationalism is the natural form of organisation for an extended collection of families. Indeed, a nation can be considered an extremely extended family, in the sense that all members of it are related, however distantly.
Christianity, by contrast, is all about bonds of faith. The Christian Bible states that bonds of blood and soil are meaningless because all are one in Rabbi Yeshua. Christians are even encouraged to turn their backs on their own families if those families don’t worship the magical rabbi: they must hate non-Christian members of their own family to be worthy.
Rejecting one’s own blood because of a Jewish religion is utterly incompatible with nationalism.
Many Christians believe that their non-Christian ancestors are suffering eternal punishment as a result of their refusal to worship Rabbi Yeshua. The Christian belief that non-Christians are doomed to an eternity in Hell also applies to their own kin. They feel no shame at holding such contempt for their own people.
Neither do Christians feel any shame at their preference for sharing an eternity in Heaven with hordes of 70-IQ Africans over sharing an eternity with their own kin. Cult before kin is the motto of the Christian. This is fundamentally a traitor’s mindset. It’s the same mentality that led to acts of treason such as those committed by the Rosenbergs or the Cambridge Five.
If white Christian Nationalists are asked whether they would prefer a non-Christian white nation or a Christian non-white nation, they will opt for the latter. Some so-called Christian Nationalists would be happy for every non-Christian member of their own nation to be replaced with Africans, as long as those Africans were Christian.
Christians are more than happy to knife their own nationals in the back if they believe it will further their cult. This is one of the main reasons why Christian churches and NGOs are obsessed with refugee resettlement. Every sub-Saharan Christian they can import means another kick in the guts for nationalist sentiments, which depend on solidarity to exist, which itself depends on kinship intensity.
The deeper motivations behind this new wave of Christian Nationalism are twofold.
The first is to bring back theocracy. Christian Nationalists aren’t honest enough to admit that they want to go back to theocracy, so they hide it behind the label of nationalism. The truth is that they don’t want nationalism, they want theocracy. To them, the Dark Ages were good times: people may have been forbidden to read, but at least they were all Christian.
Christian Nationalism is identical to theocracy in almost every respect. Women are to be subjugated, non-Christians are to be banned from public office, pre-Christian spiritual traditions are to be destroyed, and Christianity is to be forced on everyone consenting or otherwise, as Christians did to Europeans between the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.
The second is to lure nationalists into Christianity. Being a universalist cult, and having the tenet that everyone on Earth will be made to worship Rabbi Yeshua whether they like it or not, Christianity endeavours to insert itself into every possible niche. So in the same way there are Christian Anarchists, Christian Communists and Christian Capitalists, there are also Christian Nationalists.
Christian Nationalists make a strenuous and immensely dishonest effort to shoehorn Christianity into nationalism. They will claim that all of the nation’s problems exist because of an absence of Christianity. They will twist any line from the Christian Bible to create the appearance of support for nationalism, even lines like Isaiah 40:17, which states that national divisions are as nothing to Yahweh.
They will even go as far as claiming that Christianity is a white supremacist movement if they think this will gain converts. Those who put on this act are in the habit of calling critics of Christianity Jews, even when it’s the Jewish origins of Christianity that provoked the criticism.
Ultimately, then, Christian Nationalism is merely the latest variant of the Abrahamic hydra. Christians will not rest until all competing religious or spiritual traditions are destroyed, and pretending to be nationalists is just the latest way they plan to wreak this destruction. But Christianity is, and always will be, a universalist cult, beholden to globalists, and in opposition to all natural interests.
