364- Living in a religious cult 4 : health Edition

Trigger warning (trauma and religious cult). Also, *potential* inflammatory topic. 

In my youth, I never had a clear image of health - not mental and not physical. Religious dogmas can put one's health at risk, due to many skewed visions of science in general and health in particular.

Indeed, in a religious cult, belief and blind faith must win over any actual ailment, and the sacrosanct soul is more important than the body and person that hosts it. I recall all those sermons where my father would preach to me as well as his own wife (not my mother, you'll know this if you read me before), and his disciples. 

The soul and its spiritual health were the only concerns. Any illness is an illusion, a temptation by the un-named devil who wanted our spiritual failure, and in other instances, god was punishing us for any number of wrong-doings, wrong-feelings and wrongful thoughts. All about perpetual guilt-tripping. If you are feeling ill, you must have done something wrong, or about to fall from grace, into sin, if you're not already ankle-deep in it. Maybe you hadn't prayers enough, and for any offense, you must honestly ask for god's forgiveness, and for my father's as well, for having doubted his word, or for having offended him in the process of your own failings. 

As followers of my father, we were supposed to control ourselves, to transcend any human frailty of mind and body, to elevate our soul to the highest spiritual levels and to avoid any kind of temptation, sin, or even the thoughts that could lead to them. 

If you recall my entry about depersonalization, the techniques described therein includes conditioning and droning - in the form of prayers, chats/ mantras to repeat endlessly, and these were used also as cures for all ailments of body and mind. 

Prayers, in hope that the god we're supposed to represent here down on Earth would concede to forgive our transgressions, telling the devil to go away and thus lift our illness away from the body, which was the temple to the soul, but nothing more. 
In other cases, these prayers, done right, beforehand and without transgression, would act as an immuno-booster, by placing god as a shield between this body-the-temple and any devil-made-illness. 

Chants and mantras were those continual prayers where you remain focused only & solely on mister god, his emissary on earth= that-hero-father-of-mine, and all the rules and forbidden actions, thoughts and feelings as guidelines to eternal spiritual salvation as the only path we had to take, to preserve our souls, and too bad if the body was suffering - it wasn't real, and at the same time, a real punishment, when it wasn't actually a blessing god gave us - the blessing to feel pain to burn our damn karma away and thus be readier to rejoin god in heaven... 

Physical exercices weren't a thing to do at all ; they were prohibited, because they elevated the ego and put your soul at risk. 

After years of meal-privations (punishments, mentioned elsewhere), severe malnutrition and growing ill-health, my father had finally consented to send me to doctors, but this was highly regimented, monitored and limited. He went behind my back more than once, to adapt my treatment, or withheld it altogether, thus compromising my recovery and immunity even further. 

I feel it important to discuss this topic of insidious manipulation in religion, where a person's overall health is put at risk, in the name of spiritual purity and as a tool to better control that individual. It's a sick perversion, where mental health and physical health both mean nothing more than temptations by the devil or punishment by god for transgressions. 

I talk about it here, because the repetitious aspect of this indoctrination is part of my trauma, and not one that is talked about anywhere in open forum. There is such a taboo about attacking religious beliefs - as the politically correctness tries to add guilt by telling us to live and let live. Well, you know what ? these practices are damaging and ill-founded. They don't let live, hence I cannot let them be. 

They create a host of medical complications which can be at the worse, fatal, and then, where is that so-called temple of the soul, and where is that soul? nowhere, because a dead body cannot host a person, even if we admit this as the term meant for soul, but for me, even soul is such an overrated term that I don't believe in it in the shape presented by everyone.

Prayers have never been anything else than a waste of one's time, energy and can only be seen as placebos, where our will to heal is important, but praying to a non-existing entity, figment of human's imagination is useless. There is no god to care for us, selectively punishing and healing, or if s/he/it did, it's a worse person than most humans! (that's all I'll say here about this topic).

Not allowing me to physically exercice, conditioning  my thoughts and feelings, skewing my view of health, have all contributed to a host of interrelated issues that persist to this day, into my adulthood and middle-age. These aren't the same as my usual flashback etc that I already discussed, but specific ones to physical and mental health:

1. Feeling overall unmotivated and lacking both drive and being an under-achiever makes it 
2. difficult to maintain my physical exercice routines (due to the fact it wasn't a normal activity for me in my earlier life, and also due to the low-self esteem that comes with depersonalization) 
3. Lack of stamina
4. Bad posture as I had bad ones for prayers and never corrected in my youth. It created a slow build-up of back-pains, slight spine curvature and with now with age, also tired discs, which add to my pains
5. Feeling inadequate in these matters have aggravated my self-image and hence mental health
6. In lacking physical shape, I slowly dip further into my already-existing chronic depression, and we already know there is a direct link between physical and mental states

I can only assume that if I hadn't had these experiences in my father's religious cult, I'd not only be a whole different person, but that my shape and overall health would be very different. It took me many years to get where I am now, still on a healing path, still fighting, sometimes wavering and falling off the horse, sometimes climbing back on it, or usually just floating about, aimlessly wandering and existing, more than living. 

Religions often have perverse approaches to science and health, and in cults, this can be multiplied and have exponential repercussions. If anyone tries to sell you the idea that your soul is more important than your body, that prayers can fix anything, that god, jesus et al. can replace your doctor and science, these are all dangerous approaches, just like pseudo-sciences. 

I'll keep that topic for a separate entry, but now, you are alerted and I hope you can better understand where I come from. If you saw me before, and thought that "oh what a weak-looking dude, I could beat him up" or thought that I wasn't "manly enough" for your ideal image of a guy (the one with hyper-developed biceps, spitting and readjusting his trousers all the time), then, know these :

1. Not all of us have the same physical shape
2. Some of us have been told that physical exercice was of the devil
3. some of us have been told that illness was an illusion & that 
4. prayers could heal us by expunging sins
5. Also, on a male macho skewed view: this is your problem, not mine. I'm still a guy, even a non-binary who appears physically weak to you. Yes, I may be weaker on this aspect, I may not be able to lift a lot of stuff or run like you. But I'm still me, and I'm stronger in other aspects. Get over your misconceptions and macho associations, tyvm.

And lastly, thank you for having read this long entry at 1332 words long.