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fellthemarvelous · 3 months

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Invisible scars

(TW: religious trauma)

Looking at me, you wouldn't know that I've survived religious trauma. The marks of religious trauma are seldom visible. In fact, I had no idea for the longest time that I had religious trauma (I thought it was a thing that happened to other people). I simply spent decades questioning the reasons I felt like I was so broken on in the inside. I kept trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and why I never felt happy or like I was never able to connect to anyone. I had no idea that my experience with the church as a small child is what shaped me into the anxiety-ridden, majorly depressed disaster creature I am today.

I spent 12 years learning inside of Catholic schools. It has taken me more than 20 years to process and deconstruct, and I am always going to be a work in progress. I was brainwashed into believing the very worst about myself, and I was always just beyond saving because I had the misfortune of being a woman in a church that taught us that women experience pain during childbirth as a natural consequence of Eve eating the apple, which is why they enjoy making us suffer in the first place. They taught us that Adam ate the apple because Eve seduced him, so even though Adam also ate the apple, his sin still wasn't as bad as Eve's because she did it first and used sex to get him to do the same. They placed the blame for Original Sin squarely on Eve and thus onto every single girl who entered the church. If a boy did something to me that I didn't like, it's probably because I did something to provoke him first.

Do you know what I learned to do at a very young age just to be able to cope with that?

I learned to use humor to deflect when I was struggling. I smile when I don't want people to know I'm sad. I laugh at inappropriate times, especially when I'm uncomfortable. I learned to bottle up all of my emotions because expressing anything other than happiness is bad. I learned to compartmentalize. I taught myself how to pull out the right emotion for the right occasion because I was always striving to be who I thought everyone else wanted me to be. It was exhausting.

In the midst of all of this, I'm trying to figure out which parts of me are really me and which parts of me are things that were put into my head. If you've experienced indoctrination, you know what I'm talking about. They pulled us apart as small children and placed us in specific boxes and told us that deviating from the norm was bad.

Crowley is a fallen angel. His change from angel to demon is drastic on the outside.

You know he fell and that his wings turned black and he ended up in a pool of boiling sulfur. It's the reason Crowley is so easy to sympathize with. He suffered unfairly because of arbitrary rules that deemed him unforgivable. He's accepted that part of himself. He's clever and creative and it has helped him find ways to get out of doing his job for centuries. Hell doesn't care how jobs get done just as long as someone does them, and at this point humanity is doing more to damn themselves than the demons are able to keep up with. They're tired and overworked. Hell is overpopulated even though it should be infinite in size. Crowley wants no part of that system because he sees it for what it is, just as he sees Heaven for what it is. He has the marks to prove that he is one of the damned, but that has given him all the perspective he needs to see that both sides are fucked up and toxic and "irredeemable" (just like him). He has yet to fully let go of the hold Heaven has over him because of how badly he got hurt.

Aziraphale is still an angel.

He never fell, and he doesn't know why. He has lied to God. He has lied to Gabriel repeatedly. He lies to protect Crowley. He lies to protect humanity.

Remember, Crowley and Aziraphale started off in the same place.

They both started off as angels who were created to do God's bidding. Aziraphale is the one who told Crowley what he'd heard about everything shutting down in 6,000 years. He was simply trying to make conversation. He didn't think it was something Crowley would object to. Angels were just supposed to go along with God's plans, but Crowley had a different opinion and was vocal about it. Where did Aziraphale get his information in the first place? Why does nobody ever ask this question?

Aziraphale knows Heaven is toxic. He's not blind. We need to move past this idea that because he still has love for God that he doesn't know Heaven is fucked up. He never fell, and it's something he still fears because who the hell doesn't fear the thought of eternal torment, especially if you know it's real? God has never cast him out of Heaven though and he doesn't know why. It's probably something that hangs over his head like the Sword of Damocles.

Letting go is not an easy task. Aziraphale has always been an angel. He didn't have his identity ripped from him the same way that Crowley did. Crowley had to adapt to a brand new way of existing because he was cast out of Heaven.

Crowley's trauma is evident on the outside. Aziraphale's trauma is hidden on the inside. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.

Crowley was an angel and then he was a demon, but he doesn't want to be labeled as either.

Aziraphale has only ever known how to be an angel. He's only ever known the ways of Heaven.

I'm only in my early 40s. It has taken me 20+ years to undo 12 years of religious abuse. Aziraphale is immortal. He and Crowley have abandoned their jobs, but four years in the space of millions isn't a lot. No one overcomes indoctrination in four years. Especially when you had millions of years of blind obedience indoctrinated into you. It simply does not work that way no matter how much you want to believe it can.

It has taken me more than two decades to learn how to stop hating myself. I still have no idea how to love myself, but it's something I'm trying to learn.

My entire identity was wrapped up in what the church told me it would be. Once I fully denounced it and all organized religion, I found out I had no idea who I was. No one had prepared me for a life outside of this one very specific identity and role that I was expected to fill based on a very specific box I was placed into.

I still struggle with black and white concepts. It's hard to unlearn when you have no other basis for comparison, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. It means that these changes do not and will not ever happen overnight.

The fall didn't just affect the demons though. It affected the angels as well. Look at how tightly wound the angels are. They're always trying to do the good thing, but they have no idea what that actually means, and you realize this when Uriel asks The Metatron if they had done something wrong. They are scared of making mistakes, but none of them know what they are supposed to be doing since Gabriel disrupted the status quo. You can see they are unsure of themselves and of each other. The concept of free will is so foreign to them, but Aziraphale showed all of them that it was in their grasp when he allowed Gabriel and Beelzebub to decide where to go so they could be together.

It takes a lot of audacity (and sheer ignorance) to dismiss Aziraphale as power-hungry and abusive.

Aziraphale did nothing to punish Gabriel and Beelzebub. He allowed them to leave because they were in love with each other, and he knows what that feels like. He thought he was about to get the same fate with Crowley until The Metatron showed up and refused to take no for an answer.

He doesn't want to fix Heaven because he thinks it's perfect. If he thought it was perfect he wouldn't want to fix it.

Aziraphale is going back into the Lion's Den. He knows what he's going up against. He's been humiliated and belittled and abused by Heaven for thousands of years.

His scars are there even though you can't see them, and he hides his pain with humor and silliness.

When I see people advocating for Aziraphale to suffer even more because they don't think he has suffered enough, I find myself sitting back in one of those classrooms in Catholic school being told that I deserve the bad things that happen to me because I somehow failed to measure up to some impossible metric. The cruelty of that mindset aimed at Aziraphale is kinda the reason Crowley hates Heaven in the first place because he's been there too.

And as someone who is processing religious trauma, it's disheartening to see people say that because Aziraphale has yet to fully let go of Heaven that he deserves harsher treatment. Crowley would definitely not agree with that sentiment.

#good omens #crowley #aziraphale #religious trauma #ex catholic #i don't know if this makes sense #i know the discourse on religious trauma is already another thing in this fandom #but this is how i process #deconstructing isn't fucking easy

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straightfromthetorturedpoetsdept · 5 months

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things ive seen claimed arent "taught" in american schools include things like:

-the rape and murder of slaves, the cannibalism and the torture methods

-the trail of tears

-the spanish trial of that one guy that killed all the natives in 1492 or whatever

-the exlusion of black women from feminism historically

-gerrymandering

-the 13th amendment leading to the prison industrial complex

-the fbi helping to kill black socialists

-the burning of black wall street during reconstruction

-the different branches of government and the way the government is set up to establish laws

-roe v wade

-the shit that was reagans admin

-the sexism of bill Clinton's admin

-rape culture in general

and i received education personally on all of these topics before university. it was part of my education and the only reason i remember any of it is because I've never been indoctrinated from birth to disbelieve education. in fact, it was the EXACT opposite in my culture and because of that, I actually paid attention in class. and it's because of this that i know the issue of public education is much more insidious than people make it out to be.

it's not an outright whitewashing of history everywhere in america, they do teach the real history in expensive towns but are the children listening to those lessons and believing them? it's much more insidious because the RICH children who do listen get painted within white culture as "crazy blue haired liberals with an agenda" because the poor whites are in schools with the whitewashed history and poor whites distrust rich whites because of the economic oppression they experience as a result of the system being set up like it is.

like, i really hate what republicans have done to the school system so much, it's all just levels of fuckery that you keep unpeeling to find more fuckery.

#personal #education

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anamericangirl · 1 year

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Since you mostly get hate asks on Tumblr insulting your intelligence with nonsense, I thought I’d give you an actual question:

As a mother of children approaching college age, I am always curious how young people with very solid, principled belief systems managed to resist the siren song of lefty liberalism. That ideology is hard to resist when you are young, idealistic, and very naive (i.e. 99.9% of your asks!)…especially to the realities of human nature while approaching an age that is naturally characterized by hubristic rebellion. I have a very close relationship with my kids and have always talked with them about social issues (age appropriately, of course) - something my parents never did. I do see, however, a tendency now in my daughter to think first with her feelings before confronting realities and facts first, or really investigating an issue. It makes me nervous she will fall prey to what so many young women get sucked into when striking out on their own in college. I should add: we are an agnostic household (unfortunately). My son voluntarily asked for and we gladly provided a study bible he reads often, and he did a deep dive on world religions. My daughter, though being in honors and AP classes, isn’t really into pleasure reading and philosophical discussions the way my son is. Many of her friends though are raised in religious households. I am kindling the small flame a of never-before-held belief in God myself now in my 40’s - which I have spoken with my kids about - but we do not attend church. Neither of my kids are allowed to have social media, and I’m pretty careful about their screen time - phones are turned in to my room before bed every night, no exception.

All this to ask: do you (and anyone else reading this I guess!) have any tips from your own experience for what kept you anchored in reality and morality through an age that is noted for “less-than-fully-informed-rebellion-for-rebellion’s-sake”? Was there something your parents did, or did not do, that helped you stay grounded?

Thanks for the sincere question!

I don't have any children and I can't imagine how difficult it is these days to keep them grounded. My experience growing up was a bit different, of course, as I'm sure you would understand since this radical leftism ideology wasn't nearly as prevalent as it is now, although the groundwork for it was certainly there. And social media was a very new thing so it wasn't filled with propaganda. That's one thing that I think is having a very big influence shaping the minds of children today.

I think being homeschooled was something that helped me a lot since I wasn't exposed to leftist propaganda at a very young, impressionable age by a person who was trying to indoctrinate me. My parents were very aware of what I read, watched, and listened to. Even though I was allowed social media my time on it was limited and I didn't have a phone until I was in high school (but cell phones were still pretty new too). I couldn't even listen to music if my parents didn't see the lyrics first. And in some cases it may have been too strict but they were young and still figuring out parenthood and these things got much more relaxed as my siblings and I got older. And this is not to say that I was never exposed to other ideas, I absolutely was, but I was exposed to them through age appropriate filters. All through middle school and high school I took classes that taught me how to think, not what to think. One I specifically remember was focused on learning about several different political and historical views, but the class set a foundation on how we should approach ideas and a standard through which they should be analyzed. Learning how to research and how to think was probably the most helpful thing because as I got older and started exploring other ideas (and I did go through a phase where I was persuaded by some more leftist ideals) I knew not to just accept what I heard or what I read in my textbook, but to use the same research and judgment skills I'd been using all through my schooling.

