Tag Archives: books

Secular Wings, Spiritual Abuse, Trauma Talk

New Book re: Ravi Zacharias

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Back in my evangelical days, Ravi was a favoured Christian apologist.  I read three of his books.

As I look back from my vantage point now, most books I read by apologists left me with more questions than answers.  More uncertainty than certainty.  I don’t think they grounded my “faith” that the Bible was true at all.  If anything, apologetics pointed out to me the diversity inside Christianity.  This apologist says that, that apologist says this, scholarship here, scholarship there, here a Christian, there a Christian, every where a Christian Christian.

My struggle to believe these human authors, God’s go-to people, the true Christians, the real Christians, the ethical/moral Christians, the praying Christians, the studied Christians, the honourable Christians, the esteemed speakers of all thing “God” in all Its Triune glory, the “honest” Christians, lead me down that spiral staircase into the realm of:  Why so many different kinds of Christians?  Why so many Biblical interpretations?  Why so many Bibles?  Why don’t all the apologists and scholars agree?  If every *i* be dotted and every *t* be crossed, what the hell is going on?  Naturally, we all know it’s Eve’s fault.  That’s really what’s going on.  Never mind that guy behind the curtain.  God is God.  Leave it at that.  One day you’ll have your mansion over the hilltop.  For now, just believe.  Who cares what the truth is?  Who cares what the story is?

I’ve been following this story about Ravi Zacharias for awhile now.  It may be of some interest to someone here.

It very much reminds me of my days in the church.  Pastors who were not telling the truth.  Sordid details.  Those who confronted the abuse/lies (us) and those who turned a blind eye to the truth, refusing to consider that those men couldn’t possibly be guilty of (insert sordid details here).

Choosing to get-out to maintain our own integrity.  Struggling for years to find out that I do care about the truth and the story.  That’s why I’m now an atheist.  Though I no longer believe my former Christian story, I do care still, about the damage done to those who have been used and abused by my former story and its story-tellers.

https://twitter.com/RaviScam/status/1074802747516436480

Secular Wings

Book Recommendation

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I have an eleven year old family relative who doesn’t live nearby who is not being raised a Christian and who does not attend church.  She’s starting to ask questions about Jesus, about Catholics (Why don’t I go to a Catholic school dad?)  Who is Jesus?  What about God?  She has little Christians around her from various denominations asking her why she doesn’t go to church or where she goes to church?  Her mother grew up with Buddhism but does not actively practice or engage in discussions.  She doesn’t get the Christian/Jesus thing.  Her dad just sees “all” as God.  Nature, the universe, God being the term that embraces everything.  He’s at a loss (admitted this to me) to explain it.  This is up my ally but the distance between us keeps that from happening.  As well, eleven year old has a learning disability and suffers from anxiety that gets worse with age.  Depression now setting in.

Is anyone here familiar with a world religion book for children?  Preferably elementary school aged reading.  I’m wondering if I got her a book to read with her parents if it would help educate them all and make any chats I have with her easier.

While I’m thinking of children’s books, I’m also wondering about a good elementary age book re:  Humanism that might also be of some help.

I thought I’d ask here first before I start looking around.  Thanks.

Agnosticism/Atheism, Blogging, Secular Wings

2012 Wrap-Up

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I am currently otherwise occupied at the moment.  Attempts at blogging may? resume before too long.

A few things I’ll mention as a place holder until I get back.  I’m not getting around to as many blogs as I’d like and my reading as such around the net is limited at the moment.  I wanted to mention the prayer vigil for the dead in Connecticut.  Maybe someone else noticed this and wrote about it, but as I mentioned, I haven’t been out and about reading much so I don’t know.  The pastor/reverend/clergy-person who opened the vigil, I think he was from a Methodist church, included in his list of people who are gathered to remember the dead – “people of no faith.”  Not sure if those were his exact words and maybe there is a script available online somewhere that shows the quote.  I remember at the time wondering if any non-theist or non-religious people heard it and what they thought about ‘being included.’  I did not sense at all his inclusion of non-religious people as derogatory.  I heard an acknowledgement that we are out here.  That we too care and that we are around and helping too.  Compassion, mourning and activism do not belong to the “God-believers” alone.  At any rate, just wanted to mention that and see if anyone else out there heard him include us and if so please feel free to share what you heard and thought about it.

