Post by clogs on Jul 7, 2010 5:01:41 GMT -5
Hi - I've been lurking just about from the start and finally registered. Somehow registering is just so hard to do! I was in a Pentecostal church during the 1980's. The pastor at that time was an amazing person who also worked as a counsellor for the women's shelter. He was a strong support to women leaving abusive men, which is the situation I was in. He told us that, by leaving, we were not the ones who were breaking up the family. He put the responsibility squarely on the abusers: in abusing their wives, they were the ones breaking up the family. It was a simple distinction, but an important one for me. After all, so many women get blamed for breaking up the family when it's really not their fault at all. I'd felt guilty for breaking up the family, and this was such a relief for me to hear you'd hardly believe it.
This pastor moved on and was replaced by a new breed of pastor. A tract was handed out to churchgoers in defense of a man who had stalked his wife, broke into her apartment and laid in wait for her and shot her. From then on, I felt uncomfortable in that church and eventually left. (The man's point of view, in short, was that he was going hunting and broke in to her apartment to get his gun which somehow was at her place, and he happened to find a bottle of wine and and drank it and when she showed up they had a fight and he shot her).
After that, I felt very uncomfortable in the church. This pastor also started discussing the evils of secular humanism and started to openly cast suspicions on university education as a conduit for Godlessness.
I left and didn't get to know the next pastor, who apparently was further down the road in patriarchal teachings. At the same time, the home schooling culture was starting, political fundamentalism was starting, and an anti-feminist women's group (REAL Women) was starting, much of which had roots in the religious fundamentalism that was taking hold.
The transformation in the fundamentalist churches over the past decades has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I thought I'd never see the day that creationism could be openly touted as a viable theory in contrast to evolution. In a hundred years or so, people reading history will be pointing and laughing at this ridiculousness, and wondering how people ever could believe in such a stupidity. It is now possible for devout believers to openly blame demons for causing their problems. Modern-day witch hunts might not be far in the future, I'm afraid.
My spiritual beliefs don't square with dogma at all. I believe what I have witnessed, and I have witnessed some very strange things indeed. Thus, I feel that all prophets from all the world's religions are little different than blind men touching the elephant and reporting very different stories about what an elephant is like.
The fundamentalist community was once attractive to me. Everybody seemed to have it together. The families looked perfect. There were women with good careers in my church so not everyone homeschooled. The stance that church had in the 1980's is something I could respect, much of the time, even though I was beginning to see the changes that have transformed into an unashamedly violent patriarchy (when prior to this it was a more benevolent patriarchy). Patriarchy, even from the start, was not acceptable to me, but I thought it could be challenged from within. Hah!
Keep up the good work Vyckie, and other members. You're doing such a valuable service for everyone really. There's nothing like telling the truth as you do, and there's nothing like hearing the truth. It really does set you free.
Kind of a funny aside: I commented once, I think, about Katherine Bushnell. Her translation of Bible verses included mentions of (somewhat paraphrased as I don't have her book at hand), of the future in which "a host of women publish the news", and in which "woman shall compass man" (which was a literal translation she was trying to understand the meaning of). Katherine Bushnell has some interesting concepts for women who wish to continue working within the Christian faith. As a scholar of Greek and Hebrew, she was able to read what the original languages really said and, in God's Word to Women, she blasts the patriarchal and woman-hating biases in the modern translations. I just loved what she did with Genesis, especially the part of it men use to justify keeping women down!
But, enough said, I say! Don't think I'll comment much but I eagerly watch almost every day to read what's new.
This pastor moved on and was replaced by a new breed of pastor. A tract was handed out to churchgoers in defense of a man who had stalked his wife, broke into her apartment and laid in wait for her and shot her. From then on, I felt uncomfortable in that church and eventually left. (The man's point of view, in short, was that he was going hunting and broke in to her apartment to get his gun which somehow was at her place, and he happened to find a bottle of wine and and drank it and when she showed up they had a fight and he shot her).
After that, I felt very uncomfortable in the church. This pastor also started discussing the evils of secular humanism and started to openly cast suspicions on university education as a conduit for Godlessness.
I left and didn't get to know the next pastor, who apparently was further down the road in patriarchal teachings. At the same time, the home schooling culture was starting, political fundamentalism was starting, and an anti-feminist women's group (REAL Women) was starting, much of which had roots in the religious fundamentalism that was taking hold.
The transformation in the fundamentalist churches over the past decades has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I thought I'd never see the day that creationism could be openly touted as a viable theory in contrast to evolution. In a hundred years or so, people reading history will be pointing and laughing at this ridiculousness, and wondering how people ever could believe in such a stupidity. It is now possible for devout believers to openly blame demons for causing their problems. Modern-day witch hunts might not be far in the future, I'm afraid.
My spiritual beliefs don't square with dogma at all. I believe what I have witnessed, and I have witnessed some very strange things indeed. Thus, I feel that all prophets from all the world's religions are little different than blind men touching the elephant and reporting very different stories about what an elephant is like.
The fundamentalist community was once attractive to me. Everybody seemed to have it together. The families looked perfect. There were women with good careers in my church so not everyone homeschooled. The stance that church had in the 1980's is something I could respect, much of the time, even though I was beginning to see the changes that have transformed into an unashamedly violent patriarchy (when prior to this it was a more benevolent patriarchy). Patriarchy, even from the start, was not acceptable to me, but I thought it could be challenged from within. Hah!
Keep up the good work Vyckie, and other members. You're doing such a valuable service for everyone really. There's nothing like telling the truth as you do, and there's nothing like hearing the truth. It really does set you free.
Kind of a funny aside: I commented once, I think, about Katherine Bushnell. Her translation of Bible verses included mentions of (somewhat paraphrased as I don't have her book at hand), of the future in which "a host of women publish the news", and in which "woman shall compass man" (which was a literal translation she was trying to understand the meaning of). Katherine Bushnell has some interesting concepts for women who wish to continue working within the Christian faith. As a scholar of Greek and Hebrew, she was able to read what the original languages really said and, in God's Word to Women, she blasts the patriarchal and woman-hating biases in the modern translations. I just loved what she did with Genesis, especially the part of it men use to justify keeping women down!
But, enough said, I say! Don't think I'll comment much but I eagerly watch almost every day to read what's new.
