I <3 Atheism

I just found this in the Update at the end of my grandmother's death-dealing book Born in Zion (the positive reviews on Amazon horrify me). It's a passage about the process of changing deeply held beliefs, which is a kind of funny thing to stumble across, in the writ of my old beliefs, all things considered. She quotes from Charles Colson's "Against the Night" (an unlikely source for me to agree with). He wrote

"People don't pick a vision (or make a decision) piece-meal, as they might pick a bouquet of flowers in a garden. They come to such convictions (or decisions) within the framework of a braoder set of... asumptions and ideals - more like accetping a story, with all of its internal rules and consistencies

And just as beliefs are not selected one at a time (what might be called the salad-bar theory of decision-making), longheld beliefs do not fall one at a time. In the absence of a deeper conversion of perspective... minds are rarely changed on single policy matters, no matter how persuasive our arguments."

Yeah, that rings true. I dropped belief in emergency faith healing after Harrison died. I dropped belief in faith healing for all non-emergency care as well, after three years walking with a dislocated hip (and a cane - in high school, where canes aren't exactly cool.) I dropped theism/deism in May 2008. It was a gradual stripping away of the deeper core of my mythology. But she uses this passage to "support" her insane lifestyle recommendations and stances on homebirth, prayer, and the roles of women in families. She wrote

"People usually won't decide to have a baby at home, trusting God alone, unless they have a framework - a braod base upon which their life rests - of trust in God for everything else. If they're trusting in banks for provision, in doctors for healing, in pastors for insight from God, in newspapers for their daily word, in psychology for an understanding of the principles of life, in drugs for health, in science for their beliefs about the nature of matter and the foundation of the universe, in the government for the answers to our social problems, in the "experts" for wisdom and truth, then these people are probably not ready for home birth."

Can you see why I fight so hard against blind faith and religious belief? I know the dark and desperate places faith leads to. Faith leads to death, and war, and children being starved, and abusive exorcisms, and fatal home births. True faith, of the kind my grandmother advocated in the vile paragraph above, led to the death of two young boys, life imprisonment for their father, and a slow and painful death by cancer of their cult leader, who worshiped my grandmother. She was a cult leader's cult leader. And she accounts for 1/8 of my genetic make up. We share a serotonin imbalance, and she spent all my life telling me that I was just like her. It's rather horrifying, on the days when my medicine doesn't seem to be working so well.

She quotes Charles Colson once again.

"Plato argued that this deeper conversion of perspective was almost like an awakening - like remembering something you forgot a long time ago. It is the realization: 'That fits! That is the way things should be.' It is a sense of recognition. Something responds not only in your head but in the deeper layers of your being."

He could be describing the emotional release, the pure joy I felt at deconversion. Yes, I feel betrayal from my family for lying to me for all these years. I feel annoyed with myself for not asking more question, more deeply, and more often. And yet, becoming an atheist is one of the best two things that has ever happened to me (the other being the birth and life of my son.) I love being an atheist. Being an atheist gives me such a sense of joy and purpose and peace, all the things that religion promised and instead stole from me.

How could I be joyous, "knowing" my gay and lesbian and non-Christian friends would all be tortured forever in hell? How could I have purpose if my life was mapped out for me, and there was no option but to serve one of two masters, either God or the Devil? How could I be at peace, when I was in near constant pain, hating myself for being a wretched, wicked sinner?

Now that I know there is no God (know with enough certainty for all practical purposes - there is simply no evidence), I finally feel that I can exert some control over my life. If I am sick, I can take medicine to get better, or at least reduce my symptoms. If I am hurting, I can talk to someone - I can listen to the experts, and I can find some solace. If I have needs, I can confess them with no shame. I am an ape - an ape who is responsible for my own actions and decisions, but an ape nonetheless. My failure to live up to the sinless example of Jesus makes perfect sense. My desire to touch and be touched, to love and be loved, to screw and be screwed, is not the product of a "fallen" soul. It's the delightful side effect of reproductive evolution! And now thanks to science and medicine, those experts I always heard decried, I can have that benefit - without having more children.

