Well it’s guys like this that create atheists. Atheists generally aren’t the result of some sort of slippery slope of secular humanism that started when they watched PBS as a child, they are the product of beatings at the hands of fundies.
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That’s the Old Testament isn’t it?
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Well there’s a problem with many parents - they coach their kids to get specific kinds of misbehavior. This is psychological projection and also projective identification. Keep in mind that parents who had been raised in this environment will have their own issues with authority which they don’t acknowledge, at least in the confines of their church where they all tell each they even think identical thoughts with exactly the same emotional pitch. Bullshit. And that leaves them with all sorts of tensions that they blame on their kids and punish them.
This becomes really obvious (at least to a psychologist) when a family is into its second or third generation of exactly the same discipline problem, like thrashing the kid for not eating all his green beans… The family is seemingly blind to the fact that this is not a discipline issue, it’s become an actual ritual that each generation acts out. If they adopted a kid, he’d mysteriously end up not eating the green beans and getting beaten.
In laymen’s terms, watch a few episodes of The Dog Whisperer to see apparently nice people driving their pets out of their minds. Some people shouldn’t have kids and some of them should not even own pets.
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All the better to drive out the demons.
Parts of it could be certainly seen that way. Certainly the glee with which many find in imagining God eagerly condemns everyone they don’t approve to hell is a revenge fantasy.
See the link to the NY Times article about the Bob Jones University students who complained that the school counselors and psychiatrists had coached the students for years (decades probably) to conceal rape on campus as well as family histories of molestation and incest.
There are specific occupations that attract people with “codependency” (problems in their intimate relations due to unresolved problems dating back to a chaotic or abusive childhood, often with an alcoholic parent or physical abuse). And one of the main occupations is social work. And so you hear these hooror stories of kids being returned to rapist and abusers, because the social worker or therapist is unwittingly in the role of the alcoholic’s enabler or the abusive family enforcer. As you determined, they see YOU as the weirdo, and their job is to keep kids away from weirdos like you and to make sure they get the physical asbuse they need… Some of them will be obsessed with keeping kids in situations where they will be raped or killed, to the point where it is not uncommon to see people such as social workers whose own children are being raped by their live-in boyfriend. Seriously, how do you think so many child abuse scandals like the Jerry Savile affair run for years unless there are large numbers of enablers who consider this the natural order of things. And many of them a drawn to positions of petty authority where they have direct control over children or other powerless people so that they can be sadistic bureaucrats.
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STUDENT
Pastor Uppercut, I’m having trouble learning the lesson in this verse.
PASTOR UPPERCUT
(Without hesitation, punches student in the chest)
Another one delivered to the Lord.
(holds fist to mouth and blows it off, similar to a pistol)
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Those macho shoulder rolls as he gears up to tell the story… shudders
By the way, I appreciate the post’s headline: “his god.”
No capital g, for one thing. I’ve often wondered about the Christian reference to what is, after all, their god, as just, God. The name of their god is God. That’s gotta be some particular sort of logical fallacy. (And yes, I know that Christians claim that there is only one god, etc.)
Other religions give their gods names (which is not to say that they thereby allow that other gods exist, or might exist).
I wonder if Allah also simply means God, or if it’s a name for a, or the, god.
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If you want to hear criticism of Mormons, you need to meet some ex-Mormons, and there are plenty of them out there. And judging a religion by the friendliness of its members certainly gives credit to some of the most exploitive cults whose members are super polite.
Not to rub salt in the wound, but it’s worth mentioning that Mormonism started as a cult whose main selling point was having sex with lots of underage girls.
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Full out unprovoked assualt and I bet it was done in private. Dude should have been charged. I am guessing the kid told his parents and they opted not to press charges.
That’s pretty kinky!
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I disagree. The whole idea of “evangelism” is that there is a duty to convert people, because you are bringing them True Religion instead of however they lived before. It might not all always come off as imposing and coercive - but there is an element of this at the core of it. With some people and groups it becomes destructive, and even genocidal. The problem is not “these people believe certain things”, it’s that of “we need to make people believe certain things”. It denies people the agency to live as they themselves choose, and it denies real “religious freedom” to anyone apart from your own group.
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Yes, this is the case. It probably originates from the Jewish tradition against speaking or writing the name of their deity directly. Hence weird euphemisms such as “The Lord” etc. I always thought of it’s name as “Jehovah” - which it turns out is based upon an abbreviation for what is supposed to be their real secret name for the deity. It worked out to be a cunning ploy, because it allows any dominant monotheistic group to insinuate that their god is really your god.
Valid criticisms of Mormonism, the Mormon church is built on a series of silly ideas and horrible ethics, has advanced racism, sexual exploitation of women and lots of other horrible things. I meant simply that a great many individual Mormons are very nice people who live their lives in a positive manner, despite the underpinnings and history of the church to which they belong.
Churches have little to do with faith, belief hope and charity, religion less so, television nothing.
Fair enough. One of my favorite things to say…
When someone tells me they don’t believe in God, or that they believe God wants them to do a certain thing. I think, ‘neat, we’re going to have a conversation, and I might learn something,’
When someone says there is no God, or God wants me to do a certain thing. I run.
Turning the other cheek is for wimps; you’d never see Gandhi-- wait. Martin Luther King couldn’t rally the followers that I – shit.
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People who get a bug up their ass about God(s) being impossibru seem to have a lot of baggage and hurt from dealing with fundamentalist religion. So an easy, obvious, modern way to counter a fervent fundamentalist belief in deity is fervent fundamentalist belief that deities cannot exist.
Myself, I find this about as productive as arguing about whether or not Spider Man is real. Who cares? Functionally, people can think of deities in historical terms - that they need to take events in scripture at face value as historical events - or in mythical/athropological terms - that they are timeless stories or practices which can have a sort of intangible value to those who choose to consider them. When I say that “of course deities really exist, because we have invented so many of them”, I tend to encounter a shitstorm from people all across the spectrum. Most “rationalists” can accept that metaphysics exists when they do something like declare citizenship to a country, use money, or comprehend a metaphor in literature. But there is some barrier with many to understanding that religion can work in exactly the same way. If you ask them to “prove” that the US isn’t merely an artifact of human belief systems, they’d think you were crazy.
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But intelligence is dangerous to morons like him.
“utilize advanced evangelism techniques”…
No, no, no…that’s not the right terminology. You really mean “enhanced” evangelism techniques. That’s the patriotic way to describe it. Ask Dick Cheney.
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