THE PARADOX OF HAPPINESS
Happiness, adaptation to new conditions, is another big one. Let us say that a couple divorces after many years of being together. The one who adapts to the new conditions, those of being single again, starts creating a new life and new habits accordingly, for example dating, going to the gym, getting new clothes, forming new relationships and starts enjoying their freedom instead of lamenting interminably the end of the marriage is the happy one; the one who does not adapt is the miserable one, because for them things are not as they should be, and the dissolution of the marriage is not as it should be.
However, the one that forms a new relationship quickly and moves on is the one judged and accused of insensitivity, of never loving the other in the first place, of cruelty etc. In the example of a death of a loved one, the one adapting to the fact and moving on, wanting to live happily despite the loss, the ones dancing or joking the earliest are the ones most judged and criticized. There seems to be a stigma attached to happiness. In my country, Greece, that has been devastated and sunk by the worst ever economic crisis in history for many years, anyone appearing happy is severely chastised with admonitions such as: “people are throwing themselves of balconies or eating garbage and you dare being happy? Shame on you!”
However, getting out of the crisis or even enduring the crisis better, adaptation to the new conditions and the new economic, political and social environment requires people who accept the new realities, react instead of sinking into powerless desperation and who move on, immersing themselves into the new state of things rather than constantly suffering because of it.
Are we, as a civilization, castigating people who want to be happy regardless of circumstances, and at the same time holding happiness as the ultimate prize: “and they lived happily ever after...”?
In addition, we are supposed to suffer in solidarity with our loved ones when they suffer. So, if we have trouble in our lives, whether emotional, financial, health or maybe because of an accident, say even just 10% of the time, if we love and care for up to eight people, we still have a chance to be free to be happy the remainder 10% of the time, but if we love nine or more, we are never entitled to be happy! So, apparently we should not love too many people, because the more people we care for the higher the probabilities of at least one of them to be suffering deeply for whatever reason at any given moment. When is it our turn? Are we never entitled to be happy and guilt free?
THE PARADOX OF SEX
The third one, sex or reproduction, is the big gorilla in the room; although everything alive has sex as often as they feel like it and are able to find willing partners (there are also many life forms that do not require a partner for reproduction and therefore sex), sexuality is considered the holder of our darkness, our dirtiness, our immorality and everything repulsive about us. All human civilizations, cultures and religions consider many parts of sex illegal, immoral or dirty. Most religious and spiritual leaders are and have been celibate throughout history, and even civilizations that exhibit more liberal sexuality only allow sex under stringent social rules.
Religions such as the Shakers, a Christian sect, relinquished sex altogether, considering sex a mortal sin. Shakers were celibate; procreation was forbidden after they joined the society (except for women who were already pregnant at admission). Children were added to their communities through indenture, adoption, or conversion. The thing is, from a high of about 5,000 during the 18th and 19th centuries, only two old Shakers remain today. They are virtually extinct and will be absolutely and irrevocably extinct in a few years! The rest of the belief systems allow sex under stringent laws and in secret; sexuality is the most likely sin to get us to hell. How paradoxical is it to be embarrassed and ashamed for something that is responsible for our very existence and a hard wired instinct so powerful that all species are willing to put themselves in grave danger in order to pursue it?
THE PARADOX OF DEATH-CHANGE
The last but in no way least of our collective paradoxes that have affected humanity universally throughout human history is death. As we explored in the introduction, on one hand every religion describes life after death as generally a higher, better and happier state of being, on the other hand we are all terrified of death. Is it just because of the instinct of self-preservation? If so, we should be experiencing less fear and anxiety about death than less developed life forms, since we believe, we know, we are being told repeatedly that death leads to a good thing. But do we? Since in every religion there is also a version of hell, whether it is condemnation to hell fire, wandering in and out of the Bardo fields and different reincarnations, in limbo forever or a wide variety of places of punishment and despair. When do you go to that horrible place? If you have an ego and are selfish instead of selfless, if you do not suffer for others and offer more to others than to yourself and if you enjoy, like and practice your sexuality. Any or all of the above will take us to an abominable place after death, so since we know for sure for ourselves at least that we are alive and human, and thus guilty of all of the above, and we suspect or know the same for our loved ones, death becomes a terrifying concept.
It is not only physical death that we are terrified of, but any kind of death, any change and any evolution, although we can overcome our collective fears and take actions that put us into risk. Thank god, because otherwise any kind of evolution would be stunted.
