trenton

I feel drawn to this because I noticed that the label "rational" is often used to give things more authority and confidence than should be warranted. I noticed this in "rational suicide" but it is a broad phenomenon. In the case of suicide, I believe it is fundamentally an emotional decision linked to a person's capacity to find meaning in suffering rather than at its core a logical consequentialist calculation. Here is an example of "rational suicide" although the problem with self-bias in rationality is much broader. Imagine you were a Japanese soldier during WWII. You are very loyal to your country and will do anything to ensure victory. Your reasoning goes as follows. 1. I want Japan to win the war. 2. A Kamikaze strike would aid in achieving that goal. 3. Therefore I should carry out the strike In this example, suicide is instrumentally rational in a similar manner to the terrorist attacks by ISIS. The problem with calling this rational is that it is extremely biased due to self-interest. Isn't self-interest inherently a deeply emotional bias rather than a rational one? There are people who might self-sacrifice for others or who might sacrifice for the greater good due to having a broader circle of concern. In the case of the Kamikaze fighter, any apparent rationality is based on an emotional desire that got tied up in a nationalist propaganda machine with many layers of untruth. Would it not be deeply irrational to believe in nationalist propaganda and to base one's self-interest off beliefs that were not critically examined? The deeper issue I am sensing is that rationality is selectively applied as a consequence of self-interest which therefore biases the entire string of logic no matter how consistent it appears to be. Rationality in the context of self-interest appears to structurally exclude the bigger picture while mis categorizing emotional biases and agendas as though they were rational. I saw this happening with workplace studies as well. Employers were studying how rudeness and disrespect undermine employee productivity. They focused on employee interactions with customers while completely ignoring the role of the employer in terms of rudeness and disrespect that might undermine productivity due to low morale. From my point of view, the question of rudeness and disrespect should include the power imbalance between employer and employee which leads to dehumanization and a collapse of basic self-respect due to seeing oneself as fundamentally worthless. This is not accounted for in rudeness undermining workers because the agenda is biased toward corporate survival. This in turn obscures the full picture and therefore the reality of why employees become less productive. Nevertheless this kind of study passes as rational. A common problem in how science is structured includes context stripping, possibly because the fundamental agenda in the pharmaceutical industry is profiteering over effective treatment which in turn biases how the studies are conducted and applied. The double blind placebo controlled studies demonstrate that the new pill improved about 90% of those studied, but then this get applied broadly across the entirely population even though the studies are set up with heavy filters to skew the results toward high effectiveness. In practice the outcome is that medicine is typically far less effective than advertised. Nevertheless psychiatrists think they are being rational when they use studies like these to justify a prescription. There seems to be no real interest in this industry in terms of closing the gap between theoretical studies and actual practice, which in turn corrupts the entire epistemic environment. It would be irrational to trust this environment, this context, this apparent authority, and these supposedly rigorous studies due to the heavy bias behind the apparent rationality which is ultimately a deeply emotional fear. In this sense science does not actually value rigor, but rather it values the appearance of rationality and rigor for the sake of aiding in authority, survival, and self-interest. The way science is practiced isn't actually rational in this sense. It seems that rational self-interest is inherently divorced from truth as a consequence of the limited circle of concern. This includes examples such as mafia bosses, drug lords, and corporate criminals as being characterized as acting in rational self-interest despite the extreme harm they cause. It makes me question if they are really being rational or is their entire epistemic framework deeply irrational due to the corrupted relationship with truth? This is an important question because if rationality ultimately operates independently of truth, then why should it be believed? How can judgment be sound if it is fundamentally divorced from truth while using the label rational to obscure the emotional foundation of biased reasoning? If this is the case that rational self-interest includes deep self-deception, then I might be able to construct a position for rational belief in the Bible. For example, I feel happy when I go to church and believe in the Bible. Therefore I should maintain the belief that the Bible is true out of rational self-interest. Self-interest is at it's core rationality that operates independently of truth. If this standard were applied consistently, then worshipping Jesus should be considered rational. If converting people aids in my rational self-interest, then that probably means that it is rational to argue that the Bible is true and that others should believe it. In this sense, does it mean that the fundamentalist Christian is being rational when he argues that Noah's Ark was real? Applying the standards of rational self-interest, maybe it is rational to believe in these things and to teach it to children. Across all of these cases the term "rational" is commonly used to make something seem more certain, authoritative, and truthful than it actually is. The thing that bothers me therefore is what "rational belief" would mean in this context. If rational could be part of the self-deception, then what kind of real relationship does it have with truth? This is the contradiction in rationality in that it wants to claim truth as authoritative while being divorced from it. As we know from various spiritual sources we use on this site such as the book list, you cannot believe your way to truth in the sense that all of that is relative. Is it even possible for a belief to be fundamentally rational? How do you rationally believe a belief? One distinction I came across was a belief versus an alief. The alief is the felt sense that something is true without needing intellectual justification. Given a felt sense that something is true operating independently of truth, this likely serves a mechanism for rationalization to make something appear more reasonable than it actually is. Ultimately, rationality cannot be a label to indicate an ultimate truth. Rationality is more so an instrumental tool given a specific goal or objective while being limited to a specific context. Ultimate truth would require a bigger picture than rationality. Is this a fair critique of self-bias in apparent rationality?