I also thought I’d mention the titles of books I managed to read since my last grouping that I posted about.  I decided to do some reading about bipolar disease by an author who has it.  I do not have bipolar but I have wondered for a long time about a family member of mine who though never diagnosed might be on the spectrum of bipolar, if indeed the term “spectrum” is part of the discussion regarding bipolar.  The author is Marya Hornbacher and I read her books titled Madness and Sane.  If you don’t have bipolar, by the time you finish the book Madness you feel like you do.  This is not any kind of suffering that I’ve ever had.  You can read more about Marya on her website if you are so inclined.  I don’t do good reviews of books.  I just know that for me, this was helpful in getting inside the lives of those with bipolar.  Her book Sane is basically a 12-Step book along the AA model for Alcoholics Anonymous.  I didn’t quite finish the book because I had to give it back to the person I borrowed it from and can easily finish it at another time but I am going to buy her book titled Waiting.  I’m more interested in her approach to recovery and wellness in that book because as I understand it she looks at it from a non-theist point of view.

Before I read the bipolar books I finished reading my favourite book of 2012.  I learned about this book at The Agnostic Wife blog.  An Unquenchable Thirst by Mary Johnson is the story of a young woman’s calling to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity Order and her journey to fulfill that calling.  I loved reading about the very simple and quite complicated way of becoming a nun and the austere experience it was in every way.   I could relate so very much to her young sense of calling and her efforts to obey not only God but those God put in authority over her.  Obeying unquestionably leaves ones bereft of their own reasoning and identity and she just seemed to never be able to abdicate neither reason nor identity.  I could relate.  There is so much to say and I can’t say it.  It’s because in so many ways I too have a book inside of me but still I can’t bring order to my thoughts.  They, my thoughts, are much too much clothed in emotion.    Mary starts her journey as a sincere young teenager who senses a calling and heads in that direction with the greatest of intentions and a heart that does not yet know what this calling entails.  She trusts in a God that is there and the faith of those who have paved the way – Mother Teresa.  In the end Mary leaves the order and pursues a life outside her Catholic faith.  I highly recommend the book for those who enjoy reading the stories of women who embrace a calling and later leave it.  Religion looks down on them as spiritually weak for leaving.  I look up to them as having the courage to look reality in the face and obey their own hearts and minds.

At some point after leaving the Order, Mary left Christianity.  That’s the part of story you don’t hear about in this book.  I can only hope one day we will read the rest of the story.

For those who are interested to read more about Mary, Adam Lee at Big Think interviewed her.  You can read that interview HERE.

Waiting in the wings, I’d like to finish the book titled Scared Sick; The Role of Childhood Trauma in Adult Disease by Robin Karr-Morse with Meredith S. Wiley.  I read up to Chapter 6 in 2011 and then put it aside.  This often happens with me when I read books dealing with trauma, recovery and healing.  I recognize that I can only take so much at a time and it’s okay to put a book down and come back to it later when it is likely that I am strong enough to continue.

My latest new purchase is Oliver Sacks new book, Hallucinations.  I hope to get a start on it soon.  I don’t know anything about Oliver but I plan on starting to get to know him with THIS VIDEO that I found.

So, we come almost to the end of the year 2012.  I want to wish my readers well for the upcoming year and to thank you all for reading (even the lurkers) and for participating when and if you can.  I’m always aware that any time I post it might be my last, but not necessarily because I planned it that way.  Life and death have a way of dictating our next day, hour, minute &/or second, right?  :-)  Though I don’t plan on not being here, one just never knows . . .

