Article: Domestic Violence in the IFB Church Movement

Please read the article here.

"Abuse is physical, sexual, emotional, economic or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person. This includes any behaviors that frighten, intimidate, terrorize, manipulate, hurt, humiliate, blame, injure or wound someone."

This goes on in IFB circles ALL the time. I saw it go on in friends' household when I was a child. I watched it go on at the Baptist college I attended. I watched college friends go through it. I experienced it personally in at least one major friendship in the past. People I hold very dear have gone through so much abuse at the hands of fundamentalism.

Article: I Love You and You are an Abomination

I can sympathize with this man's words. The "love" often proffered by friends and family can be deeply hurtful (and annoying). Read here.

Article: Servanthood & Suffering v Equality & Justice

When a Gospel of Servanthood and Suffering Stands in the Way of Equality and Justice

When you teach people to live their lives focused on what they will get in the next life, you can lead them into doing all kinds of things. Happiness awaits in the next life, but only if they are willing to suffer greatly in this one. Why try to get ahead in life? Why try to find happiness and enjoy yourself? Nothing here on earth matters, so why bother? This is a very sad state of affairs. There is much here on earth, in the every day things we experience, that is beautiful and heavenly. The only purpose to having people stay focused on the next world is so they will more readily forget what their lives are here on earth. Makes it very easy to get good, honest people to work themselves to death for a cause, stay dirt poor and give to an institution (which may or may not use those funds for the true good of their fellow humans [I'm not speaking against charity, rather the abuse of it that has gone on for centuries in the Catholic church and others]), and submit themselves to leadership that will tell them they are filthy and worthless without Christ and should therefore gladly give all they have so they might receive rewards in the next life.

Mississippi High School Forces Fundie Messages on Students

Insanity. Read the story here.
Can I say total disregard for the law? Kidnapping teenagers was one of the stupidest things they could have done. Teenagers have cameras, phones, ipods, and who knows what else. Did they honestly think it wouldn't get out? I suppose that the most likely scenario is that they thought the risk (jail and fines) was worth getting the name of Jesus out to the teenagers. That's sad.

Looking Back & Moving Forward

If you read the earliest posts on this blog, you'll quickly realize there was a time when I practically hated all things religious and many things spiritual. I was angry and bitter after spending the first 20 or so years of my life in fundamental Christianity. The day the blindfold came off, I began realizing the many things I had learned, seen, been part of, and had done to me that were wrong. The lies, the imposed guilt, the many options I should have had but didn’t because of my upbringing. The many evils done in the name of my former religion that had been swept under the rug by fellow Christians. So very many things crossed my mind and fueled my anger.

As I look back, I realize my anger was one of the five steps of loss and grief. The five stages are denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (I pulled my list and quote from this site). They don’t necessarily occur in a specific order and you can move through them several times. I’m going to list the stages in the order that I experienced them.

Before I officially renounced my faith, I went through the first stage of denial and isolation.

I Used to Believe This Stuff... Ugh

These are things I was raised to believe as an Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB). My parents may or may not have taught me these things, but they were most certainly taught or inferred by church, school, college, and fellow IFB.

• Better use the right version of the Bible, KJV to be specific. Avoid all music that makes you want to move, so just go for old hymns and you’ll be safe.

• Spank your children, don’t trust them, because they are born with a horrible sin nature and are really little monsters bound for Hell.

Article: Religious Trauma Syndrome

Religious Trauma Syndrome: How Some Organized Religion Leads to Mental Health Problems
Posted on March 26, 2013 by Valerie Tarico

At age sixteen I began what would be a four year struggle with bulimia. When the symptoms started, I turned in desperation to adults who knew more than I did about how to stop shameful behavior—my Bible study leader and a visiting youth minister. “If you ask anything in faith, believing,” they said. “It will be done.” I knew they were quoting the Word of God. We prayed together, and I went home confident that God had heard my prayers.

