Returning to the scene

The past two weeks I’ve returned to the land of the evangelicals.

It all started with promising to drive some ladies to out bible study reunion out in the mountains.  It was a beautiful weekend and I enjoyed going for hikes and our unconventional host’s fantastic martinis.  Sunrise in the mountains almost made up for missing a livingroom dance party.  Almost.

During the weekend, I did a fairly good job of staying quiet.  However, I failed to respond enthusiastically enough to one woman’s ‘miracle’ of painting a sunset over a hill on the family farm in the exact place her grandfather had once seen a sunset.  But she didn’t know until after she painted it that her grandfather had also seen a sunset there!   Suspicious at my weak “oh, I’m glad to hear you are painting again”, she began to interrogate me on my spiritual state.

I remained polite and answered honestly and carefully until she started to get aggressive.  I assume she thought she was ‘loving’ me by letting me know she disapproved of our family time Sundays.  She asked questions like how often I met with others to discuss spiritual things.  I told her I talk about it with friends and online.   She asked what I was learning.  I talked about how learning about who wrote each book of the bible and comparing them to each other was really helping me understand it.  She wanted to know specific examples.  She was impatient when I asked for a few minutes to think of something she might appreciate and refused to give me a minute to think.

By then I was mad, so I told her the most freeing thing about what I was learning was that I no longer felt obligated to make the morality of the bible make sense.  I was free to call genocide, rape, slavery, and torture plain evil.   Of course she didn’t like this and tried to justify why genocide was good.  It felt good to turn the tables on her and start interrogating her as to how she could possibly promote such cruelty.

Then I learned that this church I had been involved with, who lost members for being too moderate, is now promoting Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill as “good bible teaching”.  This woman and her husband love Mark.  Here is a story about Mark and another couple.  Heartbreaking and disgusting.  http://matthewpaulturner.net/jesus-needs-new-pr/exorcism-at-mars-hill-one-womans-story/

The rest of the weekend went much better.  The group who wouldn’t drink with us also wouldn’t miss Sunday service so they left a day early.  The group who stayed preferred to talk about half-naked guys on TV shows and movies.  It was entertaining.

Another day, by unfortunate timing, I was introduced to an immigrant couple as a former missionary.  Then I had to pray for them.  During the impromptu prayer meeting Lil’T grew really uncomfortable.  She said that she didn’t feel safe.   Given that several of the prayers weren’t in English, and that some people got really emotional and trance-like, I can understand.

All of this has resulted in being invited to a bible study with the non-teetotalers where they talk about ‘controversial’ topics like Mormonism, homosexuality and different concepts of heaven.  I’m actually excited!

I am also scheduled to go to 3 church events in the next little while.  One of which, I’ll be sharing a talk called “How Not to talk to Atheists and Agnostics”.

Pre-marriage Pressure

We recently painted the playroom/library.  In the process we discovered that even after purging boxes and boxes of bibles, bible commentaries, bible studies, apologetics, biographies, evangelism guidebooks, hymnals, and Christian fiction, we still had nearly a bookcase full.  We now have only one shelf of overtly Christian literature or books on the history of Christianity and which contains only 5 bibles.

One of the treasures we found was a “Marriage Counseling Questionnaire” that my lover had done with a church elder.  This contains such questions as:

18. To what degree have you talked about spiritual things?

very much      some     little    none

19. To what degree does your religious/spiritual upbringing affect you now?

very much    some    little    none

20. How important are spiritual matters to you now? 

very    somewhat   slight   not at all

28.  How do you feel about the sexual aspect of marriage?

eager    eager, but some apprehension    apprehensive    fearful

My lover’s answers were entertaining.

Under List in order of importance 5 things you are looking for in a mate, number 1 had similar interests crossed out and replaced with God.

Under List 3 things you are both interested in it said

each other

       being outside/exploring

       being silly and serving others together

but  God was squished on top of that as if it had been written after

He was actually dictating the answers and the elder was writing them down.  My lover admitted that he felt a lot of pressure from the elder he was doing this with to have the ‘right answer’.   I can imagine the elder leaning across the table and saying, “isn’t there something more important?” in a menacing voice until the right answer came up.

Of course, as evidenced by our bookcase, our ideas of god were a big part of our life.  We believed this belief was the biggest part and the only secret to a successful marriage.  I am happy to announce that we were wrong !

Trick or Truth

I have had a deep chest cold and a jaw infection over the past few weeks and am starting to feel better now.  Last week one side of my face looked like I had a grapefruit sticking out of it.  It swole up to my eye and gave me a double chin but only on one side.  I should have taken a picture.  It was like a second face was trying to burst out of my right side.