I recently had an insight that changed my relationship with the mind. This is a huge topic that needs to be explored because the implications are significant for making sense of reality. I recognized that my mind seems to heavily bias consistency, but this consistency is predicated upon subliminal messages absorbed through cultural osmosis despite conscious disbelief. The outcome is inevitable inconsistency regardless of intellectual stance. In this thread I would like to explore how subliminal messages form a significant core of our worldviews while avoiding direct analysis. I have autism, so it may be the case that the autistic mind excels at detailed explicit content while struggling to name the implicit social messages that may be absorbed into the psyche regardless of apparent consistency. Changing my relationship with the mind in turn seems to open up a large range of possibilities for worldview and identity reorganization. I first realized this through extensive self-reflection and deep trauma work. One thing I discovered is that although I consciously disbelieved in religion, the familiarity with the Christian religion causes it to feel as if it were more true due to my family and the religious symbols they used. The act of sanctifying religious figures such as Mary and Jesus caused me to feel as if it were more valid or true than other religions when in reality I logically understand that this is a consequence of cultural familiarity. Philosophers call this phenomenon an alief. This is distinct from a belief in that the belief is your logical position whereas the alief is a feeling in your body or mind that causes something to seem true independent of your intellectual beliefs. This commonly creates cognitive dissonance and a lack of inner harmony which in turn has created significant confusion throughout my life. The same thing happens with a scary movie as it does with religion. When I watch a scary movie, I get absorbed into the narrative such that my body treats the monster as if it were real. I intellectually know the monster isn't actually real, but when the movie is over I still feel afraid because the monster might be lurking somewhere. The power of suggestion bypasses the intellectual layer and causes the body and mind to treat even fictional suggestions as if they were true despite the objections of the rational mind. This happened to me with religion when the repeated exposure to symbols caused part of me to treat religion as if it were true after which my mind started getting pulled in multiple confusing directions. It wasn't until I did a deep dive into systematically analyzing religion that this part of my identity finally collapsed upon me seeing the mechanism more clearly. Implicit frames are also important for understanding traumatic experiences as they are often used to impose beliefs or aliefs which are not explicitly stated, but the body and mind treat them as if they were true anyway. One example would be if you were punished or shamed for anything as a child. The implied frame is that if you do something socially undesirable, then you are unlovable. I don't think children consciously think to themselves that they are unlovable, at least I never did that. However, my body learned to internalize a lot of shame which in turn made self-love feel impossible. It became more like a living reality that I am unacceptable to myself such that I must be changed before love is possible. In fact, I recall that I explicitly organized truth and honesty around self-love as I believed that self-love required me to accept the truth of who I was as the alternative would be an incomprehensible system of lies based on nothing real. I have since figured out a counter example to this as the ego can love itself in the sense that it splits part of itself off from the truth of its nature and denies it within itself out of fear such that it loves a divided fragment of its true nature. In that sense self-love is possible in a different form through self-deception, although it requires disowning shadow material. This seems to be how the narcissistic ego works due to fragile self-esteem, causing extreme and disproportionate reactions to shame which the ego tries to protect itself from. Implicit frames applied more broadly seems to map well onto institutional dynamics involving power and authority. If I go to a Bible study, I notice that people often seem hesitant or give simplistic answers, possibly because they must hide their true thoughts or risk ostracization. If I go to a mental health professional, then if I point out the flaws in the scientific method as they are applying it and their context stripping as they apply studies inappropriately, then they will want to discredit me. If I engage in a political discussion and try to understand the bigger picture, then sometimes I end up seeming to threaten both the left and right because I prioritize understanding and appreciation of complexity over tribal allegiance. Those who challenge the assumed frame rather than taking it for granted seem to be threatening to power and authority in many different contexts. I think I would like to get better at detecting implicit frames and subliminal messages. I practiced this at the aquarium by expressing excitement about seeing the birds. Although others were confused because the expectation is to see fish, this aquarium also had a penguin exhibit, therefore it is technically correct to go to some aquariums to look at birds. This is probably a huge domain with major implications for worldview organization because the apparent rationality on the surface is often organized around underlying content that preceded rational analysis. This inevitably leads to contradictions and probably an ego dissolution under sufficient self-reflection. In my case, I try to get to this implicit layer by finding the surrounding content that stuck in my mind and then trying to deconstruct it with adult epistemology. This has its limitations, but if I can inwardly sense the general direction of the alief, then I may be able to study relevant archetypes and profiles to systematically organize reality into something comprehensible. This is what I did with religion in the case of the virgin archetype. It had an underlying meaning or significance which I analyzed because it stuck in my mind and was adjacent to trauma. Consciousness seems to be a significant part of this work to try to sense what these implicit messages are which bias the direction of our reasoning due to bypassing the intellect. It requires using some degree of a felt sense and intuition combined with accumulated self-knowledge open to reorganization. I believe one particular area which has impacted me significantly has been masculinity as it has been depicted in my life in America. The general underlying message is that the most visible forms of masculinity are the most dangerous and toxic forms. This included several cases of sexual assault and exploitation mixed with shame adjacent to sexual themes in religion. This was exacerbated by an absent father, creating an unhealthy environment for growing up due to an absence of healthy masculinity. Deconstructing masculinity both toxic and healthy seems necessary for me, but also hard to do. My psyche appears to have been largely feminized as a consequence of repeated messaging since childhood.