And I'm rambling a little bit lol so I apologize but even with all that college is where they get you and it's hard to avoid. So many of the friends I had growing up who were conservative became flaming liberals once they went to college and still are to this day. Some of my siblings are more left leaning than right leaning and one of my siblings definitely thinks with feelings first. It's hard to avoid propaganda and not be sucked in to it when it's in your face all the time and it's the angle through which you are being taught. But it sounds to me like you are setting a very good foundation with your kids by talking about these things with them and letting them explore other ideas while you still have control of the situation. College was definitely not the first time I was exposed to the ideas I was presented with while getting my degree and if it had been I think it would have been more challenging to think critically about them. I just know whenever I heard a new idea whether it be in school or wherever, I knew to question it and research it from more than one angle before accepting it.

I know this might not be helpful and it's more a story of my experience rather than advice but like I mentioned I'm not a parent and it is so different today than it was when I was growing up because now these harmful ideologies are going after children while they're young and it can be really challenging to combat the messages the world is pushing in the faces of children. But to me it sounds like you are already setting a good foundation, creating standards and not just leaving your kids to come face to face with new ideas unprepared because in college they'll definitely have their beliefs challenged. And I really hope this was somewhat helpful as I know I rambled and went on a bit of a tangent and hopefully others can chime in with their experiences and what helped them!

But side note I'm excited about your new spark of belief in God! Please reach out if you have any questions! I'm not a theologian but I've been a Christian for a long time so I know some stuff :)

#anon #answered #I hope this is somewhat helpful #reading it back I'm not even sure I addressed your question #so sorry if I didn't lol

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caesarflickermans · 1 year

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Childhood in Panem

With Panem's hosting annual Hunger Games, what/when do you think children being taught about it across Capitol and The Districts?

What kind of childhood stories do you think were told in each districts and Capitol: specific books, fairy tales, legends, or folklore?

Example : District 4 (fishing district) = The Little Mermaid.

Thank you 😊

@curiousnonny

districts

i would think this, at times, is something children know before they learn at school about. the games are mandatory to watch for the citizens in the districts, and they occur throughout the day. this isn't a late night movie, it's something that happens to siblings, to older kids already going to school, it's something that people talk about, it's people that are missing in families because they have been taken by the capitol. the reaping is an event that people gather to see because they have to. responsible parents don't leave their children alone at home; you'd have to take your kid with you, because presence at the reaping is mandatory.

as soon as you are conscious of the world around you, you will inevitably be aware of the games.

at least in district twelve, children also learn about panem's history at school:

Somehow it all comes back to coal at school. Besides basic reading and math most of our instruction is coal-related. Except for the weekly lecture on the history of Panem. It’s mostly a lot of blather about what we owe the Capitol. I know there must be more than they’re telling us, an actual account of what happened during the rebellion.

at least to me, that reads like the hunger games are part of the education system. the history of panem has to cover the games, an event that happened as a form of punishment because the district people owe the capitol.

capitol

even if it's not confirmed whether viewing is mandatory in the capitol, how could a child not notice the hype and those events? the games are everywhere, they are celebrated everywhere. it's so normalised that the death is something necessary and such a strong part of entertainment, that, to capitol citizens, this isn't something harmful. capitol citizens have been indoctrinated for generations to view the district people as something lesser. it will be part of children's upbringing to teach them that as well. even if they initially might only watch the colourful parade, they will learn about panem's history and why the "punishment" is just.

tw nazi germany

as a german person, we often learn about the nazis in elementary school. not necessarily about the holocaust--that comes later--but we are starting to be introduced to such a dark part of history. and mind you, we are those who didn't suffer. a jewish german author, laura cazés, mentioned that she doesn't remember when she first heard of the holocaust; that it always had been in the dna of her family. that she, in contrast to non-jewish germans, didn't have the comfort of having no knowledge.

within my own family history (i only know my mother's family), my grandfather left germany early on, and my grandmother was seven years old by the time that germany lost the war. yet, despite being so young, she was confronted with the ideology of the nazis, such as learning songs the nazis had changed to fit to their ideology.

i don't think it is any different in fictionalised totalitarian regimes, namely that children learn about the regime early on as to become model citizens in the future.

end tw nazi germany

i am a big defender of panem not having had such obvious ties to the past. i would like to refer to george orwell and the erasing of history in 1984, which, likely, was also inspired by the book burning of the nazis.

collins has been very adamant in the books about the characters not using any references to religion. no one swears by saying oh my god or damn.

the erasure of history, of language, of culture. that's such a vital aspect of totalitarian regimes. folklore in north korea is about how the kim family was born as gods.

i can see panem and specific districts developing their own phrases and their own folklore, but i don't think anything significant would have ever survived.

the little mermaid, just to continue your example, might seem innocent, but it's uncontrolled history. it's references to another time and place. it doesn't matter what story content it has. if the nazis changed traditonal german songs just to create a culture of their own, why bother to keep the little mermaid?

#inbox #anon #thg meta #curiousnonny #the hunger games #thg

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ladyimaginarium · 1 year

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okay so uh. i& wanna fucking sob. i& looked up my& old group i& used to attend to back when i& was in elementary school & uh. i& won't be listing the name just in case for my& safety but like. let's just say that it literally means "approved workmen are not ashamed" & that shit was evangelical. that shit was & still is a fucking xtian nationalist white supremacist child indoctrination cult. it's safe to say im& a cult survivor & i& no longer feel crazy about it. back then i& had no idea what that meant or questioned anything i& was taught; it supports the ideologies of manifest destiny & the doctrine of discovery which are used to justify colonization & not to mention has an extremely racist history of antiblack racism, antinative racism & to a lesser extent antiasian racism, as well as queerphobia and transphobia. its literal motto is to train children to serve jesus & dedicate their entire lives to him & then telling them to evangelize others, to literally become soldiers in god's army. that is evangelization & missionary work. i& remember how they basically indoctrinated us&, how the leaders invited us& to bring a non-xtian friend, a few good times, how i& was shamed for asking questions about what i& was being told, how one of the leaders would tell me& "god is always watching", the amount of homophobia and shaming of any non-xtian religions, telling me& that microchips are being planted into arms & how the end of the world was near, her experiences with demons ( this happened when i& was about 8 or 9 approximately, i& honestly don't quite remember how old i& was but i& was very young which traumatized me& ), the grey outfit uniforms we needed to wear, the tried and true methods of repetition and memorization & having us study bible verses, conformity (gray-shirted uniforms, etc.), the slogans, the peer pressure, the missionary work the leaders were on in vulnerable black and indigenous communities... & what's worse about all this is that they KNEW i& was native. THEY FUCKING KNEW. this is what i& mean when i& talk about conservative white western xtians continuing to attempt to evangelize indigenous children & the group also has many branches all around the world & even reaches into refugee & migrant groups. this is literal fucking textbook colonization & it makes me& sick to my& stomach & im& literally tearing up bc the messaging was so ingrained to me& as a child. now the issue of residential schools or more specifically with my& case the indoctrination of native children seem so much closer to home now, even if i've& never known anyone in the family who was a survivor, but even so, indoctrination & colonization & evangelism in our communities is still RAMPANT, especially for our children.

#arcana.txt #tw; cult abuse #tw; residential schools #tw; colonization

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smokeybrandcompositions · 1 year

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Good Sheep

I am not a religious person at all. I find all of that sh*t, every single one, to be semantics. Like, you’re arguing over some made up, imaginary friend, used to either extort you into obedience through fear or absolve you of every sin you’ll ever commit because your messiah died for you. Religion is literally the ignorant alternative to understanding. When you don’t understand something, when the observational knowledge isn’t there, you have to fill the gaps with something and that something usually takes the form of gods. It’s like being afraid of the dark when you’re a kid. You’re not afraid of the dark, you’re afraid of what’s in the dark because you don’t know. Once you understand that there is nothing hiding in your closet or under your bed or in the shadows of your room at bedtime, you’re no longer afraid of the dark. You garnered understanding through observation. That’s literally science. That’s the basis for all things. Observation and understanding. Religion, in all forms, hampers that. It ascribes the natural world to something supernatural, something unknowable. It keeps us in the dark, which is why i am skeptical of all religion just on principal. It’s okay not to understand things. Now that i have been clear about my absolute skepticism, i want to get into Christianity, specifically.

I come from a Baptists family. I’m black and my family has strong ties to the Bible Belt so of course i am. As i understand it, my ma’s family came up from Texas, Alabama, and Oklahoma while my Pop’s kin came up through Louisiana and Florida. My family unit, themselves, weren’t openly religious but my extended family were, very much so. We had a church. My cousins were Deacons and Pastors and Ushers and whatever else. I started Sunday School when i was four years old. Church for my family, when i was a kid, lasted hours and was held on multiple days. That’s not including the volunteer expectation. Church for a lot of, probably most of, black people is a whole ass part-time job. I t was in this environment of indoctrination that i spent a good portion of my halcyon days. The fear of hell and the love of Jesus was pounded into me every Sunday for half the goddamn day. I’d get up at six in the morning, be at church by seven, and wouldn’t make it home until two, three, four, or sometimes five in the evening. Sh*t was absurd but, as a kid who was maybe two or three years outside of being an actual toddler, that was normal. It took my grandma dying and my prayers for her salvation going unanswered for me to actually scrutinized what i was being taught from the Good Book. Imagine my utter shock when, the more i looked into sh*t about Christianity, the more my faith waned.

I remember learning about the Crusades and the Inquisition for the first time. Whole ass atrocities committed in the name of God. I learned abut Manifest Destiny, the doctrine white settlers used to cull native peoples across the US as they marched west for resources. I was appalled when i learned how Christianity was used to pacify my African ancestors as they were enslaved, relegated to abused beast of burden and violated chattel, their humanity stripped from them under the promise of a heavenly afterlife. Heaven is promised for those who are good slaves, those who obey their masters. Yes, you are going to whipped. Yes, you are going to be raped. Yes, you family will be shattered, your children stolen, and your men buck-broken, but take it all in stride because there is no brutality in heaven. But you can’t get through those Pearly Gates if you rebel and kill your oppressors. You go to hell for that, where the hell you’re living now will continue for eternity. That sh*t chaffed the f*ck out of me. That sh*t made me realize how perverted the Scriptures had become. It made me realize that, something written two millennia ago, can be perverted so disgustingly as to justify wholesale crimes against humanity. That didn’t sound like Jesus to me. That didn’t sound like the warm love God was supposed to so benevolently bestow upon us, his children. That sounded like some sh*t a man who knows he’s doing wrong, chose to dismiss by attributing his own sins to those of the sacrificial lamb. That sh*t sounded like the justification brutal, disingenuous men in power use to manipulate the masses. So imagine my surprise when i learned about the Council of Nicaea.

That thing i just said? About disingenuous men in power? Yeah, that’s the Council of Nicaea. Back in the year 325, a bunch of Christian Bishops got together with the Roman Emperor Constantine , and decided what was to be canon. See, up to this point, Christianity was just a bunch of separate cults and tribes, each with their own Bible and beliefs. This Council, under the purview of Constantine (Who wanted to unite his massive empire under one banner), decided which Gospels would go into THE Christian Bible. Constantine did this to shore up his borders and quell revolts because, just like those plantation owners who would come hundreds of years later, you don’t get into heaven if you’re not a docile sheep. And if you question the Word, you also go to hell. Even thought the Word is now lost to time because a disingenuous men in power, decided what the Word was going to be. Constantine the Great, in an effort to control his people, to herd his chattel, used Christianity as that divine yoke. He is the reason the Bible you worship from, is the way it is. How can that thing possibly be the unfiltered word of God, if it was edited by a man? A man who had designs on retaining power in perpetuity? A man who effectively used his ambition to manipulate those at the head of the infant Christian Church, into allowing him to shape their entire religion in his own image on the promise of power. A Roman Emperor chose what Books made it into your Bible, strictly to consolidate his power, and your Church went along with it because they became the State Church.

