Do you have religious trauma syndrome?

I don’t — my departure from religion was painless and occurred at a young age. But I know that many people experience great stress at leaving the faith.

Breaking out of a restrictive, mind-controlling religion is understandably a liberating experience. People report huge relief and some excitement about their new possibilities. Certain problems are over, such as trying to twist one’s thinking to believe irrational religious doctrines, handling enormous cognitive dissonance in order to get by in the ‘real world’ as well, and conforming to repressive codes of behavior. Finally leaving a restrictive religion can be a major personal accomplishment after trying to make it work and going through many cycles of guilt and confusion.

However, the challenges of leaving are daunting. For most people, the religious environment was a one-stop-shop for meeting all their major needs – social support, a coherent worldview, meaning and direction in life, structured activities, and emotional/spiritual satisfaction. Leaving the fold means multiple losses, including the loss of friends and family support at a crucial time of personal transition. Consequently, it is a very lonely ‘stressful life event’ – more so than others described on Axis IV in the DSM. For some people, depending on their personality and the details of their religious past, it may be possible to simply stop participating in religious services and activities and move on with life. But for many, leaving their religion means debilitating anxiety, depression, grief, and anger.

Next step: the day will come when religion itself will be recognized as a mental disorder, not just the effects of breaking away from it. You can find more about dealing with the trauma of escape at Marlene Winell’s site.

Bishop labels file-sharing religion a ‘sham’

The Swedish government has formally recognized the Church of Kopimism, which considers information holy and uses copying as their sacrament. It’s rather silly, if you ask me, and I’d rather just get away from the nonsense of religion altogether, but it does have one virtue: it has inspired at least one crazy Christian to rage.

But Bishop Peter Ingham, head of the Catholic Diocese of Wollongong, said the move cheapens the value of ‘real’ religious organisations and labelled the group a ‘sham’.

"There should be some measuring stick against what you call religion," Bishop Ingham told ninemsn. "In my mind, if religion has nothing to do with God — or what people perceive to be God — then it’s a sham.

"It cheapens the currency of religion in general because [now] anything can be defined as a religion."

Right. I hear that there are some people who worship a dead man who they claim was a god! I hear that there are some people who think their god manifests as a cracker, so they eat him! I hear that there are some people who think that if you don’t dunk a baby’s head in a tub of water, it won’t go to heaven if it dies! Boy, there sure are a lot of silly beliefs out there that cheapen religion.

And that takes some doing. Religion is bottom-of-the-barrel garbage as it is.

And then he says this:

“It looks like it’s just a way of getting around the law of piracy and copyright. How could a religion promote illegal activity?”

Wait…isn’t it a tenet of the Christian faith that early in their history, they were intensely persecuted by the Romans? That the martyrs refused to obey the laws of the land and thus were executed? And wasn’t Jesus himself executed for his rabble-rousing disobedience? How self-unaware are these guys?

Does he consider the current events in Nigeria to be an example of a religion promoting a legal activity?

Glorifying god’s name

In Nigeria, an Islamic group called Boko Haram has been murdering their Christian compatriots in an effort to drive the Christians out of northern Nigeria. The details are sordid; automatic rifles, bombs, unarmed citizens gunned down en masse, churches being blown up, more than 500 killed in total.

But there is a theme, and it’s a telling one.

Witnesses said gunmen burst into the hall and shouted "God is great" as they opened fire.

“Gunmen who are, from all indications, members of Boko Haram came in large numbers and have encircled police headquarters. They chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is Great] and fired indiscriminately,” a resident told AFP.

God is a self-righteous delusion in the heads of believers that justifies terror and death.

God is not great.

God seems to be more on the level of a conscienceless thug with a gun.

I’m sure they are a very spiritual couple

Kristy Bamu and his two sisters were visiting their older sister, Magalie Bamu, and her partner, Eric Bikubi, over Christmas in London. Initially, it was apparently a jolly time…and then Eric got it into his head that his three visitors were witches.

The court was told that over a period of days the pair, originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, attempted to exorcise evil spirits they believed were in three of the children – Kristy, his sister Kelly, 20, and their 11-year-old sister, who cannot be named. Bikubi refused "to let them eat, drink or sleep for days, while the punishments became increasingly violent, with [the attackers] using the many implements found in the flat as weapons of torture", Altman said.

During their ordeal the siblings were forced to pray and chant throughout several nights and, in a "staggering act of depravity and cruelty", the defendants recruited sibling against sibling as "vehicles for their violence", said Altman.

Kristy became the focus of Bikubi’s attention, the court heard. He allegedly struck the boy with a hammer in the face, knocking out his teeth; on another occasion he shoved a metal bar into the teenager’s mouth, the court heard.

