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But the reason, you see, the psychiatrist is afraid so often to get involved because he’s scared of losing his own sanity. And he knows, you know, that we walk on pretty thin ice so far as our sanity is concerned. And so: don’t muck around with that!
He’s seen too many of his colleagues who’ve worked for a long time in asylums who had to be quietly removed to another asylum. Happens all too readily. But it is the fear of insanity, more than anything, which makes one insane.
The fear of getting lost in all those strange corridors. You ever had bad dreams where you’re going through mazes, corridors, wondering whether you’ll ever get out? Whether anybody’ll ever find you?
Well, crazy people have an awful time with that corridor syndrome, because they are the corridors of the mind. Therefore, there is a certain protection of one’s sanity in being able to go into various states. And, above all, what I said a moment ago was that the thing that strikes me about psychiatry so forcibly is its lack of a metaphysical foundation in which, you see, it is simply imitating the fashionable point of view of scientism in the 19th and early 20th centuries to push across the point of view that this universe is trivial.
It is nothing but… whatever you want to say: nothing about something or other, you see? But definitely nothing but. Desperately important to get everything down to nothing but!
So that we can say: no mysteries left about it. It doesn’t matter. You know?
That’s a manifestation of hostility, you see? Of hatred of life lying under that. Because people were too afraid of letting themselves go to be able to admit that they could look at this world and say: “Wow, look at that!
Isn’t that marvelous?” Oh, you’re just ignorant. You think these things are marvelous, but shows you’re just not sophisticated. Because, you see, one of the games of aristocracy in Europe is always to look bored.
And you could put a whole history together of how people copy the attitudes of their superiors in order to get one-up on them. So to look bored was a mark of extreme aristocracy and great wisdom. The scientific world, which was a parvenu then, imitated a bored attitude to everything so as to gain its status, or involved in gaining its status.
And so they had no reason to be bored, they were just imitating being bored. The aristocrats had some reason to be bored. They had seen everything, they had had all pleasures.
They were blasé. So psychiatry, in turn, picked up the attitude: “it’s nothing but.” It’s just the libido or something, or it’s just mental mechanisms, or it’s just neurochemistry, or something like that. But one of the funniest things about LSD is that maybe it’s just neurochemistry, but boy, when you get inside, neurochemistry is something!
You see? you think: “Chemistry? Matter?
Good heavens, what of your nervous system?” It certainly is like a conducted tour inside the nervous system. You begin to realize that the nervous system is one of the whammiest things going. It’s fantastic!
And you can’t just dismiss it as a nervous system, some nasty porridge in a bottle. So then, this is the thing. I think that the crucial point that has to be developed before we can handle these substances intelligently is a medico-religious rapprochement.
And that means reforms on both sides. And they’re beginning to happen. You know, you’re probably aware that there’s a huge theological ferment going on in both Catholic and Protestant churches, and among the Jews.
The top’s blown off. There are occasional references to it in the paper. But my clergy friends are thinking things today that they couldn’t possibly have been thinking about ten years ago.
They’re as revolutionary as almost any group I know. You should talk to the local rector here in Sausalito. Or any of them; crowds of them all over the place.
Things are happening. And what is essentially happening is that they are consciously facing the fact that they need a kind of religion which is much more profound than anything they’ve hitherto been dealing with. And they are open to the dimension of religion which has been consistently ignored for centuries—which I’ll call the mystical dimension—of at last admitting that religion is not just believing certain ideas and following certain patterns of behavior, but must indeed involve a transformation of consciousness—not in the sense of an emotional blowout, like a revival meeting, but something which involves a crucial change in the sense of human identity.
There is, therefore, weaving together at this time, a whole pattern of movements. More and more it becomes (in the biological and ecological and physical sciences) clear that the individual is inseparable from the cosmos. That, after all, you are an expression of everything that’s going on.
You’re not just something that rattles around in this universe, that came into it as a stranger from somewhere else. And so that behind the facade of everyday consciousness, there are depths of oneself, just as truly one’s self as your own will, which altogether go beyond your individual organism. And that we can become aware of these depths, and as we do so, become delivered from being plagued by impermanence and death and temporary suffering.