But there are many more universal paradoxes that plague us. Let us explore a few more biggies:
THE PARADOX OF PRIDE
Although we are bombarded by admonitions like “make yourself proud”, “make your parents, your country proud of you”, “be proud of your nationality, your profession, your work, your lineage, your race etc.”, we are simultaneously instructed to be humble, that humility is the most precious of qualities in a human, that pride is one of the seven deadly sins, that pride is an offense towards others and much more in that vein.
If, for example, you start playing golf at an early age and put all your focus, love, intention and energy on it, managing to excel, showing great talent, everybody encourages you to become, to be the best. If however, like Tiger Woods, you actually succeed in becoming the best, by winning most competitions and events than anybody else in human history, staying for the longest time rated No.1 in history, and on top of that the media universally declare you as the best golfer ever, you are nonetheless never allowed to agree neither with the media nor with your fans; if asked in an interview, you are supposed to be humble, to deny it, to give credit to your coach, your family and under no circumstances declare “I am the best golfer that has ever lived”, even if you and everybody else believes you are! You would be committing not only a mortal sin but you would be somehow offending everybody else!
If, in addition, you achieve a major milestone in the sport you are not supposed to congratulate yourself in any way. Look at the synonyms in the dictionary for congratulating yourself, for being happy and proud for your achievement: advertise yourself, aggrandize, attract attention, boast, brag, crow, gloat, grandstand, hug oneself, pat oneself on the back, toot one's own horn, blow your own horn, blow smoke, bluster, cock-a-doodle-doo, exaggerate, exult, fake, flatter oneself, flaunt, flourish, gasconade, hotdog, jive, lay on thick, prate, preen, puff, shoot, shovel, show off, showboat, shuck, sling, sound off, strut, swagger, talk big, triumph, vapor among the most used. ALL OF THEM DEROGATORY, BAD.
So, to congratulate one´s self for a job well done is equal to social death and exposure to judgment and resentment.
Tennis player Roger Federer, declared by the media as the greatest of all time, his list of records, achievements and accolades a page long, in an interview with Andy Roddick, the champion he deposed in 2004 as No.1 by beating him in the Wimbledon finals early that year, was complimented by his host for not celebrating his victory against him and his achievement of an unprecedented 15th championship after the Wimbledon finals of 2009, one of the most hotly contested, dramatic and long final matches.
The comments are verbatim:
Roddick: “going to the locker room and I am at my locker, being very emotional, breaking down, it was a heart breaking loss and the thing that I remember is your team coming in and you giving them silent fist pounds and kind of giving them hugs, but it was in a very reserved manner; cause it was like you were taking into consideration that this was hard for me, do you remember that moment at all?”
Federer: “I mean, the moment was probably tougher for you than it was happier for me, I think it is so important to respect, you know, your fellow athletes and competitors, and I know how hard you´ve tried and how difficult it must be, because unfortunately you can´t have it all and that match..(raising his hands apologetically)”
Roddick: “You can, you selfish bastard (jokingly)”
Federer: “sort of (jokingly), but seriously you deserved it so much and I think this was for me a totally normal thing to do (not celebrate visibly) and not extraordinary at all really…”
Roddick: “well, it was impressive to me and I certainly appreciated it”
When I found this video while researching interviews of people widely considered as the greatest in their respective fields to see what they say about themselves, I was incredulous at the exchange; Federer saying that his opponent deserved so much to win, a ridiculous notion since he had beaten Riddick repeatedly in the past, and furthermore declaring humbly that reducing and hiding his happiness whenever he achieves a milestone in his career, is a totally normal thing for him to do! He couldn´t even accept the compliment for his consideration and his modesty! Examples of the same “admirable” attitude abound in everything: If you congratulate yourself or enjoy any success or achievement somehow you are a horrible person for “patting yourself in the back” or “gloating”. Suffer with your failures and suffer for your achievements as well, because either somebody else has lost in order for you to win, and you should be commiserating with them, or you should be stringently avoiding to celebrate lest you commit the sin of reminding those who never even try their failure, often through inaction, lack of intention and effort and passivity.
So, if you lose you are miserable, and if you win you must be neither happy nor proud lest you offend the loser! When is it your turn? When do you deserve to be happy and proud, never?