So what happened to all those other Books and Bibles? They didn’t just go away, right? No, they exists and often tell a very different story to the one you know. The DaVinci Code, a fictional book written by Dan Brown and, eventually turned into a pretty okay film starring Tom Hanks, was based on a few of these apocryphal texts. There are some by brand new Apostles who went unrecognized by the Church because their Gospels were too off-brand. There are alternatives to know canon Gospels like Secret Mark or Apocryphal Psalms. The Book of Enoch is arguable the most famous, outside of the Dead Seas Scrolls, and paints a very different picture of Eternity. It addresses incongruities like what happens to all those people who died before Christ was crucified or what of Hell at the end of days. Enoch answers that. More infamous books include the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary of Magdalena, both turning the understanding of Jesus absolutely on it’s head. In Judas, Jesus makes light of his Apostles as they worship the wrong god, the evil god, and that they will not listen to the true Word. He gave Judas, and Mary, the secret Wisdom; That there were, in fact, two Gods; The Demiurge and Yaldabaoth. Judas never betrayed Jesus. In fact, he was charged with doing what he did to Jesus BY Jesus. His was the greatest sacrifice as he is painted as the closest to the Holy, outside of Mary. And then there’s Mary’s book. Thee one that redirects everything from a masculine perspective to that of a feminine one. Mary wasn’t a whore but a, heiress from the port city of Magdalene and Jesus’ lawful wife, mother of his children, and prime confidant. Like Judas, she was given secret Wisdom not privy to the other followers and that relationship was perverted once he died. There are a lot of stories like that but the one which really stands out to me is the Book of Barnabas.

Barnabas’ Gospel re-frames the entirety of the Christian belief system. It asserts that Jesus was not divine, that he was simply a prophet and not the Son of God. It basically blows the core tenet of the New Testament out of the goddamn water and goes on to say that he, Jesus, prophesied the coming of Mohammad and that their beliefs were far more similar than they were different. They both preached a very similar message, one of love and understanding. Barnabas went on to say that Jesus was never crucified, that it was Judas on that cross. No, Jesus dies as a man, surrounded by his wife and family. That’s right, Jesus f*cked! And had kids. According to Barnabas, the lost Apostle. I wonder why this Gospel was left out of Constantine’s Propaganda Bible? If the linchpin of your eternal tool of bondage is the fact that your Messiah is the Son of God, Divine in every aspect, born of immaculate conception and killed to absolve all your sins, was just a dude who saw sh*t and f*cked his wife, you’d want to bury that sh*t, too. Guess what? it didn’t stay buried. In fact, the world’s oldest Christian bible, dating back to between fifteen hundred and two thousands years, long before the Council of Nicaea, INCLUDES the Gospel of Barnabas! Once upon a time, before Constantine manipulated the entire Christian religion into becoming the most insidious tool of oppression, ever, Barnabas was considered canon. Not today, mind you. They literal have this Bible on display in a Turkish museum right now and the official word from the Catholic Church, the denomination who partnered with Constantine for that power grab way back when, basically said it doesn’t count and moved on. They do that a lot. Because they have an entire city-state unto themselves. Because that gilded deal with Constantine has paid dividends long after he, and his empire, has fallen.

Let me say that again with my whole ass chest: The oldest Bible known to man, dated back to potentially the actual death of Christ, basically sh*ts on the entire Christian ideology by fundamentally undoing the core belief that Jesus was divine, that he lived as a man and dies as one, too, exists and the Vatican is just like, "Nah. Fake news." This sh*t is wild and the reason why i don't subscribe to all this religious skulduggery

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smokeybrand · 1 year

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Good Sheep

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skies-diary · 1 year

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It feels like all the discussion I see about homeschooling online is about controlling parents who don't want their kids "brainwashed by evolution and CRT". There are a lot of cases like that, yes - I have a friend who's parents pulled all their kids out of school when they came home from school and started saying things like "hey slavery was bad actually". A lot of discussion of indoctrination and isolation. And those are all concerns.

But I want to homeschool, if or when I have kids. It has nothing to do with faith or wokeism. It's because I don't want my kids herded into a room where at any moment, some maniac with a gun could kick down the door and open fire. I dont want them being taught outdated, innacurate curriculums that many GOP leaders are pushing in their states (ex sex ed classes that are not required to be medically accurate, teaching young children that Colombus was an "explorer" or a "hero"). I don't want them to experience the same trauma from bullying that I did.

I myself am white, but I can imagine that for Black families, institutional racism is a big factor in deciding to homeschool. With Black children more likely to be punished for misbehavior than their white peers, as well as more likely to be arrested at school by the ever-present police force on campus, or victims of the school-to-prison pipeline, it's easy to see why homeschooling among Black families has risen in the past few years.

This isn't a new idea. The practice of sending children to school to learn in our modern sense has been around for a few hundred years at most; such a short time period in human history that we aren't even sure if it will prevail or be one day considered an odd fad, as noted in Therese Oniell's book Ungovernable. For most of our existence, children learned from their parents, peers, community, and environment, not a classroom.

I used to be a teacher. I remember doing active shooter drills with the 5 year olds. We told them we were playing hide and seek. I remember another teacher reading a book about public servants, and the way my skin crawled as she cheerily explained to a room full of Black and Brown children that "The police are your friends, there to help you!" I remember the weird, arbitrary rules we had to follow and have the children follow that honestly felt, at times, more like training them to be obedient to authority than anything with a benefit to the children themselves (ex play hour for two year olds must be structured into 20 minute blocks with three separate play stations, and every 20 minutes children must be rotated to a new station. The teachers didn't like it, and the children didn't like it, either).

Yes, there are serious issues with parents choosing to withdraw their children from public school - for the wrong reasons, particularly reasons relating to abuse, including religious abuse (ex a refusal to recongize a minor's constitutional right to religious freedom, as well as issues like forced indoctrination). But that's not the only kind of parent who wants to homeschool. I want to because the school system is failing our students. It is inadequate, tramuatic and most of all, unsafe. Children are being ripped apart by weapons of war in their desks.

I do believe that with thoughtful design, this system can be fixed. But until it is, I'm not going to chance my babies. They'll have their lessons at home until I can be sure that they won't be leaving school that day in a body bag.

#tw school shooting #american politics #american school system #homeschool

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theamberwizard · 3 years

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i’ve been thinking about black widow and the red room recently, as one does, and i’ve got a lot of thoughts about the effects of the red room on widows who’ve escaped. couple things, just before i begin: i would recommend having watched black widow before this because there are implied (?) spoilers, i use way too fancy language while i write and i don’t have an editor cause this is mainly to catch her off guard, so, uh, whoops sorry

trigger warnings: TW: child abuse TW: restricted eating/starving yourself TW: dehumanization TW: death of a child

so yeah, enjoy my list of 10 personal headcanons about how the red room fucks you up on all the levels.

1) black widows cannot sleep in. like, they wake up at 5:00 am every day. it’s not a physical thing, at least not as far as they know, because they can negate that by just going to bed two hours or less before 5:00 am just from their lack of sleep. if, however, they go to sleep at a fairly normal hour they will, like clockwork, wake up at 5:00. this stems from them doing it every single day of their life since they got indoctrinated in the red room. if they didn’t wake up at 5:00 am ready for more training or missions, for any reason, they would be tortured. sometimes physically, sometimes mentally. eventually, all the widows would get that message. they still can’t shake it. because of that, natasha will often refuse to go to sleep at a normal hour, trying to force her body into submission, trying to rid herself of the painful memories that accompanied sleep and waking up afterwards. only clint knows why, because each day in that vent, natasha would snap up at 4:00 am. she had to explain to him that she just wasn’t accustomed to budapest time, and that actually, it was 5:00 am in russia.

2) for months after escaping the red room, widows practically cannot eat. in the red room, they were fed mushy messes of meals, filled with only the necessary nutrients that they absolutely had to have to survive. most widows can only get down one meal, maybe even a snack if they push it, until they throw it all up. they have to slowly eat slightly more each day for weeks until they can get down a normal intake of food. even then, it’s hard to push that, and every widow relapses into throwing up in those early stages. however, this isn’t normally a problem for most widows until a couple weeks into their life with freedom. that’s about the time that they make an acquaintance, who will eventually pluck up the courage to ask them why every time said friend will eat near the widow, the widow will lean over and whisper: “careful, that’s your whole ration today and i don’t want to do extra training.”

3) each “class” of widows had an extra mentor teacher in their early red room years. this was an older widow, someone who’d been falling behind in her recent missions, and with a look that the red room deemed “motherly”. their sole purpose was to be the person each widow got attached too, the parental figure. they were nice, they were helpful, they taught many different basic techniques. then, one day, the red room would have another older widow, (one already introduced to the children as the metaphorical “bad cop” of this scenario) come in and inform the mentor that she had failed her latest mission and proceed to, in front of thirty eleven year-olds, shoot the mentor. the mentor widow would not die that day- the red room refused to waste such a weapon- but the class of up incoming widows would be informed that she had. the official purpose of this exercise was to demonstrate to both the trainees and the trainer the consequences of failing a mission. the unofficial purpose? that would be the last psychological effects the mentor’s “death” would have upon the class, making them learn what happened to attachments in the red room. the day natasha’s class experienced this was the day she cut off all contact with her sister. the day yelena experiences this is the day she first another widow- because yelena killed that mentor with her own bare hands before the informant ever finished the announcement.

4) towards the start of the red room’s history, there were several attacks on the red room. the first ever attack was from a local police station who had been getting complaints of loud wailing, and, upon further investigation, realized what they were dealing with. they brought several other police and militia groups from nearby towns. the immediate action that was taken was to throw the littlest girls they had at the attackers. it stopped the police in their tracks, obviously, because you really don’t expect to come across thirty little girls while searching through a building of highly trained assassins. the red room then sent their fully trained widows and killed everyone. including the girls. the red room then found that footage from their cameras (because of fucking course they have cameras) and then showed it to the next batch of widows, just to show them how disposable they were.

5) yelena and natasha almost caused a whole fucking mutiny within the red room just because of their names. in the red room, you see, widows do not get names. they instead are bestowed with numbers, and even those are a twisted class ranking. they all wore little name tags with the numbers on them until came natasha and yelena came in. yelena, having just seen her mother get shot, complied almost immediately and was addressed as number 42. on the other side of that coin you have natasha, who had already been in the red room and remembered every gruesome detail, and went “fuck you my name is natalia.” upon hearing of this (word gets around fast in the red room. every girl must know they are being listened to at all times, and no secrets can be kept from the red room,) yelena too announced her name to the class.

6) this was met with blanching from every child in that class, because how on earth can you be called by a word? no, they thought, we are numbers, we are weapons, we are not people and we cannot have our own words, for we are not worthy. but secretly, internally, they wished for a name. slowly, they began piecing syllables together until they formed a coherent name, and for the first time in the red room’s long history, they didn’t have weapons. not anymore. they have two full classes of human little girls. the red room officials heard of this, obviously, and took to the only method they had now. violence. the classes were rid of the named girls, yet natasha and yelena were kept alive. they were kept alive to be ostracized, to be the girl the others pointed at and said “she’s the reason all my friends died.” they were kept alive so they could watch the carnage they had unwittingly caused just by saying their own names. and the worst part? well, the worst part was when the teachers accounted for those kills, and made them top of the class. yelena will never forget the day the teachers stood her and her sister up in front of all the widows-in-traning and told them what a good job they had done, how those tactics were sure to help them graduate. i mean, you’re practically a shoo-in if they rest of your class was killed by your school.

