Not the worst thing they did, but the most infuriating...

 

My religious upbringing did a lot of harmful things to me. The constant fear of hell, of missing the rapture, of failing to please god and not even knowing it, of falling short no matter how much faith I had and how much I worked to love my god and my neighbors. The belief that I was worthless, that my crimes were so horrible that only the death of a god could even the score, that I was broken and evil in everything I did and was, that all my best efforts and intentions were indeed as filthy rags. (Side note: the verse literally translates to "all your righteousness is as used menstrual cloths". Not shitrags or corpses or other ritually unclean things, mark you; in addition to telling us we're all tainted and worthless to the point that we should be thrown away, the authors of the Bible also worked in the misogynistic idea that the most unclean thing possible is always going to be something that comes from a woman.)

And I STILL got off easy, compared to my closeted gay friends from youth group. Especially the poor bastard who went through conversion “therapy”. Or the one who didn't feel safe to come out publicly until he was in his MID-FORTIES.

The sins of the Evangelicals who raised me were indeed scarlet and manifold.

But in some ways, even though it’s nowhere near the worst thing that was done to me or my peers by those lying assholes, the one that pisses me off the most is this:

Even now, decades later, for no fucking reason, I will sometimes get a motherfucking Sandi Patti song stuck in my head, and no amount of good music will drive it out.

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