Left religion seeking superior secular spirituality
January 12, 2015 at 6:32 am
(This post was last modified: January 12, 2015 at 6:51 am by NathanHawks.)
...and, apparently, additional alliteration.
I was raised psycho Nazi fundamentalist Christian - which is to say, we were utterly normal, if a bit lower-middle class and overly sincere, mainstream Americans. I'm from the intersection of the Midwest, the South, and New England - a state which came to exist because it opposed Virginia's stance during the Civil War, but which has never quite shaken its too-dumb-to-live Southern Democrat roots. I was born in the American bicentennial year, in a valley whose Native American tribes are even more lost to history, than the probable federation, also lost to history, they were conjectured to be a part of.
After being juggled from Baptist, through various evangelical churches, at my promptings in middle school, we finally landed on that speaking-in-tongues and having-seizures-for-Jesus kind of theatrical, revivalist fundamentalism everyone pretends is so marginalized in this country. (I say, this is being dishonest, but gets a pass based only on a technicality - if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but calls itself a goose, it's still a duck, and most American Christians, are fundamentalists to the core - anti-reality, anti-human, and preeminently easy to lead by the nose via propaganda.)
In high school I started taking life as seriously as I could - I was a gifted student in a poor public school system that couldn't keep up with me, so I had fallen behind for a few years, out of a combination of boredom, and social malaise - anti-intellectualism, already too strong in America's mainstream throughout my lifetime, is an absolutely staggering force among Christian churchgoers, and by extension, Christian communities - people who are told every Sunday that to think unapproved thoughts, is to choose Satan. As experience and study, both, led me to notice the contradictions, between the advertised God of Perfect and Total Love and his holy son the bringer of the Jewish New Deal, and our savage, hate-filled culture of bigotry, white supremacy, and domination by the most brutal - I started having conflicts.
I didn't consider this a crisis of faith exactly. I was 16 and I knew for a fact that I was the One True Scots... I mean Christian. I was drifting away from the church due to its explicit support of carte blanche federal policies (vis e.g. Romans 13:1-7), opposition to social progress (white supremacy, homophobia, etc), and the whole blood-obsessed death cult vibe one gets when one studies the Bible for enough years. I was the one who was going to find the nugget, the point, the secret - I was honest and devoted and spiritually connected at all times via practice, so it was gonna happen.
About two years later, I was still trying to become a self-made priest, still chasing my own next-level connection to the universe down the Bible's paths. Still living about as close to an ascetic life as you can in the US as a child; I was notoriously impossible to sleep with, and was becoming the annoying self-appointed Socrates of my school's faithful and intellectual types - with co-editorship of the school paper, no less.
And finally, I realized what the point was. Religion gives individuals a non-beauty-, non-wealth-, non-brutality-based form of power acquisition.
I more or less instantly puked up my entire religion in response to this realization. I can't handle dishonesty for long. I understand there are plenty of cases where a lie is the readiest alternative to something worse. But a basis for living which is entirely dishonest, is simply too much of an apparatus for harm, for me. Violent, chronic illness of the soul, is too mild a phrase, for what it did to me, realizing that everything we Americans consider to be compatible in the body of human society, is characterized by its being enslaved to a lie.
There came a morning, I woke up, and made a silent deal with myself. As soon as I pay my own rent and have my own apartment, I am an atheist. Until then, I am not going to provoke a holy war in my own house. Unfortunately, an only child does not have the option to simply hide the fact they have gone from a proto-priest, to a disgusted, brainwashing-soap-scum-evacuating proto-atheist.
For reasons both entirely arising from, and not necessarily dependent upon, the Christian elements of my upbringing, my legitimacy as a person within my family had always been contingent upon my efforts to conform and excel. Breathing (heavering) out the brainwashing made me an outcast who was not welcome to represent his case; made me uncertain what I was supposed to comfort myself with in these hard times; took away much of the post-childhood basis for my coping skills and even my social and internal personality; really turned me into a blank slate to be abused. I went into adulthood (correctly) certain that this decision had robbed me of the social security inherent in having a family; and, by extrapolation, paralyzed with a fear that waking up to the secular enlightenment, had destroyed my viability as a person.