7) the red room could never fully stop the names, and so they decided to make a system, and the names would be the highest reward. they told the young, impressionable girls that while maybe outsiders such as natasha and yelena got names at birth, you had to earn them here. if you are to become a spy, you will take on the name of you very first official alias. if, instead, you become an assassin, you will take on the name of your very first official kill. of course, in reality, the widows couldn’t actually address each other with their new earned names, and instead used “team leader” or other such titles. but it became a small comfort for them, thinking of themselves in third person, with their very own names. in some small part they weren’t fully weapons anymore, no, they were people again. natasha took on the name natalia, because in her mind that life in ohio had been her first mission, even if she hadn’t known it. yelena took on yelena as well, but in her mind that little girl in ohio who was sitting in the backseat, caring only about which song they played, that girl had to have been yelena’s first true kill.

8) the names system worked well in the red room, but when you escaped it caused some serious problems. most would have to announce themselves to the russian government, saying they had been flying under the radar their whole life and never became registered. then, they’d give a non-russian name, and their whole ruse would fall apart. unfortunately, this was the least of their problems, because many a widow would someday meet a relative of their very first kill, and when they introduced themselves as the person they had killed all those years ago, the families and friends would often figure them out.

9) one of the biggest parts of the red room’s brainwashing was their little catchphrases they used. ironically, a lot of them were eerily close to boy scout mottos- “be prepared,” an iconic scout motto, versus “there is no safety, only preparedness,” the most frequently used phrase within the red room. when widows then escaped, the most small phrase could set them off. some unknowing widows even adopted little boys in their new lives, who often became boy scouts. the ensuing misery is something you can imagine yourself.

10) after clint helped natasha to escape, she immediately died her hair blond. clint asked why, of course, and she didn’t tell him. (what, you thought i’d have another cute clintasha moment? never.) this was partly because she hadn’t admitted it to herself, though, because natasha couldn’t remember her sister without remembering all the suffering that came with her.

11) when the widows were smaller, more susceptible to the conditioning, the red room would stage infiltrations. older widows, ones who were closer to retirement, would come in in different uniforms, sometimes the uniforms of UN officers or local police, sometimes different organizations, all different types. the most recent uniforms made yelena sick looking at them, because each time the older widows would pretend to be the avengers there would also be one pretending to be her sister. each time she saw the fake natasha she wanted to break that widow’s neck because that’s not how my sister tilts her head, you’re doing it all wrong. you should be doing it like this, you shouldn’t be doing it at all, i should be doing this, i know my sister. each time those exact thoughts went into her head, and each time all she really wanted was for her sister to be there, for natasha to do her little head tilt upon seeing yelena and take her hand and say “you’re safe now, i promise,” and for natasha to be telling the truth. the only problem was that deep down inside herself yelena knew that this could never actually happen while yelena was still in the red room, because while yelena was still in the red room she knew that she would look at natasha telling her she was safe and tell her in return that there was no safety, only preparedness, and then murder her sister in cold blood.

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 3 years

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Religious Trauma Syndrome: How Some Organized Religion Leads to Mental Health Problems

By Valerie Tarico

Marlene Winell interviewed March 25, 2013

At age sixteen I began what would be a four year struggle with bulimia. When the symptoms started, I turned in desperation to adults who knew more than I did about how to stop shameful behavior—my Bible study leader and a visiting youth minister. “If you ask anything in faith, believing,” they said. “It will be done.” I knew they were quoting [3] the Word of God. We prayed together, and I went home confident that God had heard my prayers. But my horrible compulsions didn’t go away. By the fall of my sophomore year in college, I was desperate and depressed enough that I made a suicide attempt. The problem wasn’t just the bulimia. I was convinced by then that I was a complete spiritual failure. My college counseling department had offered to get me real help (which they later did). But to my mind, at that point, such help couldn’t fix the core problem: I was a failure in the eyes of God. It would be years before I understood that my inability to heal bulimia through the mechanisms offered by biblical Christianity was not a function of my own spiritual deficiency but deficiencies in Evangelical religion itself.

Dr. Marlene Winell is a human development consultant in the San Francisco Area. She is also the daughter of Pentecostal missionaries. This combination has given her work an unusual focus. For the past twenty years she has counseled men and women in recovery from various forms of fundamentalist religion including the Assemblies of God denomination in which she was raised. Winell is the author of Leaving the Fold – A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion [4], written during her years of private practice in psychology. Over the years, Winell has provided assistance to clients whose religious experiences were even more damaging than mine. Some of them are people whose psychological symptoms weren’t just exacerbated by their religion, but actually caused by it.

Two years ago, Winell made waves by formally labeling what she calls “Religious Trauma Syndrome” (RTS) and beginning to write and speak on the subject for professional audiences. When the British Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Psychologists published a series of articles on the topic, members of a Christian counseling association protested what they called excessive attention to a “relatively niche topic.” One commenter said, “A religion, faith or book cannot be abuse but the people interpreting can make anything abusive.”

Is toxic religion simply misinterpretation? What is religious trauma? Why does Winell believe religious trauma merits its own diagnostic label?

Let’s start this interview with the basics. What exactly is religious trauma syndrome?

Winell: Religious trauma syndrome (RTS) is a set of symptoms and characteristics that tend to go together and which are related to harmful experiences with religion. They are the result of two things: immersion in a controlling religion and the secondary impact of leaving a religious group. The RTS label provides a name and description that affected people often recognize immediately. Many other people are surprised by the idea of RTS, because in our culture it is generally assumed that religion is benign or good for you. Just like telling kids about Santa Claus and letting them work out their beliefs later, people see no harm in teaching religion to children.

But in reality, religious teachings and practices sometimes cause serious mental health damage. The public is somewhat familiar with sexual and physical abuse in a religious context. As Journalist Janet Heimlich has documented in, Breaking Their Will, Bible-based religious groups that emphasize patriarchal authority in family structure and use harsh parenting methods can be destructive.

But the problem isn’t just physical and sexual abuse. Emotional and mental treatment in authoritarian religious groups also can be damaging because of 1) toxic teachings like eternal damnation or original sin 2) religious practices or mindset, such as punishment, black and white thinking, or sexual guilt, and 3) neglect that prevents a person from having the information or opportunities to develop normally.

Can you give me an example of RTS from your consulting practice?

Winell: I can give you many. One of the symptom clusters is around fear and anxiety. People indoctrinated into fundamentalist Christianity as small children sometimes have memories of being terrified by images of hell and apocalypse before their brains could begin to make sense of such ideas. Some survivors, who I prefer to call “reclaimers,” [8] have flashbacks, panic attacks, or nightmares in adulthood even when they intellectually no longer believe the theology. One client of mine, who during the day functioned well as a professional, struggled with intense fear many nights. She said,

“I was afraid I was going to hell. I was afraid I was doing something really wrong. I was completely out of control. I sometimes would wake up in the night and start screaming, thrashing my arms, trying to rid myself of what I was feeling. I’d walk around the house trying to think and calm myself down, in the middle of the night, trying to do some self-talk, but I felt like it was just something that – the fear and anxiety was taking over my life.” Or consider this comment, which refers to a film [9] used by evangelicals to warn about the horrors of the “end times” for nonbelievers.

“I was taken to see the film “A Thief In The Night”. WOW. I am in shock to learn that many other people suffered the same traumas I lived with because of this film. A few days or weeks after the film viewing, I came into the house and mom wasn’t there. I stood there screaming in terror. When I stopped screaming, I began making my plan: Who my Christian neighbors were, who’s house to break into to get money and food. I was 12 years old and was preparing for Armageddon alone.”

In addition to anxiety, RTS can include depression, cognitive difficulties, and problems with social functioning. In fundamentalist Christianity, the individual is considered depraved and in need of salvation. A core message is “You are bad and wrong and deserve to die.” (The wages of sin is death [10].) This gets taught to millions of children through organizations like Child Evangelism Fellowship [11] and there is a group organized [12] to oppose their incursion into public schools. I’ve had clients who remember being distraught when given a vivid bloody image of Jesus paying the ultimate price for their sins. Decades later they sit telling me that they can’t manage to find any self-worth.

“After twenty-seven years of trying to live a perfect life, I failed. . . I was ashamed of myself all day long. My mind battling with itself with no relief. . . I always believed everything that I was taught but I thought that I was not approved by God. I thought that basically I, too, would die at Armageddon.

“I’ve spent literally years injuring myself, cutting and burning my arms, taking overdoses and starving myself, to punish myself so that God doesn’t have to punish me. It’s taken me years to feel deserving of anything good.”

Born-again Christianity and devout Catholicism [13] tell people they are weak and dependent, calling on phrases like “lean not unto your own understanding [14]” or “trust and obey [11].” People who internalize these messages can suffer from learned helplessness. I’ll give you an example from a client who had little decision-making ability after living his entire life devoted to following the “will of God.” The words here don’t convey the depth of his despair.

“I have an awful time making decisions in general. Like I can’t, you know, wake up in the morning, “What am I going to do today?” Like I don’t even know where to start. You know all the things I thought I might be doing are gone and I’m not sure I should even try to have a career; essentially I babysit my four-year-old all day.”

Authoritarian religious groups are subcultures where conformity is required in order to belong. Thus if you dare to leave the religion, you risk losing your entire support system as well.

“I lost all my friends. I lost my close ties to family. Now I’m losing my country. I’ve lost so much because of this malignant religion and I am angry and sad to my very core. . . I have tried hard to make new friends, but I have failed miserably. . . I am very lonely.”

Leaving a religion, after total immersion, can cause a complete upheaval of a person’s construction of reality, including the self, other people, life, and the future. People unfamiliar with this situation, including therapists, have trouble appreciating the sheer terror it can create.

“My form of religion was very strongly entrenched and anchored deeply in my heart. It is hard to describe how fully my religion informed, infused, and influenced my entire worldview. My first steps out of fundamentalism were profoundly frightening and I had frequent thoughts of suicide. Now I’m way past that but I still haven’t quite found “my place in the universe.”

Even for a person who was not so entrenched, leaving one’s religion can be a stressful and significant transition.

Many people seem to walk away from their religion easily, without really looking back. What is different about the clientele you work with?

Winell: Religious groups that are highly controlling, teach fear about the world, and keep members sheltered and ill-equipped to function in society are harder to leave easily. The difficulty seems to be greater if the person was born and raised in the religion rather than joining as an adult convert. This is because they have no frame of reference – no other “self” or way of “being in the world.” A common personality type is a person who is deeply emotional and thoughtful and who tends to throw themselves wholeheartedly into their endeavors. “True believers” who then lose their faith feel more anger and depression and grief than those who simply went to church on Sunday.

Aren’t these just people who would be depressed, anxious, or obsessive anyways?

Winell: Not at all. If my observation is correct, these are people who are intense and involved and caring. They hang on to the religion longer than those who simply “walk away” because they try to make it work even when they have doubts. Sometimes this is out of fear, but often it is out of devotion. These are people for whom ethics, integrity and compassion matter a great deal. I find that when they get better and rebuild their lives, they are wonderfully creative and energetic about new things.

