(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Why I don’t trust religion. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-17 I wrote this because of three articles posted here over the last several days: I read all three articles, and as many of the thousands of comments as I could stand. And the thing that really struck me is the number of people who reacted very defensively, especially since the first article specifically referred to that behavior: Unfortunately, you see some faith-based people who claim to be “progressive” here at DK reflexively lash out against anyone who challenges archaic beliefs and promotes realistic thinking. While this is not a nice way of putting it, it matches what I saw - quite a few comments on all three articles which pretty much did exactly that (and I’ll say right now that it wasn’t just people of faith doing it). I saw old arguments like “Hitler was an atheist”, and people accusing other commenters and the writer of being abusive or hateful, and that’s just what stood out enough for me to remember it after two days and change. There were people who responded in kind of course, and that just made it worse. There were also plenty of people who engaged respectfully with each other, of course, probably more than not if I had to guess, but they were overshadowed by the ones that did not. I brought this up because I don’t want to see my article devolve into people yelling at each other in the comments. If you engage with someone, please do so respectfully. If you find yourself getting incensed, take a step back and think about what you want to say, since you can’t edit what you say, and I know better than most about how much words can hurt. So if you see someone acting out in a comment, please flag them and don’t try to engage with them. So, I’ll start with a little story. It starts when I was six and had to start school with rather thick glasses. And got bullied mercilessly for it. It affected my self confidence to the point where I developed nervous habits like picking my nose and eating it, biting my fingers, sucking my thumb. I got bullied for those things too. I still have to cope with some of the aftermath, nearly 40 years later. Almost 90% of my life, and virtually all of my life experience. Needless to say I did not have a pleasant school experience. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was pretty hellish. I just wanted people to leave me alone, and ended up spending as much of my time alone, reading, as I could get away with. As it continued, I became more and more driven by fury against the people who kept on with the bullying and started retaliating, and not with words. I was easy to goad into striking out, at which point the teachers would step in and separate me from the people who were victimizing me. It went on until I was fifteen. Ten years of bullying that was consistently handled very poorly by the authority figures who kept trying to figure out how to get me to play nice with the other kids (and keeping me physically separated from them in a classroom for students with behavioral disabilities in the meantime) and didn’t spend any time looking at the way those kids might have been acting. I can also practically guarantee, given the time this happened in and where it happened at, that virtually everyone at the school went to some Christian church or another. So you might understand why, to this day, I have very little use for religion. The way people behaved towards me, every day, did not leave me kindly disposed towards a religion that claimed to be about the meek and helpless. That what one did to the least of these they also did to Jesus. Well, I was that “least of these” in a lot of ways. As an adult, I’m aware of nuances that my youthful self could not have known, but it doesn’t change the how I felt then. And when you pair that with the fact that I read the Bible in lieu of listening to the pastor talk during sermons, it shouldn’t be hard to guess that I eventually concluded that the stories I was reading of Adam, Abraham, Moses, and all the others resembled the exciting fictional stories I liked to read. It didn’t take me long to decide that I wanted nothing more to do with religion than I absolutely had to put up with. Naturally I couldn’t just not go to church, but I put as little of myself into it as I could, and only because I loved my parents (who did their best for me, their oldest, and who I could tell genuinely cared for me as a person). They taught the junior high Sunday school class and my mom went out of her way to help make sure everyone including me could be a part of things. What she taught was a more humanistic view of Jesus, which is probably most of why I live and let live with religious people. Whatever they might believe I see them as people and watch to see what they do instead of what they say. Which is good because the high school Sunday school teacher was basically a fundamentalist, teaching a lot about the Rapture and other stuff like it. Him I just endured by staying as quiet as possible, and given nobody else who went into that class with me spoke up more than I did I’m sure I wasn’t alone in how I felt. Oh, and I’d like to add that I was denied confirmation in my church because the pastor’s youthful relative would pick fights with me, and while I had mostly learned to not lash out violently by then, the pastor really didn’t appreciate that I didn’t get along with her nephew (I think, it has been over 25 years after all). My parents took exception to this and moved to another church where I did get confirmed, but I’ve not gone to a church service since. This wasn’t a megachurch. It wasn’t run by a sycophant of the likes of Falwell or anything like that. Just a small city Methodist church. Maybe I was just unlucky, and had a bad pastor and teacher. I’m sure there are plenty of good churches out there, and in any case a church is nothing without the people who attend it. But that goes both ways. If there are people who do good things in churches, there are also people who do bad things in churches. I suspect they are more common than most people realize. My city church — seating at most a couple hundred in a relatively large city — had two that I remember because of how their positions of authority and how they could act as a result impacted me as a youth. I wouldn’t venture to guess what it was like in other churches but I would be very surprised to find that mine was particularly anomalous. And I’ve read plenty of accounts about religious deconversion ‘therapy’, and youth camps which were led by abusive adults who got away with horrifying behavior to their unlucky charges, and other stuff besides. I know people who grew up in hyper-fundamentalist churches, what might as well be called cults, and somehow managed to break free of that and become decent people. As bad as I had it, I think I was lucky, because I was surrounded mostly by people who were basically decent and just didn’t know how to handle me. But as we’ve discovered in the last several years, there are plenty of people out there who seem to be perfectly fine with this kind of stuff, and most of them consider themselves as (or more) devoutly religious than anyone here. I also know how easy it is for people to say the right things as protective camouflage so they can work their way into positions of power and influence. It happens all the time outside of religion, and there’s no reason to assume religious organizations are immune to or exempt from this. I’ll conclude by saying that if you’re one of those people who does go out and do good for other people, thank you. As I see it, you’re the one doing good things, not whatever religion you might belong to. If your religious belief is what motivates you, I’m ok with that, but ultimately it’s you who decided to act. So again, thank you. Please remember what I said earlier: be respectful to the people you talk to here, take time to center yourself before responding, and don’t let angry people provoke you into responding in kind. Just flag them and let the staff handle it. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/17/2153571/-Why-I-don-t-trust-religion Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/