Evangelicals naturally have a hard time believing that growing up in their church could have been, in itself, traumatizing. After all, they think, I wasn't traumatized by the experience, I ENJOYED it, what's this other person talking about? Sure, some people are abused by clergy and that's horrific, but most clergy aren't raping kids, so why do all these Exvangelicals keep complaining that the place I love most was the source of deep pain for them? Well, here's the quiz that often gets used to measure, in as standardized a way as is currently possible, how much childhood trauma a person experienced: Take The ACES Quiz - American SPCC The ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) quiz asks ten questions. The more you answer "yes", the more traumatic events you experienced and the higher odds that it's still affecting your mental and physical health today. Now, for those of us who were really COMMITTED to Evangelical Christianity, God was a second (or eve...
I was talking with an agnostic Jewish friend today about conversion and de-conversion and realized something: I feel a lot more urgency to try and convert people FROM Christianity than I ever did to try and convert them TO Christianity. Even though I used to believe eternity was on the line, a bit of me still felt that if there was a god who truly was perfectly just, he wouldn't ACTUALLY consign a decent person to everlasting hellfire just because they didn't believe in him. As long as they BEHAVED the way Jesus would have wanted. After all, even some Biblical verses implied that there would be people who professed belief yet would not be saved, and people who would be surprised to find themselves saved. But knowing that we only have this one life, and Christians are wasting theirs - at best, by simply wasting their Sunday mornings, and at worst, by using their time to make everyone else's lives worse by their actions and especially by their votes - makes it feel much mo...
Earlier today, I posted this on Facebook: "Tonight, for Maundy Thursday, Christians all over the world will commemorate a time when an innocent man who had done nothing more than criticize people in power was imprisoned and ultimately executed without due process, due in large part to a mob of religious people demanding his destruction and claiming he was a danger to the rule of the emperor. And 80 percent of American Evangelicals will never, EVER realize that they are the Judas in this story." But on further reflection, I realized that this was unnecessarily harsh and insulting. ... ...to Judas. After all, Judas realized almost immediately that he had done something monstrous, something unforgiveable, and felt such remorse at the enormity of his betrayal that he could no longer live with himself. But Evangelical Republicans lack the moral clarity of JUDAS FUCKING ISCARIOT. No, they're something far worse. They're the crowd chanting "Crucify him!" and "...
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