Thoughts on Christianity Flame Wars... From a Jaded Ex-Fundamentalist

(Originally from Daily Kos)

OK. I must admit it. Even though I try to deliberately avoid the religion flame wars of late, I sometimes feel compelled to read a few of the diaries anyway. However, I'm nonetheless saddened by all this nasty infighting. It's really compelled me to open up and talk about a personal experience I don't always share too many details about.

Believe it or not, it helps me put into proper perspective all the flame wars here over Christianity and progressive values.

I grew up as a frightened, closeted gay kid in a scary fundamentalist church. I was constantly told I would go to hell if I were to live my life as the person I really felt I was. I tried to repress what I was feeling inside. After all, I knew how the church felt about "those wicked perverts".

You see, my family was part of no ordinary church. My mother was "saved" there, and she subsequently placed me in "Christian School" there. She listened dutifully to the wise pastors and did as they told her. But when I started to question what I was being indoctrinated "taught", she became very concerned.

She took me to pastors for brainwashing "counseling". She had friends pray over me to "remove the demons". At one point, she even removed me from school, had us fleeing from our own home, and then did the unthinkable: She hit me with her cane, then called the police and falsely accused me of attempted murder. County social services later removed me from my mother's custody, and my relationship with her has never been the same since.

Why, you ask? Why would a mother turn on her own child like this? The pastors at Calvary Chapel encouraged her to give me this "radical treatment" because I didn't conform to the church's "godly standard" of a typical straight Republican blindly following every command sermon given from the pulpit. And instead of recognizing my mother's mental health problems stemming from unresolved issues over her mother's death, they allowed her to engage in destructive "spiritual warfare" conspiracy theories that ultimately resulted to permanent division in my family.

Needless to say, I did not have a great church experience growing up. And though I tried and tried and tried again in my early college years (after coming out as gay) to rediscover Christianity, I ultimately found solace in Julia Sweeney's musings and allowed myself to let go of god.

So why am I not comdemning all churches and calling Christianity the greatest evil known to humankind? Let me explain.

In the last five years, I've come to experience another side of Christianity. When I still lived in Orange County, I found plenty of comfort in another Costa Mesa church... And attended LGBTQ community meetings at the local Irvine UCC.

And when I moved to that dreaded Sin City two years ago, I continued meeting new friends who I now call part of my family. Some of them are atheists, some of them are Jewish, some of them are Muslim... And yes, some of them are Christians.

One of the most important things I learned out of my painful Calvary Chapel experience is the constant need to think critically. And strangely enough, I see this lacking in the comment sections of far too many religious pie fights here at Daily Kos.

When I read this from commonmass...

I have a great deal of understanding about why some people are angry with religion in general, and Christianity in specific. It's not like we have a stellar record when it comes to human rights and other things most progressives hold dear.

However, in this day and age, some of us--Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Lutheran and others--are standing up for human rights, including LGBTQ rights, standing up for the end of war, for a human, fair solution to issues in Palestine/Gaza, for a lot of things. We're working hard on social issues. We're committed to them. Jesus demands it.

We may not be "you", but we stand with you. We stand for peace, justice, love, equality, representative democracy, you name it. We--at least here on Anglican Kossacks--ARE you. We are us.

I knew what he was saying, because I've seen it in action myself. Just because we're all on our own respective spiritual journeys doesn't mean some of us are "holier" or "smarter" than others here.

Just because I found comfort in letting go of god doesn't mean my Christian friends and family are wrong in finding comfort in embracing god. Again, we're all on our own respective spiritual journeys. I learned the hard way the consequences of blind allegiance to one set of beliefs.

All I ask is that we remember to think for ourselves and treat others with respect and dignity when we discuss matters of faith.

Sharrontology & Her "Calling from God"

What? You thought it was bad enough that Sharrontology Obtuse Angle believes she's on a "mission from God"? And that she's palling around with extremists who want to impose the death penalty against "homosexual sodomites and abortionists"? And that she thinks people in need of Medicare or unemployment aid are "heathens"?

Well, get a load of this...

When Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle told a Christian news interviewer this year that “entitlement programs (are) built to make government our God,” she voiced a central tenet of Christian Reconstructionism, according to academics who study the movement.

