WE CAN'T CONDEMN MYRA HINDLEY FOR THINKING OF A REAL PERSON'S REAL PAIN AS A MERE FACT AND JUSTIFY THOSE WHO TRY TO JUSTIFY A GOD
Moors Murderer Myra Hindley never lost faith in God. She was a devoted Catholic.
Hindley was known to have stated that her father beat up her mother but there was one thing that was telling. She never expressed compassion. She treated it as a mere fact. We may say that she must have had some feeling or may have had but not enough. Depending on your point of view that might make it even worse. Why have some feeling and not go further? Why not try to sense the evil of what happened to her mother?
The religionist treats the terrible unimaginable suffering that has happened since time began as a project to justify on a fact basis. They simply cannot have the feeling and compassion for something so big. You may say the suffering happened and we cannot feel for it as we are only human. True. But an atheist being like this is different from a religionist being like it. The atheist is not trying to make out it should have happened and that God should be praised. It is not God saying this must be done but his worshippers. Not all have compassion for pure reasons or the best reasons. Everybody’s compassion involves a certain amount of imagining what it would be like if you were the other person. Not the other person being you, you being them. It is too much about you. No matter how much a religionist says they don't have an exact why for the suffering, given that people project their own needs outwards it follows that they do even if they are not able to explicate them.
Hindley was described as very manipulative by inmates who knew her well. Far from accepting her sentence as her own, she kept up her battle to be released.
Fr Michael Teader was the Catholic chaplain at Highpoint prison. He visited Hindley on Wednesdays. He absolved her sins regularly. If a faith offers prayers and sacraments as remedies for bad traits and they do not work then the faith is harmful and evil. If Hindley's evil still lurked in her and she was treated as if it were not there thanks to Catholic superstition, then this is horrific.
Hindley infamously said that she held that as you cannot commit suicide and go to a priest to confess there is no forgiveness from God. The forgiveness she claimed for her crimes was to be denied to a person who dies by suicide.
Putting out such a cruel evil teaching is a red flag against her and her Catholic faith.
The Church might say you will be forgiven when you are not fully responsible. But this is a dodge. What if the person has some other mortal sin? What if the person is living with somebody in a sexual relationship outside of marriage?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2482385.stm
People worry about religions that say you can kill millions and still go to Heaven if you repent just as if you had saved them instead. As human nature can repent and then reverse it without even realising it there is a real concern. It is too much like cheap salvation. It is cheap salvation for repenting does not guarantee that you have changed for long. There is a lie here, a placebo. Even if forgiveness is real and God grants it, we will turn it into a placebo effect. This will happen whether God permits it or not.
Proof that a placebo is happening is shown by how religion claims to cure evil but refutes itself by failing to define it. It confuses what evil results in with evil. The terrible outcomes are symptoms. Religion falls apart in total self-contradiction when it comes to that subject. You cannot cure an evil if you don't know what it is and are lying that you do. A placebo is not a cure but merely feels like one. The deviance is still there and is empowered by this non-cure posing as a cure. When evil happens they say, "The true evil is the defiance of God," "The true evil is the bad example to others," "The true evil is not admitting that the evil is there or disguising it." Unless there is evil there in the first place none of these are evil as such. They are rooted in the true evil and none of them is the true evil. To say that murder is bad for somebody is dead implies that murder is good if the person could be restored to life. They deny that evil is a force or energy but say it is just a distortion of good. This confuses things more and more.
One reason the Church says that suicide is always seriously wrong is because the person is said to go against the grace of God. Actual grace means the assistance God gives you to do his work. If you are weak then he empowers you. This sounds humble. It is not. You cannot tell if you have a burst of strength yourself or if he made an input. You do not get to decide for you are not him.
To say God gives enough grace to all is to make them blame themselves when they fail. It is to make others blame them. Godly forgiveness presupposes that you are now cooperating with God's grace to keep on the right track. God forgiving you is not a risk in the sense that it would be if you forgave a person who would kill you if able to. God presumably can make forgiveness the best for the future but you cannot. You cannot put grace into the person who has hurt you so that your forgiveness will bear fruit. You could be benefiting them to enable them to do it again.
When you practice some discernment you start to see another side to Catholicism and its handling of Hindley.
Anyway back to our chaplain, when she went to hospital for the final time he went with her.
When she died in 2002, he said, "She believed in a compassionate and loving God who loves unconditionally, and that's why she felt she was going on to heaven."
Unconditional love is a phrase that is bandied about but what liberal "believers" and the likes of Hindley actually want is a God who forgives unconditionally. I can give you bread unconditionally but not porridge oats. Unconditional love is only wanted by those who want it all. Their God is to give them nice weather every time they go on holiday and to make sure they don't get a hangover and to forgive them as if nothing happened if they are involved in a hit and run.
Unconditional forgiveness goes to the extreme where you posit a God who does not really care about anything as long as you are indulged. Even repentance is not asked for or respected. It is about feeling you are so wonderful that you should be blindly loved as a person no matter what your behaviour is like. You want to be loved for your behaviours not just your personhood. You want to sit and do nothing for others and be treated the same as one who gives their right arm to help people. It is not about being loved by God as you are but being permitted to stay as you are.
Eric Fromm was
the first to talk about unconditional love in 1956. It came from psychiatry
not religion. From his observation that a woman loves her baby
that way, we are now asked to love everybody like that and to look
for that from God. He
never went that far. If people want to be infantalised with
such nonsense there is little to say. It is asking for
self-sacrifice from others. It is seeking out masochists who
serve you to hurt themselves. Unconditional love opposes, "You
have to put up with me". It argues that, "You should not even
notice that I am a problem at times. In fact there is no
problem for I am only living up to the best light I have got at any
particular moment." The claim that
unconditional love is unconditional service not unconditional liking
and worshipping is interesting. But it is gaslighting.
Unconditional love assumes "bad" behaviour is not real in the sense
that the person is only following the best light they have. If
you were forced to chooses between a person who steals small things
and a person who is totally honest you would have to let the former
be eliminated. See the point? See that and understand
why moral preaching ultimately leads to the "immoral" being hated
and persecuted.
All this suited Myra Hindley fine. She was well known for being manipulative. So much so that she managed it, she thought, on a cosmic celestial scale!
