A Fishy Tale

Apropos of Bithika O’Dwyer, please enjoy “A Fishy Tale” — a short, funny documentary about Doctor Who in the 1960s. Full title: “A Fishy Tale: Making The Underwater Menace.” Memorable quotes:

Compassion: The Mother of all Balms (MOAB)

Here in the U.S., there’s been a lot of excitement about a new kind of bomb that was dropped in a remote region of Afghanistan. Though I cut the cord years ago, I still watch cable news on the Net, and it seems that each channel has its own retired general burbling exuberantly about this “Mother of all Bombs.” The bomb weighs 21,000 pounds, and the generals only slightly less. 😉

Maybe it’s just me, but in a wounded world I can’t get too excited about greater destructive power. I tend to space out and think up alternative meanings for the acronym. In one of those bread and cheese places, it could stand for “Muenster on a Baguette.” (Hold the thirty-weight!) Then it hit me that in a world filled with suffering, compassion is the “Mother of all Balms.”

Bithika O’Dwyer: A Tale of Two Psyches

Making sense of the psychological split which some apostates appear to exhibit

As discussed previously, people often write detailed accounts of their lives while with a spiritual group. These accounts tend to reflect a thinking, feeling individual who is living out their spiritual choices, consciously reaffirming those choices day after day, year after year. But later, after exiting the spiritual group, the same individual may supply a “captivity narrative” in connection with participation in a so-called “ex-cult support group.” The captivity narrative may seem contrived, formulaic, and scripted in comparison to the same person’s prior narrative describing spiritual experiences with uniqueness, and in detail.

This phenomenon suggests a psychological split in someone who was once a spiritual seeker, but who later adopts a hard apostate stance. Comparing their written statements over a period of decades, we may find two mutually exclusive world views and contradictory sets of alleged facts, as if the accounts were written by two different people. Hence, “a tale of two psyches.” Such is the case with Bithika O’Dwyer (a.k.a. Bithika Fuschia Eve O’Dwyer), whose public apostatizing seems intended to provoke controversy and raise matters of public concern. I respond to those matters here and elsewhere, and with as much sympathy as I can muster (though not always as much as I should like).

Not that her case is unique. Apostates sometimes make a great show of breaking with their former faith group by posting lewd or hateful material on the Internet. Such “testimonials” are then collated and used as part of a degradation ceremony belittling spiritual groups and portraying them negatively to the general public. This technique is used by anti-cult groups to create a set of “alternative facts” about spiritual groups running counter to the facts established by bonafide scholars of religion and by spiritual practitioners themselves. The intent is to suppress, harass, limit the civil rights of, and discourage participation in minority faith groups.