When Kelly attempted to hit her brother using something light, she was ordered to use a heavier implement. In a desperate attempt to prevent any further suffering, Kristy and his two sisters eventually admitted to being sorcerers, said Altman. "As Kristy’s injuries became ever more severe he even pleaded to be allowed to die," he added.

They gave him his wish and drowned him in the bathtub.

A couple of people believe there is magic in the world and that their delusions are real, and a 15 year old boy ends up tortured to death.

The couple are denying that they committed murder; Eric Bikubi claims “diminished responsibility”, apparently because he’s an evil idiot who believes in spirits.

Santorum will tell you how and when you can have sex

He’s a very creepy man. His wife had an abortion to save her life, but he wants to criminalize your abortion. And that’s not all: sex is supposed to be procreative, so he wants to criminalize contraception. In this long painful video, he preaches against gay sex, against contraception, and says we ought to be urging families to have many more children, and thinks a tax deduction of $20,000 per child is reasonable.

So “contraception is a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to the way things are supposed to be”. Woo hoo! I love that license! I don’t think I want to vote for a guy who’d take it away.

Bonus! Santorum also thinks most scientists are amoral.

I have to say, he’s doing a terrible job of campaigning for my vote.

The petty cowardice of Christianity

They simply cannot tolerate the idea that other people think differently than they do, and so they play the most petty, trivial games. Cee-lo Green sang Lennon’s Imagine at New Year’s, and he just had to change the words “no religion too” to “all religion is true” — not just changing the meaning, but changing it to something that makes no sense at all.

It’s only a pop song, but it’s the same sentiment that led the Church to hammer the penises off of classical sculpture; that inspired Islam to blow up Buddhas; that has sects fighting over who owns which piece of rock in Jerusalem; that leads cults to burn books and records. They must pretend that dissent not only does not exist at all, but never existed any where at any time.

At this time of year, there are choirs singing great pieces of Christian music everywhere, and there are atheists raising their voices to sing the St Matthew Passion or Messiah — and you don’t hear them demanding that the Vox Christi be silenced or mention of God be expurgated.

Why? Because we can celebrate the music without having to pretend that Bach and Handel were atheists. Because we aren’t afraid.

But Christians are. I regard them with the contempt I reserve for all superstitious cowards.

Next year, we must wage the War on Christmas harder

I’m glad Christmas is over. This year seems to have been particularly awful in its encouragement of theological drivel, perhaps because the forces of churchy darkness are feeling increasingly desperate and irrelevant…so they marshal their paladins to go forth and wallop us with nonsense, in the hopes that we’ll become stupid enough to believe them. Unfortunately for them, the best they can do for paladins is that drone with all the expressivity of a dead mackerel, Alister McGrath, and the jolly old elf with dementia, John Lennox. I’m going to address their last-minute eructations of Christmas apologetics, but be warned — they’ll be back next year, like the hauntings of ghosts of Christmases Imaginary.

[Read more…]

Should we try harder next year?

The “DefendChristians” website has a poll to determine the Top Ten Anti-Christian Acts of 2011. There are a few truly despicable things in there: apparently, someone threw a firebomb at an elderly woman protesting a reproductive health clinic in Kalispell, an action I would unambiguously condemn, if it happened. Unfortunately, it seems to have been news only among the fanatical anti-abortion websites; I can’t find any mention on more reliable sources, and it’s peculiar anyway: a fire bomb was thrown at someone, and no one was hurt, and the demonstration went on anyway? That’s a rather pathetic effort.

I would have voted for that as a bad act, if there were any reasonable confirmation that it happened. But the rest…well here’s a sample.

  • Old Navy began sponsoring the pro-homosexual “It Get’s Better” campaign by giving proceeds from certain clothing to the campaign. The television and online campaign shows a variety of people living as homosexuals encouraging other’s to come out claiming “It Get’s Better,” and that there hopeful future for those who live as homosexuals.

  • A National Public Radio (NPR) official was caught on video making vicious anti-Christian remarks to persons who identified themselves as members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were promising millions of dollars to NPR. In the video, the NPR official called Evangelical Christians uneducated racists who hate and fear all foreigners.

  • Alabama Governor, Robert Buckley, spoke on Martin Luther King Day at the historic Dexter Ave Baptist Church in Montgomery, the church Dr. King pastored. In his remarks the Governor said, “Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.” The Jewish Anti-Defamation League falsely labeled this anti-Semitic.

  • A Christian bakery owner in Iowa was boycotted after she refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian’s couples “wedding.”

The most horrible anti-Christian oppression going on in the country right now is that homophobic/xenophobic Christians are being called out on their bigotry. And maybe some ineffective crank in Montana threw a flaming pop bottle at Christians demanding that women’s health be compromised.

We’re terrible at this pogrom business. And the Christians are really feeble, whiny martyrs.