On Halloween a friend called and me to pick her up from an appointment.  When I arrived, she said “Oh, you are always so beautiful.”  Since my husband was calling me the Hunchface of Notre Dame (sorry for the disfigured joke), I was a little surprised.  She then came with me to the community kids event I always go to.  She didn’t seem to notice that I couldn’t move my ballooning jaw but did notice that someone looked at her Christian sloganed shirt.  As we left, she ran back to give that woman a Christian pamphlet.   Thankfully, her target is already a Christian so I don’t have to do any damage control.

This person is the main reason I am not out publicly as an atheist.  My desire to protect her and stay as one of the few people from her childhood that she will talk to has been keeping me quiet.  I know if she knows, instead of listening to me and asking questions that I will automatically be labelled as bad and unsafe.  She will feel hurt, victimized, and betrayed and will cut herself off probably forever.  She has done the same to others because, I suspect, her church or someone in it encourages her to.

Damn, if I don’t care anymore.  Not because of this little incident, but because I’m tired of being on guard, tired of deliberately misleading people, and tired of being scared of hurting people’s feelings.   Yes, some of them have been hurt and horribly so but some of them are holding onto their view of themselves as victims and using it to abuse other people.

But what would coming out accomplish?  I imagine that some people would think “huh, that smart and compassionate woman isn’t evil.  Maybe I was wrong”.   More predictably “shy awkward people who go to university and start talking about women and LGBT rights learn to hate God.  We must destroy liberal arts before it destroys us.”  Or perhaps it would just cultivate a vague sense of disassociation and unease.

I still feel trapped.  Be open and free or stay quiet and make things socially comfortable for everyone else.  Does keeping quiet about my lack of belief in the Christian god help me discuss social justice for marginalized groups or am I deceiving myself?

I left fundamentalism for moral reasons

I could no longer believe Christianity for no good reason when I found there were no good reasons for believing it.  That is why I say I left Christianity for intellectual reasons.  However, I left fundamentalism for moral reasons.

My morals and values were contradicted by some of the teachings of fundamentalist Christianity.

I value truth.  Fundamentalism values faith, which means that believing what you are told is seen as superior to finding out what is true.

Compassion is a large part of my moral compass which leads me to value other things like equality, no harm, fairness, protection and the value of life.  Fundamentalism says it believes in compassion, but compassion is to be sacrificed in the name of obedience.  Obedience to authority is a higher value in fundy religions.  Anything that disrupts the hierarchy is to be punished before compassion is allowed.  That means people cannot be valued equally as part of their moral framework no matter how much they say otherwise.

Fundamentalists are compassionate.  I was a fundy, I was compassionate.  I was most compassionate to people I didn’t view as enemy.  If a person was part of my group or seen as vulnerable I was allowed to show all compassionate I wanted.  If the person was seen as a threat, that fear often overrode my ability to be truly compassionate.  I could pity them, sure, but trying to empathize and understand was called weakness.

We were told ‘compassion’ and ‘love’ sometimes looked like abuse.  It could be the most loving thing to beat an uncompliant child so they would grow up to be compliant and docile.  It could be the most compassionate thing to wipe out an entire nation.  It was more loving to tell LGBTI youth they would go to hell if they didn’t behave hetero- or asexually, to hell with their mental health or love of their life.  Compassion and love were twisted and made subservient to obedience to law or the fundy god’s morality of punishment.

Those values, truth and compassion, lead me out of fundamentalism.  It hurt me to see how women and queer people were treated, how people in other cultures were treated, how the environment was treated and how it was justified as righteous and moral.    Abuse was called love if it promoted the hierarchy.  Lies were called truth for the same reason.  That is because the fear of authority is the moral compass of the fundamentalist ideology.

I didn’t leave because I wanted to sin.  I left because I was too moral and too honest to stay in a world that values obedience over love and blind trust over truth.

I’m not perfect.  This isn’t a black and white transition.  I grew up in a sexist, homophobic, racist world and all of those fears exist in the broader society as well.  Compassion and value for truth do exist in fundamentalist circles, but they are constantly beat down by other harmful values.   There are liberal Christians still going to my old church who follow their own moral compass despite being told obedience and fear is superior.

As non-fundys, we (secular or religious) humanists  really do have a higher morality to offer and that is the truth.

Conversations with Conservatives

I had a lot of practice with small talk on the weekend, mostly with evangelical friends and relatives I hadn’t seen for a while. My surprise over some of the conversations let me see how my thinking has changed.