The psychiatrist has to know this, too. Because if he sits in his office and has nothing in his belly—you know, that is (what I would call) the certainty of eternity, somewhere here—he’s really just as neurotic as the person he’s sitting with, and is putting on a mask “a-ha” attitude, looking wise, playing the scientific role, distance of objectivity, not to get involved with the patient, use all the little tricks, when he’s really wet behind the ears. You know, you learn a whole bag of tricks, even if you’ve been through a didactic analysis yourself.
You can just have a whole domain of trickery; therapeutic gambits with very little underneath. So I think that some psychiatrists should be ready to take their own medicine—I mean LSD—just for an introduction to the realization that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. The psychedelic explosion is a subject on which we need a great deal more careful thought and a great deal less emotion, because it’s a very touchy subject.
I’m going to talk this morning about the general background of this explosion so as to put it in some sort of perspective in time and space. And I have here a letter, a little card that I received, which says, “Dear Mr. Watts, are you enlightened? If you are, will you please help me?
I want to be enlightened also. Yours truly, Miss So-and-so, age fifteen.” And, as we know, the psychedelic explosion is something which is highly prevalent among young people, and is a quest very largely on the part of young people for something which civilization as we know it in the West seems to have failed to supply. Now, what’s the matter?
The matter is fundamentally one of religion. It is that standard brand religion in the Western world is a very dreary affair. That, in effect, what one gets from a church—of whatever denomination, be it Catholic to the right or Southern Baptist to the left—is almost entirely preoccupied with moralizing.
And when you study the subjects of sermons that are preached Sunday after Sunday, you read the newspapers and see what they’re talking about, you generally form the impression that what the churches in fact are, are sexual and family regulation societies. That’s what they’re actually doing. Because if you say someone is living in sin, it doesn’t usually mean that he is following the profession of a bookie or that he is conducting a business which is profoundly dishonest and selling things that are just frauds.
It means a person living in sin is living in an improper or unconventional sexual relationship. And when we speak of immorality, it really doesn’t refer much to cheating your customers, or being intensely cruel to someone, or running a factory which is fouling the rivers. Immorality is generally taken to mean sexual irregularity.
I remember when I was a boy in school that, every year, we had a particular preacher who came to us who preach the same sermon every year. And the subject was “Drink, gambling and immorality.” And immorality, of course, meant sexual irregularity. Well, in one way or another, with certain exceptions, the official churches of the West are saying to their congregations, Sunday after Sunday: “Dear people, you ought to be good,” with a rather limited meaning on what “good” is.
And I often wonder what my devout Episcopalian brethren mean when they say the general confession before the Holy Communion, and say that “we have sinned most grievously, and that the remembrance of these sins is grievous unto us and the burden of them is intolerable.” I wonder what they think of. I used to be an Episcopalian priest—I suppose I still am—and as a result of that I often used to hear confessions. And I know the sort of things people confessed, and I know, then, very well what their idea of sin was.
And in all this history—of not only Western Christianity, but to a very large extent Judaism as well—there has been an extraordinary and curious failure to emphasize the value of what we could call spiritual or religious experience. The Jewish people are very largely occupied with manners and morals and the ritual of obeying the Mosaic Law. The Christians are preoccupied with other things besides.
The Christians are very much preoccupied with what you believe in—whether, for example, you believe that Jesus Christ was in fact God, whether you believe that Jesus Christ was the only unique incarnation of God, whether you believe that the Godhead is a trinity, whether you believe that the sacrament of the altar (the bread and wine consecrated at the mass) are in fact the body and blood of Christ or only represented. And they have fought with each other. They have cut each other’s throats.
They have waged crusades—the Thirty Years’ War, all these things were tremendous fights about doctrinal questions; though there may, of course, have been some other motivations behind it. But at any rate, this was the subject matter that stirred people to fighting anger. And in all this history, the Catholic Church in particular, and other churches in lesser ways, have ignored, excluded, or actively persecuted people that we call mystics—that is to say, those who have had a change of consciousness which in effect induces the realization that you yourself are not a weird little creature that is a subject (and nothing more than that) of the heavenly king.
But the experience that you yourself are a direct manifestation of the ultimate reality, or what Paul Tillich called the ground of being, which was his particular (I would say) decontaminated phrase for the word “God.” Because the word “God,” in our culture, has all sorts of extremely unfortunate associations. When clergymen talk about “our heavenly father,” anybody under the age of thirty squirms. “Have you made Jesus Christ your personal savior?” All these questions, you see, have a kind of a creepy connotation to them.
