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.
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