But pride is the measure of conditionality of love, since you cannot truly love something you are not proud of. If you say you love your partner or child, but are embarrassed by something they do or are, a characteristic you are not proud of, that something is where your love is conditional, where you do not actually love them. If you love your house, you are proud to show it off, but if there is one part you wish to hide, that part is where your love is conditional, where your oneness is incomplete, where your love is tainted. So, the paradox of pride is expressed as: “Love yourself, but love others more, but do not be proud of yourself, so do not love yourself, be humble, do not think too much of yourself, so do not love yourself!”
Since all paradoxes are connected as a chain of contradiction backing each other to avoid observation, the paradox of pride sustains the paradoxes of happiness, ego, sex and all others including the paradox of religion.
THE PARADOX OF TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
One of the paradoxes that creates a huge amount of cognitive dissonance and therefore distress is the perception that something is “too good to be true”. Actually this exists in every language and culture that I could verify, in some form or other, and in most cases it is an even stronger message: “If it seems too good to be true, it isn’t!” This ensures that anytime we are doing really well, have a great satisfying job, a relationship with a person that we are crazy about and all our dreams are manifesting, we experience a weird dissatisfaction, we create reasons for suffering (most times absurd and ridiculous) in order to reduce the cognitive dissonance, the contradiction between our reality and the belief that if things are too good they cannot be true! The better things are, the more we have everything we once longed for, the more dissatisfied we become over trivialities or paranoid about imaginary dangers. The dissonance can express itself as an unjustified feeling of foreboding, paranoia about dangers and calamities or even just an acute feeling of restlessness and discontent.
The feeling is so strong that we may even act self destructively and destroy everything that we have achieved, simply because things are too good to be true! On a universal level, in a world where there is less and less poverty, less inequality, less violence, more democracy, a higher global standard of living, less totalitarianism and oppression, less racism, a higher life expectancy, more free education and social care than ever before in human history (a person on welfare has a higher standard of living and better health than the king of France just two or three hundred years ago) the majority of the people on earth believe that that world is a horrible place, things are going down and Armageddon theories are pervasive from the overblown dangers of Aids, the hole in the ozone layer, the dangers of a meteorite falling on earth and a million other fears that spread like wildfire in human consciousness dominate human thought.
In addition, we complain and protest over the state of education, social care, corruption and every other issue that did not even exist even as a concept just a hundred years ago, let alone earlier in history. We even went into collective frenzy over the “millennium virus”, paranoid about people dying because there would not be enough digits in the computers! In a world where everything is exactly, deliciously as it should be, truth IS the best possible version and point of view of reality. Our default point of view, that everything is vile, horrible and dangerous is simply idiotic, unsupported by any data and not serving any discernible purpose.
THE PARADOX OF TOO SIMPLE TO BE TRUE
In a similar category to the paradox of “too good to be true”, the paradox of “too simple to be true” is equally pervasive and ridiculous. Although the sciences of engineering assert that the simplest solution is the best (less complexity equals less friction, less parts to go wrong, a lighter and more economical structure, less weak points etc.), we brainwash ourselves that things that are simple cannot be true by definition!
This drives us to complicated mental structures that nobody understands but duly pretends that they do, leaving us confused and vulnerable in a world that we cannot understand. We obsess over complicated answers and solutions that, if proved comprehensible, instantly acquire the status of untrue in order to justify the beliefs and to obscure the paradox. Why on earth should simple answers, solutions and points of view not be true just because they are simple? Nature always chooses the simplest, most economical in resources and energy solution to every issue. So if it is simple, if anybody can understand it, it is actually more likely to be true. But apparently and paradoxically, for humanity, if it is simple, it cannot be true, because of the belief that human beings do not have the capacity to understand how things work. Thus, nature is all faulty, defective, including of course our nature as human beings!
THE PARADOX OF RELIGION
Because our beliefs form our operating systems, the programming through which we perceive the world and determine our thoughts, feelings and actions, organized religion has been an integral part of all human civilizations since the first signs of homo sapiens behavior; actually, same as signs of art, signs of religion and ceremony form the major signs by which anthropologists and archaeologists determine whether remains and relics indicate humanity or not!
Religion is defined as a set of beliefs held by a group of people. Explained more comprehensively, religion is a system of agreed common beliefs and practices shared by groups of people (usually about god and the meaning and purpose of life, but not necessarily since there are various religions who do not even believe god exists). Common religious beliefs are meant to help us coexist within a set of rules, same as political and economic beliefs. Let us explore and examine the most widespread sets of beliefs through the world´s most prominent religions and categories of world viewpoints. Of course, each one is subdivided into numerous denominations, divisions and sects, so we will look at their commonalities rather than their divergences:
1.
