Moi and Religion

I get a lot of flak from religious people in part because I grew up in the Bible Belt which has a lot of Christians, so the culture there is strongly influenced by Christianity and it instilled some phrases and such into me that others take out of context and assume I'm religious.

I've talked about this before but it just seems extremely hard to kill this issue so I'm talking about it again.

I have no ready means to fact check this but my late mother spoke of taking communion in her childhood and I think one of my parents was Lutheran and one was maybe presbyterian or some other Christian flavor, none of which means anything to me.

I went to church a handful of times with the neighbors as a child and my father gifted me a Bible fit to be used as a doorstop, but my parents never attended church during my life that I was aware. A relative once told me that because dad fought in the front lines of two wars and mom grew up in Germany during World War II and its aftermath, they were bitter, felt God didn't love them and used their different denominations as an excuse to not go to church.

I tried out church for a time while living in Germany and didn't really like it. 

I was a girl gamer and my husband still gamed and we hosted games at our apartment that single soldiers came to regularly. After the first weekend where they lived on potato chips because there were no eateries or whatever nearby, I told them to hit the commissary on their way over and cook for themselves while in my home. At Christmas, I cooked Christmas dinner for everyone, which spared them the hassle of having to wear their dress uniform to get a meal at all in the mess hall.

Every single one of these guys came to my home to tell me personally a tearful goodbye when their orders took them elsewhere. They had already said their goodbyes to my husband at an all male send off at the barracks where I wasn't allowed as a woman.

Some of these guys gamed at our apartment until the wee hours late Saturday night AND got up on too little sleep to be in church. And I sat through sermons dragging the DND community as devil worshippers knowing they were talking about ME and my spouse and our guests who viewed our apartment as an oasis of civilization in an otherwise hostile environment where Germans didn't really want them there but did want to fleece them for money.

I was clear far too many people in church were there to feel morally superior for polishing pews with their ass and not to actually take moral instruction.

I've written some posts about my criticisms of the Catholic Church which covers up child molestation by pedophile priests and persecutes homosexual priests. I am appalled the world doesn't generally have more of an issue with that but I think some people see my remarks about that and take it personally, unaware that I judge individuals on an individual basis to the best of my ability.

I'm as okay as I am in part because my first therapist in my teens was a remarkable man named Doug Turley who was head of some mental health institution and took my case on personally after I was locked up for making remarks that empowered some mental health professional to inform my parents "She's being checked in as a patient and EITHER YOU can sign the paperwork agreeing to that OR I can sign the paperwork and if I sign it, you lose all control over the situation." So they signed it.

Anyway, I was seventeen and a very bright, angry spitfire with very valid reasons to be angry and other people at the facility didn't know how to deal with me. So he took my case over though he was the director of the facility and he genuinely found me likeable though his employees felt I was hell on wheels.

He was a former Catholic priest who fell madly in love with a French ballerina while living in France for a time and left the Catholic Church to marry her -- or so the polite cover story went. He was also giving communion to people who had been excommunicated, so I imagine there's more to that story which simply wasn't shared casually.

We worked together for about a year and I have always felt extremely fortunate to have known him.

My next therapist was also a man of the cloth and a relative once asked "What's with that?" that I kept seeing religious people for counseling when I wasn't religious. I don't recall what my reply was, but I know I'm comfortable discussing subjects others find extremely uncomfortable in part because of the years I spent baring my soul to two different men of the cloth.

My experience has been that a lot of White American Christians are some awful representation of the worst stereotypes of uneducated barefoot and pregnant religious culture but this doesn't hold true for all denominations of Christianity nor for other demographics.

Hispanic people I've known and Catholics from Latin America seem to be a completely different culture from this toxic judgey uptight White American garbage. They trend towards "It's okay to have a sexuality, but there WILL BE a shotgun wedding if she turns up pregnant, understand boy?"

In contrast, large swaths of America trend towards "Be a virgin until marriage, frigid after marriage and never feel okay about your sexuality no matter what the details of your life choices."

Puritan guilt to the max.

I have been known to say I wish CHRISTIANITY would go die in a fire and I absolutely mean that.

But it doesn't mean "All Christians should go die in a fire." And it frustrates me that some people assume that's what I mean and then reinforce my ugly opinions of their religion by having zero Christian compassion for me and my side of the story and spending zero time wondering why I might feel that way.

I met my ex husband when we were both sixteen. I learned later that his family was one of these toxic, misogynistic, barefoot and pregnant and go to church two or more times a week type people and I was quite shocked because he was not religious.

By age twelve, he had read the Bible three times cover to cover and could quote it better than a lot of Christians. At age twelve, he had questions none of his relatives could answer to his satisfaction and he just couldn't accept Christianity.

Completely out of step with everything else I ever learned about these people, the family let him stop going to church and never said another word about it.

When he and I were seventeen and spending time with mutual gamer friends, he was tormenting one of them one day about going gaming on Sunday instead of going to church. The guy was just losing his shit and I interrupted and said "Donny, he's kidding." and turned to the future ex and told him "Don't do that. It's cruel."

So he clearly had baggage and felt bitter. I think he WANTED to believe and couldn't.

He spent years reading other religious texts and such and finally found some non religious philosophy stuff that resonated with him.

When we lived in Germany and I was attending church, trying to find "my people" spiritually, our oldest son was a toddler and I began to realize he was a lot like his father. I decided "I'm NOT raising a second bitter asshole who will torture friends of his." and that contributed to my decision to stop going.

I was told that failure to have the same religious views was a primary cause of divorce. He and I strongly agreed on the American Constitutional right to freedom of religion and our acrimonious, argumentative marriage involved exactly zero big arguments about our different beliefs.

We told our kids "You're not required to believe what either of your parents believe. Do some reading and draw your own conclusions. Everyone actually does exactly that and it's why there are so many different Christian denominations: because the word Christian means different things to different people."

They were required to RESPECT me and not openly piss on my belief system, but they weren't required to at all take my beliefs in karma and reincarnation and astrology to heart as anything they needed to believe and I'm not sure any of the three of us knew what their dad believed in any detail.

When my husband and I were in our thirties and homeschooling, one of our sons had questions about religion and I said "Actually, your dad knows a lot more about that than I do. Let's ask him."

He didn't immediately start off on some bitter screed and was very informative for thirty minutes or so. When it turned into the start of an ugly rant, I cut him off with announcing "Lesson over!" And thanked him and got the kids away from him.

As I understand it, Tom was raised Catholic and Navarre was raised Muslim and probably quite devout because he was descended from the prophet Mohammed. Neither seemed strongly religious by the time I met them, though both had strong ideas about ethics.

I don't really care that much what labels people give themselves and I hate labels generally. I try hard to judge people by their character, not how much time they spend in religious buildings, much less which flavor of religion that might be.