I notice a lot of misconceptions when it comes to empathy and compassion for child sex offenders. I have a different perspective from most for several reasons. Firstly, my father was involved with a gang of child sex traffickers and I was one of the victims. Secondly, I have done a lot of research on criminology which is directly relevant to empathy and compassion for child sex offenders of all kinds. Thirdly, pedophilia is a subtype of preferential offenders which is disproportionately likely to have multiple victims. Most child molesters are not pedophiles and they have a diverse set of motives and psychological problems that lead to this kind of behavior without being inhuman monsters. Fourthly, empathy and compassion for perpetrators or victims cannot be cleanly separated for reasons I will explain. the core reason is that to vilify love and compassion for perpetrators is to indirectly shame child victims who cover for the parents that abuse them due to loving them, such that they feel their love makes them unacceptable and unworthy of life to the point of needing to kill themselves. Finally, empathy is not an excuse for harm. At minimum, cognitive empathy is necessary to inform prevention of violence and enable the protection of child victims by understanding what circumstances lead to victimization. You don't have to have warm feelings toward child molesters and you are allowed to be outraged at the harm they cause. Relevant to this discussion is my past thread on deconstructing monster narratives. In this thread, I mentioned incest perpetrators and parents who sexually offend against their own children. From the perspective of the parental perpetrator, they live in a distorted moral reality in which this type of love is appropriate for their child. They have all kinds of ideas about how this isn't harmful because harm comes from discovery rather than from the act. Sometimes they rationalize this behavior with cultural relativism, arguing that some cultures allowed incest, meaning the behavior isn't actually bad. The parent does not grasp the harm caused to the child because if they did then they would not be able to live with themselves, therefore the incest perpetrator must believe that the behavior is acceptable and the child can meaningfully consent. This pattern is common in parental offenders who are living a criminal lifestyle which corrupts their sense of what kind of love is appropriate, similar to what happened with my father. To clarify, most parental offenders are not pedophiles, but rather they are situational offenders who falsely believe that this kind of love is appropriate, which is technically distinct from pedophiles who are sexually attracted to children rather than having a distorted familial bond with inappropriate forms of love in it. Given my research into criminology, this closely matches my father's behavior and actions while being relevant to recovery. This gets very unsettling and disturbing, but it is true nevertheless. My father showed several distorted means of attempting to bond and connect with me. Firstly, he was afraid of me thinking of him as a bad person, as ironic as that may sound. Because of this he needed to change the standard of what it meant to be loveable and desirable. He was so embedded in criminal life that he had no realistic exit without permanent life imprisonment. Therefore, he attempted to recast his behavior as gangster and badass such that he would seem desirable. This included boasting about his exploits of all kinds including death threats, drug deals, prostitution, and his relationship with my grandpa who he claimed had extensive involvement in his crimes. My moral conscience was threatening to him such that he both wanted to change my perspective and part of him seems to have convinced himself that this was cool or an appropriate form of connection. The first incident involved my unwanted participation in drug deals. I was clearly heavy and upset with what had occurred, but my father cheerfully told me to "lighten up." He insisted that I was badass like him, but the violation of my values could not be ignored when I felt intense guilt and shame in response to these situations. I knew my father had done something wrong, but I never had the courage to tell anybody at least in part because I loved him. He also showed several patterns of grooming in that he wanted to keep the nature of our relationship a secret from others while using a lot of positive reinforcement. My father also showed apparently genuine love in response to a situation with my mother and stepfather who were drug addicts. He appeared to both want my safety and to exploit my need for safety to get out of paying child support by using me to get dirt on Mom. This included his reminders that he was involved with a violent gang that would be willing to kill my stepfather, as if I could count on them for protection when in reality I was terrified of them and my father as well. I couldn't say these things to my father or other family members as doing so would jeopardize me further. The outcome is that parental perpetrators commonly don't realize the harm they are causing their children due to their implicit theory that a child would openly complain if they were unhappy. Similar to incest cases, the victim often appears to silently accept this kind of behavior due to coercive control which shares parallels with my case. I detailed the trafficking incident in a separate document. The FBI expressed interest in my explanation of the evidence and how it connects to broader patterns in organized crime that often goes undetected. They said I do need a Bachelor's degree though to work in higher positions. I can post it in this thread too if necessary, but the necessary snippet is in the other thread for more context and evidentiary standards for these situations. In terms of fathers who traffic their children out of love, this gets very fucked up, confusing, and disturbing. However, it matches my findings in criminology and maps onto all of the other patterns of my father. Part of why people join gangs is out of a sense of belonging that is being filled with a criminal group. Therefore, from this point of view, treating a child as if they belong to the gang is held as a form appropriate connection and love. This can include initiation through child prostitution in which the father is proud and excited for what is happening to his child. I was really baffled as to why my father was happy over all of this. The overarching pattern in parental sex offenders is that they generally do not realize the harm they caused and they see their behavior as loving. They have a distorted sense of reality in which everything is perfectly fine such that their map of reality has the child's reality completely backwards as the child's behavior is interpreted through the distorted framework. This is often relevant for victims in recovery who feel that their feelings of love make them unacceptable. One the inside as I stayed silent, my logic was as follows. By following this victim logic, it often leads victims of parental sex offenders to suicide. 1. My father did something unacceptable. 2. I silently accepted my father's unacceptable behavior. 3. My acceptance of that which is unacceptable makes me unacceptable. 4. Therefore, I am unacceptable. This line of reasoning is often tied to survivor's guilt such as "I should have turned my father into the police" (who in reality were corrupt and possibly complicit) or "I should have protected others from my father" (even though I couldn't protect myself). These are the surface level should statements that victims use to blame themselves, but the deeper should is "It is wrong for me to love my father because of his actions, therefore I should cut myself off from love to prevent love from enabling harm." (therefore I should kill myself.) This is a common pattern in how victims of child sexual abuse think and it often leads to suicide because they feel that their love is unacceptable and they should remove themselves from love forever as a consequence. The belief is that if a child molester is unlovable, and your parent is a child molester, and you love your parent, and loving someone is supposed to be unlovable makes you unlovable, then the victim is unlovable. This is why it is important that we don't demonize compassion and love for perpetrators as it is connected directly into the victim logic leading to suicide. children often stay quiet and cover for abusers as a consequence of loving them in the secret relationship the perpetrator established through grooming. There is also an important distinction between "accepting" as in endorsing or consenting to my father's behavior, and "accepting" as in having a freeze response as a survival instinct and therefore incurring the cost of my father's actions. The alternative frame for victims would be as follows. 1. My father did something harmful. 2. I accepted the harm because of my desire for love. 3. The situation was logically acceptable by virtue of the fact that is was accepted. 4. Therefore I did not accept anything that was unacceptable. 5. Therefore I am acceptable by virtue of the fact that I exist and I desire to love and be loved. 6. None of this is an excuse for harm. The core point to this connects to spirituality in several important ways. Firstly, ego is not defined just by an individual human being. The ego is relational and defined relative to other. Therefore, demonizing other beings who inform the ego identity translates into demonizing oneself, as the relational nature of ego makes self and other entangled in ways that cannot be cleanly separated. In my case, hating my father translates into hating myself because he isn't actually separate from me. The same logic applies to all human beings, animals, and objects in the universe as all of them are ultimately part of me. In that sense, I am the universe and everything in it. Self is defined relative to other within the universe and the distinction is untenable. At the same time from another point of view I am the universe experiencing itself from the point of view of a human being within the domain of separateness which itself is illusory and not separate from unity. Leo takes this further by saying that I literally created the universe, not just that everything is connected. Oneness is deeper than just connectedness as would be the case for the relational nature of ego in which self and other cannot be cleanly separated. Either way, there is ultimately no difference between loving self and other though. This is also crucial for forgiveness which applies even in some extreme severe cases. 1. My father hurt me to some extent out of ignorance in that he could not distinguish the harm caused from implicit theories linked to the distorted alternative reality. 2. My father hurt me out of weakness and fear such as his fear of being caught leading to threats of disownment combined with his inability to exit the criminal lifestyle without permanent imprisonment. 3. My father hurt me out of selfishness. (no shit) 4. My father hurt me out of a need for love from his son which he sought through criminal exploitation framed as inclusion, protection, belonging, and bad ass gangster identity while being severely traumatic to his son. 5. My father hurt me out of a lack of consciousness in that his dense ego was prone to severe distortions and self-deceptions such that it could spin entirely alternate realities in which the behavior was good and justified. In the end of all of this, I hope you can see why empathy, love, and compassion for perpetrators ultimately ties back in to empathy for victims as the two cannot actually be cleanly separated due to the nature of ego, self, and other. Additionally, there is more complex information in terms of cognitive empathy for sex offenders that can be used to inform prevention. This includes situational / opportunistic offenders which are the most common, grievance based offenders such as intimate partners who rape and murder their victims, and preferential offenders which includes pedophiles who impact a disproportionate amount of victims as well as sadistic serial rapists / killers and zoophiles who rape animals believing it is an appropriate form of love. By understanding the different types of offenders and the psychological backgrounds, then at minimum it can be used to inform prevention, especially sense social isolation and feeling like an outsider in society is a common problem for criminals who might seek belonging from gangs instead. This is a big topic for discussion, but it is important for correcting the conflation between pedophiles and child sex offenders. The truth is more nuanced, and the truth is necessary for there to be any meaningful love as without truth, any love expressed is ultimately based on falsehood. In that sense it is like loving nothing. This was kind of heavy for me to type, but I hope you find value in this kind of work. In my case it also relates to abuse from my sister who likes to weaponize my trauma around my father against me by insisting he was "loving and caring like a father" while knowing the harm he caused me. Forgiveness in this context does weaken my sister's ability to weaponize this trauma. Perhaps the next question would be in regards to child sex traffickers who are not the child's parent and who instead kidnap other children at airports to take them to the wrong plane, leading to a gang who turns them into sex slaves for profit. This empathy and love for offenders could be expanded on that front, but it seems more difficult in some ways. I have a hard time with sadistic offenders especially who torture their victims for sexual pleasure, including children which creates an alternative sexual motive for the assault aside from pedophilia.

Do you have a way to roughly estimate my degree of consciousness? I'm clearly not that conscious as to realize that you are behind my eyes. Is there a way to know roughly how conscious I am, or is such a model not applicable to this kind of work?