But my horrible compulsions didn’t go away. By the fall of my sophomore year in college, I was desperate and depressed enough that I made a suicide attempt. The problem wasn’t just the bulimia. I was convinced by then that I was a complete spiritual failure. My college counseling department had offered to get me real help (which they later did). But to my mind, at that point, such help couldn’t fix the core problem: I was a failure in the eyes of God. It would be years before I understood that my inability to heal bulimia through the mechanisms offered by biblical Christianity was not a function of my own spiritual deficiency but deficiencies in Evangelical religion itself.

Dr. Marlene Winell is a human development consultant in the San Francisco Area. She is also the daughter of Pentecostal missionaries. This combination has given her work an unusual focus. For the past twenty years she has counseled men and women in recovery from various forms of fundamentalist religion including the Assemblies of God denomination in which she was raised. Winell is the author of Leaving the Fold – A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion, written during her years of private practice in psychology. Over the years, Winell has provided assistance to clients whose religious experiences were even more damaging than mine. Some of them are people whose psychological symptoms weren’t just exacerbated by their religion, but actually caused by it.

A Pastor on Gay Rights

Please continue here to see someone from the religious community speak on gay rights.

Finally! Someone who gets it! The current religious/conservative speech about gay rights is in fact similar to that group's speech on racial segregation. And it's sickening. So thankful a pastor was willing to call it like it is!

The Wild and Wacky

The original is posted here, but for convenience I'll copy paste the content here:

Test Your Knowledge of Wild, Weird, and Outright Wacky American Religious Beliefs
Posted on October 20, 2012 Some people in other countries worshipflying monkeys, or magical big breasted dancers, or Prince Phillip. That’s just weird, right?
Maybe. But, before you go all noblesse oblige or manifest destiny or white man’s burden or otherwise smug, you might want to take a look at what one of the Bible writers called “the plank in your own eye.” Why are you looking at what’s in your brother’s eye, he said (to paraphrase), when you have gunk in your own? In other words, a little self-examination might be the first order of business.
So, forget for a moment about those fantastical creatures above the altars in “exotic” places.  How well do you know what your neighbors believe? How about the church to which your parents are quietly tithing away your inheritance? For that matter, how about the actual details of the creed to which you yourself give a nod?
All of the following beliefs can be found in your own back yard, still today. They have been long taught by religions that either are considered part of the Abrahamic mainstream or are home grown, made in the U.S.A., produced here and exported. Some of these beliefs are ensconced in sacred texts. Others are simply traditional. All, at one time or another, have had the sanction of the highest church authorities, and most still do.
How many of them can you match up with a familiar religious tradition? (The answers are at the bottom.)

Moving On

I haven't written much lately (obvious, I know). Truth be told, there hasn't been much to say. People and their religions are still as twisted as ever, but for the moment I am content in knowing I have untwisted those webs enough to escape, so I'm enjoying my freedom.
I've continued to read up on all sorts of worldviews, philosophies  religions, etc. and have enjoyed learning from each of them. The more I read the more I realize that nobody/nothing has it "right." I've also learned that there doesn't have to be a "right" and "wrong" in life. Well, at least not so clear-cut as religious books and set ideologies teach people. Life may be more simple in a world of clearly defined black and white, because it certainly takes out a lot of guesswork and pondering on the part of the individual. Reality, however, lives far more frequently in the nebulous realm of the gray area - somewhere between black and white. I once clung to the illustrations of light and darkness, found it was easier if I could sort the world into black or white. Now I see the world on a sliding scale, with much of reality lying somewhere in the middle... and I'm cool with that.
Anyway.
I still consider myself to be spiritual but not religious. I'm still enormously happy and content with my freedom from religion. I've gone through trials and pain, but instead of looking up for help I've pulled myself through and come out stronger for it. In short, I'm not looking for a new religion or a new set of rules, and I'm most certainly not going back to Christianity. I'm moving forward in life with no desire to look back.
As the writing bug bites me I'll be on here writing. There are some old topics I'd like to address further at some point. Until then, tootles.