Blogging, Secular Wings

Zoe Review – Part One

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Well, here I am, again, considering closing this blog down.  And just as I come this (**) close to doing so, a few more people sign-up (thank you) to start following my blog and I think to myself, ‘Hmm, maybe I’ll stay?’

On May 11th, I will hit the 8th year mark of my moment of knowing that I could no longer call myself a Christian.  All my former efforts to think that I knew “the” truth and could speak with assurance that I knew what the hell I was talking about in regards to “God’s” truth, ceased.

When I started blogging, I had no idea it would create its own life and in the early years, (those that pre-date my deconversion), I was quite naive and just blogged away almost without fear.  I said, “almost” because fear was and still is very much a part of my cellular make-up.  By now it has worn down my DNA big time.

At one time my daughter read my other blog and she found it helpful.  Then a few years later, she didn’t and she felt that being immersed in my blogging culture kept me “stuck” in my recovery and healing phase and didn’t I think it was high-time to be “over” all of this?  She may be right.  Maybe though, it’s not a matter of right or wrong . . . maybe it just is what it is and maybe if I was younger and preoccupied with those years of raising our children and all that went with it, I might not still be here blogging.

I was in my 40’s when I entered into my Christian heretic days and was seated at the top of the slide.  Our children were in their teen years and moving on with their lives.  I was immersed in researching this new phenomenon called Spiritual Abuse and finding a happy home outside the corporate church of Christianity but still within the Body of Christ Christianity.  I really had no idea I was on top of the slide at the time.  I kept myself busy with study and research.  I’m sure that naive part of me thought I might even make a difference within Christianity.  My research and study took me through countless Bibles, books and tapes.  All Christian material.  Just this morning I felt another one of those regretful earthquakes shudder through me at the memory of all the money I spent at the Christian bookstore.  I was one of their preferred customers.  If Zoe was shopping the til would be ringing.

Years of reading books authored by Christians and yet where was the harmony in it all?  Each had their own theology, each had heard from “God”, each knew “the” truth.   Odd enough that every author that claimed “truth” was inevitably making an authoritative statement which led to the fact that a whole lot of other Christians didn’t have it quite right.  They all agreed though that the answers were in the Bible.  Bible.  Bible.  Bible.  All of them believing what they believed based on the Bible and yet the many answers were all different.

There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to give Christianity another moment of my time.   There’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Aren’t you lucky that the whole “religion” thing is one of your hobbies?’  Another part of me then thinks – :roll:  Still another reminds me that for the most part I have nothing else better to do, so . . . why not?  But then the perfectionist in me (ever so small at this time in my life, but still hanging on) thinks, ‘Okay, well maybe what you should do is try and organize this mess.  Start at the beginning.’  Almost immediately though, the PTSD-like part of me shouts, ‘Oh no.  You’ll never survive all the triggers of a “Genesis” moment.  About all you can manage is, In the beginning and from that point on, chaos!  Don’t do it Zoe.  Choose peace.’  ‘Yikes’,  the old skeptic part of me pipes up . . . ‘Peace?  Peace?  There is no frickin’ peace.’

Time out for a Zoe Zen moment (which does not involve sitting cross-legged on the floor)  Closed eyes and deep breathing on the other hand . . . highly recommended.

Zoemmmmm.  :neutral:

 

Agnosticism/Atheism, Emotions, Pain, Personal Recovery, Secular Wings, Spiritual Abuse

Counting The Cost

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I’ve been reading a book by Kay Redfield Jamison, a “Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and codirector of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center.”  She tells us some of her story about coming out to the world and to her professional community as one who lives with manic-depressive illness, often known as bipolar disease.  For the most part, her book Nothing Was The Same, a memoir is the story of how she met her husband, their life together, a reoccurrence of cancer for him and his eventual death from cancer.  The end of the book, the last few chapters are waiting for me, but for now I’ve set it aside to look at something in her book that captures for me, the reason why it’s so difficult for me and others to come-out in total about ourselves.  People who might otherwise write their own books, don’t for a variety of reasons.  It takes great courage to stand up to the ridicule one can face, the misunderstandings and the broken relationships that result from one’s own truth.  Yes, it is true that coming-out helps many others who are suffering.  Yes it gives them strength and they feel less alone.  Yes, one’s words can even give life to those who wonder if life is worth it.  But then?

