An Integral Part of the Puzzle

Every Sunday morning of my childhood, I found myself kneeling in the wooden pews of our local Catholic church, surrounded by the scent of incense and the soft murmur of prayers. My devout parents ensured we never missed Mass. We would recite the Confiteor, a prayer of confession that included "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault." I would beat my chest three times while speaking these words, but this ritual always troubled me. I felt it was absurd.

Imagine if, as a parent, you made your five-year-old child kneel before you each week, strike their chest, and declare their faults. We would recognize this as psychologically damaging, perhaps abusive. Yet when wrapped in religious ceremony, people accepted the ritual as spiritual necessity. We wouldn’t force our children to perform such acts of shame and self-blame. So why would God, supposedly the embodiment of perfect love and compassion, demand this of us?

The divine force, whether called God, the One Life, Spirit, or the Absolute, never demanded guilt performances. These self-blame rituals are human inventions created by religious institutions.