Christian Reconstructionism is a political-religious movement formed in the 1960s and ’70s that seeks to return American society to the rule of biblical law. Any attempt to expand government beyond the dictates in the Old Testament — for example, by establishing Social Security benefits, education policy or property taxes — turns government into a false idol, reconstructionists believe.

“The problem is that government becomes an idol when it overspills its biblically proscribed boundaries, and people start looking to government for salvation,” said Julie Ingersoll, a religious studies professor at the University of North Florida, in explaining a tenet of Christian Reconstructionism. [...]

Many of Angle’s religious and political beliefs appear to align with the tenets of Christian Reconstructionism. She’s supported eliminating Social Security and Medicare, is a home schooling champion, sees the separation of church and state as an unconstitutional doctrine that was never meant to protect the state from religious belief, and believes public policy should support the traditional family structure as defined in the Bible.

She also helped resurrect the Nevada affiliate of a national party founded by a prominent Christian Reconstructionist and has raised campaign money from reconstructionists.

But Ingersoll said Angle’s comments on government as a false idol come directly from the movement’s founder, R.J. Rushdoony, an orthodox Presbyterian minister.

It's become increasingly clear that Sharron Angle has rather strong ties to the Christian Reconstructionist movement. The late RJ Rushdoony is commonly credited as the intellectual parent of this movement. Now he had some very... Ummm, let's say interesting ideas for this country that now form the basic "platform for change" that Christian Reconstructionists seek.

Rushdoony's most important area of writing, however, was law and politics, as expressed in his small book of popular essays Law & Liberty and discussed in much greater detail in his three-volume, 1,894-page magnum opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law. With a title modeled after Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, Rushdoony's Institutes was arguably his most influential work. In the book, he proposed that Old Testament law should be applied to modern society and that there should be a Christian theonomy, a concept developed in his colleague Greg Bahnsen's controversial tome Theonomy and Christian Ethics, which Rushdoony heartily endorsed. In the Institutes, Rushdoony supported the reinstatement of the Mosaic law's penal sanctions. Under such a system, the list of civil crimes which carried a death sentence would include homosexuality, adultery, incest, lying about one's virginity, bestiality, witchcraft, idolatry or apostasy, public blasphemy, false prophesying, kidnapping, rape, and bearing false witness in a capital case. Although supporting the separation of church and state at the national level, Rushdoony understood both institutions as under the rule of God, and thus he conceived secularism as posing endless false antitheses, which his massive work addresses in considerable detail. In short, he sought to cast a vision for the reconstruction of society based on Christian principles.

The book was also critical of democracy. He wrote that "the heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state ... Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies." He elsewhere said that "Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy," and characterized democracy as "the great love of the failures and cowards of life."

No wonder why Sharrontology has embraced such hardcore homophobia, transphobia, and all around xenophobia! This is just plain frightening.

And you know what's even more frightening? Sharrontology's embrace of these "tea party doctors" who want to reject proven science! I'm not even kidding here, Sharrontology is supported by the "Association of American Physicians and Surgeons" teabagger front group, and will be doing a rally with them in San Diego tomorrow. These "tea party doctors" claim President Obama performs "covert hypnosis" on crowds, call Medicare "evil" and "immoral", and claim "there are real grounds for positively denying that HIV causes AIDS."

Why am I getting the feeling we're talking about voodoo doctors here? Remind me not to go to them when I have a fever. I suspect they'd recommend I have leeches suck out the "impure humors" from my body. So does Sharrontology's God tell her to reject real science in favor of this mumbo jumbo? And Obtuse Angle's God wants her to reject Constitutional representative democracy for some hocus-pocus theocracy that would make Iran and Saudi Arabia look "liberated" by comparison?

Now do we have to ask any more why Sharron Angle is unfit to serve in the US Senate? This country was founded on religious freedom, NOT religious extremism. Our Country is governed by The Constitution, not RJ Rushdoony's radical interpretation of The Bible. And for being such a "Constitutional expert", she has no idea what's actually in The Constitution. (Hint, Sharrontology... It's not this theocracy crap!)