The churches endeavor to attract young people by all sorts of devices, by having dances and parties and any kind of goings on, even happenings in the more advanced churches today. But young people know very well that the object of these happenings or socials (or whatever it is to attract young people) is honey to catch flies and that, finally, the minister is going to take you aside for a serious talk. And that serious talk is going to be about your morals, and about what is your relationship to your heavenly father?
Do you say your prayers? Do you read your Bible? You know, “your prayers” and “your Bible”—these are ghastly phrases!
So the thing that is singly missing—and it doesn’t matter whether it’s Catholic or whether it’s Protestant—is the central function of religion in changing consciousness. Because it’s quite apparent to everyone that something is wrong with ordinary consciousness. And what is wrong with ordinary consciousness is reflected in ever so many casual phrases that we are accustomed to use, such as “I like to forget myself.” “I want to get away from myself.” “I want to feel that my life has some meaning.” And I find that meaning, for example, in joining a movement, whether it be political, religious or whatever.
Something, then, is apparently wrong with one’s self if one’s self is something that you need to forget. If you feel (when you’re alone) hopelessly anxious and bored, what’s wrong with you? Why is your self so intolerable to you?
You can’t really well love your neighbor as yourself unless you have some love for yourself. If you don’t have any love for yourself, you don’t have any store or a fountain of love in you to give to your neighbors. And all this preaching of, “Be good, be good, be good, and love everybody,” everybody recognizes: yes, it would be wonderful if we could love our neighbors.
Great! But how do you do it when you hate yourself? And the church is never explained—except, as I say, with some very rare ministers and special rather far out types of church.
So there is (in the history of Christianity in particular) an exclusion—and there has been from the very earliest times—an exclusion of what is called gnosis. And this has a complex history, which I’ll go into a little because it’s quite important to our whole subject. There were, in the early history of Christianity, some subsects that were called Gnostics.
And they emphasized that the important thing was not belief, not so much even action, but knowledge. Could you attain to the actual knowledge of God, of the ultimate reality of the universe? And many of the Gnostic sects offered this knowledge.
The problem with many of these sects was that they felt that the knowledge of God was contingent upon the renunciation of the world—that is to say: upon asceticism, upon celibacy, upon trying to separate one’s spirit from involvement in body and in matter. And therefore, the Gnostics classified three types of human being who were respectively called hylic, from the Greek hylē, which means wood. The wooden people.
Next there were the psychic people, from the Greek psȳchḗ, meaning the soul. And then, finally, there was a pneumatic people from the Greek πνεῦμα, meaning the spirit; the breath. And only pneumatic people could really expect to attain salvation, because the lowest people were absorbed in their bodies, the middle people were absorbed in their egos, the psyche, but the superior people were absorbed in the spirit.
And they were aloof from all material concerns. And there were two kinds of pneumatic people according to the sect of Gnosticism to which you belonged. On the one hand, there were (as I have said) the very, very spiritual people who tried to divorce their attention from all matters of the flesh.
But there were the other people who said that the flesh is unreal, and therefore what you do in the flesh simply doesn’t matter. And they were Libertines. And the official church disapproved of both of them—and rightly, in a way, because they said of the people who were the ascetics that they had missed the central point of Christianity, which is the doctrine of the incarnation: that in the person of Jesus Christ God had become man, and the spirit had adopted the flesh.
And therefore, a reasonable, fleshly existence was quite proper. And that remains, to this day, a tenet not only of Judaism, which holds it very strongly, but of Orthodox Catholicism. However much Catholicism may deny this in practice, it has to adhere to it in theory.
And Jews, especially, believe that the material world is the positive creation of God, and therefore is good and is to be enjoyed thoroughly. And that’s why Jewish food is, on the whole, very good in this country and better than Christian food. A good Jewish delicatessen has a kind of lip-smacking, robust attitude to eating.
And, you know, is it kosher? Jews will even go so far as to admit that God created the principle of evil. Because it says in the book of the Prophet Isaiah, in the seventh verse, in the forty-fifth chapter: “I am the Lord and there is none else.
I form the light and create the darkness. I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things.” And so Hebrews believe that God put into the heart of Adam something called the yetzer hara, which is the spirit of waywardness, which I translate as the element of irreducible rascality that is involved in every human being.