Religion is the single thing that did the most harm in my life, and I believe it's also the single thing that's done the most harm in the history of our species. It certainly hasn't been good for our planet, or our governments, or our mentally ill. It's not just that religion teaches people they are evil, and that their neighbors are evil, (and worse yet, that their children are evil); religion makes good people do bad things for bad reasons.

I want to live my life based on good reasons. Don't you?

* Sorry for the excessive self-referential linking to prior ATAT posts. I'm trying to figure out how to organize all this mental diarrhea into a book.

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Intervention and Parents Rights

I've been listening to old episodes of the Non-Prophets Radio podcast. (If you're not listening yet, it's your own fault. I've linked and embedded tons of Atheist Experience videos. Okay, okay, I forgive you. Go subscribe to the feed now and let us never speak of this unpleasantness again.)

The issue of intervention keeps coming up. When does the government, or we the people, or the US, intervene in how a family raises its children or how another nation treats its citizens? One of the four hosts, Shilling, (no longer on - I told you, these were archives) essentially takes a non-interventionist stance the majority of the time. He suggests the long-range approach of educating a culture, and essentially waiting things out for self-correction. He cites the decrease in racism and homophobia in younger generations as an example of this working in practice. And I have to say I agree with him up to that point.

Because I think the long-range plan is important and I do think it will work. I think history in a large sense shows that, our culture at least, is getting progressively more liberal and egalitarian. Neato. Swell. But in the meantime, if we use only the non-interventionist long-range approach, kids aren't getting vaccinated. Unassisted childbirth is killing mothers and babies.* Honor killings are happening in the United States. Parents treat their kids with unproven "natural" remedies rather than with FDA approved medicines. A little boy gets named Adolf Hitler (and his sister is named Aryan Nation.)

When are we gonna stop talking about parents rights and start talking about kids rights? I think part of the problem with the debate is that we act as if the two interested parties were the parents and the government. And of course, we object to the idea of a government raising its children - that falls under the domain of parenting. But the real nature of the issue is between the rights of the parents and the rights of the children. The government acts as attorney on behalf of the child, not as a direct antagonist to the parent. I get that now.

I was raised to fear HRS, so when they came to do an investigation, I lied. When my friend's mother told my mom I wanted to live with them, my mom told me she was playing arm chair psychologist, and that it was a common problem among psych students. That it didn't mean anything (like trying to get hit by a car when I was six didn't mean anything; or saying I needed therapy or I was gonna kill myself at 14 didn't mean anything; or saying that I had an eating disorder and that I was going to die if I didn't get help at 25 didn't mean anything).

I have to intervene for the kids right now. Fuck the long-range-only plan. Well-meaning high-minded secular and moderate religious people who were trying not to step on anyone's toes or interfere with anyone's parental rights let me get beaten, brainwashed, and Bible-fed. I didn't get to form my own personality and identity as a human. I was raised in a cult, like being a borg or a clone. I'm having to figure this shit out (who I am, what I value, what my own personality is) now and I'm 26 and I have a 4-year-old kid. It's kind of terrifying sometimes to realize how little I know and how far behind I am. I got cheated out of a childhood and it's seriously affecting my adulthood. And now I find out there's no afterlife, so this is the only shot I'm ever gonna get.

We can't sit by and let other kids have their psyches destroyed. I can't really express enough just how crazy I am and how uncomfortable the inside of my brain is. I have a really high IQ. (I don't remember the number; it was over ten years ago. I was in Mensa but we quit paying dues.) If I'd been raised in a healthy home, I'd probably be a doctor or a lawyer or a civil rights activist or married. Not unemployed and semi-agoraphobic. This isn't a pity party. I'm good at getting through shit - I have a lot of practice. (And hey, unemployment checks are the bomb. I consider that my salary for writing on my book.)