Christianity: Christians believe in a benevolent, loving god with three dimensions, the father, the son (Jesus Christ) and the Holy Spirit. There is also the concept of Satan, the antipode of god, a malevolent being trying to win over human souls in competition and eternal battle with god. All humans are born with the original sin; life is a behavioral trial culminating in everlasting heaven if all temptations of the flesh and the mind are overcome and humans suppress their animal-human impulses and instincts, or eternal hell if they succumb to their nature which is sinful by definition (all humans carry the burden of the “original sin”). Bottom line: Self-sacrifice and suffering, selflessness and humility combined with a culture of shame and guilt are integral to the various Christian beliefs, since the prime example, Jesus, sacrificed himself for humanity and paid for its sins. Love is the goal, and god loves us; apparently he does not love himself and we shouldn’t either. We should just love others, never ourselves!
2.
Islam: Muslims believe in one god, Allah and his primary prophet, Muhammad. The purpose of humanity is to serve Allah and obey moral rules. Human nature again is considered morally deficient, and Allah is a severe judge and a punishing god. A strict set of duties regarding the worship of Allah, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly practices and moral obligations must be unerringly performed to reach paradise, any diversion to be strictly punished. Bottom line: humans are there to serve the true god and worship him, we are inherently flawed, immoral beings that need to be checked and kept in line strictly with a pervasive set of moral and legal rules and we should be willing to sacrifice ourselves in the service of god to reach paradise.
3.
Hinduism: Hindus generally believe in one god, Brahman through infinite representations of gods and goddesses. Hindus believe their position in this present life was determined by their actions in a previous life and we experience many reincarnations as many different creatures to absolve ourselves from our bad karma. If a person’s behavior before was evil, they might justifiably experience tremendous hardships in this life. Pain, disease, poverty or a disaster like a flood is deserved by that person because of their own evil actions, usually from a previous lifetime. A Hindu's goal is to become free from the law of karma...to be free from continuous reincarnations. Only the soul matters which will one day be free of the cycle of rebirths and be at rest. Bottom line: We carry bad karma through numerous other lives, which, although we do not remember we carry the stigma and curse for them. Again, life is bad and something that we experience to pay and atone for earlier sins and then, only if we succeed in correcting our indignities from past lives that we do not even clearly see, just need to take the guilt and responsibility for them, then we can get rid of the burden of material existence.
4.
Buddhism: Buddhists do not believe in god at all, rather the attainment of divinity through enlightenment, Buddha himself being not a god but a human that has ascended through self-realization, enlightenment itself attained through meditation and self-discipline, as well as the eradication of all wants, temptations, weaknesses of the flesh and desires as well as of the ego. Like Hindus, they believe in multiple reincarnations full of suffering in order to achieve divinity, the ultimate prize being freedom from endless cycles of life and death. Bottom line: Our nature is against our divinity, life is bad, through self-discipline, relinquishment of earthly wants and desires, enlightenment through meditation and deprivation will lead us to get rid of our material existence and ascend spiritually.
5.
Judaism: Although the least populous of the major religions, it has the distinction of being the first monotheistic religion, the most practical and dedicated to this lifetime, the only one where humans can argue with and question god and the only one that is genetically restricted and not possible for all humans, but only for the “chosen people”. As such it is an ethnic, non-inclusive religion. Judaism also imposes morals and practices to be strictly adhered to, and punishment is mostly in this life, although the concept of heaven and hell still exist, hell often referring to this lifetime. Multiple interpretations of the bible and the Torah and vigorous debate are not only permitted but encouraged, however dogmatic parts also exist in the belief system. Bottom line: Ethical rules, intense study and intelligent debate, maintenance of a separate identity from everybody else, the keeping of traditions and practices of worship and a wide net of rules is the key, with survival of the race and preservation of tradition as the main objective.
6.