Homeschooling Mom and I were talking about our kids and how they like biking.  She has 3 boys and a baby girl.  She told me that boys like riding bikes more than girls because they are boys.  She went on to describe how her middle boy loves biking naturally as he is a boy.  No comment on her other two boys’ unenthusiastic relationship with their bikes.  Then she talked about how her baby girl is also obsessed with bikes.  However, the baby is only interested because she sees the family biking.  It isn’t because she actually likes bikes, being female.

Later, Lil’T came up to me.  ”Mom, that lady is crazy.  I like bikes and I’m a girl.  That’s silly.”

Well said, Lil’T.

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At a jewelry party, I was sitting with a woman whose husband is a lawyer.  She was talking about her husband’s difficulty in the first place he worked as if he was the only one who had not found the perfect job on the first try.  I told the story of a lawyer friend of mine who left his first job because he found the firm to be unethical.  The second workplace didn’t foster respect in the workplace, and he is now enjoying his third job.

Her first response, “Oh, he is a Christian!”

“Umm, no.”  This guy is an atheist, polyamorous and bisexual.   He isn’t even christian in the loose, cultural connotation.

She looked bewildered.  ”Then how did he know it was unethical?”

I assured her my friend has high moral standards.  I didn’t mention he would think it immoral to follow a god who commanded genocide and promoted slavery.

She went on to tell me that God is calling her to homeschool her kids to protect them from the other kids they’d meet at public schools.  Sincerely sweet, she did apologize in case it came across that she was judging those in the public school system.

————————————————————————-

After my birthday supper, one person stayed later and asked me to pray she would find a new job.  I asked why, since I thought she liked her new place.

She said she had been asked to do things that went against her faith.  I couldn’t imagine what an elementary school would ask of her that would go against her faith.

Then she leaned over and quietly spelled out “y …. o…..g…..a”.

I had no sympathy for her feelings of violation for being asked to assist a child with disabilities so they could participate with the class activity.  When I asked why she thought that violated her faith she said it was because the Hindus started it.

“Well, the Buddhists practice acupuncture.  The Muslims and Zeus worshipers developed modern medicine.  You use both of those.”

She wasn’t impressed.

I prayed with her, feeling conflicted.  Yes, it brings her comfort and yes I can sneak in sermons like finding the joy where you are, but I feel like I am ultimately undermining her own autonomy and confidence in herself.

_______________________________________________

I’m not sure I would hold onto gender stereotypes in the face of obvious contradiction, but I did once think that morality came from an external authority and was suspicious of yoga until I learned what it was.  These are smart people who listen too much to other people’s stupid ideas.

But I did get to use my new respect of fashion in helping someone pick which necklace to buy!  Actually, it was the stuff about colour and line harmony I’m working on in art class that was most helpful.  Either way, win!

Here is another example of what I’m learning in art class.  This is my mischievous niece:

How to manufacture a miracle

Step 1: Pray for something you are likely to get.

Step 2: Repeat Step 1 making sure you have a large variety of requests.  (This also works for draws and other such contests.  Yay for statistical probability!)

Step 3: Ignore all the unanswered prayers and focus on the ones that will inevitably come to pass.  If something happens that is different but similar to what you prayed, it still counts.  God knew what what you really meant.

Step 4: Tell someone the good news making sure to downplay the high probability of it happening and not mention the unanswered prayers.  Use words like “miracle”, “amazing”, “blessing” and “surprise”.  Use words like “coincidence” or “chance” ironically.  Make sure all the credit goes to supernatural intervention even if it means downplaying or ignoring the contributions of people like medical staff or caring friends.

 

Example 1: A young mom is up half the night with her teething twins.  She prays for coffee when the alarm blares.  Her husband, aware that she missed crucial sleep, makes her coffee in the morning.  ”Praise God!  He knew I needed coffee and he brought it!”.

Example 2: When I was in Taiwan, I was feeling homesick.  I asked God if I could play a game of basketball.  A group of men who played evenings asked if I wanted to play with them.  Hallelujah!

Of course, I had been aware these guys met once a week and coming from a small town had the opportunity to play a variety of sports, including basketball which was one of my favourites.  But in my mind, God had known that playing a game of basketball was exactly what this small town girl would need to feel more at home.  He blessed me, but not by having me reminded of how much I loved to play.  Nope.  He had put it on the hearts of these Taiwanese men years ago that they should play.  Then God caused them to play at the school I was volunteering at.  Not because I was volunteering at the one English speaking school in the city that happened to be perhaps the only one set up to play basketball.   No, it was a miracle.

I think I might have prayed for fresh salad greens too.  That prayer wasn’t answered.  Or mentioned.  God knew I needed basketball more.

