Addiction to Culture, In Need of Redemption

This is crucial to get hold of:

WE ARE CULTURAL ADDICTS AND WE CANNOT BREAK THIS ADDICTION ALONE.

Finally seeing this truth really "getting it" that we are addicted to the very culture and the very way in which we live is the beginning of true freedom.

When we "wake up" to the fact that we have been distorted as human beings by the culture; that we have been "drugged" on a chemical which is culture, and are very much like the addict who is hooked on alcohol, then we see the need for a community whose narrative is wholly different from that in which we have been intoxicated. We have to "detox" from the culture of individualism and violence.

When we finally see that we are addicted to a culture of comfort, security, competition, praise, staying busy, controlling people, being in shallow relationships, having too much or too little money, worrying, seeing ourselves as superior or inferior to others that a vast assortment of sensations, behaviors, substances and activities keep us disconnected from our real feelings and needs and disconnected from God we can then unmask the false nature of this cultural system and see that it can never give us what we long for. We will be able to see at last how much we have depended on this false system, and how utterly helpless we are to break our dependence and to heal ourselves.

Then, together with every alcoholic or drug addict who has hit bottom and cried out for help, we too will cry out for a Saviour and for a faithful community to save us from our cultural addiction. At this point, humbled and ready to receive mercy and healing love, we see the truth and commit ourselves to becoming recovering cultural addicts and to being used by God in whatever ways God chooses.

See Flash Video of part of my conversation with Gordon Cosby, where he covers some of this , referring to the latest thinking of theirs on the way their support groups work