ajm51987

I once ran into the pastors wife at the local supermarket!

Her: Gee this store is big

Us: Uh yeah heh heh

Her: Oh heres the bread! ::runs off::

I was lucky that time, all i can say is you just have to tell them your minds made up, when you encounter them.

keyser_soze

My wife is a regular church-goer and as such for her singing, teaching, etc....I have gotten to know many of them, and it is a large church. They actively run from me now. I cannot but feel good about it. It's the willingnes to talk about it that scares them more than anything. But if you run up against the fundies with the glassy stare and the kind of neurotic feel about them....Just leave them alone. They are dangerous.

Greg2003

Extremely good advice. These are the borderline, if not full blown, mentally ill.

keyser_soze

The thing is it's generally cyclical in nature. I know soooo many mentally ill people. They get better for a while, then relapse, at this time they are so open to anything that offers to remove that responsibility and control. These are the same people who join cults, and the like. They need a crutch so bad, that the biggest crutch they find is the one they latch onto. They are to be pitied. Most fundamentalists fall into this group. It is the same everytime, a willingness to set aside their rationale and to take up a cause of some kind. Some are extreme, the kind you know have a feverish hard on to be martyred for SOMETHING, doesn't matter what. You can see it, the shaky, crazed feel of them. I generally recommend a short "stay" in a behavioural unit for that type. Get them situated on the right meds, and they can usually be functional in the real world. Otherwise, you might see them in a few years on the streets wearing signs that say "the end is near". Muttering to themselves, and filthy. To me religiosity is a symptomology of a diseased mind. At least my wife is honest about it, she goes because she always has, and she knows the bible has problems, but she goes anyway. I tell her not to question it, because if you read it too closely, with a clear head, you will despise it.

Carrie

Actually my old church is a cult, even according to other Fundie churches. And I did notice some goofy things about a lot of the people in my church. Even me - I used to be the type to try pyramid schemes, since I was very gullible and trusting and naive. And a lot of the people in my church were into weird things like super strict diets - like no cooked food, or only foods that were okay for their blood type, or they'd be vegetarians for a while. Many joined Mary Kay and bought all the inventory and never tried to sell it. Some found other such things to sell, like cleaning products or vitamins. I think that went along with their evangelistic ways. Some believed in acupuncture because they thought their yin and yang could be balanced, even though those ideas didn't fit in with their Christian beliefs. And others were super paranoid about allergies and never went outside. For a while it was like half the church was just going nutso.

Thankfully my husband is one of the more normal ones. I think he too just goes because it's all he knows and doesn't know what else to believe. And he likes friendships. But I do think organized religion is a kind of crutch. I think people who latch on to religions like this are looking for someone to tell them what to believe, and they like something "solid" like that to lean on and hold them up. They don't want to live in uncertainty, not sure about what is true. As for me, I'm finally okay with just not knowing.

keyser_soze

Carrie, I'd be most interested in what let you out of that cycle. I've also noticed the trend to jump onto things like get rich quick stuff, and alternative lifestyles...as I noted. But rarely have I seen people leave such a cycle without supervision and medication. What allowed you to finally step aside and see yourself externally?

Boro Nut

Oi! Watch where you're going stupid atheist cunt!

Boro Nut

Carrie

Keyser Soze,

Hey is that name after the guy Kevin Spacey played in The Usual Suspects? In that case, I think it would spelled “Kaiser Sozay.” That was one great movie.

Anyway, what let me out of the cycle without meds or supervision? Hmm, well, it’s been sort of a long process of de-converting myself over several years. I was a Fundie for 6
years, and the last 3 were not very faithful ones.

I never saw myself externally really. I didn’t look at myself and think, “man what an idiot I am to believe this stuff.” I thought it was all true all along, but I thought I was the one with the problem. I just hated the whole thing, and I felt bad for hating it. I felt evil.

It started with me not liking my roommate. My church advised that Christians only live with other Christians. So when I got out of college, there was only one other girl in my church who needed a roommate, and I couldn’t stand her. But we ended up being
roomies anyway. And I couldn’t help hating her. I knew I was supposed to love her and all that, but it felt impossible, no matter how much I tried. (She was super annoying and weird). We never should have roomed together. I think the Christian idea of loving everyone is nice, but it’s not realistic. Sometimes it’s impossible, and the best you can do is try to tolerate or avoid the person. (I have a very bad temper, and when my buttons are
pushed, it feels impossible to control myself. So I don’t like being around people who really get on my nerves, because they make me feel like I’m going to lose it and explode). Besides, you can’t be friends with everyone. And my church wanted us to make friends with the whole church of 120 people. So you’d end up hanging out with all these people who weren’t really your friends, and didn’t have time to get close to the people you really wanted to hang out with.