It's just that I can't not care. I can't pretend kids aren't dying from medical negligence homicide (AKA "prayer"). I know there's this huge Quiverfull generation coming up now, and a lot of those kids are growing up in abusive homes; they're learning misogyny and rigid gender roles; and they're not getting a proper education. Let's stop that. Let's stop the people who do that. I don't want go so far as making people get a license to have a kid. I get why we can't do that (examples: majority Christian licensing board = no atheists getting baby licenses; eugenics). But we have to get these religious exemption laws off the books. We have to stop acting like it's okay for people to pray, when we know that prayer prevents positive action. We need to recognize and vocalize that faith is not a virtue. Faith is a vice.





* Both those stories are in Australia. The homebirth movement in Australia is largely due to my grandmother (and here)and Nancy Campbell. (On Nancy's Facebook she asks for money for a broken arm; yet she rolls with faith healers.)

** I have no idea what language the image captions are in. But it translates to: kids have a right to food, clean water, an education, passport or national identity (refugees), family, I think happiness?, exercise/entertainment, and to be clean; and a right to not be amputated, armed, enslaved, or abused. I think it speaks across culture and language - don't you?

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Prayer Bugs Me

My mother never pried. She had faults as a mother, but invasion of privacy was never one of them. She knew the importance of private thoughts. While I think her unwillingness to pry into my feelings left her unaware of the pain and mental confusion I was in for a long time, I have to say I value and respect the choice she made to let me be my own person, with my own thoughts and feelings. I could leave my diary open on the coffee table and know that she'd never read it.

Yet, I always felt better writing outside of the house, somewhere secret and quasi-magical. It was down by the blackberry patch at the creek when I was a small child, then onto a copse of trees beside a frozen golf course waterfall at the first place in Iowa, and either in a tree at the edge of a cornfield or on top of a wall holding back a hill from a parking lot at the second place in Iowa. When we first moved back to Florida, in to the apartments, I would sit beneath the willow tree on the bank of the man-made lake; once we moved into the house in the suburbs, I sat at on the dock at the riverfront park down the road.

So it shouldn't have surprised me, at 20 years old and living in my own place, that I still might feel the need to leave to write in peace. I remember crying, gasping in big tantruming toddler gulps of air, sobbing out loud to Jesus. "They say you won't give me more than I handle, but I'm telling you, I can't handle this! It's too hard. It never gets any easier and it never gets any better. Every time I think it's gonna get better, it just gets worse, and I'm tired of fighting all the damn time!" At the time, I was crying about money and how there just didn't seem to be enough of it. At other times, I cried nearly the exact same script, at the end of my rope, utterly desperate, crying heavenward and begging for mercy. Sometimes things would seem to get a little bit better following one of these break downs, but I didn't seem to be getting spiritual fruit or reaping any benefit for the trials I was going through. I was under the impression that when God tested you, when He gave you all that you could handle, when you survived it, you were rewarded for remaining faithful. Wasn't that the whole point of Job?

I feel sad and betrayed when I look back on those times. I knew that I needed help to carry life's burdens, but because I thought God was going to do that - and when there were only one set of footprints in the sand, that meant He was carrying me - I didn't look hard enough at the resources around me. Two weeks later, one night instead of calling on God, I called the suicide hotline. I'm typing this today because that was the right choice. It would still be another year till I got my first mental health diagnosis, and another five years till I found the right combination of diet, exercise, sleep, and medication, but it was a start. I was beginning to deal with my problems, instead of waiting on God to fix my breakfast.

Because God was nothing more than a voice in a head, He could never offer any comfort I wasn't capable of giving myself, or any insight I was incapable of having. Reliance on God, in mental and emotional anguish as in all things, caused me more pain. When I depend on God, when I say "It's all in His hands", I stop taking positive actions in my own life.

I would have gotten a therapist, a diagnosis, and medication sooner if I hadn't been raised in a faith healing cult, certainly. But I think I would have got them sooner still if I hadn't been raised a believer. I hate prayer now. It actively infuriates me when people bow before an imaginary construct, grovel and beg NOTHING, to fix their problems instead of working to fix them themselves.