 

Example 3: An elderly man is in excruciating pain and on his death bed.  At prayer meeting, someone asks that God take him home soon.  That week, he dies.  God answered prayer once again.

I’m not saying that prayers don’t do anything, but that miracles are easy to make.  (There are studies that show prayers can help, especially if the person who is being prayed for knows about it.  I’ve also heard there are also studies that show prayer having an adverse effect, but I haven’t read any of those.)

Would anyone else like to share a miracle?

 

Logical vacuum

We went camping last weekend with a friend from the Dance-walk flash mob.  A very nice family had their tent next to ours.

One evening around a bottle of wine, my former Anglican friend and I were joking about communion wine.  This of course led to talking about religion.  She told us that she’d never found any  satisfactory answer to how people “know” that their religions are the best.  Most people just tell her that they “know” because they’ve experienced it or that they “just know”.  Since the same answer comes from Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Pentecostals, and others, she has remained unconvinced of their conclusions.

The dad from the family next to us couldn’t resist.  He walked over and immediately began to tell us that we shouldn’t be so cerebral.  The answer was in the Bible, after all, and could be found with logic.  However, this man couldn’t explain to us how it was logical, but a preacher he follows on YouTube explains the mysteries of the bible with said logic.  If we watched YouTube Preacher we would also see the logic of creationism and leave the cerebral folly of evolution.

This man said the problem with the bible was how people read it.  I agreed with him.  I mentioned the relief of not having to read it as historical fact and trying to deal with the fact that the birth and resurrection stories don’t match.   The man stopped.  He couldn’t compute that the birth stories didn’t all match and began to argue that they did.  The conversation ended with him encouraging us to watch his YouTube preacher and me encouraging him to reread all the birth and resurrection stories and charting the events.  For fun.

The man was very polite, passionate and well-meaning.  The hardest part was that I felt like I would be hurting his feelings or challenging him to a duel if I disagreed with him.  Witnessing is not a fair set-up.  It is not an exchange of ideas, or even storytelling.  It is a sales-pitch, but when you reject the pitch the person who is offering it feels personally rejected.  If you don’t want a vacuum, you don’t want a vacuum.  If you don’t want an incoherent explanation of the logic of creationism, you aren’t just rejecting the idea since the person has tied that idea with their life experience, world-view and even life purpose.  You are rejecting them.  It isn’t fun and it isn’t fair.

Church Camp Blues

I have this recurring dream that I am at church camp.  I can feel something bad is coming.  Sometimes it is a hurricane, or giant robotic man-eating insects, or just a dark shadow.  It is coming and I need to get out.  I try and rescue my kids,my family and my friends.  Finally I know I have to leave without some of them.  Usually then dramatic heroics happen and I get to do car stunts I’ve never even seen on movies.  Is this about me having a saviour complex?   Maybe.  But strangely I still miss church camp.

Last week was our church’s biggest annual family camp.   About 700 people spend their vacations travelling to a semi-rural campground that was once an aircraft training compound.  People come from India, South America, all corners of the US and  Canada too.   This was our yearly vacation, as it was for many families.  A few times we went to a smaller camp in the US.

After breakfast, there was church until lunch.  After lunch there was Children’s Church and Young People’s.  Then there was supper.  Then church until almost curfew.  In between was some time to play sports or visit, unless you were working since all the meals were done by volunteers.  In order to get more out of church and ‘fellowship’ we weren’t supposed to use cell phones, computers, watch TV or even listen to the radio.  If it was a youth camp we were supposed to get permission from the elders to leave the grounds.  I know I wasn’t the only girl to have to ask a crotchety old man who loved to preach on the sins of female flesh permission to go buy extra pads or tampons.  I also wasn’t the only one to run away without permission.

Church was long.  Hours long.  Sometimes 4 hours long.  The preachers weren’t trained orators and one of my favourites mumbled so much I could only understand every 3rd word.  Not exaggerating.    Some had accents so strong we weren’t sure what language they were actually speaking.  The music dragged, with the front third of the church always a word or two ahead of the back half.

And I miss it.

I miss it because it was a familiar tradition.  We never missed July church camp.  Aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents would be there.  People were there who cared about us.  Sleep deprivation made everything seem louder and more important.   We were a small, tight-knit community pulled together by how few there was of us.  Prophesies about how we were a First Fruits company helped unite us too.  But I do miss the community.  I am the third generation of my family to be involved.  As a third  generation Canadian, that is a lot of my history.

There was a feeling of safety on the grounds.  This may have been rooted in naivety.  After all, a friend has the same feeling when in small towns, never mind that his wife was raped as a child in a small town.  But regardless of reality, the camp felt sacred.   I used to want to get married there.  Of course, my wedding plans included a weiner roast and blob tag.  (I’m not a stereotypical romantic.)

