Why Easter Is Bad For You
I choose to spend Sunday morning having sex or reading a good book as my satisfying experience as opposed to going to some organization to be undervalued and called a loser for their financial profit.
Dr. Albert Ellis, the psychologist who brought the world evidence based cognitive therapy, (which because of its speed and long term effectiveness is used in every psych ward in North America and Europe) once said somewhere something like, “all religion and nationalism are fascistic.”
I feel Dr. Ellis was referring to the dictates of dictators. Any sentence that contains the words that boil down to should, must, ought to, etc. are the dictates of dictators. ‘I should, you should,’ are the ingredients of anxiety and anyone who stays anxious long enough gets depressed, and anyone who stays depressed long enough dies from it according to The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook.
Religion likes depressed anxious people and works to further their illness by agreeing and supporting their underestimate of themselves. Their modus operandi is to distract from the illness with repetitive practices they charge money for, a temporary relief, so that you have to come back endlessly, a tidy little dependence cycle. The practices are prayer, meditation, chanting, confession of the 12 step meeting, the group singing, etc. which causes the hypothalamus to release oxytocin, a feel good hormone, similar to when we have a sexual experience. The charge for this discharge is a donation in money or time, a recommended tithe called ‘giving back’ part of the F.O.G. of cult recruitment: Fear, Obligation and Guilt. You are actually paying them to stay sick. So this is why so many of these organizations forbid sex. Competition kills the competitor. You must not, you should not have sex because it is bad for their bottom line. The 12 step program posts multimillion dollar profits every quarter. Every 3 months. Addiction to distraction is big business.
So, why are we mammals anxious? Ask evolution, it’s good for the species to be frightened of scary things and run away. We over estimate the danger and under estimate our ability to deal with it using our imagination for that purpose. When not being used for that purpose we use the imagination to create satisfactory experiences. AKA good mental and emotional hygiene based on evidence. Religions and nationalists hate evidence. We must, should, ought to, believe in belief and have Faith in the anecdotal evidence of whatever programming aka teaching we are being subjected to in order to pick our pockets and rob us of the time we have left on the planet. I choose to spend Sunday morning having sex or reading a good book as my satisfying experience as opposed to going to some organization to be undervalued and called a loser for their financial profit.
In the cognitive therapy labs at Stanford, according to Dr. David Burns in his ‘Feeling Good’ book, it was found that the statement ‘I highly prefer to but I don’t have to’ reduced anxiety and therefore depression, creating changes in the brain similar to taking Prozac. Other studies have shown that in the USA, highly religious states such as Utah consume the most amounts of Prozac and online porn, a repetitive feel good distraction from anxiety.
‘I highly prefer to but I don’t have to’ is a rational response to a must, should, or ought to disputing questions such as ‘why must I’? Where is the evidence that I’m a loser if the church folk don’t like me? There is no evidence that I’m a loser for any reason. I highly prefer to have them like me but they don’t have to. I’ll make new friends. I’ll figure it out. I choose to spend my time on my satisfactions enjoying my life with or without these friends. Win win.
So again, thanks to evolution, cognitive therapy practice is the mental and emotional hygiene that we all do automatically when we find we have under estimated ourselves to insure that we run away from danger that we may or may not have overestimated. We are actually really good at this hygiene as we are with other forms of basic hygiene. We avoid crashes in our car so regularly, we don’t even think about it. We don’t run away from driving as dangerous as it can be. The more un-anxious we are, the more alert we are as drivers. We stay un-anxious with rational responses such as ‘I have training in how to recognize the six positions of the 2 car collision and experience tells me I am a good safe driver as a result’. Automatically.
The problem arises when the corporate dictator, like any predator, seeks you out in times of vulnerability, usually a transition due to loss, and promises instant oxytocin feeling good through any of their practices. Usually we use a good self helping distraction such as regular exercise, but like self defeating Yoga cults, they want you to drink the Kool-Aid. The Lulu Lemon heroin dealer.
As Albert Ellis says, “If it is to be, it is up to me.”
