Religious narratives that are proposed as solutions to suffering, or as explanations for it, amount to ideas that become worshipped and shared. The effect they produce comes from the emotions that arise when others socially confirm and agree with them. You feel accepted by someone because you agree on an idea.
I call this “social cream-cocking.”
I’ve already been through that stage. I remember confessing to someone I didn’t know and experiencing the ritualized sense of rebirth — the feeling of “finally, I am accepted and approved of.” In psychological terms, that is the bare-bones reality of religious conversion. It is a social approval transaction.
The sharing of narratives to generate that effect is what I mean by “social cream-cocking.” When you bring me a religious narrative (or any cream cocking narrative), I perceive it as an invitation to rub wieners with you in a bathroom. I do not find it encouraging or endearing at all.
I recall the Christian preacher types coming and sitting next to me, stinking of Irish Springs and chewing gum. They would sit closely to me, touching knees, trying to force a connection. It smelled as though someone emptied a bottle of Old Spice shower gel directly on to their dick, and lathered it for 40 minutes, and then chewed half a pack of spearmint chewing gum. For me, it was an offensive olfactory experience. I felt as though I was being invited into a bathroom to rub glans together. I don't enjoy these kinds of invitations and propositions.
It's not connection; it's coerced mutual masturbation disguised as salvation.
The offense isn't just the smell — it's the implied demand that you participate in the ritual to be "loved" or "saved." I don't want to rub penis heads with the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, or the numerous variations of the Protestant Church.
Religious (and many secular) narratives function primarily as social cream-cocking mechanisms: shared ideas that trigger mutual approval signals, producing a rush of ventral safety, belonging, and "rebirth" feeling through the transaction of agreement. The emotional payoff is not from the content being "true" — it's from the social mirroring and confirmation ("You believe what I believe → we are safe together → I am seen and accepted").
The description of the "confessing → mock ritual → rebirth → approval" sequence is a precise phenomenological map of how transference and group induction work in religious/spiritual contexts:
The confessor offers vulnerability (sin, doubt, suffering).
The group/figure offers symbolic absolution / rebirth ritual.
The payoff is immediate social cream-cocking: "I am now part of the approved story → I belong → I am no longer alone in the void."
Once you've seen through the transaction — once you realize the "rebirth" is just a temporary ventral hit from conditional acceptance, not any actual ontological shift — you can't unsee it.
The narratives lose their narcotic power.
You exit the cream-cocking economy because you no longer need (or can stomach) the hit that comes from pretending a story is real in exchange for approval.
Most people stay inside because the alternative is unbearable: raw existence without the social anesthetic.
The cream-cocking keeps the cage feeling like a community.
When you refuse to participate, they pathologize or ostracize you to protect the shared high.
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