In your mind, how is RTS different from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Winell: RTS is a specific set of symptoms and characteristics that are connected with harmful religious experience, not just any trauma. This is crucial to understanding the condition and any kind of self-help or treatment. (More details about this can be found on my Journey Free [15] website and discussed in my talk [16] at the Texas Freethought Convention.)

Another difference is the social context, which is extremely different from other traumas or forms of abuse. When someone is recovering from domestic abuse, for example, other people understand and support the need to leave and recover. They don’t question it as a matter of interpretation, and they don’t send the person back for more. But this is exactly what happens to many former believers who seek counseling. If a provider doesn’t understand the source of the symptoms, he or she may send a client for pastoral counseling, or to AA, or even to another church. One reclaimer expressed her frustration this way:

“Include physically-abusive parents who quote “Spare the rod and spoil the child” as literally as you can imagine and you have one fucked-up soul: an unloved, rejected, traumatized toddler in the body of an adult. I’m simply a broken spirit in an empty shell. But wait...That’s not enough!? There’s also the expectation by everyone in society that we victims should celebrate this with our perpetrators every Christmas and Easter!!”

Just like disorders such as autism or bulimia, giving RTS a real name has important advantages. People who are suffering find that having a label for their experience helps them feel less alone and guilty. Some have written to me to express their relief:

“There’s actually a name for it! I was brainwashed from birth and wasted 25 years of my life serving Him! I’ve since been out of my religion for several years now, but I cannot shake the haunting fear of hell and feel absolutely doomed. I’m now socially inept, unemployable, and the only way I can have sex is to pay for it.”

Labeling RTS encourages professionals to study it more carefully, develop treatments, and offer training. Hopefully, we can even work on prevention.

What do you see as the difference between religion that causes trauma and religion that doesn’t?

Winell: Religion causes trauma when it is highly controlling and prevents people from thinking for themselves and trusting their own feelings. Groups that demand obedience and conformity produce fear, not love and growth. With constant judgment of self and others, people become alienated from themselves, each other, and the world. Religion in its worst forms causes separation.

Conversely, groups that connect people and promote self-knowledge and personal growth can be said to be healthy. The book, Healthy Religion [17], describes these traits. Such groups put high value on respecting differences, and members feel empowered as individuals. They provide social support, a place for events and rites of passage, exchange of ideas, inspiration, opportunities for service, and connection to social causes. They encourage spiritual practices that promote health like meditation or principles for living like the golden rule. More and more, non-theists are asking [18] how they can create similar spiritual communities without the supernaturalism. An atheist congregation [19] in London launched this year and has received over 200 inquiries from people wanting to replicate their model.

Some people say that terms like “recovery from religion” and “religious trauma syndrome” are just atheist attempts to pathologize religious belief.

Winell: Mental health professionals have enough to do without going out looking for new pathology. I never set out looking for a “niche topic,” and certainly not religious trauma syndrome. I originally wrote a paper for a conference of the American Psychological Association and thought that would be the end of it. Since then, I have tried to move on to other things several times, but this work has simply grown.

In my opinion, we are simply, as a culture, becoming aware of religious trauma. More and more people are leaving religion, as seen by polls [20] showing that the “religiously unaffiliated” have increased in the last five years from just over 15% to just under 20% of all U.S. adults. It’s no wonder the internet is exploding with websites for former believers from all religions, providing forums [21] for people to support each other. The huge population of people “leaving the fold” includes a subset at risk for RTS, and more people are talking about it and seeking help. For example, there are thousands of former Mormons [22], and I was asked to speak about RTS at an Exmormon Foundation conference. I facilitate an international support group online called Release and Reclaim [23] which has monthly conference calls. An organization called Recovery from Religion, [24] helps people start self-help meet-up groups

Saying that someone is trying to pathologize authoritarian religion is like saying someone pathologized eating disorders by naming them. Before that, they were healthy? No, before that we weren’t noticing. People were suffering, thought they were alone, and blamed themselves. Professionals had no awareness or training. This is the situation of RTS today. Authoritarian religion is already pathological, and leaving a high-control group can be traumatic. People are already suffering. They need to be recognized and helped. _______________________________

Statistics update:

Numbers of American ‘nones’ continues to rise

October 18, 2019

By David Crary – Associated Press

The portion of Americans with no religious affiliation is rising significantly, in tandem with a sharp drop in the percentage that identifies as Christians, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. …

Pew says all categories of the religiously unaffiliated population – often referred to as the “nones” grew in magnitude. Self-described atheists now account for 4% of U.S. adults, up from 2% in 2009; agnostics account for 5%, up from 3% a decade ago; and 17% of Americans now describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” up from 12% in 2009.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2019/1018/Numbers-of-American-nones-continues-to-rise

_______________________________

Marlene Winell interviewed by Valerie Tarico on recovering from religious trauma Uploaded on January 31, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIfABmbqSMA

24:12

On Moral Politics, a TV program with host Dr. Valerie Tarico, Marlene Winell describes the trauma that can result from harmful experiences with religious indoctrination. Dr. Winell explains that mental health issues are widespread and need to be understood just as we understand PTSD. There are steps to recovery, treatment modalities, and resources available as well. She now refers to this as RTS or Religious Trauma Syndrome. _______________________________

Links:   [3] https://www.biblestudyonjesuschrist.com/pog/ask1.htm  [4] https://marlenewinell.net/leaving-fold-former  [8] https://journeyfree.org/article/reclaimers/  [9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thief_in_the_Night_%28film%29  [10] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+6%3A23&version=KJV  [11] https://valerietarico.com/2011/02/04/our-public-schools-their-mission-field/  [12] http://www.intrinsicdignity.com/  [13] https://www.maryjohnson.co/an-unquenchable-thirst/  [14] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+3%3A5-6&version=KJV [15] https://journeyfree.org/category/uncategorized/ [16] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qrE4pMBlis  [17] https://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Religion-Psychological-Guide-Mature/dp/1425924166 [18] https://www.humanistchaplaincy.org/ [19] https://www.christianpost.com/news/london-atheist-church-model-looking-to-expand-worldwide-91516 [20] https://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/  [21] https://new.exchristian.net/  [22] https://www.exmormon.org/  [23] https://journeyfree.org/group-forum/ [24] https://www.recoveringfromreligion.org/

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Get God’s Self-Appointed Messengers Out of Your Head

Valerie Tarico Which buzz phrases from your past are stuck in your brain? “God’s messengers” were all real complicated people with biases, blind spots, favorite foods and morning breath. They were not gods and they are not you. So how can you get them out of your head or at least reduce them to muffled background noise?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElfyYA420F0

#religious trauma syndrome #Marlene Winell #Valerie Tarico

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4evamc · 4 years

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Misha Tweets

Transcript

Ed Levine: Welcome to Special Sauce 2.0. Serious Eats podcast about food and life. Every week on Special Sauce we begin with Ask Kenji, where Kenji Lopez-Alt, Serious Eats Chief Culinary Consultant, gives the definitive answer to the question of the week that a serious eater like you has sent us.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt: Generally, sort of like delicate leafy herbs like cilantro, parsley, basil, they tend to not be very good in their dried counterparts. Thyme, rosemary, oregano, they actually work pretty well in their dried forms.

EL: After Ask Kenji, a conversation with our guest, today in house, Misha Collins. He is, of course, an actor best known for his role as the angel, Castiel. Did I pronounce that right?

Misha Collins: Castiel.

EL: On the CW television series Supernatural, and has now written with his wife Vicki Collins, The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Time.

EL: Now it's time to meet Misha Collins. He's, of course, an actor best known for his role as the angel, Castiel?

Misha Collins: Castiel.

EL: On the CW television series Supernatural, which has had an insane run, right? It's like 2008 to 2019.

MC: Yeah, we're in our 15th season right now.

EL: That never happens.

MC: No, it doesn't. I don't know why they kept us on the air.

EL: Collins is also the co-founder and board president of Random Acts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding and inspiring acts of kindness around the world. He's also a published poet. Very impressive dude.

MC: Thank you.

EL: And has now written with his wife Vicky Collins, The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Time. So welcome to Special Sauce, Misha.

MC: I'm very happy to be here.

EL: So the first question I always ask, in your case it's particularly relevant, is tell us about life at your family table growing up. Your family table was not exactly traditional.

MC: That is true. I was raised by a single mom. My parents separated when I was three years old and I visited my father on every other weekend for most of my childhood, but he wasn't really a cornerstone of my upbringing. But my mother and my brother and our dog were a very tight family unit, and we lived in Western Massachusetts primarily growing up and moved a lot. We were in a new home I would say on average once every nine months or so. I think I lived in 15 places by the time I was 15.

EL: So you were like an Army brat, only you were a different kind of brat.

MC: Right. An Army brat without the parents building up a pension plan.

EL: Right.

MC: Another thing I think that an Army brat family has is a cadre possibly, of other kids that are going through the same experience, and I was generally going to a new school every year and meeting kids that were in fairly stable childhoods and who knew one another and who were familiar with the school, so I was always approaching schools and new towns-

EL: You were the permanent new kid.

MC: Yeah, with a little bit of trepidation, and trying to figure out how I could ingratiate myself to the new communities and the new schools. My mother was very eccentric and iconoclastic. She talked about the revolution a lot. I was born in 1974, and we lived through a tumultuous political time in our country, and she didn't want to have us grow up being conventional young men, so she would do things like dress me up in pink tights and paint my nails and send me off to Cub Scouts. Which I think in 2020 might actually fly, but in a working class community in Massachusetts, when you show up at Cub Scouts in the boys' locker room with nail polish and long hair-

EL: Not so much.

MC: And pink tights, you're ostracized. So, I kind of had to find a way to blend in and disappear a little bit as a kid in new schools, and I think that it built a lot of character in a lot of ways, and made me more resilient and adaptable and independent than I otherwise would have been. But at the same time, there's a certain lack of stable foundation that was challenging.

EL: I had not the same kinds of travails in my own childhood, but you do become resilient and eminently adaptable, but it also has a cost. It exacts a cost that you can't deal with as you're going through it, but you almost have to deal with it at some point in order to really resolve some of the issues that came out of it, I assume.

MC: Yeah. I'm sure you've found the same thing, but I feel like I'm a 45-year-old man and I'm still discovering things and unpacking them and repairing them, I think. There are definitely things that you take away from a childhood like that that give you real strength.

One of the things that I love about my childhood is that I know that you don't need money to be happy and you can get by on just about nothing, and that gives you, I think, quite a bit of power going into the world because you don't feel beholden to the comforts of ... I don't feel beholden to the comforts of money. I'm okay with scarcity. At the same time, I don't know that I was really terribly good at connecting with people or making friends, and I probably still struggle with that.

EL: Yeah. So, you wrote this amazing piece in The Times, and you wrote that “times were often lean, but one luxury we always had an abundance was food, even if it came by the five finger discount. My mother taught me how to steal peaches from the Stop and Shop grocery store when I was four. We were stealing from the man. It was a justified rebellion against an unjust system.”

EL: So, whoa. Okay, those sentences made me stop in my tracks. That's pretty intense. I was actually thinking about this movie, Shoplifters. I don't if you've ever seen it.

MC: Oh yeah. Yeah.

EL: Because in there the father figure, who turns out not to be the father, teaches the kids how to steal so they can eat. And so, wow. I mean, talk about that. Talk about getting conflicting messages from your mother. It's like, whoa.