@Leo Gura you are right that this is radical. The obvious question is how the fuck does that work? This is a mindfuck. For some reason I feel scared when imagining my father looking through my eyes right now. By this logic I should be looking through your eyes right now, but you probably don't mean me as an ego. You probably mean that if I am God, and I am the universe, then my father is also God and the universe. God experiences itself through consciousness such that there is no difference from looking through these eyes versus someone else's eyes. In that sense there is no distinction between any content or information in any situation in reality as all of that is relative. On top of that, I guess it applies to all beings looking through my eyes, as ultimately they are all God. I think this raises a serious question about who is behind my eyes and how do I know. This is a tough one for me to understand.

I would like to engage with this seriously to see what I am overlooking and where my level of consciousness is. I have a lot to learn and a lot to discover to the point that it seems overwhelming because of how big the universe is, but I will do my best. The main thing I need to clarify is what exactly you mean when you say that I am my father as "I" could mean a lot of things depending on the perspective through which I am my father is being filtered. I will lay out a few interpretations of what I am my father might mean. 1. I am my father in the sense that in an alternate reality not accessible to this human ego, I am experiencing life literally from the perspective of my father with full access to his thought process and life history, and I am literally carrying out autonomous actions such as sex trafficking children. 2. I am my father in the sense that any division between self and other is imaginary. From the perspective of this human ego, I am interpreting information in reality and constructing stories about it. This include the appearance of human beings claiming to be my family, when technically I am imagining a belief system with stories about them being my family. All beliefs are mental constructs regardless of whether they are true or false, so in that sense any belief is only true in the relativistic sense of corresponding to a certain phenomenon. This includes the belief that I am a human, I have a family, other human beings exist, and I live in a material universe. The consequence is that I interpret reality such that there is information external from me. If all of this reality is happening within me rather than outside of me, than in that sense My father was never outside of the experience which constitutes me. The hallucination of my father is therefore me even if he violates me. If all of reality is happening within me, then in that sense my father can't be other than me and that includes this computer screen happening within me. In this case "I" is defined as the entire bubble of experience. 3. I am my father in the sense that given a deep enough level of conscious, I am God constructing reality through this hallucination of a self. I therefore constructed my father as part of my nature through this imagination, including crimes which the human ego had not framework for understanding or comprehending. The human ego Trenton did not know what sex trafficking was when it happened. As God I imagined that Trenton would not know these things at that time in the past which is also imaginary. This sounds like it would be a mindfuck. It is important to clarify these things as much as possible because "I am my father" could be interpreted in a lot of ways and it isn't obvious which one is meant. It might be important to clarify what we mean by "I imagined." I imagined could mean a lot of things, but I'm not sure which one is meant. I remember my father was also a Star Wars fan. His favorite line was the mindfuck "I am your father!" I wonder how much of a mindfuck it would be if the reveal was actually that Luke Skywalker is his own father. Luke thought that his father was an evil man happening outside of him, but actually Luke was Anakin Skywalker slaughtering the younglings and terrorizing the galaxy. I find myself laughing at the mindfuck, but I want to take it seriously and engage with it.

One day, there was a man in profound distress. This man was poor, sleep deprived, and distraught. He sat down by the rail of a bridge, curled up in a ball crying as he sat on a blanket next to a broken guitar. God saw this man in distress, and walked up to him. God asked the man "Why are you crying? Do you need help?" The man looked to God and said "There is nothing you can do to help me! Only God can help me! You are not God! You can't help me! Only God or someone with power can help me!" God wanted to reason with the man, but the man would not believe that he was God. The man requested that God walk away. However, God would not abandon this man. God fulfilled this man's request to walk away, but did not abandon him. Instead God used his power on a cell phone in his pocket to dial 911. God requested that the police come to the bridge while describing the scene that was unfolding. The police asked God if the man was black or Hispanic. God told the police that the man was white. The police arrived in about 1 minute. An officer approached the bridge. God pointed to the man on the bridge and described what happened. A witness told the officer that he was considering calling the police himself as he described the man's behavior. The officer thanked them for the information as he approached the man on the bridge. God understood that the man would probably be pissed at him for calling the police, therefore it was time to leave the scene as the presence of the body he inhabited would likely trigger further destabilization in the distressed man. As God and the witness walked away from the scene, they briefly discussed the significance of what had happened and the broader social patterns that were occurring in the region such as poverty, crime, drug addiction, and previous suicides at that scene committed by people who believed that jumping would lead to a swift rather than slow and agonizing death. Once the two parted ways, God was approached by a cat. The cat started mewing and rubbing against him as a sign of affection. God pet the cat and gave it some water before coming home to type this story. This story seems fitting for actualized.org.

I had a friend named Noah who hated his name. He was an atheist born into a religious family. He had to go to church for things he didn't believe in. If a child wants the approval of their parents, then they might silently act like everything is fine while internally dreading everything. So, if you took your child to church and they acted like everything was fine, how would you know if they were acting this way because they liked church or if they are acting this way for the parent's approval? If religion becomes evidence of conditional love, then the child might hide their true feelings from the parent. I guess my question is, if taking a child to church is considered immoral, then what kind of information should we expose children to? Are we not ultimately shaping children based on what we think is right due to our limited understanding of child psychology?

Apparently, most human beings cannot comprehend that a parent would do these things to their own child. It challenges their sense of reality because what is held as absolute to parents is in reality subjective. Parental love can be applied in destructive and horrific ways. Loving your child therefore does not prevent incest and rape. If you dig into sex offender typologies it might challenge your understanding of reality once you see the twisted nature of evil. Meanwhile, I see that you are sorry this happened to me, but sometimes I struggle to comprehend what kind of empathy I would need from others. Part of the problem is that love has proven dangerous and it might make me attached to a perpetrator. It is also frustrating that those who see the pain can often do very little to help the situation somehow. This may be part of why therapy is ineffective in that the therapist does not realize that they are God and are therefore limited by the paradigms they apply to child sexual abuse. I think it would be worth discussing, what kind of love do I need? If I have learned to numb myself to my feelings because of how overwhelming they are, then I become numb to people offering love as well. This is complicated by autism leading to difficulty understanding my emotions and is compounded by shut down when exposed to severe trauma. Eventually I just become numb because of how overwhelming it would be to feel everything. This in turn leads to chronic stress and emotional dysregulation in which death is seen as an escape from the psychological wounds and my sense of existential dread. I will try to figure out what kind of love I need if family isn't helpful. If not family, then I thought career accomplishment would be something to pursue instead of relationships, but it was undermined by depression and educational disruptions. If career does not fill the void, then what love do I need? I hoped spirituality would give me an alternative sense of purpose and reality, but that too is easier said than done. Ideally healthy relationships are helpful for recovery, but in reality this is hard if family has betrayed their own children.

There's all kinds of ways for the ego to play God. As far as I know, I am everything. It is a bit much to explain all of it, but I'm sure you or someone else on the forum figured it out. There are multiple paths that can be followed to realize this.