First I’ll share the passage from Kay’s book that caught me by surprise.  Then I’ll try to finish this post today.  It’s been simmering here in my draft folder as I try to let my brain figure out what it is I want to say and how to say it.  For clarification, Kay comes out about her illness in her book titled, An Unquiet Mind.

After coming-out to the world about her illness Kay states on pg. 43-44 of Nothing Was The Same:

“I was overwhelmed by the many thousands of letters I received in response to the publication of An Unquiet Mind.  Most were generous; many were disturbing.  Religious diatribes were common.  I received hundreds of letters from fundamentalist Christians berating me for turning my back on God and abandoning my Christian faith, which I had not been aware I had or had not done.  Others thought my illness just deserts for not having truly accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into my heart, or for not having prayed often or sincerely enough.  I had left my mind open to Satan, and he had entered in.  Madness and despair were precisely what I deserved and would have in this world and in the next.  I should expect to burn throughout eternity.  I got more than a taste of intolerance and hatred religious extremity harbors toward those with mental illness; it was unpleasant and frightening.

I was taken aback by the medieval quality of some of the beliefs held, modern incarnations of demons and possession, and by the viciousness of the attacks.  One women, who included a prayer card with excerpts from the Bible, wrote that it was a good think I hadn’t had children as I had at least “spared the world of one more crazy manic-depressive.”  There were several variations on this theme.  “You are clearly unaware of the pain and suffering you and other manic-depressives cause,”wrote one person.  “How could you have even considered having children, bringing another psychotic into existence?”

So, I have read this far in my post, and my heart is pounding.  All I can think is, doesn’t that just take your breath away?  She didn’t get one or two letters from fundamentalists, she got hundreds.  Hundreds of fundamentalists learned of her illness and what?  Well they decided or believed the Holy Spirit called them to judge and harass her, that’s what.  All of it in Jesus’ name of course.  Can’t you just feel the warmth and loving concern in their condemnation of her?  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, it’s possible to do both at the same time I think . . . but look how she gets letters that judge her Christianity.  What the hell do they even know of her faith?  Others figure she’s not a Christian at all and that’s why she’s ill.  Oh yes, asking Jesus into your heart is the magic elixir.  Take a dose of this and you’ll never be sick again.  If by chance you do fall ill, well, maybe you really didn’t ask Jesus into your heart or if you did maybe it was in the wrong denomination?  (This reminds me of the lady in the Baptist church who told me to doubt my salvation because I asked Jesus into my heart while in the United Church of Canada denomination.)  And not even thinking about the pain she or he is inflicting on Kay, she/he blames Kay for causing other people “pain and suffering” because of her illness.  Oh thank you very much for sending me your letter, gosh I never thought my illness caused anyone any pain.  :roll:  Crap, most of us who suffer from illness live every day knowing that it isn’t easy living with us.  Shall we end our lives now?  Would that makes things easier for you?    The ignorance, the platitudes, the brainwashing . . . I’m not sure I have the courage to receive even one letter telling me Satan got me, let alone hundreds.

Truth be told, I fear the emotional and physical cost to my very essence if upon writing my own book I was treated like Kay . . . and she’s an expert in her field!  Me, I’m a nobody and easily tramped upon by so-called Holy Spirit led people who think they know other people better than “God” Himself.

Blogging, Politics, Secular Wings

Religious Right in Canada

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In 2010 I read The Armageddon Factor; The Rise Of Christian Nationalism In Canada, by Marci McDonald.  I thought I’d let my Canadian readers know that I’ve added Marci McDonald’s new The Armageddon Factor Blog to my blogroll.  Marci writes about the rise of the Religious Right in Canadian politics.  Most of my readers here are from the U.S. and I’m not sure they realize that we have a “Religious Right” in Canada.  We do.  I use to be one of them.

