this is also how i became a leftist after being raising very traditional/conservative/catholic tbh
hearing them break down ‘bad’ leftist ideas and i was just sitting there waiting for the bad part that didn’t come…and i’m like….yes? you should probably give free lunches to kids when their parents can’t afford to feed them dinner? why do you not want this?
trying to figure out politics was me just moving further to the left the more i learned about pretty much every single issue because of the traditional/catholic parts of my upbringing which is why i’m so baffled that so much of my family falls much more red than blue and i’ll probably never understand how that happened
i’ve had family straight up ask me why i support programs like free lunch and i had to explain that i support them because they taught me that i should care about other people and try to make the world a better place and the golden rule…they never seem to have an answer for when i ask them back why they don’t support those same programs
If you’re on my blog or in these tags, this week might be difficult for you.
I know it will probably be difficult for me - it usually is.
Good Friday was always hard when I was a Catholic; they always laid the guilt on extra thick.
Over the course of my deconstruction, I have found so much freedom and relief in no longer participating in Lent and in no longer believing.
And yet I find that Easter is now much more difficult for me as an apostate. Maybe it’s because my associations with Easter are not just bunnies and chicks and pastels. All of that was superceded by the crushing guilt and gore that was ever-present surrounding Easter.
If you are reading this and feeling anxious, guilty, sad, conflicted, etc. heading into the week ahead, I love you and I am with you.
Whether you are just beginning your deconstruction, whether you’ve been out for decades, whether you have to pretend this weekend or not, I hope you can take some time and make some space for yourself and your own needs.
I’m planning on making some type of “coping” toolkit post this week if I have time.
You want to live to see your friends and family grow old. You want to drive a car. You want to live to see yourself forget your own age. You want to live by yourself. You want to be more than a child. You want to make bad decisions. You want to learn how to do better. You want to find purpose in life. You want to know who you are before it’s all over. You don’t want it to be over. You want to live to see your last day. You want to live to fall in love. You want to live.
I am trying to find queer former ‘missionary kid’ tumblr (like the ‘evangelical lived overseas for their whole lives’ type) but I can only find US Mormon missionaries which is a somewhat different experience- is “ex-evangelical missionary kid” a niche of tumblr that exists? Looking for takes on reconciling the country you loved living in and the colonialism that brought you there oop-
Your sexuality is a part of yourself, and as such, deserves as much care as the rest of you. This can look like…
* Deciding for yourself when, whether, and with whom to engage in sex. * Deciding that sex just isn’t for you, and that’s okay. * Getting regular OB/GYN or urologist checkups. (And being honest with your doctor!) * Getting tested for STIs regularly, especially in between partners. * Saying “no” to sexual acts that make you uncomfortable, or that you don’t feel ready for. * Exploring and learning what you like and don’t like. * Learning about sex, anatomy, birth control, etc. especially if the sex ed you had during your formative years was nonexistent or just straight-up garbage. * Ditching purity culture and all its empty promises. * Using reliable birth control unless and until you want a baby. * Deciding for yourself when and whether to have children, and how many to have. * Deciding for yourself what you will do if you have an unplanned pregnancy. * Being really honest with yourself about whether you personally can do casual hookups, or whether you absolutely need to have a relationship in order to have sex. * Communicating and setting boundaries with partners. * Making sure that if you choose to have sex, you’re doing so for the right reasons (i.e. not just to please your partner, or “fit in,” or what have you) * Making sure you get your share of the pleasure pie, too. * Listening to what your body is telling you. * Letting go of shame. * Ditching toxic diet culture and learning to love your body, or at least accept it. * Understanding that porn is a fantasy; it is nothing like real sex with a real human being. * Getting help for porn and sex addictions. * Letting go of internalized misogyny, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, etc. * Learning to both give and receive pleasure. * Learning to communicate what you need. * Taking responsibility for your own thoughts, words, actions, omissions, marital fidelity, feelings, etc., instead of dumping that on other people. * Dressing for yourself, in clothes that make you happy (within the scope of appropriateness for a given occasion), not to either attract or repel any sex or gender. * Deciding for yourself what labels define your sexuality or gender, or whether any labels fit at all. * Carrying condoms/dental dams/etc. with you on dates, even if you don’t end up needing them. * Making sure someone knows where you are when you go on dates or hook up with people. * Understanding that being rejected doesn’t necessarily mean anything is wrong with you, and not taking that as a personal affront. * Learning what healthy relationships look like. * Getting help for and healing sexual trauma of any kind. * Deciding for yourself what you share (or don’t share) on the Internet about your sexuality, your past, etc. * Learning how consent actually works. * Showing concern for your partner’s well-being and pleasure, as well as your own. * Not using sex/porn/masturbation/etc. as a way of masking or avoiding your personal or relationship problems. * Not tying your sexual history (or lack thereof) to your worth as a human being, or as a partner. * Deciding that what other people think of you is their responsibility, not yours. * Getting out of toxic relationships. * Not sleeping with your ex. * Going no further or faster than you really want to go. * Deciding for yourself whether you’re into kink or not. (And that vanilla is valid!) * Peeing after sex. * Being honest with yourself and your partners. * Developing a positive body image. * Accepting that both you and any partners you have will have a past, good, bad, and ugly, and not judging or defining yourself or them by it. * Really getting to know someone before agreeing to move in with them, have a baby with them, marry them, etc.