I still struggle with money and I still struggle with a list of mental disorders. I am still crazy. But I don't have to beg any god to make me sane now - I can take medications, make alterations to my lifestyle, avoid certain foods. I can manage my life without a higher power. Believing in one hindered my drive for self-sufficiency and kept me dependent and child-like long past the time the world expected me to behave as an adult.

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Cults Can Be Funny

Today I wanna talk about one of my favorite topics - Cults. Now I know most of you probably have hobbies that are entertaining, or physically exhausting, or mentally stimulating. I have a hobby that's suicidally depressing. But important.

One way I deal with the the compassion fatigue or emotional overload that comes from reading tol many cult survivor stories in one sitting is with the lulz. This video, while being totally instructive and accurate, cracks me up in a dark humor kind of way. (I still think Angela's Ashes is funny and has a happy ending. My family saw the movie based on my impression, and now they think I'm twisted and weird.) So, with that kind of a endorsement, watch and enjoy!




I may have posted that before - I don't care. It's a good video. Seriously, of all the cult checklists and papers and testimonies I've read, this is the best, simplest Cult 101 explanation I've seen. I showed this video to a Christian cult escapee who was staying with me for a while this summer. I was trying to let her know that what happened to her happens to lots, yadda yadda. I think it just freaked her out that I know how to start a cult.

But really, starting your own cult is easy. Just look at the five simple steps in this eHow article. (I don't know if it will happen for you also, but when I pulled up that page a giant flash $cientology ad came up under the checklist, lol.)

Phil Milstein has a more thorough (and delightfully snarky) six steps in his piece "How to Become a Cult Guru or, You Too Can Induce Mass Suicide." Some pearls of wisdom from it include:

Remember that everyone you meet is, deep inside, like a scrawny branch wavering in the stiff wind of life, just waiting for a big tree to sprout up alongside and protect them. Be that tree...

And on why laundromats are an awesome place to collect new recruits:
Down at the local suds parlor you'll find oodles of brain-dead scum, just sitting around twiddling their thumbs and spitting pumpkin seeds. Perfect cult fodder.

Heartwarming, no? Although I'm pretty sure around here sunflower seeds are a lot more popular than pumpkin, I'm sure the principle still applies.

This post that made me wanna ROFL or at least PMP (pee my pants - come on people, it could catch on). It's 5 steps to starting your own $cientology off shoot denomination.

So remember folks, whatever your cause or passion is, while it's important to stay dedicated towards positive actions and efforts, and while promotion awareness and legislation and social protests (I mean marches dumbass - leave your assault rifle in the armory at home), it's okay to laugh, too. I know cults are awful. I know good people do terrible things and have terrible things done to them. But laughing can be a really effective coping mechanism, and it's served me well through many trials and tragedies, so I'm gonna keeping LOLing over here, even about the serious stuff like cults, and I'd love it if you joined me in the merry making.

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Demons and Deliverance

(I recommend catching up on the highlights from Demon Busters 1 & 2 for background.)

Being told your demon possessed isn’t exactly flattering. In a way, it was very much like being told by my mother in my teen years and my husband during my pregnancy, “You’re just hormonal.” It’s saying your perceptions are invalid and your complaints unimportant. There is something wrong with you and that’s why god's promises don't seem to manifest in your life.

My grandmother was a great believer in demonic activity and possession and, unlike hormones, having a demon was often your fault. All kinds of things could let demons in – having insufficient faith in God, listening to secular music, watching certain TV shows, engaging in hedonism, reading about witchcraft or other religions, or soul ties. A soul tie is an evil spiritual connection with another person, and it was impossible not to acquire these.

You got them through the bloodlines in the form of generational curses, from every person you’d had sex with and every person they’d had sex with (sort of like an STD), from any doctor who touched you, and from anyone you’d ever “broken bread” with. I met a girl on the farm who took this last example to such extremes that she believed that if you ate popcorn in a movie theater you had formed a soul tie with – and acquired the demons of – every other person in the theater. She refused to eat in restaurants or at picnics, concerned that with each bite of food, she risked becoming more and more possessed.