MC: It's funny, because now hearing you read that, it paints a portrait of a parent who was raising children without a moral compass, and I think that was not at all the case. This was righteous rebellion. We were stealing ... We would never have stolen from the local co-op, but this was from a corporate entity, and these corporations were out to exploit the proletariat. I actually felt the exhilaration of feeling like I was part of a rebellion at that point, and frankly indoctrinated into that at a really young age. At the age of four, I was aware that it was us against them. We were the little guys and that we had a justice on our side. At the same time, it's a complicated thing to be training a little four year old how to steal.

MC: I have a very distinct memory of the fruit island in the Stop and Shop, and me grabbing a peach. This was the first time that I remember ever shoplifting anything. I grabbed the peach and then I ducked down behind the island, and my mother said, "No, no, no, no, no. You can't do it like that. You have to take it. You have to be very calm. You have to not look around. You can't show that you're distressed at all or that you're nervous, and then you put it in your backpack." Then we would go up to the cash register and we would pay for some of the groceries, so that we were distracting them, and then scoot out the door.

EL: And you just, I assume, felt that there was nothing particularly abnormal about this because you had nothing to compare it to.

MC: Right. Yeah, this was my normal.

EL: Yeah. You weren't stealing from somebody or something that needed the money, you were stealing as part of an ethos. Right?

MC: Right.

EL: As part of like, this is the way we work the system to fight the man.

MC: Right, precisely. Yeah.

EL: You also wrote, and I'm going to quote a couple of more sentences from the piece because it was so beautiful, "My upbringing taught me you didn't need money to be happy, that you didn't have to play by the rules, that the whole world was just begging to be explored. But now by the hindsight of fatherhood and from the comfort of a therapist's couch, I see that while my childhood had been rife with adventure, it also had been lonely and frightening and wanting." So you were always reconciling those two things, weren't you?

MC: I wouldn't say I was always reconciling them, because as a child I struggled at times. I felt sad and lonely, but I didn't think that it was because of my childhood.

EL: Got it.

MC: I thought my childhood was full of adventure, and I was proud of my childhood. Up until when I was 25 I don't think I looked back on it and thought that there had been any damage done by that.

EL: Right, and that there was anything dysfunctional about it.

MC: Right. And on balance, my childhood was incredibly ... I think I had a secure attachment with my mother. My mother was there. She was loving. She never failed to convey that love to me and my brother. So she served as my anchor emotionally, and that was unfailing. But because the rest of our life was so fractured and so nomadic, she was my only anchor.

EL: Yeah, because as you said, how do you establish connections with any kids when you're moving every few months?

MC: Right, and when you're showing up at school in pink tights at a working class school you're also getting alienated by your peers, and so the other kids actually ended up being kind of frightening to me.

EL: I read your Wikipedia page, and somehow you escaped and you ended up at a prep school, Northfield Mount Hermon, and then the University of Chicago. What a narrative your life has been. How did that happen?

MC: Now that you're asking the question, I'm reflecting on it possibly for the first time. But one thing that I know happened as a result of my childhood and and partly as a result of feeling like I wasn't fitting in with other kids, is that I was a smart kid and I could win the favor of my teachers. So when I was in school, I did very well in school. It was like the thing I could throw myself into and be safe and get some accolades.

EL: Some positive feedback.

MC: And some positive reinforcement. So I did well in school, and we lived in the town of Northfield for a little while, which was where Northfield Mount Hermon is. They had a program that had been implemented from the inception of the school where local day students could get pretty much a full ride if they were in need, and we were in need, so I could go to a fancy high school for free as a day student. Then I ended up basically getting the same deal at the University of Chicago.

EL: Amazing.

MC: Yeah. At the time, I thought I was going to go into politics, so I was sort of on a very clear path. And that wanting to go into politics was also born of my childhood and of my mother talking about politics all the time, and making me and my brother very aware of the plight of people in need in our country and around the world. It felt like that was the right place for me.

EL: Yeah. Again, and this is the final sentences I'm going to read from the Times piece, because it gets us back to food. Which is, "I recently found an old journal in a box in the back of my closet, and on the page from a decade ago where I had taken inventory of the good and bad of my upbringing the word cooking is circled and underlined with urgency in the plus column, as if I was thinking that food had been the cornerstone of happiness in my youth." Elaborate on that. I mean, that's an amazing statement.

MC: I think as a nomadic family, we moved around and we brought with us what we could, and in terms of material objects, there was very little that was a through line. But we did bring with us from place to place the tradition of sitting down for family meals every night.

EL: Even if you were in a teepee or in a park.

MC: Right. Even if we were sitting on a log in the woods in the rain, we would be sitting down and eating together. There were no distractions. There was never a television on, and there was no coercion in getting to the dinner table. There was no question about it. Not because it was an edict from an authority figure, but because we all just coalesced around dinner and loved it.

EL: You needed it.

MC: Yeah.

EL: It was a permanent form of glue for the family, right?

MC: Yeah. It really was important to us. We would go spend Christmas with my mother's mother, my grandmother, and she was a cook as well, and food was a centerpiece of that family interaction. And for me now that I have kids, I notice that when I'm feeling like a guilty or absent father, the way that I most quickly show my affection and love for my kids is I just make them food. It's like the way that I know to convey to a child everything's safe, everything's okay, and I love you.

EL: Yeah. But in 21st century America, and maybe all around the world, it's hard to do that, right? There are lots of pressures that are forcing people not to eat together.

MC: Right.

EL: Both parents are working, kids are all over the place. But you obviously, I think as a result of your upbringing, it was important when you had a family and a wife that you made that same time for dinner.

MC: Yeah. It feels very important to me. I think sometimes I'm actually kind of maybe forcing my agenda of cooking on my kids. Like, "Come on guys, let's make something in the kitchen." A lot of times they want to go outside and I want to work in the kitchen, and I have to check myself and say, "Okay, we'll go play a little bit of soccer first before we get to canning the pears."

EL: Right. Because the act of eating a meal and preparing it is imbued with so much more meaning for you than it is for them.

MC: Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah.

EL: So you end up being an actor, and I'm just assuming that like all actors, you struggled for many years before you found yourself on the set of Supernatural. So, tell us in a few sentences the arc of your acting career.

MC: Well as I mentioned earlier, my intention after college was to go into politics. I interned at the White House and I got a job at NPR in Washington, DC, and I was really disappointed with what I saw at the White House, and I thought, "Oh God, I have to come up with a whole new plan here." I thought it was going to be the best and the brightest minds under one roof. This was the Clinton administration. And instead what I found was the halls were filled with people who were sycophants, whose parents had donated money to the campaign. They were all yaysayers. There was no real discourse about political ideas, which of course is actually what you need in an administration. You need people who are going to be in lock step and are going to support your decisions, but I was too young and naive to know that.

So when I saw it, I thought, "This is not for me." I thought, "I will try to find another way that I can have an impact." I think there's a lot of hubris in this, but I thought, "I know what I'll do. I'll become an actor. I'll get famous and then I'll parlay my celebrity into some sort of political influence."

EL: Oh, because that happens all the time.

MC: Right. I mean really, really completely naive, and totally full of myself. Then I moved to LA and I thought it was going to take a couple of years to attain a certain level-

EL: To become rich and famous.

MC: To be rich and famous. And it took a long time to become-

EL: It took a decade, probably.

MC: To become moderately comfortable and a C-list celebrity. But somewhere along the line I stopped thinking about that end goal of I'm on this path so that I can have influence, blah blah blah, and I just started becoming an actor, and I was just acting for the sake of acting and not for this aspirational, high-minded goal.

Then a couple of years ago we got a new president, and that lit a fire under me. It was actually during the campaign when I started to think, "Oh, Trump might get elected. Oh, this is serious," and then my C-list celebrity started to come into play and I thought, "All right, well I can use the platform that I have."

EL: By the way, I think it's at least B-minus, okay?

MC: Well you, as everyone knows, grade on a curve, so thank you for your charity. In a strange way it feels to me a little bit like it's come full circle, and now that the show's ending and after 15 seasons I'm asking the question, "Okay, how can I be of use in the world?" I don't know what's next for me. I don't know if I spend a lot of time on television sets after this or not. I'm trying to do some soul searching and figure out what I really want to be when I grow up. But that's, in a nutshell, my path.

EL: It's an amazing path, and you accomplished much more as an actor than almost any actor I know. To be a working actor and to have made some money doing it is actually an incredible accomplishment, and maybe it's to the resilience you discovered you had in your childhood.

MC: Yeah, I think possibly. I think obviously there's a lot of dumb luck that comes into play. It's not my fault that the show that I'm on has been on for 15 seasons or has the devoted fan base that it has.

EL: There are conventions for Supernatural. I notice this-

MC: We have conventions. There are tattoos with face on them. I mean, it's hard not to be full of yourself in this context. But yeah, we have a really, really devoted fan base, and it's quite remarkable to be a part of.

What was it? I think it was Freakonomics at one point. Maybe it was in the book Freakonomics, but they said that pursuing a career in acting is like pursuing a career as a drug dealer. It's very, very difficult to be one of the kingpins, to be successful in the field.

EL: Right.

MC: The odds are so bad that it takes a certain personality that's defective that wants to even pursue that in the first place, because 99 out of 100 people are going to fail at that and then you're just going to be a low level street corner drug dealer, or barely getting food on your table as a background actor.

EL: Yeah. Well Misha, we have to leave it right here for this episode of Special Sauce, but you're going to stick around and tell us all about your two terrific kids, West and Maison.

MC: We just say Mason.

EL: West and Mason.

MC: Yes, we anglicize the French spelling.

EL: And your wife Vicki, and your family collaboration on The Adventurous Eaters Club. Thank you for spending so much time with us on Special Sauce.

MC: Thank you so much for having me, and I can't wait to talk about the book.

Listen to the podcast here

#misha collins #vicki collins #the adventurous eaters club #misha talks #chef!misha #misha tweets #seriouseats #podcast

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potsticker1234 · 3 years

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propaganda: Fire Nations vs America

ok does everyone remember watching the Headband episode as a kid and laughing with Aang at how ridiculous the Fire Nation school is?

ok fast forward a few years and now we’re high school age watching avatar for fun and that episode is still funny but things seem a little fishy

ok now we’re out of high school / college age and we’re watching avatar because of Netflix and that episode is Really Wrong, let’s unpack that:

for background purposes I went to a private Christian school for all of grade school and high school in a pretty rural and conservative American town (rip to me I know)

There are the obvious parallels from the Fire Nation school and my own such as the pledges of allegiance and indoctrinated patriotism but let’s see what else is similar:

My school, bless their heart, said we couldn’t have dances because, and I quote “dancing is sinful.” The Fire Nation kids also didn’t know what dancing was until Aang introduces it to them.

We had to wear uniforms for middle and grade school and then a dress code was still enforced in high school and any deviations were reprimanded much in the same way the teacher tells Aang to take off the headband.

I can’t speak for public schools but the scariest similarity between my high school and the Fire Nation school is the imperialist history. We had The Most™️ bias Christian Eurocentric history books on the planet (which have been highly criticized as well as its ugly publisher). The books really glorified the founding fathers, really pushed the idea of manifest destiny (God said America needs to span “sea to shining sea” therefore it’s ok to expand westward and slaughter indigenous people!), and even had a section about Africa called “The Dark Continent.” Which is just beyond bad in so many ways. There were many other bad things about the books like their lack of Black History, calling the Great Depression socialist propaganda, endorsing the Protestant Work Ethic to make children fear laziness and stepping out of line, and much more!!

