Your Conscience or Theirs? How to Tell the Difference | The Managed Sacred, Part 2 of 2

Have you ever made a decision about your own life and found you couldn't feel good about it until somebody else told you it was the right one? Most people call that being considerate. A lot of it is a habit that started in church.

Part 1 looked at how the church used fear and guilt to keep people in line. This one shows where those habits are still running, in people who haven't been near a church in years. The old punishment of being thrown out now happens on social media. Penance shows up in how people talk about food and their own bodies: I was bad this weekend, so I've got to make up for it. And the priest who stood between people and God has been replaced by an expert who tells you about your own life. Then comes the first thing Part 1 promised, a way to tell in the moment whether the guilt you feel is your own conscience or the guilt that was put there. You ask who it is protecting, and where it is sending you. After that, what to do when the guilt keeps coming anyway, and what is still there once it goes quiet.

If you believe in God, there is no argument with you here. This is about the church as an institution and the habits it left behind in all of us.

The Atlas names the pattern running your life in a single sitting. It is built from twenty years in the chair and the thirty-three books of Michael Lauria, a qualified therapist, author and philosophical mythologist. It takes about forty-five minutes, costs nothing, and ends in a written Record of that pattern, drawn from your own words. It is not therapy and not for crisis. Begin here:

A question for the comments: whose permission do you still find yourself waiting for, even now?

Michael Lauria

The Architect