Christ and BDSM

Wednesday 18th July 2012: Christ and BDSM

Just treated myself to a cooked breakfast, and a lazy day beckons. Surf the net for a bit. Casual stroll to the shops. Gentle bike ride to Seaview and back - if it's not raining. Cook something tasty for dinner. A film this evening. Bed and maybe, a shag.

Sounds okay, but is it, what could go wrong? Maybe today is the day that something horrible happens: I suffer a massive heart attack. I get knocked off my bike and horribly mangled. Or maybe today is the beginning of anarchy. The banking system collapses. Runaway inflation. Mass unemployment... I can't help it, contentment and happiness, make me twitchy. And the more I attempt to dismiss such thoughts, forebodings, anxieties, the more I dwell on them. And to recall what my mate quotes, "An optimist is just someone who isn't, as of yet, in full possession of the facts."

I don't seek these terrible things to happen so why do I immerse myself in gloom a lot of the time. Why? And why am I drawn, excited, also to fantasies and images of pain, humiliation and degradation?

I have some ideas forming, out of the darkness that passes for my mind, and when, if, they crystallise I will share them with you, but now, here is something, highly contentious, for you to think about. Christ and BDSM.

As a child I was brought up to believe in God, a good God, who would right all wrongs, defeat evil and reward the individuals who obeyed him if not in this life but in the life hereafter. I also recall my mother counselling me, “Matt, this life is a test. Don't fail it.” I remember the exact spot where she had told me this too: above the tunnel entrance on Ryde Esplanade, which was also kind of significant because a few years earlier a stranger had saved my life (he had turned me upside down and struck me hard between the shoulder blades apparently) after I had started to choke when a boiled sweet I had been sucking on had become lodged in my windpipe. Looking back, I wonder if that was a deliberate, and quite subtle, ploy on the part of my mother to associate a real life 'second chance' with a spiritual one. That, stuck with me for quite a while, and it had also chilled me because, even at that young age, secretly I had been entertaining some rather 'evil' thoughts.

However, a few years later (I was about nine) I was in church with the primary school to celebrate Easter when the words from a hymn, ‘immortal, invisible, God only knows...’ had triggered something in me to suddenly transform my image of God from being a deity in human form to an agency, an energy, an energy, like a furnace, that sustained and supported the cosmos 'invisibly' - I was too young to understand the concept of transcendence (more about my views of transcendence another day). That 'revelation' coupled with the increasing awareness that many of the religious types I encountered were not only uptight but didn't practise what they preached led me in due course to become an atheist; my mother's stratagems and efforts to gift me with a sense of peace and purpose were in vain.

Having rejected Christianity but still searching for a meaning to life, over many years, decades, I read and researched Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, the Bahai Faith, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Anton LeVay, amongst many others, and the result of which has left me considerably more knowledgeable yet no wiser or happier. However, in the background was always the powerful image of Christ and the Cross. Why couldn't I relinquish it? Why?

Now, when you look at the story or moral message of Christ it doesn't make any sense; why would a good and all-powerful God sacrifice his only son in the most cruel, degrading and agonising way for someone else’s sins?

However, what could make sense, possess value, is if God is not omnipotent or all powerful but rather ‘more’ powerful and that the only way he can increase his (or its) power is to absorb us, and that the only way he can absorb our energy or essence is to destroy our form, like releasing the energy from fuel by burning it. Right, if it is the case that our essence in some sense is indestructible then by merging with God one becomes more a part of something more powerful, more intense - to surrender to God is to become God, and 'The meek will inherit the keys to the Kingdom of God' (I forget the exact words) actually begins to make sense.

I don't know whether I'm explaining this at all well, but I think you can see what I'm leading to: that submission is about sacrificing choice in order to gain power, advantage.

So, does BDSM actually reconcile something we thought couldn't be more far apart: Christianity and Darwinism?

Hmmm, I think that's enough heavy stuff for today - gone off on a tangent again.

Anyway, feel free to post comments.