Reply #22: Mental instability often seeks relief in religious excess and/or... [View All]

...sexual abnormality.

The Opus Dei are like any other group of moderately functional nutjobs who have found a system that works for them. Creepy repressed sadomasochistic physical rituals are part of extreme religious practice in many faith groups. As long as they confine it to psychospiritual masturbation they're not doing ME any harm, so who gives a flying monkey?

The thing is, one in some (large) number of functional nutjobs is also a great saint, genius, artist, etc. and makes fabulous contributions to humanity out of their own pain and chaos. So you have to be careful about assuming that the weird ways they find to deal with their own nuttiness are necessarily a bad thing.

Contrariwise, one in some (large) number of functional nutjobs ends up going completely bughouse and harming others with their nuttiness. So you have to be careful about assuming that the weird ways they find to deal with it are harmless, too.

Most of the functional and moderately functional nutjobs in Opus Dei are neither geniuses nor criminals. They're adults who have made a somewhat informed and perfectly legal choice to live a lifestyle that involves creepy displaced sadomasochistic sexual practices tarted up as religious ritual, totally disgusting levels of discrimination and misogyny, and the exploitation of themselves, their bank accounts, and/or their labor for the advancement of other power-hungry functional nutjobs. To keep them comfortable in the cult, they are focused on altruistic and noble religious impulses acted out in carefully structured "works of charity," which may or may not offset the overall harm of how they are, in effect, self-medicating their mental instability. By convincing themselves that they are "doing good," and acting for a higher religious purpose, they hold still for fleecing and exploitation longer.

The ones who are really caught up in the power games, of course, get further enmeshed in the heirarchical games of gaining "advancement" in the cult, which convinces them that they are getting "better" in some way.

They're all adults, they're all free to piss away their potential futzing around with this creepy stuff, and the cult is careful to see that enough "good works" are done to make a case for it not being totally without redeeming social value. They aren't supermen, illuminati, or secretly in charge of the Church bleeding off the Vatican Bank to fund vast underground networks of pedophiliac Satan worship. They're just sort of sad, really. But it's their business, unless you happen to be a family member of one of them. If so, work with a therapist or attend Alanon or something to help yourself deal with the pain. You can't do much for them unless/until they start to question their own participation in the cult.

expositorially,
Bright