But it’s only a little bit. It’s like a touch of salt in a stew. And you don’t, of course, put salt through the whole stew; you just put a pinch.
And God put a pinch of waywardness, of disobedience, of unpredictability (and therefore evil) in the heart of Adam. And that is the reason why Jews have a very subtle, itchy sense of humor: they recognize this. Christianity, on the whole, with certain exceptions, is devoid of humor.
Although man like G. K. Chesterton is a humorous Christian, but they’re very rare. Whereas a Jew can talk to God with a certain kind of banter, and you see that in a play like The Fiddler on the Roof. And you see it throughout the literature of Hasidism, which is full of very funny stories about spiritual things.
And a Jew can talk back to God in a kind of a friendly way, but a Christian finds that difficult. A Christian is too impressed. And it’s very strange how Jews have escaped from this, since they are, in a way, responsible for the heart of the trouble about religion in the West, which is that they foisted upon themselves and upon all of us a model of God which is patterned after the great tyrant kings of the ancient Near East: after David, after the Pharaohs of Egypt, after the great law-givers like Hammurabi, of the ancient world of the Tigris Euphrates civilizations—and particularly even the second Isaiah, who wrote the book of the Prophet Isaiah from chapter forty onwards.
He was very beholden to the then Cyrus of Persia, who invaded the Babylonian Empire and set the Jews free. And so this word, Cyrus, is the Greek kyrios, which means the lord, the king—as in the prayer Kyrie Eleison: “Lord have mercy upon us.” And the title of the Emperor of Persia in those days was the King of Kings. And this title was adopted through Isaiah as the title of the god of the Hebrews: The King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.
And so the model, the conception, of God under which all these religions have operated is one that is essentially monarchical and political. And so the human being is taught to view himself as the subject of this independent, extraterrestrial spiritual prince who is definitely authoritarian, definitely paternalistic. You were, therefore—according to both Jewish and Christian theology—brought into being by a fiat of the divine will out of pure nothingness.
And you’d better watch your step, because if you don’t accord with the divine will, if you displease this ruler, you can be not only instantly annihilated, but the much more fearsome possibility: you can be condemned to the celestial dungeons for ever and ever and ever. And so you must cultivate spiritual obedience and humility by considering yourself a miserable worm; a nothing whose entire existence is contingent upon the divine pleasure. And you must never, by any means, commit the final ultimate blasphemy of saying, “I am God.” They say in Arabic: an al haqq.
It’s the word of the Sufis, the Islamic mystics in Persia, which spread right through the Islamic world. And they were always being persecuted and put to death and tortured because of an al haqq: “I am Allah.” Jesus, you see, was such a heretic. From the standpoint of Judaism, when Jesus claimed that he was one with God—“I and the Father are one.
Before Abraham was, I am. I am the way, the truth and the life. I am the resurrection and the life”—this was the reason why he was crucified, really.
He outraged Jewish piety. And you can see that Jesus is a case of an individual who had a very profound mystical experience and was hard put to it as to how to express that experience in the terms of contemporary Jewish theology. He more or less concentrated—I mean, apparently, if you examine and study the gospels very closely—he admitted that he really was one with the Father to a select circle of disciples.
What he said in public was that he was the son of man. And this title meant the supreme prophet. The expression “son of,” in Hebrew, means “of the nature of.” When you call—in modern slang, you call someone a “son of a bitch,” that means they behave like a bitch.
And so in Hebrew or in Arabic you have such expressions as ibn elkalb, which means “son of a dog,” ibn ya homaar means “son of a donkey.” It means you’re a dog, you’re a donkey. But “son of” means “like.” And so Jesus calling himself either the son of God or the son of man—he used both expressions—means: the one who is of divine nature (“son of God”), and “son of man” means the essentially human. The Man.
The The second Adam. The regenerate Adam. But he had a terrible time, you see, expressing these ideas.
Because if you are brought up in a culture where the prevailing cosmology is monarchical, and you have the mystical experience, you are very liable to make claims of being divine that you imagine are peculiar to yourself. You have had this experience, and because God is conceived as a commander and a ruler, you are apt to think that you (in some sense), yourself, are now the commander and the ruler of people and of the whole domain of nature. And you are not apt—as would be the case in India—you are not apt to see that everybody else is in the same situation, whether they know it or whether they don’t.