Here’s another interesting article about the release of The Armageddon Factor  in paperback from Religious Right Watch.

Christianity, Islam, Politics, Secular Wings, Spiritual Abuse

And low, the Infidels are always with us.

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After reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s books ‘Infidel’ and ‘Nomad’ (not quite finished Nomad) I would have to say for the most part, that I agree with the author of this article, Mischief in Manhattan  from the Ottawa Citizen.  Though I am still uneasy with the idea of moderate Islam, just as I’m uneasy about moderate Christianity.  I think moderates cherry pick their way through the Bible and the Quran as much as anyone does.  I am uneasy with the thought that moderate might mean complacency when one is silent in the face of  the rights of women and children.  Within moderate Christianity there appears to be a letting-go of Biblical literalism.  Is this so with moderate Muslims?  Is the Quran Allah’s perfect book without error or not?

I understand why people would be offended at the building of this “community centre” near Ground Zero.  Not even ten years later, it must seem like a sick joke.  In fact, I’m sure our Native Americans feel the same way when they see our monuments in place of theirs.  Healing takes time and in the end, does that kind of healing ever truly take place? 

Can you imagine the glee of the extremists at such a notion?  A Ground Zero Islamic Community Centre.  Take that you Infidels!  Up yours!

I wonder though, how will the extremists/fundamentalists take to the women swimming in the swimming pool?  Will their bodies be covered, head to toe?  Then again, perhaps the women of the fundamentalist sects won’t be allowed out of the house to use the swimming pool?  Or they’ll be let out, covered, but with a male escort.  But then again, that might be difficult for the male escort because even if he sees one bit of her flesh or other men see one bit of her flesh this could cause sexual weakness on his part and she’d be responsible for his sin and then she’d be in danger of Sharia law for dishonouring her male escort/relative…and well who knows?  A simple swim at the pool and she never returns home.

Oh I know, this all seems so politically incorrect of me but why do we in modern societies not realize that Islam is not the religion of peace it claims to be any more than Christianity is.  Yes, we can cherry pick and make them religions of peace and many people live in that context but I think we error in thinking the mindset behind any kind of religious extremism in the West is of little consequence. 

Fear mongering?  I don’t know.  Ask our Indigenous populations, (what’s left of them around the world) if it’s fear mongering.  Maybe it’s the collective guilt of our past God-inspired, Holy Book Covering, conquer and convert actions and beliefs of the past that make us prone to sleep off any attempts to take note that behind closed doors, women and children are being abused in families with out-dated cultural and religious beliefs.  If an Islamic Community Centre is going to be built, then use the funds to educate and empower Muslims to live in the West not with the eventual hidden agenda of conquering the West and killing the Infidels (some of which are their own people by the way…honour killings ring a bell?)

Is this a way to heal, building this place so close to the victor’s succesful jihad?  I don’t think so.  It may be legal to build it under a freedom of religion act, but how much freedom do women and children actually experience in the religion of Islam or for that matter, any religion who takes their Holy books as the literal word of their God(s)?  Looking specifically at Sharia law.  Sharia may be legal within Islam; but, is it legal in a modern democratic society?  Is female genital mutilation legal in a modern democratic society?  Is forced marriage legal in a modern democratic society?  If the Muslim says yes to all of these things because they believe Allah’s law is greater than modern democratic law, then maybe freedom of religion is a bad idea.

Rather complicated, isn’t it.  I don’t think religion is going anywhere but I sure hope that it evolves enough that people stop taking their holy books as literal correspondence from their holy ones.  I hope they start looking at the texts in light of the tribal clans who passed this stuff down and realize that history bares out a lot of jihad has been going on since the dawn of civilization and still the Infidel lives on.