The years confirmed this in part, but I wouldn't come to understand until my late 30s - recently - how much the outside world was reacting not to my lack of faith in God, but to my lack of faith in myself. Yes, my outspoken atheism and general criticism of American culture has made me few friends; but my expectation to be a pariah only one smart mouth and two strong legs away from a lynching, has been, at least, an equal problem. I can't help, oftentimes, but wear quite visibly the expectation that Americans will do exactly that - lynch me. I have been attacked, in so-called soft ways, by mobs of American adults, strangers, for fearless expression of radically progressive views, on multiple occasions - and been subject to direct, in-person threats and attempts at dehumanized violence.
Before I was either an atheist or a religious person, when I was too young to realize these things would ever matter, a pair of neighbor kids, teenagers who knew better, tricked me into eating a belly full of poisonous mushrooms. Without a stomach pumping, I would have died very painfully - I believe my guts would have disintegrated.
The choice to become an atheist has therefore simply removed from me, access to protections which previously had the potential to elevate me, by force of unjust social coercion to which I was previously blind, away from a common American culture which is made up, I believe, mainly of base, airheaded murderers and potential murderers. Becoming atheist went hand in hand with discovering that we Americans are, primarily, a culture who gives lipservice to all those things which good, kind, loving people would say - but we do so only as deliberate, subconscious-but-chosen acts of camouflage, as predators who don't overthink their abilities which help them strike their prey, nor their lifestyle as predators in an eternal social order of retrofitting mythology onto the might-makes-right model of society.
This story isn't over, by the way, for those of you who aren't reading between the lines. My atheism is definitely antitheism; monotheism, at least, is, I am convinced, that which inspired the One Ring; a covenant which is one thing for those who control it, and another thing entirely for those subject to its power, but which corrupts and destroys both in the end. I believe any atheist who does not see the emergency Judeo-Christian empires now imposes on both saner members of their flocks, and atheists, is an atheist who still suffers from dangerous delusions and has failed, however marginally, to complete their own conversion. For, to believe that the world can go on ticking just fine, so long as you are free from religion, is to finally make useful the wisdom of the claim: the greatest lie ever perpetrated by the Devil, is the one saying he doesn't exist. Once you become somewhat free in your own mind, you can lose all that progress in an instant, by pretending you now live in a separate world from those bleeping psychos who, in fact, are now so powerful that they are - yeah, I know you think you taste tinfoil at this point - on the cusp of bringing their death orgy, the Rapture, to reality in America.
Right under the secular noses of atheists who got their tiny bit of freedom but didn't take it all the way. Atheists who believe they have rejected fantastic claims, but who still believe America is a just, great, or free nation, are not done analyzing the fantastic claims they were raised under.
And here am I, the hardliner again, bringing the antitheist, civic responsibility, don't-you-know-the-UN-has-a-website-and-speaks-English, don't-you-know-Big-Money-are-white-Christian-racists-and-that's-intersectionality-too evangelism to the lost flock, Americans. I'm aware of the irony, but let me go on as if my admission does not deserve ad nauseum attacks by those wielding the Fallacy Fallacy.
My conversion will be complete when I find an antitheist community and lifestyle that nurtures everything I value in myself, like any worthwhile community of humans would do; and where my conviction is widely shared that it is an absolute necessity of human survival, that we acknowledge and end the shades of theocracy to which even most proles are conditioned to be blind.
Looking at the economic warfare, criminalization of ethnic identity and history, white Judeo-Christian supremacy, and other slow-and-fast extermination agendas being pursued as the only priorities of the world's dominant powers -- and seeing the extraordinarily anti-human cultures of the "world leaders" such as the US being continually upheld as models, replicated by the EU and wherever the IMF can extort a people's future -- places this as a spiritual challenge, if such a thing exists at all - the human spirit is being, perhaps permanently, destroyed by an intersection of religious supremacy, wealth, and racism. We are being transformed into unfeeling, unthinking murderers - returned to an animal state, a mass of soldiers to move forward into space, disposable explorers of a wealthy new frontier. If you think militant, anti-intellectual imperialists in space is a fantasy, you have not yet fully embraced the reality our English-speaking people are told, by religion, to reject.