In case it wasn't clear. I went for a walk and there was a suicidal guy on the bridge. There was actually a guy acting like he was going to kill himself a couple of days ago when I posted that. We seriously need better programs for addiction and poverty or this is what we end up with in our society. Not to mention the organized criminals that exploit jurisdictional gaps on different sides of rivers while targeting people in these areas to ruin their lives. Individual compassion is important, but systemic change is needed if we truly want to help the maximum number of people. I can't be at the bridge everyday to stop people from jumping. We can't rely on the good Samaritan forever because there needs to be a better social structure in place to stop people from reaching such a severe state of crisis.

Green also values love and connection. Sometimes this can be applied in inappropriate ways. Green is also open minded to cultural relativism including the reality that some cultures were fine with incest. It might make it seem like incest is not evil if a parent loves their child very deeply. Sometimes rapists act from love, not from power and domination. This includes statutory rape cases for example. Combine this with severe stress, trauma, and possible drug problems from poor coping, and you might end up with a stage green rapist with a warped worldview who believes he is acting from love, not from power.

I believe the mechanism by which this would happen would most likely be an opportunistic or situational offender. There are incest perpetrators, pedophiles, and zoophiles who believe that they are not harming the victim. In fact, they believe that this kind of love is appropriate for the victim. A father doesn't rape his daughter because he hates her and wants her to suffer. Instead it is more often out of his twisted sense of love, just as with a mother and son. In the case of the mother and son incest, the mother often has a trauma history with which she is identified and therefore locked into a depressing schema while becoming emotionally incestuous with her son. Again, she develops an inappropriate bond, similar to the mental health centers I've been to in which people bond very fast through vulnerability such that they start having sex when their not supposed to because they love each other and have confused boundaries around sex as a consequence of past abuse. Of course there are also animal lovers who have sex with their dogs because they believe the dog can consent and that this love is appropriate. The key is that they must believe their behavior is not harmful, otherwise they can't maintain it. They actually have a distorted moral reality rather than simply being evil. Obviously drugs might be a factor in disinhibiting someone who copes poorly with trauma. Severe stress can also temporarily override normal inhibitions stage green would have. In the case of this man, he may not have believed that having sex with that 16 year old was harmful if where he is from it would have been consensual and he felt the love was appropriate. The secrecy comes from beliefs such as harm comes from discovery not from a father raping his daughter. @Leo Gura is this how a stage green rapist thinks?

@Zen LaCroix I will clarify these things. I'll start by summarizing the shame. Firstly, I was shamed by my mother at age six when she accused me of raping her daughter and threatened me with jail. This was after sexualized play with my four year old sister due to having a dream in which my uncle molested me. My mother was also a Catholic drug addict with an ex boyfriend who abandoned his children following his multiple sexual relationships with highschool teenagers as an adult while carrying out gang activities like child trafficking. This should summarize my sexual shame clearly, although there were further details related to various boundary violations they were responsible for against me. My moral issue has recently collapsed. I did some digging around Christianity and found an old unconscious childhood belief that maintained my shame. It had something to do with the virgin Mary representing something I could never be. The belief is that due to unforgivable sin I am permanently broken, unlovable, tainted, and irredeemable, such that not only can Jesus never salvage me, but also I will be damned to perpetually try in vain to prove worthy of my own existence. This ties into present sexuality due to the fear that further sexual acts will taint me further, thus confirming what I already know to be true. In terms of viewing women sexually, what happened was after my past experiences, I lost my ability to look at a woman and feel attracted to her appearance. It's not that finding a woman hot makes me bad, it's that my ability to look at a woman and spontaneously feel these things is dead. I therefore require proximity, established safety, mutual interest in hobbies or intellectual frameworks, and respect. Over time I can develop an appreciation for your looks. I just can't operate like a normal man anymore. My developing sexuality was actively shaped and undermined by those around me. The closest thing to a moral issue I have would be toxic masculinity. I have no idea what version of masculinity would be worth embodying. Not to mention it probably won't be tailored to the traumatized autistic mind anyway. I seem to be especially sensitive to toxic masculinity.

I have been struggling with this conflict for a long time. My natural sexuality such as attraction to the opposite sex was disrupted due to internalized shame. I see conflicting messages on this subject constantly, mostly with women emphasizing respect, morality, and not acting like pigs, while men emphasize getting laid. The conflict is intensified to an extreme degree when a male has a father who was a sexual predator, and therefore had no decent role model at all. I have also been feminized due to being the only boy in a household of women who viewed me as more dangerous unless I was gender non-conforming. I probably struggle with this cognitive dissonance much more than most people, but I have some frames that might resolve the tension. Firstly, from a biological perspective, the the brain is structured such that pleasure and disgust are processed in overlapping regions such as the Insular Cortex. This may be linked to postcoital dysphoria in which there is sudden feelings of repulsion and shame following a sexual climax. On some level this makes sense if as humans beings we were not designed to do nothing but have sex all the time. Eventually we would have to get sick of it while also needing a pleasure incentive to engage in the act. In this sense, pleasure and disgust is part of a biological process which operates independently of morality or objectifying ideologies. If in the cycle of emotional disgust, then morality would probably be given precedence compared to pleasure which prioritizes objectification in the moment, but can be generalized by an ideology. In my case, due to my association between sexuality and severe moral transgressions in childhood, my disgust response is probably much more prevalent or more intense compared to the general population. Therefore, for me especially, what is considered normal seems horrible and unacceptable. This was reinforced throughout school when boys would hit on me at the urinal, causing me to be afraid of urinals to this day and preferring stalls. I'm afraid of someone coming up right next to me, winking at me, licking their lips, and putting their hands on my shoulder. I feel vulnerable and exposed at urinals now. There were other instances of sexual assault and harassment which made the cognitive dissonance worse, including girls who insisted that I always wanted it because I was a boy. This was happening while my family disputed which sexual orientation was desirable for me to have while I was being vilified as predatory due to my father's actions. This creates a lot of cognitive dissonance that is hard to resolve in terms of morality and prowess. given that my disgust response is stronger in response to moral violations, there is probably a function to this disgust beyond just getting sick of sex so you can move on. maybe it is supposed to be protective, although in my case there was significantly more terror than moral disgust. That said, perhaps the disgust is itself rooted in fear in which case it would explain why fear amplifies disgust. If I am afraid of intimacy due to the possibility of harm, then this would amplify disgust around sexuality and especially prowess. I recall that my core fear was being unloved. This was combined with repeated exposure to the nakedness of female relatives and disgust. Given this fear of being unloved at the core of the avoidance of intimacy, what exactly would a woman want from me in order to love me? It seems that this would be closer to resolving the cognitive dissonance I have been describing. I have been under the impression that I need to be somebody different or to change my identity as there was a fear that my current self was not good enough. It would probably help to clarify what are the exact standards that women are looking for. There might even be a system available for types of women and what they want. I don't know where I would be if there were an equivalent model for men, but it seems that safety and trust needs to be prioritized in some kind of demisexual pattern of attraction. I previously did not have a problem with looking at women and walking up to them based on beautiful appearance, but now the disgust response was overwhelming to the point that it has erased this natural attraction mechanism to a woman's appearance that I previously had. I now have a hard time selecting a woman who is attractive based on appearance and then approaching as this form of beauty has become largely invisible or irrelevant to me until I first establish a person's character. It seems the only exception is massive obesity which makes me terrified of getting close. Other women are more neutral. It might also help to know how exactly to go about practicing vulnerability if women seem to emphasize that. If I have autism, then it is harder than normal for me to communicate my feelings. I tend to instead describe the surrounding circumstances and my responses to them as well as how they impacted my predisposition. The outcome is that my explanations are long because I am not sure how else to discuss my feelings without using models to help me navigate this terrain. Perhaps I am afraid that women will be disgusted with me and I therefore cannot show my full character. The outcome is more isolation instead which is kind of a silent death. What are the exact things which are categorically unacceptable about a person such that they should remain perpetually condemned without a shred of compassion extended to them, and which are the things that are bad but not that bad and therefore acceptable and loveable? Apparently people with autism struggle with dating and intimacy more than the general population in addition to being more vulnerable to abuse as a consequence of difficulty in reading social cues while assuming good faith. What do you think about resolving this cognitive dissonance? How do you square morality, terror, shame, prowess, pleasure, love, and disgust when sexuality seems to encompass all of these things simultaneously?

