I am very fortunate in that I’d already detached by the time I found out I was made “wrong”.
It’s a skill that overlaps with that needed to break, say, an opioid habit.
Which is profoundly ironic to me when I look at how the “anonymous” addiction-recovery communities equip their members to stay clean.
Paradox perhaps. There is a strong element here of what I have learned as the necessity of grace. I believe otherwise, but I never let on it I’m around an anonymouser. It would be unnecessarily cruel when that is what works.
As you know, I especially lament the almost-universal exploitation of unnatural chastity as a way to invoke a a Stockholm-syndrome sort of doctrinal loyalty. It’s how we end up with the literally perverted concept that states “since all sex is sin — rape, incest, pedophilia etc. are no worse than masturbation.”
The sad conclusion is that since religion is at its root totalitarian, any attempt to come to a humanized piety is either subverted by cultists, or a polite shadow like what I’ve seen in my few and light contacts with Unitarians.
At this point, I am practicing chastity because I am living in a sparsely-populated area that is also intensely socially conservative. It’s not really by choice. At my age, the two hours each way to the nearest real city, where there might be opportunities, does not appeal to me enough to take the hassle on.
