#NotAllChristiansHate

Today I watched this talk. I felt like I was hearing my inner monologue from a decade ago. I was moved to write about my feelings, especially in the current world climate of hate masquerading as religious piety.

We are living in a new age of persecution by the Christian faith. You heard me right.

There is a dominant narrative in a large number of modern denominations born from a school of doctrines that have popularised the following ideas that Christians use to justify oppressing others:

1. Spare the rod: The belief that physical violence is a valid and even essential tool for appropriate parenting. This teaches that you are not allowed sanctity of your person if you disobey a dogmatic rule set by an authority figure, regardless of your opinions on the rule. This attitude later justifies to Christians why violating the bodies of nonbelievers is a valid form of care and love.

2. Demons can possess people, it is an affliction that affects their ability to conform to dogma, and it is your duty as a fellow believer to liberate them, by force if necessary. This line of reasoning teaches that different beliefs are a disease in need of a cure, and the cure may be administered involuntarily because the demon is in control and thus the person is not fully human.

3. Demonposession is catching. By associating with the possessed, you make yourself vulnerable to possession and familial disaster. This has two effects. It teaches believers to other divergent thinkers as possessed, thus efficiently dehumanising them, and it invokes the aforementioned notion of forced treatment for their affliction but elevates it to a group level.

4. We must liberate the world from the yolk of Satan. This neatly corrals all divergent thinkers ( and to dogmatic Christians EVERYONE not of their faith is divergent) into a position of infantilisation to the parental love of Christ and his "bride", the church. And since we've already established you shan't spare the rod...

It's easy to see how some would then take this rationale and extend it to include rape, assault, even murder or genocide. If the Stanford prison experiment taught us anything it is that a few bad rules can make a monster out of anyone.

I watched her talk on cults and the abuse she experienced and it hit me like a gut punch.

This was my life.

This was my partner's life too.

Divergence led to othering because of perceived satanic influence and this later justified abuse. Her eventual motive for rejecting conservative Christian doctrine pretty much matches my experience: That's not love.

My father is ultra conservative. It is commonly agreed by him and my grandmother that I am deranged, and that my beliefs result from demon possession.

When I stood my ground against his advocacy for the revocation of abortion rights and transphobic propaganda he became blatant in his attempt to force me to accept his abusive worldview or risk the relationship.

I chose to walk away.

I love my father. I miss debating art and philosophy with him. He loved discussing maths and science. I miss being held by him, his scruffy beard and sharp wit. I miss arguing with him...just not the arguments about dogma.

If you ask me to choose between two people I love I will not choose the one who made me choose. It's that simple.

If your doctrine teaches a seperation from  sinners as an instruction from god, if it teaches humiliation as punishment and excommunication,  the use of  a the rod, if  it demands unquestioning faith and obedience to power and accepts violence as a normal experience in families, if it encourages coerced marriages and shames difference or independent thought then I reject your dogma.

If it is a choice between your god or my sinful friends, I choose my friends because it was your god who made me choose between loving Him and loving everyone else.

If God is love, then let there be love or I reject your hypocritical god.

I will not respect your religious rights if they remove the right of others to choose to reject your doctrines and morality. So if you cry for your religious freedom to me while believing this you can cry me a river. I will not protect your faith.

Religious freedom is the freedom to choose your practice of faith. Any action that impedes this freedom is a violence against an individual's right to autonomy.

It is incompatible with a society free of war and cannot be thought of as ethical when viewed from the moral values common to the overwhelming majority of cultures, which is that we generally abhor violence towards others and should avoid it.

So no, you do not hide your hate under the veil of religious freedom or for that matter free speech ( but that's another rant...) with me.

I will give you no quarter. No excuse for abuse.

Christians, you need to put your house in order. Take the beam from thine own eye. If you are in a church where these doctrines are accepted and can safely challenge this, speak out.

If you are silent, know that in the words of Archbishop Tutu you have taken the side of the oppressor.

Show the world that #notallchristians hate.

Regards,

Someone who read the Bible,
Cover to cover,
But got stuck on Corinthians 13.

PS. I'm agnostic now, so I've no horse in this race as it were. So don't go presumptiously frothing at the mouth about how I'm just  some Dawkinsian verbally abusive atheist who denounces all religious practice. You don't know me.

About PMDD

About a month ago I start both Concerta for ADHD and Zoladex for PMDD/Endometriosis.

Gotta tell ya, this has been a trippy month...

Everything was fantastic. I was doing stuff, organised, I was just rocking round the clock...

Then I ovulated and all hell broke loose.

For those unfamiliar with the disorder you may want to Google PMDD. It's PMS - but instead of just moody or emotional you're psychotic (literally) and suicidal or violent. AKA clinically insane. Until you start to bleed.

The heaviest bleeding of my period has always been the day my partner and I know it's going to be ok again.

This month was different. I hope that means the meds are working.

It wasn't as bad as usual...but that was sorta worse from a certain perspective because I realise now I'm usually so far off the reservation I don't KNOW how bad it is.

Before all this I was flying high. I felt fantastic. Life without stimulants for my ADHD was HELL. Getting the meds I needed was liberating.

I was in a flawless routine. Up and at it by 8:30. I was eating, sleeping, working like a well adjusted adult for once. I was ticking off items on my task list so fast I was running out of to do's, a completely novel experience for me.

Then I ovulated.

Day one of PMDD everything I was shattered like glass. I stopped eating, cooking, bathing, moving, talking, working. My sleep cycle isn't. I wake up or pass out seemingly at random. Reality seems abstract. People feel like NPC's in a MMORPG. I don't know what day it is without checking the calendar on my phone. I lost a day twice in a week - I can't remember what I did that day at all.

