This is http://www.essayz.com/a9712141.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %ADDICTIVE RELIGIOUS LEADERS BELIEF CONTROL EMOTION+971214 %DESIRES FANTASIES DREAMS BEHAVIORS IMPOSSIBLE SEX 971214 Addictive religious leaders believe that humans are able to control emotions, desires, fantasies, dreams and behaviors more completely than is possible --- and lead others to behave in ways which are predicated upon such dishonest beliefs. Their followers are set up for failures --- in that they are lead to try to do what they cannot possibly do --- out of fear of punishment if they fail to make a public show of an effort to attempt to do what they cannot possibly do. They are made to feel that it is safer to make a dishonest show of attempting to do what cannot be done, than to call into question addictive beliefs in the possibility of humans controlling what they cannot control. The alcoholics and other kinds of addicts often believe that if they just try harder they will be able to control their addictive thoughts and dishonest behavior patterns. They regard their personal problem to be a problem of focus, will-power, effort and dedication. Thus, they focus their attention even more closely upon alcohol, drugs and other technical solutions for dilemmas which are treated as as if the dilemmas were technical problems. They fail, because dilemmas are not technical problems. Their dishonest pretense that dilemmas are technical problems with available technical solutions --- is one of the tap-roots of their addictive behaviors patterns. The dilemmas of addicts are rooted in personal relationships which are disintegrative and rooted in alienation. When entrapped within the addictive mode of attitudes, thinking, feeling and acting --- addicts cannot acknowledge that their dilemmas are not technical problems which face them as individuals. They cannot admit to themselves that the resolution of their dilemmas entails in essential ways the question of how they relate other people and their communities. Their dilemmas do, however, entail in essential ways the qualities of their personal relationships. No one can be in control of the qualities of their personal relationships with other people. Personal relationship cannot be controlled by any of the participants in them. Also, personal relationships are not technical procedures. They cannot be under the control of someone who is outside of the procedures. It is dishonest, and so is disintegrative, to pretend otherwise. The dilemma of religious followers of addictive- religious-leaders is that it is hard for the followers to discern that their religious leaders are playing the same kind of collusive games of mutual self-deception, which are played by alcoholics and other kinds of addicts. Addictive religious leaders are preoccupied with issues of control --- and they seek followers to play the roles of codependent supporters of their attempts to be in control through religious procedures which are at heart technical in nature. They create addictive organizations garbed in deceptive vestments of religiosity --- which suggest that they are concerned with promoting personal and communal integrity. They do not acknowledge how often their kind of religious leadership has led followers into disintegrative wars, inquisitions, excommunications, exclusivity, crusades, witch-hunts, and ethnic- exterminations. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================