I was thinking of this precise analogy, though perhaps you have mentioned it before. Perhaps that would be a better source of solutions, to ask women what finally led them to leave abusive men. I am sure that certain thoughts played a role, but I would think that emotions played a strong role, also.
I have read some of those stories. Many of those women say that the worst was right after they have left.
I couldn't come to any conclusion as to what finally drove them to leave, and many accounts seem to have considerable hindsight bias.
It appears that many may have left in a state of great distress and confusion, not actually thinking much, but just sort of closing their eyes, gritting their teeth and walking away, and that they felt there was no way to make sense either of the relationship with their husband, of their own role in it, and of whether to stay or to leave.
Musn't there be at root a personal component to this. Something that means there is something wrong, specifically with you, either your faculties or moral essence or both? A belief, that is, that you specifically cannot trust yourself because ______________.
"Because I a pagan." It's a double bind.
I think the question form and the generalized third person may be misleading.
I think it is part of the problem: Christian epistemology seems to be formulated in impersonalist conceptions - objectivist, neutral, as if presuming omniscience.
While in so-called Eastern traditions, they distinguish between knowing something theoretically (having book-knowledge of it) and knowing in terms of personal realization (the knowledge that comes from having thoroughly applied the book-knowledge), this difference is generally not acknowledged in Christianity.
"It doesn't matter what you think, know, or don't know, what you want or what you don't want, what you think you need or what you think you don't need. The only thing that matters is the truth, and the Bible presents it veritably."
But we're not talking about Christianity here per se, but about a set of double-bind epistemological stances and examples of moral reasoning that by general human terms seem absurd - it is just that these culminate in mainstream Christianity.
As I said earlier I think there must be a personal component, a reason it seems you cannot trust yourself. At least this was the case for me. I think we simply do decide not to listen to abusive voices at a certain point and at that point we stop demanding of ourselves that we must prove them wrong. We stop assuming we have the onus.
I suppose this is when the battered wife leaves.
From a neo-buddhist/hindu perspective, a soul believing it must accept an abusive thought is a soul damned as long as that thought is given power. This is hell. I wish I could present as intimidating and extensive an edifice - as the one Christianity does - so this might seem as authoritative and counteract the other, but I can't.
I've been thinking about worst case scenarios. A WCS isn't static or somehow a given - the more I read and think about things, the more I can think of different WCS.
For example, what is worse:
WCS1: "God will torture me for all eternity if I don't do what I find impossible and morally repugnant to do."
WCS2: " Thinking that I could become qualified to become friends with God, a running-through-the-meadows-eating-strawberries-together kind of friends, if I regularly follow a prescribed, doable practice - but not doing that practice."
I think the second one is actually worse.
Death threats - which eternal damnation is the ultimate form of - make the whole thing very hard to even relax enough to look at, I think.
Yes. The threat of eternal damnation just turns my mind into a blank for the most part.