Everything hurts. I'm sorta limply trying to institute my usual chronic illness coping strategies but I keep finding myself doing something else, usually hours later, super confused about how I got so off track.

There are times, like now, when I'm lucid. I try to write or tell people about it. I guess I'm trying to take field notes for my research, or warm people of what's going on. But twice I've found half written essays in text on my phone.

This piece has been discovered after I passed out around one today:

"I haven't eaten. I was awake until 4am, then slept an hour and was awake again by 6.

I have a back spasm and I keep catching my jaw clenching. I think that's how I passed out earlier - I took a tranquilliser for the back spasm. How many? I can't remember.

I should eat. I never defrosted anything. There's fish fingers. Been saving those for days like today when I fail to function. Hurrah. The system works!

I'll be back shortly. Fooooooood..."

The next day:

"I made fish fingers in the oven. Twice. The first time I forgot to turn the oven on, lol."

Four hours later I was asleep again. I wrote this the next morning:

"I lost another day. I was awake for 4 hours, slept for 8, woke up tired and throbbing with anxiety.

Things are more sore than usual. Burning hands, random sharp pains in my legs.

If I take another Rivotril I may as well write off the next week too - the hangover at this kind of dose lasts days. Damnit I have things to do! You know! Like survive!

What is happening physiologically?

I wonder. If I can understand what's causing all these secondary issues maybe I can compensate. Many sites talk about Progesterone intolerance. Seems consistent with my case. Would explain why going on birth control at 14 coincided with me getting more nuts, and the disaster that was depo provera.

Thank goodness I resisted doing that again. Sometimes I do get it right on instinct - I never had a hard science reason for saying no, I just felt it would be bad."

It's tough when all you have is instinct. People don't respect your intuition. Guess that's how I ended up in this mess. I never had a good enough explanation for why I said there was something wrong with me.

It's the hardest thing about this: Being treated like the girl that calls  wolf.

I've been judged a lot. Too lazy. Too selfish. Too dependant. Unwilling to commit. Defiant. Martyr complex. Hystrionic. Hypochondriac. Arrogant. Stubborn. Superstitious. Inflexible. A bitch. Borderline. Manipulative.

Really sick day in and day out isn't something people understand. They can't conceive of it.

I think people just have a tolerance limit for drama...and if your life sucks more than they can deal with they bounce.

Can't blame them. I've had a lifetime to get used to this high octane level of ridiculously improbable bad luck. I don't even see it anymore. I was diagnosed as really seriously challenged at 4.

It's truly still surprising to me when I post something I think of as dark but funny online ie. "When your endometriosis is so bad they put you on chemo...:/" and people respond like my mum died.

That was supposed to be like a little funny...I mean it's not actually chemo, they just called it that, it's a hormone treatment....oh whatever. "Thanks for the sympathies." I finally end up saying instead, feeling like a tool for making people worry so much.

I forget it's a surprise to them that it's THAT bad. You get to the point of being insensitive to how really very strange it all is when it's your daily life.

I don't feel like I'm a downer, but I guess I am. It's like having cancer. Just admitting you are ill reminds people of this terrible truth they feel they should be tiptoeing around, bowing to, like they need to dress in black, cover mirrors, speak in hushed tones, bring flowers to your grave...

And I'm like, dude, I'm right here. Just chill. If I need a black parade I'll show up dressed like Wednesday Addams. If I'm not crying about it, you don't need to be on your toes about it with me either. I want to laugh about this. It helps.

I dunno what to say. What do I need from people? Why did I write this?

Maybe just for others like me. It's been the only thing that made me feel less nuts  - reading about how others felt.

So yeah man, you peeps aren't alone. I get you. *Hugs*

My child just got diagnosed today. What do I need to know?

Dear carer.

Everything and nothing has changed.

When we arrive we get handed a set of default character traits from a lotto basket, and sent off to the world without a user guide or a walkthrough.

All of us.

But two things are known.

There are those who understand that kindness and cooperation is the only path, not just between equal adults but between all living things on the earth. ALL living things.

And there are those that believe they control this world and things or other people in it.

Be the former. There's no control over your life.

There's just learning to surf the waves that would drown you with style, reveling in that with others, learning the skill or teaching it. Control is the dream, the illusion we all want to share.

I'm going to be counting on you to teach me when you learn, because my waves are the kind that put people under the ground early more often than normal.

But dude, if I lick it, you're gonna watch me surf some epic waves.

People will try to stop you seeing me as a person like you. They will tell you what to do or think or feel or believe, as they try to determine how to get me to behave.

Aim to misbehave. It's said no well behaved woman ( or for that matter man) ever made history. Think on that.

Trust the ones who try to understand what YOU think. Who help you better understand what other people are thinking by helping you hear and see them better when they try to tell you.

Those are the good ones with the knowings of the way of life.

And remember I'm not little you, or less you, or kinda you, or you plus.

I'm just you. We all are. We are all one thing, and the same thing: Sentient.

Forget literally everything else you think you know. I'm about to matrix your life.

You can let that break you.  You can try to fight the sudden break in your world and sell me out for a steak and some potatoes and the illusion of that comfortable reality back again...

Or you can realise that for the most part there really is no spoon.

I don't need to speak, or write normally to communicate.

I don't need to hit milestones to develop.

I don't need to recover from being different. We're literally all different.

I am also sentient like you. Nothing changes.

But things just got real because someone noticed I'm off the proscribed child behavioural script and are trying to put me back on track.

I'm likely not liking that track.

Get me out of here if you need to. I might not be able to run. But I can show you if you watch me closely. Watch my eyes.

We're going to need to stick together, you and I, if we want to get through.

But you got this.

Up to you. Blue Pill, Red Pill.