Rooster Booster wrote:Thank you for self-disclosing with such honesty.
Without being too pyschy, I can see where your projections of anger comes from now.
As I said, it's lessened in the last five or so years as the anger has receded – and it has. I've had to learn a new way to deal with my own family, for starters.
But the thread that led to this really did anger me.
I really don't care what people believe – they can believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden (and some do) if they want and, to coin a cliché, I'll defend their right to do that.
What I dislike intensely is when people try to force their beliefs on people who have other religious beliefs or none. This is nothing new, of course, but after a period of apparent tolerance, we seem to be seeing an increasing rise in religious fundamentalisms* and demands for special rights.
So you get the likes of people demanding that wearing a ring to indicate a commitment to chastity before marriage is recognised as a religious symbol and allowed in schools (I seriously feel for the girl whose parents were behind her pushing this). It has never been any such symbol until recently, when it was deemed so by US Christian fundamentalists – who in the face of all evidence of its counterproductive impact, still claim that abstinence-only sex education is the only acceptable variety.
So this is new. As is this culture of claiming that you can't be allowed near women waiting for an abortion if you're a nurse who has a 'conscience'. We've had legal abortion in the UK for decades and we only appear to have started having such problems in the last few years. Why's that? Were there no nurses of 'conscience' before? Have they only just materialised, along with pharmacists who are refusing on 'conscience' grounds to provide women with emergency contraception.
Where was all this 10, 20, 30 years ago? Why is it visible now?
Kirkstaller is a useful reminder that religious fundamentalism is not just about Islam or the US.
And then there's the arrogance of saying that the suffering of a child is neither here nor there, because heaven will be nice. It beggars belief. Or of telling others that you know enough about their religious experiences to tell them that they 'weren't doing it right'.
The latter feels particularly personal in light of what I've touched on. How dare he claim to (in effect) tell me I wasn't 'doing it right'. How dare he.
And to give more detail, there I was, at around 13, just going through puberty, having already taken onboard the lesson from my father's pulpit and his dinnertime sermons, that sex is sin, and having nobody to turn to and talk to as I started experiencing the mental and emotional aspects of puberty (a cursory check from my mother that I knew what would happen physically); and lying awake at night in a torment and praying – oh, praying so hard, for God to take the dirty feelings away – and no answer; no answer. Just the guilt, seeping deeper and deeper in.
And the growing belief that I was like a leper – yes, that was the word I used to describe myself to myself in my mind: a leper. And it was impossible to talk to anyone because I was unclean – except to God, who simply ignored me.
Of course, that was because no such figures existed. But that's an illustration of how religion does such damage.
But Kirkstaller, in his arrogance, grants himself the same omniscience as his god and declares that he
knows that I (and others) were not 'doing it right'. And that would be at the same time as declaring that it was perfectly fine for his god to torture an adolescent like that, because everything'll be nice "in the sweet by and by, when we meet at that beautiful shore".
