If you know of someone who has no guilt, nor remorse, I would advise you to stay away from such a person. Such a person is a potential psychopath in training. However, I would also say that those who always feel guilty and have a need for daily or weekly confession as just as emotionally imbalanced though maybe not so dangerous. Maybe!
The Judeo-Christian God seems to specialize in guilt!
Guilt is one way that the church can keep one beholden to the institution. All too often the Sunday message starts off with the topic of SIN and then ends with the solution being to come to confession, make amends through financial offerings, or submit oneself to the priest, minister, rabbi, IMAM, or pastor.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the top theologians of the past century, warned people to run from such “spiritual quackery”.
Unfortunately such guilt begins even before we had a chance to do anything to be guilty for. Since two people (back before artificial insemination) came together and united in bodies to create me, here we are a product not of any choice but love or maybe passion gone loco. Before we take our first breath we are GUILTY.
Bummer!
And of course the church lightning rod is SEXXX. St. Augustine railed against the SIN of SEXXX and the apostle Paul would have nothing to do with it (we think). It’s amazing that the Song of Solomon got canonized; however, the church so emptied it of romantic love, and the goodness of sexuality with spiritualization, that it lost the buzz- and reality of the message.
How about you? Do you have a healthy outlook regarding who you are in God and your human failures called guilt?
But while sex was the core for building guilt there was always more things to fll guilty of such as: lack of attendance, failure to tithe, disrespect of leadership, missed communion, disagreement with doctrine, and on and on and on!
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