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I found this sensitive, informative and thought provoking blog today (licoriceroot) that contains many posts that get me to thinking in new ways about the ‘complex’ of my own severe infant-child abuse history and its (most obvious) connection to my abusive mother’s own infant-childhood history of malevolent treatment.
One of the posts on this blog is about ‘hyperreligiosity’: Hyperreligiosity: Fabulous Article Published Jan. 2010
I used to tract my mother’s ‘fundamental religious fanaticism’ to when I was in 10th grade and she became a member of an Assembly of God church. The stories I wrote concerning the religious abuse I suffered post-mother’s getting religion contain traumatic experiences I suffered that I believe have interfered with my ability to be comfortable with ANYTHING that has to do with religion.
I have come to realize that the foundation of my mother’s terrible psychosis she placed me at the center of (that because she and I were ‘dying’ during her difficult breach birthing of me and that the devil had sent me to kill her – meaning to her that I was never human, that I was the devil’s child) WAS absolutely a religious-based thought and belief that not only affected my entire infant-childhood but that lasted for the rest of my mother’s life.
As my mother’s friend of 45 years told me in a recent interview about my mother’s aging years my mother had answered her knock on my mother’s door with 666 written on her forehead and hands to keep the devil from being able to find her when he came for her I realized how pervasive my mother’s religion-based terror actually was.
I further believe that someone in my mother’s deeply disturbed earliest years of life didn’t put the ‘fear of god’ into her but rather instilled in my mother the ‘fear of the devil’. I strongly suspect that the abuse related to my mother’s deepest terrors was in some way sexually based.
I understand now that even my mother’s insane obsession with my ‘cleanliness’ was connected (wired) into her by something she had experienced as a child that she was told was ‘dirty’.
In fact, I can consider the entire violent abusive pattern of my 18-year childhood with my mother as being connected to religious abuse within a system that could not resolve the range of ambiguities – the grey scale – of good-bad within her Borderline body-brain.
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I went looking for the source of the article posted on the licoriceroot blog and found it here:
Website: The Hindu: Arts/Magazine
Article: A Japanese genius and his God module!
By Dr. Ennapadam S. Krishnamoorthy
This article discusses the idea of there being a ‘God module’ in the brain as it presents neurobiological underpinnings for the human experience of religion – and its experience of THE EXTREME.
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I also located this article posted on The New York Times site November 14, 2009
The Evolution of the God Gene by Nicholas Wade
“IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.
During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state
This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.”
And…..
“It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.”
[Read entire article by clicking HERE]
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After you take a look at the above article, consider this also: Google search ‘genes dancing’ and a fascinating universe of information will appear before your eyes. I already knew about this 2006 study that comes up with the Google search term combination of ‘Israel genes dancing’:
‘Dancing’ Genes Discovered by Israeli Researcher
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These articles I mention here point to a fascinating connection for me. When an individual’s actions appear to us as unbelievable, we can think a bit more deeply about who and how these people are in the world.
The insane infant-child abuse my mother perpetrated against me involved a distortion in how her original genetic potential displayed itself, just as it undoubtedly did for the young paranoid schizophrenic man who was capable of perpetrating the horrific violence displayed in last Saturday’s Arizona shooting.
See post: +IS MENTAL ILLNESS THE COST OF OUR SPECIES’ GREATEST GIFTS?
I don’t believe that our continued survival as a species was ever determined by what tore us apart. Our survival depended then – and still does today – on what brings us together and binds us together.
When we look at extremes of abuse and perpetration of violence and trauma we are looking at the ABSENCE of the positive traits that ensured our specie’s reproductive fitness and the continuance of our genetic lines.
Rather than try to examine the faults of any single individual representative of our species I believe it would be far more helpful and productive to search for the malevolent conditions that existed in their earliest caregiving environment that CHANGED how their genes manifested themselves during the earliest critical windows of their development.
If we can manage to take a step back as we examine human behavior that represents a ‘tearing apart’ of the fabric of healthily bonded social connections and their expressions we will begin to notice how clearly these negative patterns reflect malevolence in an environment of deprivation and trauma. The negative displays the absence of the positive.
As we begin to focus on the necessary POSTIVE qualities that contribute to building the best body-brain possible in a new little human being we will automatically lessen the potential for a lifetime of trouble that growing a body-brain in a malevolent environment causes.
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Stop the Storm 