Caffeinated_Sloth

Musk just wants to get to Mars. That’s all he cares about.

I’ve been part of several denominations: fundie baptist, charismatic, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox. I’m now a bit of a free agent, but I attend a UMC when I’m feeling up to it.

I wrote a novel in reply to HarkMahlberg above.

I wrote a novel in reply to the same question asked by HarkMahlberg above.

I’m going to test the character limit for a Lemmy comment.

My views on religion and politics have evolved a lot over the years. I hope I remain open enough to continue to change and grow. I can think of several touchstone moments, people, events, podcasts, and books that have influenced my departure from religious fundamentalism and political conservatism. There was a book I read as a child, a skeptical professor in college, a compassionate neighbor, a contrarian friend, a challenging podcast, an insistent and feisty little girl, spiritual slavery, and a God who didn’t listen to a community in pain. It’s a story of exposure to new ideas.

I was brought up to be a fundamentalist baptist. I was faithful to the only baptist creed: “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, I’m don’t chew, and don’t run with those who do.” Well, I suppose there were additional “don’ts “ like dancing, swearing, listening to worldly music, and watching rated R movies, but those items don’t fit into a nice little rhyme. Anyway, when I was a kid, one of my relatives had a book called The Handbook of Denominations. I found it and spent an afternoon looking at it, having my mind blown. To that point, it had never really occurred to me that there were Christians who were not baptists. This primed me to pursue relationships in middle school and high school with people who believed differently from me. I thought the heathen kids were wrong and disobeying God’s word, but they were interesting. I had friends who were LDS, Catholic, Charismatic, even atheists. I enjoyed a wide exposure to ideas while my church mates were cloistered.

In college, I took Biblical Hebrew. The professor was a secular Jew. His breakdown of the wild poetic imagery in Genesis 1 exploded my fundamentalist idea that it was literal history. Throughout the class, we were to visit synagogues and report on our observations. This exposure to a different way of worship impacted me deeply. I saw people earnestly believing and praying in a way different from me, yet with the same sincerity and conviction.

When my wife and I started our family, we had an elderly neighbors who were life-long Roman Catholics. Throughout my life, the Catholics I had met only went to church on Christmas and Easter, drank, cursed, and fornicated, and were generally indistinguishable from the heathen around me. I saw them as not-serious idol worshippers, doomed to eternal hellfire. My neighbors were different. They were the kindest, most generous people I had ever met. Even now, years later, I tear-up thinking about their sweetness toward us, a struggling young family. It was like living across the street from Jesus Himself. They brought us meals, helped with home repairs, watched our kids, bought clothes and toys, and so much more I can’t remember. Their love turned the tables on the Protestant reformation for me. I didn’t convert, but I started to realize in every group there can be shitty people, ordinary people, and beautiful people.

During Obama’s first term, as I mentioned above, I was a Christian nationalist. AS far as I can remember, one single comment from a trusted friend and mentor upset my political apple cart. After a Bible study, I asked my friend if he had seen some story about the President on Fox News. He said, “I don’t watch that crap. He’s my brother in Christ, and I don’t appreciate a bunch of talking heads telling me to hate my brother.” That was a watershed moment. My friend was politically conservative and religiously extreme. I respected him and that put a lot of weight behind his words.

Another trusted friend recommended a podcast for entertainment’s sake where the hosts talked about their shared experiences in a fundamentalist religious upbringing and current-day divergence while getting drunk. I saw how two people can keep a close friendship despite holding different views; in this case, Catholicism and agnosticism. They also spoke favorably about Obama and when 2016 rolled around, they were huge fans of Bernie Sanders. I strongly related to their experiences and their left-leaning political views were challenging at first, then contagious. In 2016, for the first time, I did not vote straight republican down the ballot.

In my adult life, I have been a member or regular attender of five different Christian denominations. Some of these changes were quite significant and involved catechism and re-baptism. I’m always searching for answers.

Once upon a time, I was an Eastern Orthodox Christian. For many years. This is a culturally conservative and religiously fundamentalist expression of Christianity. The church has strict gender roles, especially within its rituals. Women are permitted to teach the children and perform domestic duties. In some Orthodox denominations, women may serve as cantors and choir directors. Women are prohibited from serving at the altar. They cannot even enter the sacred space surrounding the altar. After services one day, a few groups of people lingered, talking. They were mostly parents, as there was to be a short altar server class. When the priest announced it was time for altar server class to begin and for all the boys to meet him at the front of the church, a girl, maybe seven years old, declared excitedly, “can I go? I want to be an altar server!” The priest, caught off-guard answered “no, I’m sorry.” “Why not?” “We can talk about it when you’re older,” the priest replied nervously, looking at her dad for backup. This little exchange stuck with me. It seemed inappropriate that a child’s enthusiasm for wanting to feel helpful and important was squashed simply because she had the wrong biological equipment. This was the beginning of the end of my religious fundamentalism.