Leo often mentions things like "how do you know Jesus died for our sins?" He argued that all of Christianity fails on this point because there is nothing to back this up. I did some digging, and I have discovered the core claim as why Jesus is the Savior and how Christians know it. It is completely preposterous. Essentially, the reason Jesus is believed to be the Savior is because there was an unrelated prophecy from 700 years prior to his birth which had already been immediately fulfilled, but somehow also prophesied that Jesus would die for our sins over 700 years later despite making no such mention of this or a virgin birth or Jesus. "The young woman will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel" this is the core claim as to why Jesus is the Savior. The term "young woman" is what was originally used to describe Mary, but in the translation this term was changed to "virgin." The implication is that Mary probably wasn't even a virgin if she did exist and this story was inserted completely while serving as the core basis of the religion. If the scripture is taken on its own terms, then whatever religion there was supposed to be would be unrecognizable compared to modern translations as there was no virgin birth and there was no prophesy about Jesus. So what religion are we even talking about if the meaning can be twisted so far in completely different fan fictions? Sometimes I encounter tensions when I am in the presence of Christians. I feel like it is not safe to say what I think. Additionally, if I do speak of spirituality, I often get lumped together with this religion even though I am very far from that category. This was a problem in therapy as well when a therapist insisted I pray while imposing religious beliefs even though I made clear that I didn't believe in these things. There is also clear disdain when I simply compare different religions and point out similarities. I feel like something died inside of me. I remember in childhood, my family was nominally Christian but I didn't believe it intellectually. However, for some reason my mind kept coming back to as if it were trying to make sense of something, or if there was some emotional pull of hope that dragged my mind to it despite conscious disbelief. It is almost like a split personality in which despite my conscious disbelief, somehow part of me existed as though there were truth to what I was focusing on. I came up with positions like, "the Bible is clearly wrong on these points, but this doesn't refute the existence of God." Hence I stood by the position of God but not religion because of the fact that religion is heavily a social demand for conformity rather than any real commitment to truth. In fact, "belief" is misleading because in the context of religion it isn't meant to be held as an intellectual position, but rather as "trust" in God or Jesus rather than epistemically believe it. Religion uses the language of literal belief when meaning something entirely different. Again, this changes the entire nature of what religion even is if it was never meant to be an intellectual position in the first place. It seems to mean more like "do as you're told and everything will work out" when using the term believe. In that sense, religion shouldn't even be treated as a truth claim, but more of a fantasy narrative that sounds pretty while being built around human institutions with millions of different agendas that are divorced from reality on every level. I don't know why exactly there is this heavy feeling of sadness. Maybe it is because I know I can't seriously engage with a community that shuts down any legitimate questioning while assuming that I intend to offend people due to pointing out the inconsistencies. I prefer to contemplate things like religion on my own away from others for this reason. Although my emotions are low, I still logically prefer truth and accept whatever it is even if it for some reason feels painful. Perhaps the absurdity was deeper than I could have imagined beyond even the miracle claims that defy science. I struggle to imagine something more nonsensical than an unrelated prophecy from 700 years ago proving an unmentioned person was born under unmentioned circumstances and did unmentioned things. I feel like this closes off or collapses something. What do you think? I have a prophesy of my own. 700 years from now, something unmentioned will occur.

I remember in my case, there was a particular reason I was drawn to Christianity more than normal. Not only was this about my culture, but even more so it was about childhood sexual abuse and feeling tainted and unclean. This is ultimately what motivated me to explore the meaning the virgin Mary recently. Supposedly, virginity was meant to symbolize purity, humility, and duty bound behavior even when difficult. The problem is that the symbolic meaning of virginity was lost in the literal interpretation which in turn conflated an entire religious morality system around a biological feature with no objective moral standing. The counter examples are Christians who engage in acts other than vaginal penetration to retain technical virginity or rape victims who were physically no longer virgins even if they still inwardly symbolized everything the virgin archetype represents. In that sense the rape victim wasn't actually tainted in terms of the character the archetype represents poetically, even if they might feel ashamed or degraded because of what happened. This is the sort of thing I was contemplating when I started exploring this thread in Christianity. What I ultimately discovered is that not only was the entire system of morality wrong, but the virgin Mary may not have even been intended to be a virgin based on the translation errors. On top of that the entire prophecy on which the religion is based is logically incoherent and has nothing to do with Jesus or a virgin birth. I think the grief may partially for the child I was that believed I fundamentally bad and permanently tainted, hoping that the cleanliness Christianity spoke of might restore me to who I once was. In reality I was never broken, not even in the context of this religion where literal virginity wasn't meant to be an all or nothing adjudication of character. Much of that judgement had to do with male property laws in which women were treated as commodities. Although religion unfairly places the burden moreso on women, if the logic of the Bible were applied consistently, then there are plenty of predatory men in the Bible who would have been considered whores. There are also some ancient theologians who reached similar conclusions to me in terms of physical virginity and what it was meant to symbolically represent beyond a biological state which was often circumstantial rather than indicative of a person's true nature. Basically, you are not the body and your true nature is something deeper which cannot be physically destroyed. Ultimately, the beliefs my mind held onto as if they made me happy on the surface despite my conscious disbelief, were actually making me miserable because of the assumptions on which contempory Christianity operates. It treats a biological state as permanent condemnation rather than a circumstantial state that exists independently of ones true nature.

I noticed in myself, that I didn't intellectually believe it, but for some reason the beliefs made me happy. I did not consciously choose to hold onto these beliefs, but my mind insisted on sticking to what family and culture mentioned while glorifying it. I ended up having dreams in which I met Jesus even though I also explored many other religions aside from Christianity. it seems that it might have something to do with lacking a stable direction or identity which religion offers. The person might want simplicity if they find deep spiritual work extensive, exhausting, and confusing. Religious themes are also common in trauma narratives as Jesus offers to heal people. If a person is drawn to spirituality in the hopes of avoiding suffering, then they might revert to religion if they were ultimately not motivated by truth. I'm not quite sure I understand why, but those are some guesses.