So because, then, of the definitely imperialistic and royal and monarchical nature of the conception of God which has come to us through Judaism and Christianity, mysticism has always been suspect for the simple reason that it sounds as if it were going to create democracy in the kingdom of heaven. And that, of course, is treachery, insubordination, subversion. Democracy in the kingdom of heaven cannot be tolerated.
And this presents for people living in the United States a very peculiar problem. Because this country is politically a republic. And as a loyal American citizen, you have to curse and swear and say that you believe the republic to be the best form of government.
And yet, an enormous number of Americans have believed and still do believe (or half believe) that the universe is a monarchy. And if the court of heaven is a monarchy, then obviously it’s the best form of government. And how can you then be a member of a republic without serious inner contradictions?
And this lies at the root of the reason why, in the United States, there is a very serious conflict between church and state—or rather, I would say not so much a conflict as a mix-up—so that we have our laws and our law enforcement officers enforcing commandments which are essentially ecclesiastical. And herein lies one of the great roots of the psychedelic problem. Consider some other laws which throw a great deal of light on this.
Let’s take the situation of a conscientious objector. Now, until not so long ago, it was a necessity to qualify as a conscientious objector that you stated that you believed in a supreme being, and therefore implied that you had received from the supreme being a commandment that you were not to fight in war or to kill. And this was taken as an absolute.
You had (to qualify as a conscientious objector) to say that the commandment “thou shalt not kill” means you must not under any circumstances kill another person. And so they always asked you, “What if a German soldier raped your mother and cut her throat?” You see? Would you kill under those circumstances or wouldn’t you?
Now, the significance of this law—it’s been altered recently—but the significance of it is this: that you are saying that you have a conscience against killing, or fighting in a war, because you have received orders from a higher echelon of command than the president of the United State—namely, from the Lord God. And this was always the test until quite recently, because there had been a lot of Buddhists around and people like that who don’t believe in a monarchical God, but do believe in conscientious objection. They could not say that they believed in a supreme being.
Although it’s highly possible that the intention of the law in employing the words “supreme being” was to be vague. The people who wrote this law, they didn’t know what to say. And so they just used the vaguest phrase they could think of instead of saying “God” or something like that.
They said supreme being. A supreme being. There’s a subtle difference between “supreme being” and “a supreme being.” Like between “religion” and “a religion,” “God” and “a God.” Is there a God?
Is there God? These are two really fundamentally different questions. But that’s the situation.
And therefore, because in the laws of the United States and England and many other Western countries, and in the fundamental attitudes of Western religion, there is this sense of God as the monarch, there has been going on for centuries an insidious and perpetual persecution of the rival religions. Even though we say that everybody in this country is given religious liberty, that is not true. You do not really have religious liberty if you subscribe to the heretical doctrine that the universe is not a political state, but instead an organism; a living organism in which, just as all the extremities and differentiated features of the physical body are expressions of the whole body.
A finger, you see, isn’t just part of the body, because it’s not like an automotive part. If you lose a finger, you can’t just screw on a new one—although they’re trying to do that. They’re trying to put in hearts and grafting on this, that, and the other.
But it’s terribly difficult to do. Because, you see, the organism rejects alien parts. And so you have to give it drugs so that it won’t reject those alien parts.
But at the same time, those drugs make it unable to reject all sorts of bacteria that it normally would reject. And therefore, you have to keep a person with a heart graft in an absolutely sterile environment because he won’t be able to resist infection. But it is a fallacy, you see, that the human being has parts like a car.
Because a human being is not a mechanism, a human being is an organism. And an organism functions quite differently from a mechanism. An organism functions in such a way that every part is a complete expression of the whole.
And this, of course, is what Jesus was trying to say when he said to his disciples, “I am the vine and you are the branches.” When he put forward the idea that “you all belong to my body.” The image of the body and the image of the vine is an organic image as distinct from a political image. So our problem, then, is that throughout the history of the West, all those who belong to the organic religion, or who felt the organic religion, have been persecuted. You see, let’s take the case of the mystical revolution that began with roughly Meister Eckhart in Germany.
It began in the 13th century, but achieved its maximum force in the early 15th century, and eventually became the philosophy of nature as exemplified, say, by Goethe. But there started out, in Germany, a movement that included people like Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbroeck, the Brothers of the Free Spirit, Angelus Silesius—all these people writing from a mystical point of view, and they were very heavily persecuted. Some got by; Ruysbroeck got by.
