I don’t feel so good.

I feel like I have been squeezed and squashed and mangled by a thousand unnatural births and rebirths because no matter how many times I pass through that misbegotten womb, I just can’t seem to get it right.

And every single time. I’m premature, born weak and malformed and nowhere near ready to breathe and function on my own. But there’s no incubator in the infant ICU waiting for me. No worried family looking through the plate glass window and commenting on how tiny and fragile I am. No highly trained medical professionals hovering over me, measuring and monitoring and maintaining in order to make sure I am one of the ones that makes it.

My only hope for survival is to go back in and hope I get it right next time.

But I don’t.

I have been having low grade panic attacks lately. They’re not set off by any identifiable trigger, and they are nowhere near the intensity of the real thing, but they still leave me feeling haunted and hunted and harried to death.

The fact that I know it’s just chemical bullshit in my brain making me feel that way helps in one way – I don’t freak out over freaking out any more.

That’s super helpful and I am extremely grateful for it. Would not trade it for anything.

But in another way, it makes things worse, because it means I come face to face with the reality of my insanity over and over again. It’s very scary to realize – in realtime, as it is happening – that your mind is broken and you are helpless to do anything to fix it.

All you can do is weather the storm and hope there isn’t another any time soon.

I think that a lot of the time, I am in a form of denial about just how sick I am. It’s a subtle form of denial because it’s not like I would deny being ill if asked and I never truly  stop feeling my damage altogether.

But I think, as a form of self-protection, I spend most of the time thinking that it’s not all that bad, and I could shake it off and be perfectly functional if I really had to.

And in a sense, that is reassuring to me, because it shows that my mind is not completely unable to generate the kind of highly functional illusions necessary for health and healing in the human mind.

Every day, my conviction grows that without the ability to lie to oneself in order to keep our fundamental assumptions unquestioned and inviolate, the human mind cannot function in a healthy and robust fashion and is doomed to constant chaos and collapse.

Its skeleton is just too damned soft.

And the truth is that reality does not meet all our emotional needs. Even if we have a life full of love, support, validation, and all the other things we associate with emotional wellbeing, there are still a lot of treacherous gaps and gaping holes waiting to swallow us whole, and the only way to stay out of them is to generate whatever beliefs are necessary to cover those gaps and then seal those beliefs behind a wall of protective denial that protects those beliefs from interference from our metaconscious minds.

That’s the vital role that religion plays in the life of most of humanity. It fills in the gaps and thus allows people to function as if truly whole. It creates the very important protected zone from which we can self-generate everything we need in order to get our most basic emotional needs met without having to worry about whether or not it is truly “real” or not.

Our mental health is too important to leave up to the vagaries of the real world.

A classic example of this self-generation effect is the phenomenon of the imaginary friend. Children create these friends in order to meet their psychological needs. To a child, this friend is real. Maybe not real like their parents or their siblings or their classmates, but real enough in all the ways that count.

Real enough to comfort them when they need it, entertain them when they are bored, play with them when they are feeling lonely, and in all other ways be whatever it is the child needs it to be at the time. ^[1]

Religion, in this context, serves the same function, but in a form that reflects the broader scope and depth of the adult mind.  It takes something cosmic and all powerful, composed of extremely potent emotional symbols in an equally potent supporting structure, in order to “fool” an adult’s mind in the same way.

But one thing remains true : these vitally necessary illusions must be absolutely safe from being questioned or doubted. Their role as the foundation of a person’s entire psyche demands it.

Sadly, people don’t realize this, and bring their religion into public discourse and thus open it to being questioned and brought into doubt, and then end up lashing out in anger as a response because this questioning hurts them on a very deep and intimate level. A level far too deep for a reasoned and rational response.

It exposes them to the truth that these deep beliefs do not represent rational reality. That was never their function. Their highest priority is to fulfill the emotional needs of the believer when rational, objective reality fails to do so.

Being an accurate model of external reality is strictly secondary. A highly accurate model of the world is useless if you are emotionally crippled by unmet needs.

Take it from one who knows.

Keep this truth about the function of religion in the human psyche in mind when you are tempted to attack someone’s religious beliefs as being logically absurd and completely unsupported by reason and evidence.

You will be, of course, be right. Religious beliefs do not make any sense.

But that was never their purpose in the first place.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.