THEOLOGY’S GAS-LIGHTING ETHOS

Wikipedia: “gas-lighting is a form of psychological abuse in which a victim is manipulated into doubting their own memory, perception, and sanity.”

Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or members of a group, hoping to make targets question their own memory, perception, and sanity.    Oxford dictionary

“Gas-lighting” is an outside effort to make someone doubt their perception of reality by convincing them that how they interpret what they sense is delusional.

Victims learn to question and doubt what their intrinsic rational says about how they perceive their surroundings.

“Gas-lighting” was termed from the 1944 movie “Gaslight” that starred Ingrid Bergman. It was patterned after a 1938 stage play of the same name. While her husband used gas lights in his secretive attic search for hidden treasure, she noticed the dimming of the downstairs gas lights.

Trying to convince her she was mistaken and even delusional, her husband told her there was no dimming and that her eyes were deceiving her.

He was gas-lighting her.

Cheating spouses, politicians, narcissists, sociopaths or just anyone wanting to exploit others might use this technique. Some merchants fashion their own methods of gaslighting prospective buyers in how they advertise their product or belief.

NATIONAL GASLIGHTING

National gas-lighting involves a government-staged public ethos of a reality backdrop with no supporting tangible evidence to verify its living presence.

Greek rulers supported the existence of the Greek Gods and often used the threat of the situationally appropriate god powers to influence Greece citizens.

It was 312 AD when Rome legalized Christianity as its only recognized religion. Including the buried Gnostic Gospels discovered within the past 100 years, all material evidence of the unselected accounts of Jesus’s teachings and all the other competing religious doctrines of the time were ordered destroyed.

By adopting Christianity and with the Roman priests’ handpicked gospels crafting the theme of the Roman Bible First Edition, the Roman Emperor Constantine had secured a way to corral and control his Romans. Jesus’s deeper reaching teachings to the more spiritually mature audiences that were understood and written by the more spiritually mature authors of how each human had the inborn freewill power to find their salvation and direction from within had been neutered out of the Roman Bible First Edition.

So as Rome intended … Romans looked for Rome’s guidance from without … not to their living source from within.

Rome’s government was gaslighting its Romans with the logistics of another reality so it could step in and tell them what their direction should be.

USA NATIONAL GAS-LIGHTING

The USA uses the same theological template to corral its citizens and bless its endeavors.

Like by having Ingrid’s character question her sanity when her husband tried to convince her of what her reality was, the USA government certifies through its politicians’ orations and its various forms of government publications and monuments that there’s a never-been-seen reality hosted by a never-been-heard god figure that’s responsible for the safety and destiny of its citizens. It treats that notion as an assumed time-proven fact.

Looking up into the sky holding onto the same untethered Roman thread of hope for salvation leaves much of the USA public totally plan-less in an unprepared state for today’s un-letting real life parade of unpredictable naked change ups and downs. This state of national unawareness makes for the different incarnations of the nationally corraled state of common unrest and confusion that’s evolved since 1776.

American politicians know to ask for God’s blessing of America to end their speeches if not only to grease the reelection voting lever but also to subconsciously remind the listening audience of the white elephant that waves the USA flag. “In God We Trust” can be found stamped on US currency and in the gamut of anything subject to government control.

“We all salute the same flag and we all are made by the same god….Thank you. God bless you and God bless America.”

Closing words of President Trump’s 2-28-17 Speech to Congress

These words were spoken by the man who in a presidential campaign speech while quoting the Bible hesitated a bit before stuttering out: “Two Corinthians” before the chapter/verse instead of saying “Second Corinthians” which is what’s used in church settings.

Hypocrisy? Nah … it’s ok … they all do it on some level.

At America’s 2017 presidential inauguration there were religious figureheads representing several theological traditions currently active in this country. They blessed what was about to happen in the name of their god and prayed for the new regime’s policy to reflect their god’s wisdom.

This demonstrates nothing less than government imposed politically correct spiritual hyperbole.

In modern times, some of these religious sects are conceding that there might only be one god. Yet they stay true to their religion’s unique collection of rights, ritual and dogma that their believers must adhere to without question.

FROM ANCIENT SUPERSTITION TO AN AGE OF REASON

Since mid second millennia, mankind’s collective perspective has transposed from ancient superstition into a question-asking proof-seeking age of reason that’s come to be known as science.

Science serves as mankind’s freewill and asks why and wants proof concerning reality’s uncertainties. It wants to bring to conscious awareness the self-evident proof of what’s been theorized. Scientific questioning has brought understanding to the Greek god Thor’s bolts of lightning used by Greek rulers to help corral Greek civil disobedience and objection.

Freedom to follow a religious sentiment can’t be denied yet has greatly retarded this country’s ability to focus and advance its collective awareness and understanding of how the human condition fits into its human experience.

From the youngest age, USA citizens are exposed to a culture professing that there is a reality with a different nature than the one their five senses report to exist. Through the various means of handed down misinformed misguided conditioning from parents, grandparents, schoolteachers, national anthems and currency, court house lawns, license plates, historically endorsed passed-along religious design, religious pundits, friends and etcetera … the collective USA belief system has been stymied into an ongoing state of confused self-doubt and guilt.