Everyone was also just so busy doing Christian stuff. It was hard to get shit done, or have time for fun and rest. Of course, church stuff was supposed to be fun, but it wasn’t fun for me. There was church on Wed. and Sunday, a meeting with a mentoring partner once a week, and usually something else going on during the week too. So I went to church things about 4 times a week. Plus you were supposed to share your faith and study the Bible with people, and that took time. And you were supposed to pray and read your Bible every day. If you were a good Christian with a good heart for God, you were supposed to LIKE doing all this stuff. It was the “quiet times” (times spent reading the Bible and praying) that were supposed to make you close to God. But they didn’t work for me. I got so bored reading the Bible over and over, and I was praying the same stuff all the time and getting no answer. Reading the Bible just made me doubt it more, and praying made me want to yell at God, or fall asleep. (One day I did yell at him and I flipped him off). But I didn’t feel like anyone was listening. I’ve never felt close to God. So I gradually just quit reading the Bible and praying, and would only do it on occasion. I felt like I was a better Christian if I didn’t read or pray, because then I didn’t have to think about it, and I could keep on going through the motions.

Another reason I didn’t want to read the Bible was because I never liked my beliefs from the start. And reading the Bible made me think about those beliefs. I only became a Christian because I thought the Bible was true, so I felt I had no choice. I became a
Christian just to avoid hell.

I was 20, a junior in college, and I was having fun. I was also looking for something to believe in, and when some girls invited me to a Bible study, I went. I ended up studying the Bible with them for 4 months. It took me that long to make a decision about
becoming a Christian. I didn’t want to become a Christian, yet felt like I should become one anyway. After all, the Bible does say to deny yourself, and give up your life for God. So I just had to be convinced that the Bible was true, and they actually convinced me and converted me! (That’s what can happen when you only hear one side of the story). But I never liked the idea that most people went to hell, and a lot of it just didn’t make sense to me. So right away I had anger toward “God.” But I just sucked it up and went on.

Actually, at first I was pretty zealous. I remember being proud that I knew the “truth.” I liked the idea of being saved. And I was glad to have a moral framework to base my life on. (I stopped sleeping around, quit doing drugs, stopped stealing, quit cussing, didn’t lie, and started being nice to my mom). So these were good things for me. I also really liked the friendships. To tell you the truth, there was a lot about this church that was great. It was very racially mixed, and for the first time I had black friends. I could trust these people, and many of them I really loved, and they loved me. And these people tried
really hard to be good, and so did I. So I don’t think everything about Christianity is bad. In a lot of ways, being a Christian was a positive experience for me.

All religions have good and bad about them. The good thing about religion is that it can bring about great changes in people’s lives. But you can’t say that only Christianity is true, because any religion can make you into a good person. I’ve met a lot of good
Mormon folks, but I don’t want to BE a Mormon. Heck, you can get good morals just by being raised right, or going to counseling, or being around other good people.

The problem with Christianity is that you are told it is the only way, and that really starts to mess with your head after a while. Under all the good external things that you see, lies FEAR. Christians are good because they fear hell. If there was no threat of hell, people would not choose to live like Christians. It’s not just all about this great loving God. Some churches do teach only about the loving God, but Fundie churches teach about the
God of wrath as well. People that go to the “nice god” type churches, usually do not have the same moral lifestyle that Fundies do. For example, my liberal Catholic family sins it up, and they don’t worry about it. So the LOVE of God is not enough to make people want to be good. My family believes God loves them, but that’s not enough to get them to obey the Bible and behave. It’s the FEAR of God, that the Fundies teach, that gets
people in line.

Since I had that fear, AND since I saw a lot of good in Christianity, I lived the life. But after a while, it all got old. I was always good at just DOING things, and it wasn’t from the heart. I was going through the motions. I’d go to church, but my mind would be
elsewhere. And I shared my faith quite a bit, but it was all about getting people to come to our Bible studies. I wasn’t out there telling people how much I loved Jeeesus and all that. I didn’t really love Jesus because I didn’t understand him or God. I didn’t see why God would create the world knowing in advance that most people would burn in hell for eternity, and only a few would follow Jesus. And I didn’t see why Jesus had to die in order for people to be saved. But I grew up Catholic, so I just believed it, because that’s what I had always been taught.

It really sucked to live this way, especially for something that’s not even true. So I just pretended to be a Christian for a while, and I was fooling myself. I kept thinking that one day I would get it, and one day I would love God. But it wasn’t happening. I hated it more and more. I got to the point where going to church made me want to gag. It was so hokey. I hated singing the stupid songs. There was this one that went, “God told
Nooooooah to build Him an Arrrrrrrk. He said to build that Arrrrrrk out of gopher wood, woooooood, out of gopher wood, wooooood.” And I was clapping along and singing and grinning and dancing, and I felt like such a friggin’ dork.