Romans f___ing 13:1-7, y'all. These people ain't kidding. Wake up.
I was raised psycho Nazi fundamentalist Christian - which is to say, we were utterly normal, if a bit lower-middle class and overly sincere, mainstream Americans. I'm from the intersection of the Midwest, the South, and New England - a state which came to exist because it opposed Virginia's stance during the Civil War, but which has never quite shaken its too-dumb-to-live Southern Democrat roots. I was born in the American bicentennial year, in a valley whose Native American tribes are even more lost to history, than the probable federation, also lost to history, they were conjectured to be a part of.
After being juggled from Baptist, through various evangelical churches, at my promptings in middle school, we finally landed on that speaking-in-tongues and having-seizures-for-Jesus kind of theatrical, revivalist fundamentalism everyone pretends is so marginalized in this country. (I say, this is being dishonest, but gets a pass based only on a technicality - if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but calls itself a goose, it's still a duck, and most American Christians, are fundamentalists to the core - anti-reality, anti-human, and preeminently easy to lead by the nose via propaganda.)
In high school I started taking life as seriously as I could - I was a gifted student in a poor public school system that couldn't keep up with me, so I had fallen behind for a few years, out of a combination of boredom, and social malaise - anti-intellectualism, already too strong in America's mainstream throughout my lifetime, is an absolutely staggering force among Christian churchgoers, and by extension, Christian communities - people who are told every Sunday that to think unapproved thoughts, is to choose Satan. As experience and study, both, led me to notice the contradictions, between the advertised God of Perfect and Total Love and his holy son the bringer of the Jewish New Deal, and our savage, hate-filled culture of bigotry, white supremacy, and domination by the most brutal - I started having conflicts.
I didn't consider this a crisis of faith exactly. I was 16 and I knew for a fact that I was the One True Scots... I mean Christian. I was drifting away from the church due to its explicit support of carte blanche federal policies (vis e.g. Romans 13:1-7), opposition to social progress (white supremacy, homophobia, etc), and the whole blood-obsessed death cult vibe one gets when one studies the Bible for enough years. I was the one who was going to find the nugget, the point, the secret - I was honest and devoted and spiritually connected at all times via practice, so it was gonna happen.
About two years later, I was still trying to become a self-made priest, still chasing my own next-level connection to the universe down the Bible's paths. Still living about as close to an ascetic life as you can in the US as a child; I was notoriously impossible to sleep with, and was becoming the annoying self-appointed Socrates of my school's faithful and intellectual types - with co-editorship of the school paper, no less.
And finally, I realized what the point was. Religion gives individuals a non-beauty-, non-wealth-, non-brutality-based form of power acquisition.
I more or less instantly puked up my entire religion in response to this realization. I can't handle dishonesty for long. I understand there are plenty of cases where a lie is the readiest alternative to something worse. But a basis for living which is entirely dishonest, is simply too much of an apparatus for harm, for me. Violent, chronic illness of the soul, is too mild a phrase, for what it did to me, realizing that everything we Americans consider to be compatible in the body of human society, is characterized by its being enslaved to a lie.
There came a morning, I woke up, and made a silent deal with myself. As soon as I pay my own rent and have my own apartment, I am an atheist. Until then, I am not going to provoke a holy war in my own house. Unfortunately, an only child does not have the option to simply hide the fact they have gone from a proto-priest, to a disgusted, brainwashing-soap-scum-evacuating proto-atheist.
For reasons both entirely arising from, and not necessarily dependent upon, the Christian elements of my upbringing, my legitimacy as a person within my family had always been contingent upon my efforts to conform and excel. Breathing (heavering) out the brainwashing made me an outcast who was not welcome to represent his case; made me uncertain what I was supposed to comfort myself with in these hard times; took away much of the post-childhood basis for my coping skills and even my social and internal personality; really turned me into a blank slate to be abused. I went into adulthood (correctly) certain that this decision had robbed me of the social security inherent in having a family; and, by extrapolation, paralyzed with a fear that waking up to the secular enlightenment, had destroyed my viability as a person.