Some USA localities are trying to include Creationism in their public schools and give the knowledge associated with pseudoscience’s theory of Intelligent Design the same credence earned by modern science through its process of double blind experimental verification.

Theology gaslighting can shadow and bring the second-guessing and the self-doubt that distances any “aha” moment of inspired insightful wisdom an individual might realize on their pathway to self-understanding. Trying to merge the intellectually spun footprint of ancient reality with the sensually wired emotional sounding board of living reality only invites confusion and emptiness of conscious understanding.

This is like back in Christian theology’s Garden of Eden account of creation when Adam and Eve were snake-convinced that they would gain wisdom about everything from good to evil by internalizing the fruit of wisdom they borrowed from the Tree of Knowledge. Their unearned wisdom was fused with the confused shame coming from their conscious awareness that was empty of understanding.

This is what had them reaching for fig leaves.

When the integrity of an individual’s freewill ability to question and objectively decide becomes compromised, their resistance to believing what’s not been adequately verified becomes weakened. It becomes much easier the next time for them to strike up some blind faith in the unverified stain of wisdom justifying some other sort of belief or conviction they borrow from elsewhere.

They become further lost in their quest for emotional bliss.

THE STRAW THAT BRAKES THE CAMEL’S BACK

In the first God-to-man conversation while the earth still cooled from creation, Christianity’s god Jehovah told Adam that to partake of the borrowed wisdom of the Tree of Knowledge only one time would result in his spiritual death.

Today … when a new religious believer … come Sunday morning … works up the willingness to chance-out the blind faith-backed courage to rise to the preacher’s call for sinners to come forward to repent and “give their life to Jesus” … while sullenly radiating the seeming emptiness of a lost soul … the admitted sinner socially extends their spiritual neck … outwardly declaring their blind pride-protected willingness to acknowledge internalizing the plausibility of an unsubstantiated religious claim’s untestable truth.

They are about to force feed their belief system an unfamiliar strain of wisdom … empty of their understanding.

This freewill-compromising decision tenders a new personality trait highlighting their new blind faith-backed willingness to subordinate their innate freewill questioning ability to the validity of the wisdom supporting the unverified truth of another’s suggested notion.

They’re compromising their freewill ability to question and understand uncertainties to a degree of never-to-be-forgotten magnitude. This is a monumental christening act of freewill self-defiance, synching up their innate freewill questioning ability to test and confirm the applicability and truth of an unverifiable claim.

The resulting indecision and pending uncertainty coming from this imbalance will brew up an ongoing unsettled emotional cocktail that will prevent their attaining emotional bliss. Like Jehovah warned Adam, he will be dead to his emotional state of Garden of Eden bliss as he suffers from the emotional downs from his emptiness of understanding instilled by the borrowed empty wisdom.

This new believer now lives by a new code of wisdom to follow unquestioned.

They now live in ignorance guided by a blind faith in how they intellectually perceive what they’re told the wisdom means and not by having intrinsically developed a steadfast faith in from feeling the meaning of its truth.

Their un-quantified untethered blind faith submission will now echo from their worldview in all their future decisions. They’ve mortgaged out their innate freewill questioning defense system that’s meant to be used to protect them from the uncertainties of life, for the hope of a promised eternal afterlife having the non-suffering emotional bliss the borrowed wisdom purports.

Their freewill questioning will be silenced into following the unexplained wisdom trail of their chosen god.

STUCK SUFFERING IN AN EDDY OF COMPROMISE

As their connection with their intrinsic sense and feel for understanding what’s right and what’s wrong is weakened, they stand more vulnerable to the incipient suffering resulting from the miscued conditioning leading them to some form of contaminated pleasure. Their ability to question stands frozen in confusion when trying to use their ancient strain of borrowed wisdom to make sense of the self-evident truths that might even seem obvious or that are revealed through science’s ever-questioning observation.

As an individual’s freewill consciousness fades, their intuitive nature becomes all the more easily mortgaged out to trusting the influence meant to serve the unverified or unverifiable mindsets of other entities. Like Steve Jobs once said in a company meeting that it’s not their job to do customer surveys, their job is to tell the public what it wants.

As undefinable focus eats up an individual’s waking energy while trying to socially posture and defend their ego-managed perception of their current state of being, they will reach for fig leaves to hide their shame from their ignorance-spawned emptiness of understanding like Adam and Eve did when confronted by Jehovah at the very onset of the Genesis creation.

From behind religious theology’s protective veneer, this confused believer will still keep an opened eye for a more substantial understanding of reality.

This conflict seeds the self-doubt that can last an entire lifetime. The barrage of input to how USA citizens must be brave with their blind faith in the wisdom they’re borrowing from some ancient source comes from all government certified angles in America.

This does very little to help them understand the cause of the suffering putting them through their present moment emotional mayhem. Theological gas-lighting manifests in many forms throughout the world.