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This article is excerpted from the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal. Each issue of the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal is published by High Plains Arts and Sciences; P.O. Box 620604, Littleton Co., 80123, a Colorado Non-Profit Corporation, under a Public Domain Copyright, which entitles any person or group of persons to reproduce, in any form whatsoever, any material contained therein without restriction, so long as articles are not condensed or abbreviated in any fashion, and credit is given the original author.! IN GRANDMOTHER'S LAP Copyright 1987, RMPJ "Morals are the nagging fear that somebody somewhere may be having a good time." --H. L. Mencken What is the difference between one of us and Oral Roberts? Well, hopefully there are lots of differences, but the top one on my list is that I work on being ethical and he is a moralist. The moralist knows how everybody else should behave in order to be a good person, avoid Hell, fit into decent society, etc., etc. He is quite likely to feel that he is a valid exception to all his own rules, since he can handle temptation and control his outcomes. His main characteristic is frantic paranoid distrust of other people. No one should be seen nude, for instance, because this would be un-bearably sexually arousing and lead to promiscuity, neglect of ordinary duties, etc. He knows he can control himself, but everybody else has to be "protected" from their evil impulses. His major defence is projection: "I'm not oversexed, and of course I'd never want to be or want to be unfaithful to my wife, but that woman in the (name situation or article of clothing) sure is asking for it. Ultimate expressions of this type of thinking are wife-beating -- one man said, "When I walked into the self-help group I thought that when they heard what I'd had to put up with they'd con-gratulate me for not having killed her." -- and witch-burning -- "I am a good person. Bad things do not happen to good people. A bad thing has happened to me. Somebody did it! Kill them!" In essence, the moralist is saying "It can't be my fault (I'm not able to face the idea that it might be my fault). It must be somebody else's fault. If people would just follow these few simple rules, which I'll be glad to explain to them, nothing would go wrong and I wouldn't have to feel anxious. But since they won't all follow my rules, everything is their fault, not mine, and I don't have to feel anxious."
To me this is nauseating. I have no idea how you "should"
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