So since I hated church so much, I ended up skipping a lot, and I told people I was sick. It became obvious to everyone that I was not “doing well spiritually,” so the preacher’s wife got together with me to talk. I told her that I just didn’t understand, and I didn’t like my beliefs, and I had a lot of doubts. So she told me to write down my doubts and questions and feelings, and we could talk about them later. (I always had doubts, but I never put them down on paper before).

So thinking about my doubts, and writing them down, is what did me in. It was supposed to make me stronger in my faith, once the church folk answered my questions. But the opposite happened. My faith was GONE, and it was impossible to get it back. I realized that Christians are unable to answer my questions (in any sensible way at least). My questions WERE answered, but not by them. The answer I got was that the Bible is not true!

In this process of de-conversion, I started going through the Bible, and I wrote down everything that made me doubt, or made me mad. And I ended up with like 20 pages of stuff (and a lot of it is what you now see posted on the s.w). Then I got online to see what other doubters had to say about the Bible, and I was shocked. People pointed out things that I had never even noticed before, like the fact that in the O.T. God demanded proof of virginity, when there is no such thing. That was the big one. After I read that, I figured that there is no way the Bible is from God! And I figured that if the O.T. was not from God, then the N.T. was also not from God. With this realization, I was able to read the Bible with open eyes and I could see so much in it that I never noticed before. I couldn’t believe that I had never seen that stuff before, even though I’d read the Bible many times.
It was like at the time my brain didn’t want me to see it. Or if I had a doubt, I used to just tell myself that God must have a reason, so it’s all okay. I was just not using my brain.

I have now started to use my brain again. I don’t need counseling, because I’m happy. I’m a lot happier than I used to be, because I feel freed. As soon as a realized that the Bible was not true, I left it all behind right away. One day I just decided that I’m not going back to church ever again. I haven’t even talked to a lot of my old friends about this. I mean to, but it’s not a priority, because I don’t really care if I’m friends with them
anymore. We can hang out sometimes, but they’ll never be my best friends. I want friends that I can be close to, so why waste my time with Christians? It’s no fun to hang out with people who are just going to pity you for being doomed to hell. I need to be making new friends. Right now ya’ll are my only friends, besides my husband and my family. I do need to get out more.

Although I’m happy, I can’t say this transition has been a cake walk. Me and my husband did have a big fight, which was mostly me telling him that he’s ignorant and close-minded. It wasn’t very nice on my part. And now I want to try to get him to see
things my way, and that won’t be easy. And we have to figure out how we’ll raise our kids once we have ‘em.

Oh, and then there was the night that I drank too much. (Don’t know my limit anymore since I didn’t drink much during my Christian years. I have a lot of learning to do still. And I’ve already learned that I don’t want to drink too much). Because I got drunk and my emotions took over. When we got home, I puked in the toilet and started crying. Then I got in the bathtub, totally wasted, puked again (in the bath water), and then I started screaming. I felt like I had done something totally bad. But I knew that rationally I shouldn’t have been so worked up. Then I was pissed off because I was confused. My head told me that the Bible is not true, but my emotions at the time were telling me that it is true, and that I’m a huge sinner, so I was fearing hell, but mad about the idea of hell at the same time. (It’s going to take me a while to get totally unbrainwashed of the guilt and fear). I was mad about my own confusion, and the
confusion of the whole world. I was screaming and howling in anger, like a mad-woman, in the puke water, and that’s when my husband woke up and found me, and cleaned me up, and got me back into bed. And then I jabbered on for a while about how fucked up everything is, and then I crashed. The next day I laughed about it and was fine, but I had to reassure my husband, because I scared the shit out of him.

I think the reason that I’m okay (most of the time) is that I know that lots of other people are confused too. They just might not know it. Yes, I was deceived for 6 years, and believed and lived a lie, but most people live a lie their whole lives. All Christians are
deceived, as are all Muslims, Jews, etc. I’m just glad that I figured it out. That gives me comfort. I’m ready to move on. I have a nice life without Jesus, so I’ll be okay. And now I get to think about life and explore it like I never have before. So I think this journey will be fun, and interesting.


(Hey, this is a pretty good “loosing my religion” story. A lot of people have been asking how I ended up losing my faith, so maybe I’ll make this a new post and then everyone will know how I ended up here on the s.w.)

keyser_soze

A niggling little doubt and too much knowledge. Wasn't it the guy who first printed the bible for the masses that the catholic church crucified? I doubt catholocism or christianity would have made it this far if it had been readily readable by the first 3 centuries of followers. Knowledge IS power.

Ted Hoffman

Shouldnt this be in SL & S?