I feel the need to tell you guys that if there were a pedophile in your childhood school, then you probably didn't notice. I can map out the details if need be, but you can intuit why this is. We were taught to trust adults and report bad behavior by other kids. A common feature in school environments with severe staff abuse is that the environment is chaotic with chronic failures of discipline. The fear of peer abuse takes up such cognitive energy that the child doesn't consider the possibility that a staff member might be a pedophile. Taking this possibility seriously as a child would be terrifying in a school environment. On top of that, the abuse would be structurally hidden through private lessons the child never visited. Surface level abuse like verbal abuse by staff might be normalized while the most severe abuse remains hidden. The surface chaos hides the underlying disturbing reality. In the case of my school it was later found that one of the staff members was a drug addict which at the time I wouldn't have guessed that. She did have us stand out in the rain as she yelled at us, but much of this behavior was normalized by the school culture. On top of that sexual assault was common among my peers such that it didn't register as a violation severe enough to be acted on in response when it happened to me. I was so busy navigating the school bullies that if there were a pedophile in that environment, I would not have noticed as it would have been covered and quietly hidden from sight. Although this is a real phenomenon, I'm not sure how we should teach children about how in the event their teacher was responsible for this, they wouldn't notice and instead continue trusting them as if nothing was wrong. At the end of the day, a proactive prevention focused approach is necessary for stopping institutional abuse because the structure is such that individual reporting is extremely unreliable and deeply compromised in many ways. Whistleblowers can't be counted on in this environment.

@Hojo Thank you. Pokemon is just as real and just as beautiful of Jesus.

I have been reading about people who survived extreme circumstances. I am currently reading Man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl. I have found some valuable lessons in how to manage one's relationship with suffering. I started exploring difficult situations like these partially because I noticed discrepancies in how moral philosophy is taught in western countries. I noticed that if applied consistently, then most people would fall in line with Nazis and remain passive during a genocide. I therefore began challenging the moral frameworks with extreme scenarios that do not match western assumptions about love, meaning, purpose, morality, and existence. This included love in the darkest moments possible. I have found many interesting psychological insights that overlap with many areas of life including my relationship with death and human connection. Some of it made me cry due to imagery of a parent holding their dying child while singing a lullaby about how precious the child is regardless of circumstances. I found that these lessons in love and resilience are relevant for me when I navigate darkness largely alone. I have found secular frameworks that offer equivalent benefits to religion without requiring faith in a supernatural entity or Savior. Love is something that cannot be taken away even in death as the being lives forever in your mind and heart along with the warmth they gave when alive. It is something that gives a person the will to live even when all else is lost. This relates to an abusive situation I try to navigate with my family. I'm looking for psychological tools to prepare myself to potentially become split from an abusive family forever and find new meaning outside of the narratives they imposed on me. It is something I face largely alone and sometimes it contributes mental health problems by undermining my will to live. Much of my research focused on perpetrator psychology as in my previous thread, but the deeper problem is how perpetrators have impacted my relationship with meaning, life, purpose, love, and so forth. So what is the will to live? Personally, when my family was cruel to me, I felt my reality fall apart along with my identity. The identity crisis never fully resolved. Part of me knew that my family was feeding me lies as they had no real moral philosophy. I sought to ground myself in truth, believing that the truth is what I live for. If I reject truth, then I reject myself, making self love in a sense impossible if I must be erased and live a lie such as a false identity. I came to spirituality partially because of seeking the true self. Learning was a method of seeking truth while using epistemology as a survival strategy. It seems that the will to live is not merely a cost benefit analysis based on the pros and cons of staying alive. The consequentialist philosophy which western education is biased toward might guide someone toward this kind of assumption. There seems to be something prior to any rational or irrational cognitive layer that can be bypassed through love and without needing to argue with the content of the mind such as the exact right answer when struggling to find the words for experience. I seem to be leaning toward a detached, arational relationship with the mind, seeing that rationality or irrationality can be bypassed toward a deeper and more present being. The will to live does not seem to merely be hope that things will get better. It seems to be a core self that refuses to be erased. Is this ego survival? Or is it something different? Why does it refuse to be erased? It seems to desire unconditional love, both offering and receiving. Maybe it is the work of some spiritual force, or maybe it is the structure of human survival, or maybe it is both. I don't really know what the will to live is or why it operates in this way. It is like a creative force seeking expression no matter the content of experience. A relevant thread of this inquiry may be what is will. As for the will to live, what is it at it's core? It seems to be a creative force of love seeking truth to know itself. This seems to be at the heart of my will to live and why I haven't killed myself. What do you think?

I remember that there is a similar objection to the Republican party prioritizing compassion for a school shooter over all the kids murdered. My approach seems to be to treat offenders as objects of study in many cases, seeking insights into human psychology. Oftentimes this information can be used to inform prevention, thereby protecting future victims. Once I apply a framework that does not separate understanding, compassion, and prevention, it seems that from that point of view compassion for victims is inseparable from compassion for offenders. For example, we can look at institutional abuse with massive sex scandals. The psychological pattern in humans is common enough that entire churches can become overrun with child molesters. Finding the commonalities across such individuals by treating them as fundamentally human rather than monsters informs us on how to structure society to best address these vulnerabilities. I wish this information on prevention wasn't restricted so much. Some research should be restricted, but not this part. Leo maintains that it is less about prevention and ultimately about realizing you are God. I'm not there yet. Meanwhile, I maintain that most people who abuse children are motivated not by pedophilia, but by many other factors. This is why pedophilic framing can be misleading, granted that pedophiles target a disproportionate number of victims as is the case for preferential offenders, similar to sadistic offenders. Ted Bundy is an example of a preferential sadistic offender.