The years confirmed this in part, but I wouldn't come to understand until my late 30s - recently - how much the outside world was reacting not to my lack of faith in God, but to my lack of faith in myself. Yes, my outspoken atheism and general criticism of American culture has made me few friends; but my expectation to be a pariah only one smart mouth and two strong legs away from a lynching, has been, at least, an equal problem. I can't help, oftentimes, but wear quite visibly the expectation that Americans will do exactly that - lynch me. I have been attacked, in so-called soft ways, by mobs of American adults, strangers, for fearless expression of radically progressive views, on multiple occasions - and been subject to direct, in-person threats and attempts at dehumanized violence.
Before I was either an atheist or a religious person, when I was too young to realize these things would ever matter, a pair of neighbor kids, teenagers who knew better, tricked me into eating a belly full of poisonous mushrooms. Without a stomach pumping, I would have died very painfully - I believe my guts would have disintegrated.
The choice to become an atheist has therefore simply removed from me, access to protections which previously had the potential to elevate me, by force of unjust social coercion to which I was previously blind, away from a common American culture which is made up, I believe, mainly of base, airheaded murderers and potential murderers. Becoming atheist went hand in hand with discovering that we Americans are, primarily, a culture who gives lipservice to all those things which good, kind, loving people would say - but we do so only as deliberate, subconscious-but-chosen acts of camouflage, as predators who don't overthink their abilities which help them strike their prey, nor their lifestyle as predators in an eternal social order of retrofitting mythology onto the might-makes-right model of society.
This story isn't over, by the way, for those of you who aren't reading between the lines. My atheism is definitely antitheism; monotheism, at least, is, I am convinced, that which inspired the One Ring; a covenant which is one thing for those who control it, and another thing entirely for those subject to its power, but which corrupts and destroys both in the end. I believe any atheist who does not see the emergency Judeo-Christian empires now imposes on both saner members of their flocks, and atheists, is an atheist who still suffers from dangerous delusions and has failed, however marginally, to complete their own conversion. For, to believe that the world can go on ticking just fine, so long as you are free from religion, is to finally make useful the wisdom of the claim: the greatest lie ever perpetrated by the Devil, is the one saying he doesn't exist. Once you become somewhat free in your own mind, you can lose all that progress in an instant, by pretending you now live in a separate world from those bleeping psychos who, in fact, are now so powerful that they are - yeah, I know you think you taste tinfoil at this point - on the cusp of bringing their death orgy, the Rapture, to reality in America.
Right under the secular noses of atheists who got their tiny bit of freedom but didn't take it all the way. Atheists who believe they have rejected fantastic claims, but who still believe America is a just, great, or free nation, are not done analyzing the fantastic claims they were raised under.
And here am I, the hardliner again, bringing the antitheist, civic responsibility, don't-you-know-the-UN-has-a-website-and-speaks-English, don't-you-know-Big-Money-are-white-Christian-racists-and-that's-intersectionality-too evangelism to the lost flock, Americans. I'm aware of the irony, but let me go on as if my admission does not deserve ad nauseum attacks by those wielding the Fallacy Fallacy.
My conversion will be complete when I find an antitheist community and lifestyle that nurtures everything I value in myself, like any worthwhile community of humans would do; and where my conviction is widely shared that it is an absolute necessity of human survival, that we acknowledge and end the shades of theocracy to which even most proles are conditioned to be blind.
Looking at the economic warfare, criminalization of ethnic identity and history, white Judeo-Christian supremacy, and other slow-and-fast extermination agendas being pursued as the only priorities of the world's dominant powers -- and seeing the extraordinarily anti-human cultures of the "world leaders" such as the US being continually upheld as models, replicated by the EU and wherever the IMF can extort a people's future -- places this as a spiritual challenge, if such a thing exists at all - the human spirit is being, perhaps permanently, destroyed by an intersection of religious supremacy, wealth, and racism. We are being transformed into unfeeling, unthinking murderers - returned to an animal state, a mass of soldiers to move forward into space, disposable explorers of a wealthy new frontier. If you think militant, anti-intellectual imperialists in space is a fantasy, you have not yet fully embraced the reality our English-speaking people are told, by religion, to reject.
Romans f___ing 13:1-7, y'all. These people ain't kidding. Wake up.