When I went to see Tangled with my family, I was terrified of having to talk about the movie afterwards because I related so much to Rapunzel, and I was sure my mom would hate the movie because it was so obvious that she was exactly like mother gothel. So when mom asked me afterwards if I liked it I gave a tepid non-answer. But then my mom started talking about how she loved the movie! And it slowly dawned on me that she also saw mother gothel as evil and abusive, but somehow didn’t make the connection that she and her were the same. My mom even made a comment to the effect of how, like rapunzel’s real mom, her love for me would always triumph or whatever. And she didn’t get it!
She didn’t see the similarities of how she locked me away in the house, or how she kept me under the tightest supervision under the guise of keeping me safe. I spent the entire mother knows best song stealing glances at her next to me in the theater just waiting for her to drag us out of the movie because she couldn’t stand to have her “love” portrayed as evil. And she didn’t see how the fact that she created her identity completely around being a mother and nothing else was like mother gothel’s dependency on rapunzel’s magic hair.
It was only after seeing her positive reaction to the movie, that I really understood the meaning of the phrase “everyone is the hero of their own story”. No one actually thinks they’re the villain, even if confronted with a painfully obvious rendering of their own actions done by someone they agree is rightly portrayed as evil.
“everyone is the hero of their own story”. No one actually thinks they’re the villain, even if confronted with a painfully obvious rendering of their own actions done by someone they agree is rightly portrayed as evil.
Raised Catholic things: you won’t step foot in a church but you can’t watch any fictional depiction of Mass without twitching when they use a different translation than the one you know
You are allowed to feel what you feel, even when those feelings aren’t pretty and “godly.” Anger is still and emotion. Hate is not evil. Yes, you should strive to be in control when you are in states of anger or hate, but do not shame yourself for feeling natural emotions. You wouldn’t shame yourself for happiness, so why any other feelings? You wouldn’t shame yourself for love so why the antithesis? Sometimes, you just need to let emotions run their course. Trust me. The pain, anger, and hate will fade if you allow yourself to feel it. Pushing it away will only make it stronger and more painful.
You are safe to feel. There is no being judging you for being who you are. I know it feels that way. I’m sorry my loves.
i have this overwhelming sense that i have a major trauma in my past. i spent a lot of my childhood wishing something bad would happen to me so that i could justify these feelings. and even now, i know it’s the cult, i still feel like it’s not bad enough. my trauma isn’t enough.
but not only that, i feel like i can’t blame the cult. the idea that it is good and right and that there’s no other way is so ingrained in me, that even though i know it’s wrong and traumatic and stole 16+ years of my life, i still can’t quite rationalize my feelings and responses to it.
it’s like someone told you after almost two decades of life that the sky isn’t blue, it’s been green all along, and all the facts point to that being true, and you know rationally that it is, and you know you’ve been lied to your whole life. you know the sky is green, but if someone asked you, you would still automatically say that the sky is blue.
(the sky is actually blue. not trying to trigger anything in anyone.)
so much religious belief seems to stem from a basic confusion over what emotions mean, and the fact that they provide feedback on what’s happening inside your head, not out there in the world.
so many conversion stories involve someone visiting a cathedral and feeling an emotion and concluding on that basis that the Christian god is real and miracles described in the bible really happened and people go to heaven when they die, when those conclusions don’t follow from the premise at all!
and it’s not a simple oversight, a lot of apologetics even rely on it, like half of C. S. Lewis’ guff is him saying he feels a sense of dissatisfaction sometimes and this is obviously evidence that the Christian god is real and miracles described in the bible really happened blah blah blah and like dude is there no other possible reason why you might feel this emotion, or why this emotion might exist in the first place?
I can get tingly sometimes when I listen to the right music in the right frame of mind but that doesn’t constitute proof that there’s a god of nightcore dubstep remixes out there rearranging the cosmos for my personal benefit, as cool as that would be.
Certainty was something I craved after leaving Christianity. And I felt very, very guilty about craving it.
As a new ex-Christian, I saw a lot of mockery directed at Christian ideas online and I wanted to be safe from that mockery. For the first few years after leaving, I hid my feelings and stopped myself from grieving the loss of “absolute” certainty in my life.
Only through mourning that loss and getting some healthy distance from my fundamentalist Christian life could I start to embrace and celebrate the uncertainty of my new secular life!
The fact that it has nothing elseto contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn - for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for cheeking your parents? If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion’s moral values to accept} Or should we pick and choose among all the world’s religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, fili-cidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror. (The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins)
How did the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings cope with such polytheological conundrums? Was Venus just another name for Aphrodite, or were they two distinct goddesses of love? Was Thor with his hammer a manifestation of Wotan, or a separate god? Who cares? Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination and many. Having gestured towards polytheism to cover myself against a charge of neglect, I shall say no more about it. For brevity I shall refer to all deities, whether poly- or monotheistic, as simply ‘God’. I am also conscious that the Abrahamic God is (to put it mildly) aggressively male, and this too I shall accept as a convention in my use of pronouns. More sophisticated theologians proclaim the sexlessness of God, while some feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a non-existent female and a non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient attribute than gender. (The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins)
I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus or Wotan. Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, conies into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.
Not surprisingly, since it is founded on local traditions of private revelation rather than evidence, the God Hypothesis comes in many versions. Historians of religion recognize a progression from primitive tribal animisms, through polytheisms such as those of the Greeks, Romans and Norsemen, to monotheisms such as Judaism and its derivatives, Christianity and Islam.
American polls suggest that atheists and agnostics far outnumber religious Jews, and even outnumber most other particular religious groups. Unlike Jews, however, who are notoriously one of the most effective political lobbies in the United States, and unlike evangelical Christians, who wield even greater political power, atheists and agnostics are not organized and therefore exert almost zero influence. Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to ‘come out’, thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored. (The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins)