New Age: New Age spirituality, although not a declared religion per se, believes that divinity is in every being. The need for the extermination of the ego, selflessness are at the forefront and it encompasses not only many practices mostly from eastern religions and ancient indigenous beliefs, but also forms an amalgam of beliefs centered on the wrongness of our human nature and the dangers that humans pose on the universe as well as the desirability to escape the form, the material world. Tight moral and behavioral rules apply, judgment and guilt are prevalent. New Age spirituality is also the harbinger of the era of the feminine to correct the “evils and abuses” of thousands of years of masculine rule. Bottom line: our nature is wrong, human beings are inherently dysfunctional and dangerous to the planet due to their destructive egos. We should be ashamed of our nature, act against it and abolish it so that we can ascend to an ethereal, formless, non-material existence.
7.
Animism, Paganism, Heathenism, Romanticism: They all represent belief systems and practices that glorify nature, including human nature. There are numerous ethnic and historical variations but they share an extraordinary distinction; they all believe the divine made things right, that we should be happy and enjoy life and that we should get our lessons from our nature and the way things are around us. Animism, for example, a scientifically constructed term that describes a wide range of indigenous religious beliefs, basically suggests that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human (the concept that plants, animals, rocks, rivers, clouds etc. all have a sense of self and thus are “persons”), and that life is always lived in relationship with others, thus we should live our lives in respectful relationship with all other beings. Paganism or Heathenism are also constructed terms, this time not by scientists but by the early Christians, usually used as slurs against non-Christians. They generally refer to seeing divinity in nature and all other beings.
Paganism came to be equated by Christians with a sense of hedonism, representing those who are sensual, materialistic, self-indulgent, unconcerned with the future, and uninterested in sophisticated religion. Pagans therefore are people who like to enjoy life and not live in constant anxiety of the future, including in fear of afterlife. Paganism is also associated with 18th and 19th century Romanticism. Astoundingly, all the above categories are to collective opinion like a red cloth to a raging bull; causing fear, anger, disgust and generally an unspecified and fuzzy feeling of disapproval. They seem vile, dangerous and immoral.
8.
Cultism: The word cult has at least three meanings, the first of which is just choosing to love or admire something or somebody “too much”, like the Elvis cult. The second is just an “unorthodox” religion with fewer followers than the major ones, a non-mainstream set of beliefs. Many major religions like Christianity, the most populous in the world today, were considered cults when they first started out. The third and most common one refers to a group venerating a specific symbol, person or object instead of any notion of the divine as the creator or the one, and carries many negative connotations that have to do with authoritarian, secretive, abusive, exploitative and often even deluded leadership. Bottom line: Absolute dedication to a cause, a symbol or a leader in the few positive connotation cases, blind obedience, abandonment of personal judgment, relinquishment of personal will and responsibility are the most common negative connotation cases.
Atheism-Scientism-Scientific Materialism
Although again there are numerous variations and long standing debate as to whether atheists are by necessity materialists, what all of these belief systems share in common, regardless of their variety of beliefs, is the belief in the non-existence of a creator entity or intention and the concepts of “spirit” or “soul”. The world works through purely statistical probability obeying similarly random natural laws that are measurable. Bottom line: If you cannot measure or directly observe it through empirical data, it does not exist or is a random, non-meaningful event.
Secularism-Agnosticism-Skepticism:
This diverse, wide category of beliefs is more of a stance or philosophical viewpoint than an actual religion as we perceive it, signifying rather a lack or refusal of any religion, and there are infinite variations sharing either an indifference to anything other than purely material life issues, or the admission of an inability to understand or know anything more than a restricted range of the purely physical experiences. The similarities between this category and the atheist-scientist category are many but the main difference is lack of interest, passion or willingness to be bothered, namely lack of strong beliefs. Where atheists and materialists can be very passionate about their beliefs, these belief systems focused on non-beliefs and indifference. Nihilists also fall generally in the same category, but in this case driven by disappointment rather than indifference or resignation. Bottom line: Nothing exists or matters except living a comfortable, safe, good life, life is a dog eat dog proposition and anything else is a baseless concept.
If we now examine first all religions based on the existence of an all knowing, all powerful creator force or entity we can see the paradox right off the bat: They are all based on the divine having made a mistake in creating humans which we must suffer to rectify and to discipline our inherent dysfunction. Basically they say that god fucked up in making us and we must be guilty and ashamed of our nature and try to defeat it. In religions not accepting the existence of a creator entity such as Buddhism and a potpourri of ethnic religions the same disdain at our nature is displayed, most of the time directed against our sense of self, our ego but also extended to condemnation of sexuality, desires of the flesh, pride and everything else that constitutes our material existence.