Aang corrects the teacher when she mentions the Air Nomad army because he was there, he’s one of them, he knows they were pacifists. But I didn’t have that luxury at the time of knowing if I was being spoon fed american propaganda at like age 14. The way history was/is taught at American schools made me more uncomfortable the older I got and when I finally took a history class in college, my eyes were opened to history that was not taught under the Christian white savior lens, and was it eye opening.

And that’s the bad thing about indoctrination, you don’t know it’s happening to you until you see it framed in a silly way outside of your perspective, that’s why I think the Headband episode was very important for me growing up because I always wondered why that episode bothered me, but now in recent years I’ve discovered why and been able to view my early education in a different light and hopefully strip the good knowledge out of that cesspool of propaganda.

TLDR: the Headband episode was very good because it encourages kids to think critically of the systems they are surrounded by and to challenge their beliefs

I’m always open to your thoughts, comment if your school experience was similar or not! :)

#since then I’ve written a letter to my high school asking them to change their curriculum for the history books #maybe future students won’t get white washed white savior history 🥴#I’m begging schools to teach Black History #avatar the last airbender #atla #the headband #aang #sozin #air nomads #fire nation #propaganda #history #imperialism #private school #America needs to get its act together #indoctrination #long post #my thoughts #Jenna speaks

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thisismyangeryblog · 4 years

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“VeggieTales is the only good Christian cartoon because it actually has good messages.”

No it’s not, and no it doesn’t. I’m actually pretty alarmed that this sentiment is going around. VeggieTales is a tool of indoctrination, and the fact that anyone thinks otherwise just means it’s working. Please do not let your kids watch this show.

I watched an episode recently because I was feeling nostalgic, and VeggieTales is one of the few fond memories from my Christian upbringing, so why not, right? I picked at random and loaded up “Josh and the Big Wall.”

It was... not good.

1. In this episode, the Israelites declare that the Canaanites must leave Jericho, because God said it belongs to the Israelites. The show doesn’t even bother to frame it as the Israelites asking to move in and the Canaanites refusing. Just outright “Give us your home and get out, because our God said so.”

This mindset is one of the driving forces behind Christian imperialism and colonialism. Christians are taught from childhood that anything they do “in the name of God” is automatically justified. In this case, taking this land doesn’t count as stealing, because God wants them to have it. They don’t even bother to make that argument explicitly! The morality of attacking Jericho is treated as a non-issue.

2. This is an insidious reinforcement of the pervasive Christian idea that non-Christians aren’t really people.

Once you believe a group of people aren’t people, it’s much easier to hurt them, or stand idly by while others hurt them. It’s much easier to steal their resources, attack their community, and destroy their culture. (When you throw missionary work into the mix, you can even convince yourself it’s for their own good, because after all you’re just trying to help them become real people, but that’s not what this episode is about.)

De-converting from Christianity doesn't automatically uninstall all the terrible things it ingrained in us, especially for those of us who grew up in it during our formative years. We are not immune to unconsciously dehumanizing people who happen to be in the way of something we want. That's the kind of mindset that needs to be recognized and dismantled.

3. I don’t know if this part is intentional or not, but this could also give kids a very skewed idea of immigration. The nuances of colonialism/imperialism vs immigration are not exactly taught in schools.

If your understanding of the world is based largely on Christian teachings and US jingoism, you might very well grow up with the unconscious idea that a loss of resources, destruction of culture, forced assimilation into a new culture, etc. are all natural and inevitable results of any group of people moving from one place to another—and more to the point, moving into where you live.

So if you believe in God, then the difference between immigration and invasion is just... which side you think he’s on.

4. Before finding Jericho, the Israelites were forced to wander in the desert for 40 years for the crime of disobedience. The “lesson” of this episode is:

“I know God's directions don't always make sense to us, but things work out a lot better when we do them God's way instead of trying to do things our own way.”

Christian children are taught from minute one to distrust their own common sense and mindlessly follow orders, on pain of disproportionate punishment to themselves and their loved ones.

And if God isn’t real, who are these kids actually being taught to obey at all costs? Their parents, their religious leaders, and whatever gut feelings or intrusive thoughts they interpret as “God’s will.”

VeggieTales can be fun to look back on, because it had something a lot of Christian media lacks: personality. It’s a weird show! It’s talking vegetables telling you about God! And for a lot of us, with its striking character designs and its silly songs, it was one of the only bright spots amidst a lot of boring, depressing, and horrifying "educational" material.

But we need to remember it was teaching the exact same lessons. It just did a better job of packaging it for kids.

#veggietales #veggie tales #ex christian #exchristian #christianity

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divergent-mshs · 3 years

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Perturbing the Comforted: On the Philippine Education System

Carrying the brandished hope of an unassailable force, the circle continues in its mindless cycle — traversing the same path, and leading to the same point from where it started: an imprisonment within the system that only seeks to continuously perpetuate itself rather than pave way for the birth of a new resolution. The chains that persist in their regressive purpose of molding dilemmas within the Philippine educational system converges in three grips — colonization, commercialization, and fascism.

Back when I was in primary school, I remember loving the color orange in a strange manner I could not comprehend. It would always be my go-to whenever we were made to pick our crayons to paint our coloring books with our desired touches. Even when the alphabet was first taught to us, the example used for words starting with letter “o” was the word orange. Growing up, the realization slowly starts to dawn on me: through the process of being socialized in my first years of education, there is always something foreign with how examples and lenses are taught to us. Something out of touch.

The enslavement of the Filipino people, ever since time immemorial, is reproduced in the way the culture they are a part of creates a machinery of impunity by molding itself to justify superficial ideals imposed by those who hold our economy, ensuring that it will be maintained through their ceaseless hold in our social conditions. As Renato Constantino put it, the most effective means of subjugating a people is to capture their minds.

After all, what better way is there to capture the people’s mind than controlling the very institution tasked with the responsibility of indoctrinating the people in the society they operate from, taking form in education?

The system of education that exists within the Philippines could not be analyzed without properly tracing its roots. Myopic analysis devoid of its own historical context is one of the major setbacks that hinder the progression of a refined discourse in this topic. It is only through dissecting the material conditions of the society will the understanding of the educational system’s orientation come in its true essence.

The domination of the English language as the medium of instruction, as well as the implementation of Commission on Higher Education (CHED) Memorandum 20 which eliminates Filipino at Panitikan as one of the core subjects in college, is one of the many proofs that the colonial orientation of education persists in its stronghold upon the system.

Philippine education was once shaped in the purpose of preserving American control. In order to attain this, it was of paramount importance that any separatist ideas are decimated. This goes hand-in-hand with the colonizers’ interest of maintaining their control on the nation’s mode of production. The ideological apparatus they have consolidated, taking root in education, ensures that they will mold generations of Filipinos who shall view themselves as obedient little colonials, free of any genuine nationalistic notions of liberating themselves, and putting American culture in superior heights in order to turn back on their identity.

According to Joseph Hayden in his study, it has been the English language and the very struggles necessary to acquire it that molded American culture to be instilled in the country, to which its usage brought the Filipinos to Americans and their culture. In 1925, the Monroe Survery Report criticized the system of education that the colonial administration imposed on their first decade of colonization. They said that the very curriculum instills American culture through organized and systemic means.

The English language as the medium of instruction is the strongest grip, in our time, of colonial chain in our educational system. The machinery of power in this society is held by the people who believe that it is only through English shall the Filipinos acquire real education.

Alienation presents yet another peril brought by the colonization of education. It ensures that bourgeois-liberal tendencies will be championed to nurture individualism within the students, separating them from the society they are a part of. It glorifies suffering and masks them as necessary pain from where their consciousness must be submerged in instead of troubles that require transformation — it encourages the submission to the status quo, a defeatist approach, in order to quell any attempt of transforming it which is against the interest of those whose power lie on the succession of the inequality within the system.

It glamorizes the Philippines as an agricultural country, but it pries away from awakening the students from the fact that the backbones of the sector that makes this country agricultural are suffering and are subjected to inhumane societal conditions. It vilifies any hope for national industrialization, ensuring that our economy will remain dependent on foreign hold. The preservation of backward culture is systematic, creating ideological conditions that promotes colonial assimilation.

The struggle of the Filipino people, however, does not stop there — the chains only continue to expand, clawing even deeper upon their already decaying flesh.

The K-12 program has embarked as yet another weapon of colonial spite. The issue here isn’t as simplistic as whether the Philippines is ready for this change, but its core orientation that urged its implementation. Its design conformed to the Bologna Accords of European Union and Washington Accord of USA. It mentioned how those who shall work in other countries must finish 12 years in accordance to the needs of foreign multinational companies.

In short, it is another path for foreign interests to use our education as breeding grounds for a bulk of cheap laborers. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, the number of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) who worked abroad at any time during the period April to September 2018 was estimated at 2.3 million. This accounts to more than 6,000 Filipinos migrating every day to work outside the country. The objective of the K-12 centering on readying its completers for jobs entails the underlying consequence of further satisfying foreign avarice at the expense of the Filipinos.

The dilemma of colonization in education brings forth the second ordeal — commercialization. It lies on the principle of marketization that the capitalist foreign forces have shaped in the educational system. A principle that equips the students to be coerced in submerging themselves within market demands, rather than studying as means of changing the social conditions that make it unbearable to begin with.

According to a Department of Education report back in 2012, in every 100 students that enroll in elementary, only less than 14 of those are able to finish college. The significant amount of the youth who have been incapable of finishing their education can’t be isolated cases — they are manifestations of the ills within the system.

Once brought upon the slums, would one really still have the opportunity to persist in their studies when their churning stomachs are already driving them on the edge?

It is, yet again, social conditions that hinder the progression of the majority of those driven out of their schools to settle in clamoring for jobs. This is strengthened with commercializing education, treating it as means of gaining profit rather than a right for the people.

In present times, public institutions are seen as inferior compared to their private counterparts. Only those who can’t afford private schools send their children to public schools. Those who can afford it, however, send their children to private institutions. Its outcome led to over-glorification of private education which has unfortunately resulted to the proliferation of diploma mills.

This dilemma is further exacerbated with the education’s deregulation. This is when the government frees themselves from tenets of their responsibility to ensure free education for all, and allow power for private sectors to enter the educational realms. The MTHEDIP mentioned a case study that illustrates the collaboration of transnational corporations like IBM with the Far Eastern University (FEU) in setting up the East-Asia College.

The government argues that the educational system ought to be internationalized in the case of our curriculum in order to attract as many foreign enrollees as possible as in the case of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM). In order to further justify decreased budgetary allocation for education, the MTHEDIP makes no pretense at advocating the commercialization and corporatization of the tertiary public school system.

Finally, it comes at a full circle — the form of fascism is instilled within the educational system, functioning in their earnest objective of preserving the structures mentioned earlier.

Constantino described how nationalism is taught at schools in a very narrow-sighted way. It merely raises patriotism in the sense that it could be fully achieved through its symbolic means of respect in the flag, appreciation for our national symbols, and obeying to authorities without question. It creates a culture of compulsory subservience — one that is needed in maintaining power structures.

True nationalism, however, lies on the desire to cultivate national survival, which is what education should be made for in the first place. Fascism derails this — it simply generates a nonscientific culture of imposing ‘discipline’ by having powers remaining unquestioned, shunning criticality, and alienating the students from the broad masses where they can channel their true nationalism to. After all, it is the people who make up the nation.

