Like a huge percentage of this country, I was raised in Christian home, and brought to church on Sundays. When I was fairly young (early teens, perhaps younger) it dawned on me that there were quite a lot of religions in the world, and if any one of them was true, the odds of it being the one I happened to be born into were somewhat small.

So I've always been interested in learning about other religions.

Along the way, I've noticed there's this huge lie about religion which is enormously popular: that all religions are basically the same. It's certainly true that all religions (and a great number of movements which are deeply religious, but not called that) attempt to answer the same basic questions and needs. But that doesn't mean that they're the same.

To draw an analogy, I suspect most people have a need to medicate their brains in certain ways. We all use a certain sort of "drug", whether that's a "runner's high", or a need or desire for extreme sports, music, sex, booze, video games, or methamphetamine.

So listening to Mozart might arise from the same need as someone who smokes pot -- and might even induce a few similar effects. But, if so, that doesn't mean we can just then assert that classical music and marijuana are the same. The underlying need or desire may be the same, but the solutions are very different, and have very different "externalities".

Religions & Guilt

Each religion has some way in which it's distinct from others. Buddhism poses that the core problem is attachment, for example. In Islam, submission to Allah is key. The New Age movement is a bit like a guy at a party who will do or be anything in order to get people to like him.

The Christian proposition, if I have to boil it down similarly, is partially that you (a) aren't really good, and (b) that you can't earn your way into heaven. (Indeed, I'm saying the same thing twice: If I can pay for something, then I can rightly say I "earned" it, right?) And when you look the religious world through this particular lens, it's easy to see all faiths as dividing into just two camps: Religions where you can earn your way into "heaven" (everything else) religions where you can't (orthodox Christianity).

(Though I recently think I should add a third category, as there are religions which don't care at all about human moral behavior. Old-time paganism, for example: the Greek and Roman gods didn't care who was well-behaved. Scientology also doesn't organize itself along moral lines such much as purported efficacy.)

Guilt plays a huge role in religion -- in some religions anyway. Judaism, even though it's sometimes fuzzy on the afterlife, seems pretty good at guilt. Islam and Hinduism likewise. And who even needs to mention the Catholic church, which, according to many, has guilt down to a science?

And again, there are multiple answers to what you do about any guilt you might have collected. Basically: (a) don't care / it doesn't matter, (b) work it off, and (c) you can't work it off: file for spiritual bankruptcy.

Guilt as a Political Engine

Liberalism, for many, is a religion. Not necessarily for all, but for many.

Consider the topic of race. I was born into a white middle class family, with an income higher than the average black family. Why did I have such good fortune? one might ask. Worse, it could be argued that other white people oppressed some other black people, and I have indirectly benefited from this inequality.

What to do with this guilt? Our first reflex is to buy -- bribe -- our way out of it. By doing something, by doing enough, you redeem yourself -- you show you aren't really bad, overall: you have, or can have, plenty of moral clout with which to make up for your own misdeeds. You just weren't doing that until now.

Given that the natural result of guilt is to want to do something, it's easy to channel that impulse into our desired end goal. The Catholic church in the middle ages sold indulgences ("give us money and you can sin!"), Al Gore wants to sell us carbon credits (of dubious provenance, no less), and white liberals support affirmative action and income redistribution. (The last being a particularly cheap bribe, as it's done with someone else's money.)

The leadership on the left understand full well that, alongside anger, guilt is a primary engine of their religion. It's no accident that the further left someone is, and the more interested in producing "activists" they are, the more likely they are to support sensitivity training, the main purpose of which is to induce guilt that can be channeled into "useful" political activism.

For example:

In the exercise, Ryan Visconti, a senior at ASU, was required to portray a gay Hispanic male and told to “create his perfect life” by visiting booths (“life stations”) representing his opportunities in housing, employment, banking, worship, and other facets of life. At each booth, the exercise required Visconti to repeat scripted responses meant to correspond to his assigned sexual orientation and ethnicity, with most outcomes being negative. For example, no matter how much he pleaded, Visconti was told at the “church” booth that he was going to hell and that “his kind” weren’t allowed. Similarly, the “housing” and “employment” booths informed him that “he could be a landscaper and live in a ghetto apartment or be unemployed and homeless.” ....

Visconti argues that the training session was “basically saying that if you don’t feel the same way, you’re wrong,” and that if “you weren’t a minority or gay, you were supposed to feel guilty and that everything was given to you in life.” [1]

The idea that you can be completely forgiven is not especially useful in such systems, because it takes away a future promise of control. Ideally, the person should endlessly have to "work off" the sin, guilt, bad karma, or CO2 one accrues.

(And, again, this is one of the areas where orthodox Christianity is so patently strange, in that it offers a once-and-for-all forgiveness, which really screws up the control mechanism.)

What's Guilt Got to Do With It?

It would be easy to argue, given the abuses, that we should do away with guilt. But, aside from the fact that we'd be sociopaths without it, we should note that correct guilt (and a correct response to guilt) can also produce many good things.

But the guilt induced in "sensitivity training" sessions is bad guilt.

First, the moral reasoning is bankrupt: People are feeling guilty for all the wrong things. I'm not guilty because I was born into a higher status than someone else. Nor I am superior. These are two sides of the exact same Nazi-like fallacy. Instead, I believe we are morally responsible for our own choices, not those which others have made, nor for circumstances beyond our control.

And second, the solution being offered is almost always useless or harmful. Guilt, when used properly, should lead people into productive behavior. For example, if I've stolen something, my guilt might lead me to stop my robbery, return the goods, and perhaps even to turn myself in. I stop my own crime, I restore what my victim lost, and then I make an example of myself so that others will be discouraged from doing the same.

But the kind of penances being sold aren't even helpful or appropriate. No amount of affirmative action for wealthy African Americans (the main beneficiaries of such) undoes the deaths on slave ships. No amount of casino gambling will undo the massacre at Wounded Knee or the Trail of Tears. "Living Wage" policies make the poor even more destitute. And you'll never work for freedom and peace by joining hands with the totalitarian apologists at International ANSWER and the UN Council on Human Rights.

And all these "solutions" are sold at a price: Put me in power, and I'll make things right.

Martin Luther objected to the selling of indulgences not because they made people feel guilty, but because they, in a sense, let people off too cheap. Genuine guilt serves to help make us stop doing what's wrong, and, he would have argued, bring us back to our creator. But Brother Tetzel and the Cardinals were perfectly happy to tell you that you were good as long as you advanced their agenda. (A constant stream of indulgence money in their coffers!)

Certainly guilt and religion have both been abused. And some, like Richard Dawkins, would argue religion is inherently abusive. But such critics don't look closely enough: Many who avoid religion end up running into the arms of something which is still essentially religious (and often far more fanatical), but which makes far less sense, and has a much worse impact on the world. (Atheists have had a good number of their own do this, if they'd care to honestly examine the record.)

So my closing point is that I don't dismiss guilt: When should we feel it? What should we do about it? These are serious philosophical questions which can lead to productive thought and action.

And likewise, we shouldn't dismiss religion either: most of us have one, whether we admit it or not. But the people who are willing to admit their religious convictions, haul them out into the light, and allow those propositions to be openly questioned and debated are generally a lot safer than those who refuse to even admit they have one.

The answer to bad guilt is good guilt; the answer to bad religion is good religion. And the way you can tell the two apart is to look the foundations underpinning each, and at the ultimate impact on the world.