https://actualized.org/insights/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-feminism I have some positions around feminism that might add nuance to the bullet points Leo listed. I believe there are some complications that are commonly overlooked. In terms of agreement, all of it looks like common sense. However, there is one point "Women should be paid equally well for doing equal work. (But only if they truly do equal work.) This comes after "Women should not be discriminated against in the workplace." These two go hand in hand. One complication is that using methods to measure gender inequality such as wages is that if you account for the exact positions, then the pay gap largely disappears. The problem is that workplace discrimination also places men in positions that women should be able to reach, thus causing unequal pay due to position access. It can be a qualification problem or discrimination preventing a woman from gaining the opportunity to do equal work to a man and therefore remain in a lower pay range with both men and women, thereby seemingly erasing the gender pay gap. This is a problem with measuring the phenomenon through broad standards as it misses these scenarios. All other points of agreement seem straight forward with my main concern being the tension between equal work, equal pay, and ongoing discrimination preventing equal work and therefore creating a wage gap or not depending on the frame of reference in terms of measurement. Leo mentions later on that inequality cannot simplistically be measured, which ties into what I am describing as measurements can obscure inequality or make it appear more prevalent than it actually is. In terms of disagreement, I see more tension. Firstly, "men's objectification of women and men's psychology is merely bad patriarchal social conditioning." In this case, I partially agree but at the same time conditioning is a huge and possibly the main factor when it comes to objectification. For example, there is a long history of relational status being used to confer consent. This gives historical precedent to the entitlement worldview in which women were systematically treated like objects with no right to say no. Marital rape wasn't fully criminalized in the U.S. until 1993, meaning that many men alive in America today are still operating from a worldview in which it is not rape if you use force to make a woman in a relationship have sex with you. This is a strong sign that conditioning plays a huge role in objectification and may be the main factor in this male behavior. The part that gets more subtle is that although conditioning is important for describing male behavior, there is still an internal sexual attraction that has elements of objectification. This may be what Leo refers to with "merely bad patriarchal social conditioning." It is definitely a factor, but not the only factor. It can be greatly reduced, but likely not eliminated entirely. In terms of Women needing to be responsible for being attracted to abusive and corrupt men, this could be deeply problematic. When dealing with someone like a psychopath or a serial rapist who puts on a convincing persona with many layers of lies that are difficult to uncover while tailoring his psychological strategies to target a woman's vulnerabilities, it is hard to blame women for being attracted to corrupt and abusive men. In some cases women go on a date with a man who seems completely normal. They then go to his place where a gang then pulls a gun on her, kidnaps her, rapes her, and possibly kills her. I know women who have been in situations like these and it is hard to blame them for being tricked by organized criminals of sex traffickers who threaten to stick a coat hanger inside of you if you don't let them gang rape you. Sadistic offenders are the rarest typology in sex offenders, but it is also genuinely difficult to distinguish a seemingly normal man or woman from gang members involved in organized criminal activities planning to set you up and jump you. In terms of women being partially responsible, many organized criminals use women for specific roles such as targeting caregiving roles or making people feel at ease or lower their guard while they are kidnapping children to sell them to rapists while posing as relatives. There are documented cases and I have witnessed this behavior. Leo's frame of reference for women being attracted to abusers is probably that there are women who like "bad boys" but then end up getting treated badly. Given that frame of reference, it sounds like we might be screwed in terms of preventing abuse. There are bad boys and women who like bad boys, so I don't see what can be done to stop this dynamic from creating abusive situations. Maybe the only realistic way to stop this dynamic would be to generally raise the consciousness of mankind such as through education in relationships, boundaries, empathy, self-reflection, and other areas. Otherwise if there are bad boys and women who like bad boys, I don't see how else to stop abuse. Is it the case that telling women to take responsibility is about as helpful as telling men to take responsibility? Most low conscious actors tend to just deflect responsibility anyway even if it were true that they are not being responsible. What system could we create that would make men and women more likely to take responsibility rather than taking the path of least resistance which is typically to blame someone else? A point that jumps out at me is in regard to feminizing men. This has been a big problem in my life. Feminization partially happens when a son is fatherless. In my case, my father was a criminal and I grew up as an only boy with a mother and sisters. On top of that, my maleness was seen as threatening and the people around me were trying to mold me into being gender non-conforming. They made it seem that gayness was almost desirable. This was combined with perpetrator projection linked to assumptions about my nature as a male. I have now become deeply traumatized and conflicted about my sexuality while my father was a heterosexual male who engaged in actual predatory behavior. his gang also did have a woman in it though and she would participate in drug deals and sometimes blackmail people with rape accusations as a means of coercing them for money. Female criminals seem to commonly have male partners in crime as they like to place more distance between themselves and the direct act while manufacturing social situations more indirectly to set people up and manipulate them into vulnerable positions. There is a point about gender roles and whether or not they should be changed or equalized. I think gender roles probably should be changed such that men do some childcare as well. The logic is simply that it is no longer possible under the current economy for a man to provide for the household like the nuclear family model. A woman must work and often times the economy is such that couples are required to be financially codependent as housing is otherwise too expensive. If women must also work, then it seems unfair to say women should do equal work to men in the workplace, and then women should do more childcare than men. In this case, it seems like it makes sense for men and women to split childcare more equally if women are overburdened due to being expected to maintain traditional gender roles which are simply impossible depending on how the economic situation changes. If traditional gender roles were such that women were restricted from working outside the home, then it seems that society has already drifted very far from traditional gender roles anyway. It seems to me that gender roles are not merely a social construct, but rather they are largely an economic construct as well, beyond our individual attitudes which then adapt to the environment. As economic incentives change, they seem to change gender roles by necessity as women can't stay at home and be only caregivers in many cases now. Overall, I think the points seem mostly solid. I thought it would be worth adding my perspective to try to stress test some of these points and see what you think.

I haven't considered the possibility that I may have developed inappropriately high moral development. In my case I was about six years old when I had a developmental disruption leading to hyper empathy for victims of child sexual abuse. It was a consequence of having feelings like these myself and it created an imbalance in terms of where my moral standards were and where the rest of the kids at school were. The other kids would frequently sexually harass or assault others even though I recognized this behavior as a possible trigger for someone who was abused. On top of that, since my parents were criminals I felt the need to reject their way of life and develop an autonomous moral philosophy. I didn't believe in religion, but I simultaneously was drawn to it because it represented love and goodness while committing mass genocide in the name of "love thy neighbor." I was wrestling with questions like these from a young age and it may have been developmentally inappropriate. There was also a need to compensate for the failures of my parents when my younger siblings were endangered by them. Sometimes I go to boundary classes and apparently every boundary that isn't supposed to be crossed in childhood was crossed in my case. It can lead to parentification or some other disrupted developmental trajectory which creates a discrepancy between someone like me and everyone else around me. Autism adds to what makes me seem even more foreign. Are you able to think of examples of situations with inappropriately high moral development and how to manage them? One example I can think of involves children who are overly obedient to the point that it is abnormal. This is often achieved through threats and coercion. When police officers notice this at airports it is part of what signals to them that these kids are being trafficked by people posing as their relatives.

I think part of the asymmetry I noticed is that at first I was a normal kid just like all the other boys. After severe harm, I now had a reference point that nobody else had. I could no longer look at typical kid behavior the same way anymore. My reference point had made me more of an alien to everyone else who was fine with grabbing my private parts. Meanwhile, men who experience severe sexual harm seem to be more likely to act outwardly, though it is not always the case. Some become hyposexual rather than hypersexual as in my case. It seems that part of the problem is that I confused this reference point for severe harm for who I am. It seems the jovial nature of a child exists in the absence of this reference point. Once I label this a reference point rather than being enmeshed with it such that an entire identity is spun around this pain, it seems to allow self love to become easier. I'm not really sure who I am if not a reference point around which an identity forms, but I seem to be that which identifies with the point. There was an identity disruption caused by severe harm and the construction of an identity that was crushed before it could form is the project I never quite worked out. I never even managed to get a therapist who specializes in both autism and childhood sexual abuse, meaning I have been required to figure out all of this without professional help. The professionals are compromised by our terrible educational system in America.