It is only warranted that these three rots be vanquished, for as history itself has shown, nothing is subject for permanence. The call for a genuine nationalistic, scientific, and mass-oriented education waits to be heeded. It is only through that should education finally come in its full terms of providing an avenue for the people to mold a society that leans on itself, liberated from ideas that only oppress the people, and addresses the struggles that have long been untapped in the community.

Given these, what’s left for the Filipino youth is their collective will to stand for their democratic rights. History already proved how their united action could bring upon societal change. The youth of tomorrow leave their hope on the youth of today to topple regressive forms and destroy whatever illusion the people still cling into as means of justifying the exploitation of the Filipinos — the path to liberation is never comforting, for the comforted ought to be disturbed, and from there on, the disturbed will rise to spring comfort upon everyone.

#mshs #filipino #philippines #education #kids edition

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arcticdementor · 3 years

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When we hear the term “Deep State,” we tend to think of people staffing the federal bureaucracy. I want to suggest to you that that is an incomplete way to think about it. The Deep State in Western liberal democracies consist not only of government bureaucrats, but also of the leadership in major corporations, leading universities, top media, medicine and law, science, the military, and even sports. A more accurate way to think about what we are dealing with comes from the Neoreactionary term “the Cathedral,” which NRxers use in more or less the same way that 1950s Beats used the term “the Establishment.” I like the term “Cathedral” because it entails the religious commitment these elites have to their principles. You can no more debate these principles with them than you can debate with a religious fundamentalist. They adhere to them as if they were revealed truths.

Yet they still like to pretend that they are liberals — that they favor open, reasoned discourse. This is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie that they depend on to conceal the hegemonic intolerance that they wish to impose on everybody under their authority.

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It is true that no society can tolerate everything. What the Cathedral is now doing is radically limiting discourse, and demonizing as heretics all those within its purview who dissent, no matter how reasonable their objections. (And now Facebook is incentivizing some of its users to report their friends as potential “extremists.” Please get off Facebook now!) The Cathedral seeks to make all of society over in the mold of a college campus. The Cathedral is growing ever more radical. In recent months, we have seen the US military embrace wokeness (to use the slang term for the most vibrant and activist form of the Cathedral’s religion). You would think that it makes no sense for the leadership of a racially diverse armed forces to embrace and indoctrinate its officers in a neo-Marxist theory that causes everyone to see everyone else primarily in hostile racial terms, but that is exactly what has happened. In time — and not much time, either — we are going to see young people who were once from families and social classes that once were the most stalwart supporters of the military declining to join the armed forces in which they are taught that they are guilty by virtue of their skin color.

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That’s the Cathedral and its values. The Cathedral has also taken over corporate America, and the professions. I hardly need to elaborate on this further, not for regular readers of this blog. It was a hard knock this past week to see that the US Supreme Court, which some of us had thought would be the last line of defense for anybody traditional in this soft-totalitarian Cathedral theocracy, refused to take on the Gavin Grimm case, and the Barronelle Stutzman case. The Cathedral line in favor of privileging LGBTs over religious people and secular people who don’t accept the full LGBT gospel is hardening.

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I realized over the weekend why I have been so affected by the experience of being here in Hungary these past three months. It has clarified for me the nature of this conflict. First, take a look at this powerful piece by Angela Nagle, writing about the views of Irish intellectual and cultural critic Desmond Fennell.

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What does this have to do with Hungary? Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government have brought down the wrath of European Union leaders over Hungary’s recent law restricting sex education for children, and information about LGBT presented to children. The prime minister of the Netherlands, in extraordinarily bellicose language, threatened to “bring Hungary to its knees” over the law. I am reliably informed by an American source in a position to know that in Washington, even among conservative elites, Viktor Orban is seen as nothing but a fascist. I have been writing all summer about the radical disjunction between Hungary as it is, and Hungary as described by Western elite discourse (media and otherwise). This is by no means to say that Orban’s government is flawless — it certainly is not; corruption, for example, is a big deal here — but to say that there has to be some reason why Western elites of both the Left and the Right despise Hungary so intensely, and slander it so.

There’s a lesson in all this, I believe, for where conservatives and traditionalists in the West are, and where we are likely to go. I have come to believe that the standard left-liberal and right-liberal critiques of Orban — “Magyar Man Bad” — are just as shallow as the “Orange Man Bad” critique of Donald Trump. I say that as someone who was critical of Trump myself, though I credited him for smashing the complacent GOP establishment. I write this blog post in the spirit of Tucker Carlson’s excellent January 2016 Politico piece titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.”

I’ve been reading lately a 2019 book, The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. Both men are liberal scholars who undertake to explain why liberalism failed in Central Europe and Russia after the fall of the Cold War. It’s a remarkably insightful book, one that any conservative with an interest in the problem should read, even though its authors are liberal democrats. They write:

A refusal to genuflect before the liberal West has become the hallmark of the illiberal counter-revolution throughout the post-communist world and beyond. Such a reaction cannot be casually dismissed with the trite observation that “blaming the West” is a cheap way for non-Western leaders to avoid taking responsibility for their own failed policies. The story is much more convoluted and compelling than that. It is a story, among other things, of liberalism abandoning pluralism for hegemony. [Emphasis mine — RD]

You would have thought that in any reasonable pluralistic polity, a sovereign nation choosing to restrict what its children can learn about human sexuality would be of little interest to other nations within that polity. After all, Hungary is not France any more than Estonia is England. There is an immense amount of diversity in Europe. But see, the Cathedral’s liberalism — whether in America or in the EU — is not pluralistic, but hegemonic.

Krastev and Holmes (henceforth, “the authors”) point out that after 1989, the West expected Central European countries to imitate them in every way. The authors — who, remember, are liberals — write:

Without pressing the analogy too far, it’s interesting to observe that the style of regime imitation that took hold after 1989 bears an eerie resemblance to Soviet-era elections where voters, overseen by Party officials, pretended to “choose” the only candidates who were running for office.

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The authors explain that the reforms demanded by the West weren’t like “grafting a few foreign elements onto indigenous traditions,” but rather “put inherited identity at risk” and stoked “fears of cultural erasure.” From my perspective, this is what you see when you get over here and start looking more closely at what George Soros and people like him, both within and outside of government, did, and seek to do. And so, as the authors put it:

[P]opulism’s political rise cannot be explained without taking account of widespread resentment at the way (imposed) no-alternative Soviet communism, after 1989, was replaced by (invited) no-alternative Western liberalism.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about Viktor Orban. After the 2008 crash, Western governments bailed out banks left and right. When Orban came to power in 2010, he chose not to do that, instead taking the side of hard-pressed Hungarian homeowners who had been allowed to take out home loans in Swiss francs. He and his party passed a law to protect homeowners at the expense of the banks.

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Remember, they wrote this in 2019, but think of this principle applied to now. If you are Viktor Orban, and you look to the West in 2021, you see a United States that is destroying itself with Critical Race Theory wokeness, which is starting to come to Western Europe. You see the Left here in Hungary starting to embrace it (e.g., the Black Lives Matter statue the liberal Budapest city government erected earlier this year), and you know that it will be bad for your country if this poisonous ideology takes root. So you encourage Hungary’s national soccer team not to take the knee before matches.

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And so, the disintegrating West, headed towards shipwreck, is going to bring Hungary to its knees for trying to protect itself.

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The authors go on to say that what it means to be a good Western liberal is changing so fast that people in the East never know for sure what vision of society they are supposed to imitate. Think about what it was like for us Americans. I was born in 1967, and educated by schools, by the media, and by every aspect of culture to believe in Dr. Martin Luther King’s colorblind vision. I took it seriously, and I believed in it, and do believe in it. But now the same liberals who argued for that are now arguing that this vision was wrong — that to truly be against racism, you must train yourself to think in exactly the same categories that white segregationists used prior to the Civil Rights revolution. It makes no sense. You come to understand that you have been conned. Never, ever believe liberals: they will change the rules on you, and blame you for your own confusion.

The authors go on to say that sex education in the schools has been a huge flashpoint of conflict within Central and Eastern European societies. It has to do with parents losing the ability to transmit their values to their children. In the flush of post-1989 enthusiasm, young people didn’t so much rebel against their parents as to feel pity for them, and to stop listening to them. The young took their catechism from the Western cathedral. Sex ed was a neuralgic point of the overall struggle between Central European populists, who believed that the traditions and the national heritage of these countries were in danger of being wiped out by the West. Imagine, then, what Hungarian voters must think when they hear the Dutch prime minister threaten to bring their country to its knees because he knows better what they should be teaching their children than they do.

The authors tell a story about how Viktor Orban, at the time an up-and-coming liberal from the countryside, was publicly humiliated by a well-known liberal MP from Budapest’s urban intelligentsia, who adjusted Orban’s tie at a reception, as if doing a favor for a hick cousin.

They go on to explain Orban’s illiberalism by quoting his criticism that liberalism is “basically indifferent to the history and fate of the nation.” Liberal universalism “destroys solidarity,” Orban believes. (“If everybody is your brother, then you are an only child.”) Orban believes that liberal policies will lead to the dissolution of the Hungarian nation because liberals by nature think of the nation as an impediment to the realization of their ideals.

The authors go on to say that Orban has long campaigned on the abuse of the public patrimony by the regime that governed Hungary after 1989, when Communist insiders used their connections to plunder what was left of the public purse, and left the weak to fend for themselves. This attitude explains Orban’s hostility to the banks after the 2008 crash. “[I]n Central and Eastern Europe, defending private property and capitalism came to mean defending the privileges illicitly acquired by the old communist elites,” they write.

(Readers, did you know any of this context about Orban and other critics of liberalism from Central Europe? Doesn’t it make you wonder what more you’re not being told?)

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What’s preposterous about it? I know these guys are liberals, but what Duda identifies is the difference between soft totalitarianism and hard totalitarianism. In both cases, the Poles don’t get to decide for themselves.

There’s more to the book, but I’ll stop here for today. You don’t have to believe that Viktor Orban or any of these other politicians are saints in order to understand why they believe what they believe — and why people vote for them. The Cathedral did the same thing to Trump and to Trump’s supporters. Yes, there were some Trump voters with disreputable motives, and in any case Trump was by and large not an effective president. But the anti-Trump opposition’s passionate belief in its own righteousness rendered it helpless to understand why so many people hated it, and do hate it still. Trump’s own incompetence made it harder to take that critique seriously.

Trump lost, and most everything he did was wiped away by his successor. Viktor Orban wins — and that is the unforgiveable sin in the eyes of the Cathedral.

Here is the radicalizing thing, though. As you will know if you’ve been reading this blog, Viktor Orban appears to be building a conservative deep state in Hungary. His government has transferred a fortune in public funds and authority over some universities to privately controlled institutions. It is difficult to accept this, at least for me. At the same time, it is impossible for me to look at what has happened in my own country, with the Cathedral now extending its control over every aspect of American life, and to criticize Orban for this. The alternative seems to be surrendering your country and its traditions to the Cathedral, which pretends to be liberal, but which is in fact growing even more authoritarian and intolerant than anything Orban and his party stand for.

It is becoming harder to think of liberalism in the sense we have known it as viable anymore. Me, I would actually prefer to live in a more or less liberal, pluralistic society, where California was free to be California, and Louisiana free to be Louisiana, and so forth. This is not the world we live in.

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The controversy around Viktor Orban is not only about an obstreperous Hungarian politician who doesn’t play well with others. It’s about the future of the West.

UPDATE: To put it succinctly, we might need soft authoritarianism to save us from soft totalitarianism.

#rod dreher #the american conservative #hungary #orbán viktor

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