In all these sets of beliefs our material existence, our lives are undesirable, a horrible wretched suffering and we should suffer even more to get rid of them. In order to achieve paradise, nirvana, nothingness or any other kind of super blissful afterlife promised by each one of these religions we must actively refrain from being happy and enjoy no pleasure in this lifetime, instead we must live a life based on sacrifice and discipline!
PARADOX:
EVERY ORGANIZED RELIGION IS AGAINST NATURE AND LIFE, AND IF IT BELIEVES IN SOME CONCEPT OF THE DIVINE, PROCLAIMS THAT THE DIVINE MADE A MISTAKE IN HOW HUMANS ARE, FOR WHICH WE NEED TO BE PERSONALLY GUILTY, ASHAMED AND PUNISHED. TO ASCEND, WE MUST OVERCOME OUR HUMANITY AND REPAIR OUR ERRONEOUS NATURE.
Their common message: Suffer, relinquish the self and all your pleasures and sacrifice yourself in this undesirable life in order to achieve happiness in a theoretical afterlife!
All categories of the non-religious, such as Agnostics, Atheists, Scientific Materialists, Secularists and others, are almost invariably chosen by people disillusioned by the hypocrisy and rampant contradictions in all religions, thinking that they are escaping the paradoxes, but actually falling into the same paradoxical traps. To give an example, a Scientist that believes in random probability and natural selection as nature´s way of evolution are paradoxically blind to the fact that if the best solution survives, then we as humans are also the best solution! However, they end up believing like everybody else that there is something wrong with us!
This is because the collective and universal paradoxes are just that: Collective and Universal! They are installed in every human being irrespective of ethnicity, culture, geographical location or historical period. All of them see physical life as a burden even if they profess otherwise.
Religions or sets of beliefs that see oneness as the ultimate objective that we humans should be striving for, paradox themselves equally impressively:
If everything is one, how could we be wanting and striving to be one, which by definition assumes that we are not?
Actually, Animism, Paganism and Heathenism are the only belief systems trying to stay out of the universal contradictions and the guilt, shame and fear of the afterlife that comes with it. This is why they are the most detested, the most feared and the most morally judged and persecuted. Is this a whopper of a paradox or what?
THE PARADOX OF SHAME AND GUILT
In Wikipedia we read, according to the Bible that “God fashions Adam from dust and places him in the Garden of Eden. Adam is told that he can till the ground and eat freely of all the trees in the garden, except for a tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Subsequently, Eve is created from one of Adam's ribs to be Adam's companion. They are innocent and unashamed about their nakedness. However, a serpent deceives Eve into eating fruit from the forbidden tree, and she gives some of the fruit to Adam. These acts give them additional knowledge, but it gives them the ability to conjure negative and destructive concepts such as shame and evil. God later curses the serpent and the ground. God prophetically tells the woman and the man what will be the consequences of their sin of disobeying God. Then he banishes 'the human' from the Garden of Eden.”
Do you see the paradox? Wikipedia states that “As of 2005, estimates classified 54% (3.6 billion people) of the world's population as adherents of an Abrahamic religion, about 32% as adherents of other religions, and 16% as adherents of no organized religion.” Abrahamic religions, the most known and widespread of which are Christianity, the Islam and Judaism while declaring that we were banished from paradise because we lost our innocence and became ashamed of our nakedness and became able to conjure destructive concepts such as shame, propose that the path back to Paradise is to enhance our concepts of shame! So, we lost our place in heaven by acquiring shame and we need more shame to go back!!! How paradoxical is this? Fifty four percent of the earth’s population suggests shame as the way back to being unashamed!! To be unashamed you must be ashamed! How many times have you heard the derogatory phrases “Have you no shame?” or “This person has no shame!”?
As for guilt, a similar and related sentiment to shame, similarly to shame is supposed to be useful in guiding you to avoid doing things that make you guilty. But even if you never repeat an act twice you are supposed to be guilty about it. Not doing it again does not absolve you, you are supposed to be ashamed regardless! Since it makes no difference to whether you feel shame and guilt if you never repeat an act or even rectify the consequences of your actions, shame and guilt are used as eternal punishments and due payment as well as excuses to keep doing the same things that cause them. As long as you are a good person by paying the appropriate penalty of guilt and shame, and are not delinquent in experiencing the socially accepted appropriate amount of shame and guilt, you can do whatever you like. Confess, repent, be ashamed and guilty and then come next week for absolution of your weekly shameful acts!
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