Now that the illusion has been shattered, I wonder what it is that I miss.

I miss the illusion

of safety

and superiority : that I belonged to a special group that had a special revelation from the Divine which would change the universe.

I miss the illusion that I belonged.

 

Its still a wonderful group of people.  But when I think of bringing my daughters there, I get a sick feeling in my gut.  Once upon a time I didn’t think I could live without camp.  Now I don’t think I could live with it.

Confessions for Revival

When I was still involved in my church, we were always preparing for a revival.  An elder, also an engineer, had read enough about revivals to feel he had figured out the formula.  Here is the simplistic version:

Prayer + Public confessions of sins = Outpouring of the Holy Spirit (as evidenced by healings, restored relationships, and hundreds of new believers joining the church)

He was sure that we’d had enough years of prayer.  Since we were on the third generation of The Move, that gave us about 60 years worth.

It was time for confession of sins.

Easily guilted, I volunteered to confess to the congregation a horrible, secret sin.  I called it “intellectual arrogance” which sounded absolutely horrible.  In reality, what I meant was not that I was conceited about my cognitive abilities, but that I

1) wanted people to think I was smart (I like smart people, I wanted them to like me)

2) wanted to understand things and didn’t like being told that I should accept contradictory, irrational or immoral things because I wasn’t capable of understanding ‘god’s mysterious ways

3) sometimes didn’t do things because I was afraid of failing

When explaining the depths of my sin, I didn’t use these exact words since we were never allowed to use the word immoral in reference to god.  I doubt anyone heard anything after the phrase ‘intellectual arrogance’ since I knew an entire row of people had expressed their belief that higher education makes people arrogant and stupid.

I do regret it now.  Not because I could easily be labeled as conceited, but because I may have discouraged people from thinking.  A friend who was studying for his doctorate in English whispered to me that I had apologized for ‘sins’ that he ‘struggled’ with.  What would all of the teenagers and kids think to hear thinking confessed as a sin?  Probably the same things I thought when I heard it, as our flawed human mind was a common topic for promoting blind faith.

The first part of my sin, wanting people to think I was smart, I can now laugh at.  How many people would confess to the sin of wearing mascara because they wanted their eyes to appear larger?  Or how many people wash with scented soap because they want people to think they smell nice?  Its ok.

The second part angers me.  I let myself be manipulated into feeling bad for wanting to understand something.  I forgive myself.  I was brought up hearing this, as were the ones who preached it.

I now see that the third part of my confession had nothing to do with wanting to understand things, but actually kept me from trying to discover things.

To rephrase: I profess to having that wonderful human trait of curiosity, morals and common sense; I profess to liking smart people and wanting to be smart; and I admit to being afraid to fail but willing to anyways.

According to the formula, we need a few more confessions before a revival can start.  hint, hint

 

The real flaw

A former classmate was talking about fat female bodies and their portrayal in art.  She seemed amazed that the old Dutch masters preferred to paint curvy women.  Instead of concluding that curvy women were the ideal, she thought Rubens was a particularly kind painter to non-endomorphs.

“They weren’t afraid to show their flaws” she kept repeating.  I tried to explain that Rubens and those in his culture did not see ‘fat’ women as ugly, but as ideal.  Dimpled thighs were not flaws but markers of beauty and wealth the same way protruding collar bones and Gucci purses are desired by (some) women in our culture now.

I tried to explain that in Europe and some parts of North America at various times, muscle definition was a flaw as were square shoulders.  Women were taught to keep their shoulders sloped and rounded in the early 1800s.

    

Even in this 1899 poster, the Amazon woman has no visible muscle definition and narrow shoulders.  (See http://www.flickr.com/photos/taisau/36089690/http://www.flickr.com/photos/taisau/36089690) for the essay that goes with the poster.)

 

The thighs of our modern Amazon, Wonder Woman, are not dimpled, but defined.  (However I miss the more dominant or assertive pose of her ancestor.  )

But, I could not get my classmate to see that Rubens was not a revolutionary fat-activist but a popular painter.  She could not imagine cellulite as anything but a flaw.  It is the same with church history.   Even when reading the gospels and literally seeing how the Jesus character evolved and began to show different traits, the evolution of thought cannot be accepted.  We find an explanation that doesn’t fit the evidence, but fits our current cultural story.

If cellulite is always a flaw, then a painter would only paint it to be generous.  ?

If Jesus is always a deity, then his (contradictory) representations do not represent change in thought, but a different facet of his divine character.  ?