Once a demon had you, it could ride along inside your head, tempting you to all manner of wickedness, and it could case you illness or injury. The only way to rid yourself of these demons was through “deliverance.” Abiding Life was a deliverance ministry and for each of the three consecutive weekends I was on the farm, I attended deliverance sermons at the church.

These would begin on Friday evenings with a sermon on the dangers of demon possession and the absolute certainty that every one of us in the pews was infested with these spiritual vermin. We each received a packet listing all the ways we could become possessed. Then for each item on the list we were supposed to detail each example we could think of. These crazy, scary strangers wanted me to write down for them the name of each boy I’d kissed, blown, or screwed; every person at any party I’d attended where drugs or alcohol was present; every secular song I’d ever listened to; and any non-Christian book I’d ever read.

At the time I thought it was ridiculous. Surely God didn’t need this level of detail. If I just said, “Lord, please break all the soul ties from any boy I’ve been with, and rid me of demons from any books, TV, or music,” he’d know what that meant. And what if I forgot something? Would God leave behind a demon if, despite my best efforts and intentions, I neglected one song or one kiss?

Now I know the true purpose of these lists was to shame us. Look how long my list is. See how wicked and secular I’ve been? Surely, I am covered in filth, and unworthy to be in God’s presence. What a miserable wretch of a sinner I am! You have to first convince people they have a problem, before you can peddle your snake oil cure.

Saturday morning we returned to the clapboard country church for hymns and prayer warfare. We sinners held our folded lists of sins in the air as Geri prayed out against the influence of demonic forces. She prayed in painstaking detail, “against sexual immorality, lust, erotic literature, filthy and unclean thoughts, impurity, unchastity, prostitution, petting, kissing, incest, oral sex, sodomy, and abominations of the flesh.”

She prayed each such list, out loud, multiple times. If she’d gone by simple categories and named each thing only once, it might have taken an hour. As it was, we were there – praying, moaning, crying, and begging for forgiveness – all weekend long. As she prayed, her deputies would roam the aisles looking for someone “in struggle,” either crying too much or not enough, and bring them to the front of the sanctuary for the laying of hands.

I was brought to the front as Geri’s voice carried on in the background, her litany of our transgressions. An overweight, illiterate former prostitute, her son, a “cured” lesbian, and three farmhands touched me. They babbled incoherently, speaking “in tongues,” and began to gently push me around, bouncing me from one person to the next, trying to rouse the demons inside of me. For an hour they did this, as I cried and begged God to make me clean, make me not a disappointment to my family, make me acceptable in His sight.

But the demons wouldn’t come. I began to doubt, in the quiet corners of my mind, that these people had any idea what they were doing. None of them had any great theological experience, and with the exception of Geri, none even seemed to possess either knowledge of the Scriptures, or a charismatic weight of authority. Tired of standing on my feet, I realized they would not stop and let me go until I gave them some sign that their efforts had worked.

So I began to fake a seizure. I quivered and quaked and shook and babbled as if I too was speaking in tongues. I fell down upon the church floor, writhing and wriggling, and their prayers got louder and faster in response. Finally, after several minutes of this, exhausted, I lay still. They clapped and cheered. They had cast the demons out of me, or so they thought.

It was emotionally manipulative, physically invasive, and a complete waste of time. But at the end of three weeks of this, I was allowed to return to my mother’s house.

Image credit to the artist Dale GrimshawY for his piece "Exorcism 2"

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"Maybe if they were fighting turtles"

First I have to say that it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to see that the words "glenn beck turtle" bring up 69,200 results on Google.




"The other 80% MUST BE SPENT ON SAVING INTERNATIONAL TURTLES!" Sorry readers. I usually refrain from crude font tactics such as all caps. But this man speaks in all caps.


"Is there a lobbyist for otters and turtles that I don't know about?!"

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