Tauler barely got by. But Eckhart was condemned. And all for the reason that they experienced oneness or identity with God.
Eckhart said, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye as with which God sees me. The love with which I love God is the love with which God loves me.” And Angelus Silesius went much further than that. He said, “If I were to die, God would no longer live.
Because my eye and God’s eye are one eye.” Just as the Sufis in Islam said, “As there is no deity but Allah, so there is no [heity ???] but Allah”—that is to say: no selfness. So all selfness, or I-ness, is the I-ness of Allah.
It’s the same as the Upanishadic saying tat tvam asi: “you’re it.” “That thou art.” So this mystical movement in Germany flowered into various types of religiousness that spread to England and from England to the United States. Let’s take George Fox and the Quakers. The Quakers were regarded in their early days as the most dangerous subversives.
They, for example, refused to remove their hats in church or in court. They refused to use titles. And so, in Quaker speech, I would always be just Alan Watts.
No Mister, no Doctor, no nothing. Just Alan Watts. And it’s curious, incidentally, how this form of address has become prevalent today; that very many people write letters now, not “Dear Mr. Watts,” but “Dear Alan Watts”—or whoever it may be; it’s not just if you’re a celebrity.
It’s a very common form of address now. The Quakers also, of course, refused to take oaths because of Jesus saying: “Do not swear by anything. Just let your communication be ‘yes, yes’ or ‘no, no.’ For what is more than this cometh of evil?” They wouldn’t fight.
They wouldn’t join armies. And they even felt that scripture was not as holy as the Bible is usually held out to be. Because they said that there’s something else that has a higher authority in scripture, which is the inner light.
As the gospel of St. John describes it: “The true light which enlightens every man that comes into the world.” And if you just put your mind back into the 17th century and consider that, in those days, the theology of the Christian churches—whether Catholic or Protestant—had for people living in that time the same kind of authority and the same kind of respectability that is today enjoyed by great scientists. Let’s say you ask a question to the professor of pharmacology at the University of California; the professor of pathology. This is the last word.
And on the advice of the professors of medicine, laws will be made preventing you from ingesting certain substances, or from refusing to be cured in certain ways, from having certain operations or injections, and so on. The scientist today is priest. And his vestments, instead of being the old fashioned chasuble or round collar, he wears a white coat and a stethoscope ’round his neck.
Boy, is that a symbol of office! And so those people, those scientists, you see, we take very seriously. In exactly the same way, people living in the 17th century took the theologians very seriously indeed.
because the theologians knew what the answers were. They knew how the world was constructed and what was the proper way to behave. And so when people like the Quakers—and there were other people who came out of German mysticism along with them: the Anabaptists who were against Baptism because they felt that salvation didn’t depend on a silly ritual of pouring water on someone and muttering a mumbo jumbo, there were the Levelers.
All sorts of sects flourished in the 17th century and were regarded just as, today, hippies and freaks of that kind are regarded: as extremely dangerous, subversive people upsetting the morals of society. Now look what happened. Look what the Quakers have become.
Nothing is more respectable than the Pennsylvania Quaker. A veritable pillar of society! But the laws of the United States about religious freedom were designed for just such people as Quakers.
They were individualists, they were far out. And yet, today, when you claim in court that you object conscientiously to war, or that you have some peculiar religion with very odd sacraments, they say to you, “What church do you belong to that authorizes this? How well established is it?
How many members does it have? Can you prove that you were brought up by your parents in this way of life?” Because these are the tests of whether your grounds for claiming that you are doing a thing as a matter of religious conscience, this is the test for whether you’re valid. And thus you’re in a frightful double bind.
Because if you are accused in court of what is generally regarded to be a heinous felony, you know your chances of getting a light sentence are much better if you take a guilty attitude. You plead guilty. You say, “I’m so sorry.
It was a grievous mistake. I didn’t mean to do it. Please forgive me, dear God!” You know your chances are better.
But if you say, “I insist that I did this as a religious act. It is in accord with my conscience and I am not guilty,” the judge will say: “Your attitude is truculent.” And he won’t like you. And you’re liable to get a more severe sentence.
But this story is as old as the hills. It’s been going on and on, and we never learn from history. We do the same things over and over again.