I had exercised my rights as a male in the Orthodox Christian denomination and performed vital roles in services for many years. I’m going to be brief here because the community is small and I am protective of my anonymity online. I was pressured to serve the church and be available for every service (at minimum three per week) on a volunteer basis. Although I became exhausted and frustrated, to entertain thoughts of quitting was considered spiritual weakness. This was an especially damaging time for my spiritual life.

While I was involved with this church, a tragic incident occurred in a nearby rural community. A mother was home with her four-year-old son and put him down for an afternoon nap. She also fell asleep on the couch. When she awoke, her son was nowhere to be found. She searched the house and property, called neighbors, and eventually called law enforcement for help. By the evening, dozens of friends, family, and neighbors were out looking for the boy. It was spring and the nights were still dangerously cool for a boy in pajamas. Word spread on social media and churches prayed earnestly for the boy and his family. I was especially touched because I had young children. The boy was found two days later, dead from exposure, lying in a ditch just 100 yards from the house. Many people had probably walked right past him. I hated God for that. This was a catalyst for my investigation into whether I believed in a personal God who actively intervened in his creation.

TL;DR: My faith and politics changed over a period of 10-15 years from Christian Nationalist and religious fundamentalist to progressive agnostic through exposure to new ideas, often introduced to me by people I trusted.

Wasn’t it a sexual harassment thing?

Edit: I guess I don’t know the story at all. I thought I remembered one of the guys being involved in a sexual harassment suit. It appears I was mistaken.

I miss that show. PJ is good on Search Engine, but I miss Alex. Both of them.

This is very common, but was not the reason for my worldview change.

You do see that quite a bit in “ex” subreddits. Personal experience can shake anyone’s views, not just “that crowd.” Spiritual abuse played a role in pushing me away from religious fundamentalism, but there were other factors that laid the groundwork. The process took years and key elements involved a mind-expanding book, two compassionate friends, a podcast, and a local news story that showed me God was quite a bit different than I thought he was. I’ll write the book about it under another comment.

Just for some perspective: in 2009 I was a Christian nationalist and I thought Obama was going to use FEMA to imprison conservative dissenters and would turn the US into a communist dictatorship. I hoped and prayed for an explicitly Christian government and an end to most federal programs. If I had the same worldview now, I would be orgasmically happy with the way things are going.

Thanks for the great list! I found several neat communities I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I appreciate your view and I think I probably agree with you. I work a manual labor job and I’m alone most of the time. I listen to many audiobooks on Libby and many podcasts. I’ve noticed over the past several months my thinking getting more muddled, almost like there’s just too much information in my skull. I’ve started to build audio breaks in my week where I go a day or two without consuming anything with earbuds. I feel better. On info diet days my mind wanders, I’m able to think about things more carefully, my workflow is more organized, and I think more about the people in my life.

I held a similar view many years ago, applied to all media and religiously motivated. I believed pleasure was sinful. My views and beliefs have since changed. Why do you make this recommendation?

I know what it’s like to depend on the food bank. The ones in my area suck, but it’s something. These people now have nothing.

If there were like 87 Al Greens yelling during the SOTU address, getting thrown out, yelling things that everyone cares about like “you’re crashing the fucking economy you moron,” then maybe the dems would have earned a little respect. But no, they brought cute polite ping pong protest paddles.

In the US, I work 4/10s which enables me to work a part-time job on the weekend and still have one day off to do chores and homework (I’m also a part-time student). It’s the only way my family can survive. Someday I hope to earn a living from just one job and relax on weekends.

I thought of Lost. They’re not all villains, but they’re all kind of shitty.

I call universities white collar vocational schools because that’s what they’ve become.

The “studies” degrees and other liberal arts programs hearken to an earlier understanding of the university as being a place of higher learning. In the US, our view of post-secondary education has changed in recent decades and we now look at university degree programs largely as white collar vocational training. The old higher learning paradigms still exist, but now there is a societal expectation that they prove their economic value. Knowledge and wisdom no longer have inherent value, only that which can be exploited by capital. Higher learning in its traditional modality is a luxury.

I agree. I changed my mind about a lot of things in my 30s. My views on politics, religion, and social issues all changed.