Help! I Was Hurt By Religion!

Please forgive me that I, once again, took a few weeks since the last post to post this one. A family member was injured, and I became a caregiver again. Fortunately, this time it will be short-term caregiving and the patient will recover. I'm determined not to give up on writing even though I'm often side-tracked. Thank you for your patience and understanding. In my last blog post, I wrote about how we can be trained to succumb to people who are likely to retaliate if we don’t protect their ego and the way the world sees them. As I said in that post, this can happen in toxic religion when egos reign over spirituality. Since my greatest familiarity is with Christianity, I will be using words from the Christian religion such as congregation, denomination, Bible, etc. If you are not Christian, please replace those words with the most appropriate word from your own religion. I do not want to offend people from other religions by trying to use their terminology that I am not as familiar with and risk using it wrong. Thank you for working with me on this. Also, I will be telling my story of overcoming ego-driven personalities in religion; however, I realize this can happen in any religion. To hopefully help my writing be meaningful to a broader audience, I am sharing a youtube video that tells the story of a Muslim man who met a wise Imam who helped him better understand the Quran. At around minute seven of this video, you see how this Imam helped him understand the context in which their scriptures were written. Once he understood the context, he saw the Quran in a very different light. His story is very similar to how a Pastor and those around him helped me see the bible in context, thus seeing it in a very different light. I think this story can be universal across many religions. Here is a link to that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbrYnhqIhSI I don’t think all religion is toxic. Even a toxic congregation can have good people who are members. I still consider myself a Christian and I still attend church; however, I was lucky enough to find a healthy congregation after an extensive search. My search taught me that a major key to a healthy congregation is leaders who take the right stands, especially during conflict. A common danger I’ve witnessed in toxic congregations is leaders misunderstanding, and thus wrongly teaching, about forgiveness and unconditional love. Any time those words are used to excuse a toxic or predatory person while shaming their victim for expressing the harm done to them, it’s a warning sign that the congregation may be toxic. Forgiveness can happen from a safe distance while allowing the wrongdoer to face the consequences of their actions. Unconditional love can also happen from a safe distance by praying for the person we must protect ourselves from instead of retaliating in any form. We don’t need to prove our forgiveness and love by reconciling for the eyes of judging onlookers. You know if you’ve forgiven and are acting loving from a safe distance, and you don’t need to prove that to anyone else. As I said before, I was fortunate enough to find a congregation that I believe is non-toxic. They are not perfect and have problems just like everyone does in life, but they handle those problems in a way that protects the health of the environment. It was frightening for me to look for a healthy congregation, because the denomination of my upbringing taught me that any church that sprinkled instead of dunked in baptism was evil. I had to see enough evil in the ego-driven members (note I said ego-driven and not all members) of the dunking church that the sprinkling church looked less scary in comparison before I could step across that imaginary baptism line. Ironically, when I was able to look at the Bible without the prejudices taught to me by the dunking church, it became apparent that the burial with Christ scripture mentioned in Romans 6:4 wasn’t about being buried in water when we were baptized like the denomination I came from had taught us. To my great and pleasant surprise, I discovered that the denominations that sprinkled during baptism weren’t evil. Of course, there were some ego-driven people in those congregations just like there are in most congregations, but they seemed to be the minority whereas they had been the majority where I came from. It seemed that higher education standards for their leaders accounted for some of that. Many in the denomination I came from thought education was evil - a way of giving your mind to Satan. The places where the congregations with higher theological education requirements for leaders were effective revealed to me that education gives people the tools they need to free their minds from the negative consequences the dunking churches had attributed to Satan. That reinforced my belief that we shouldn’t jump on gossip or propaganda bandwagons. Instead, find out for yourself. You might be pleasantly surprised. I don’t want to mislead by making it sound easier than it was. My original denomination’s baptism theories, among other things, were so deeply ingrained that I left Christianity and went to another religion for a couple of years before I found the courage to attend a church that sprinkled in baptism. While in that other religion, it became apparent that my original denomination had ingrained female submission into me so effectively that I was a doormat. That was a big factor in me submitting to the egos of the kinds of toxic people I talked about in my last blog post. Toxic and predatory people in the new religion quickly recognized my submissive nature. They revealed how aware they were when they began to make jokes about me having the word VICTIM written on my forehead. I soon found myself reliving what I’d lived in a toxic church. That is when I realized I needed to change me, but I wasn’t sure how to do it. The day I left the new religion, I went to a local coffee house, because that was a place where I had always felt comforted. As I sat in a state of abject misery, a nearby conversation broke through my thoughts. The person speaking was a Pastor, and I realized his words penetrated my thoughts, because I’d never heard a Pastor speak that way before. He was loving, accepting, positive, affirming – and his staff were responding to him in the same way. In my belief system, the things that followed would be attributed to the Holy Spirit. I felt a gentle urging to go talk to him. The longer I resisted, the stronger that urging became. However, my fear was as great as that urging, because my Christian past was full of women who were taught to be so chaste that it led some of the men to prey on children or force exceptionally vulnerable women. In addition, there was a lot of open sexuality in my new religion, which led to some unattractive occurrences. That made it very intimidating to walk up to a man and trust that he would treat my body with dignity and respect. Eventually, that gentle urging became stronger than my fear. I approached his table and asked if he was a Pastor. When he answered yes, I asked if I could attend his church. I became increasingly more aware that the Holy Spirit had guided me to that Pastor. My life opened up in the best possible ways. Not only did this Pastor and his wife help me see a more loving translation of the Bible, they also lived it. I never saw them speaking hate or spreading propaganda about people who were different than them – a major problem I had with the denomination of my youth. Instead, they encouraged their congregation to seek understanding instead of accepting popular opinion without finding out for themselves. I understood the wisdom in that, since finding out for myself had allowed me to cross the imaginary baptism line and find these wonderful people. They taught people to be a community who supported each other. They guided individuals to be mindful of their own heart and actions and work to be the best people they could be. They didn’t focus on the sins of the outside world like the denomination of my past, but instead taught their congregation to be an example that would attract non-Christians rather than screaming judgments that ran non-Christians away - I later learned that is what 1 Corinthians 5:12 instructs Christians to do. I would still be attending his church, except he was transferred to a church in another State while I was a 24/7/365 caregiver. I still consider them friends that I would do anything within my power for them if they ever needed me. Fortunately, they introduced me to a woman named Linde Grace before they moved, and she became a good friend as well as a life, spiritual, and writing mentor. Not only was she a licensed counselor and teacher who had audited her pastor husband’s seminary classes to learn theology, she had also healed herself first. Therefore, she really knew how to guide others to healing. I now understand what the book of Matthew means when it says to take the plank out of our own eye first, so we can help others take the speck out of their eye. Linde Grace’s planks were gone, and she lovingly helped me remove the specks (that sometimes I recognized as planks when I began to work on them) out of my own eye. She helped me heal from the religious and cultural past that had too often been toxic and harmful. And, she never gave up on me. When long-term 24/7/365 family caregiving exhausted me so much that I repeated my own pattern and became vulnerable to toxic personalities again, she helped me heal myself a second time without any judgment. I try to pay forward what Linde Grace gave to me. One thing I’ve had to accept is that many people will repeat the familiar during their healing process, just as I did. In my case, I was over-exposed while I was a caregiver to the teachings that had brainwashed me in my younger years. Too many of the people who visited those I was a caregiver for came preaching hellfire and brimstone -- which is the last thing most sick people need. After the sermon ended, they too often shared the current propaganda they were spreading against anyone who was different from them. Hearing those toxic messages hundreds of times conditioned me to repeat the familiar. I may not have found my way out of that thinking had I not previously been taught to see the Bible with fresh eyes by Linde Grace. Many people can’t escape until they learn to see the Bible in a way that gives them permission to change. So many people were given wrong interpretations of the Bible as a way to control others, and using the fear of hell as a way to cement those teachings makes it hard to trust that any other teaching is a safe one. People can’t just start a healing group or movement and expect people who have been brainwashed to accept what they have to say. A brainwashed person has to be helped to unlearn and relearn, a concept that many are now calling deconstructing and reconstructing. Most people have to be shown from scripture why the toxic way was wrong, or they will never truly have peace. In the hope of helping some people who might want/need to deconstruct and reconstruct, I’m going to be sharing some of my experiences that taught me a better understanding of the Bible. I will end this post by sharing one experience and will continue to share other experiences in future blog posts. I will also be starting a Facebook page that focuses on the subject of recovering from toxic religion. Although I’d been brainwashed to justify the bad things in my denomination and congregation, I knew there were many times those things made my spirit squirm. That is what I was talking about in my last blog post – subconsciously propping up the egos of toxic people to avoid retaliation. One thing that made my spirit squirm was pastors leading their congregations to try to force the world (non-Christians) to be what we thought they should be. That bothered me, because the harder we tried to focus on their “sins”, the more sins we committed. I said earlier in this post that I never saw the pastor I met in the coffee house speaking hate or spreading propaganda about people who were different than us – a major problem I had with the denomination of my youth. Trying to control non-Christians set the denomination of my youth on a path of lying about people they disagreed with by creating propaganda smear campaigns to get their dishonest message of judgment and/or hate out to as many people as they could reach. As social media became more popular, I became very disturbed by the horrible things I saw Christians sharing to make the people they disagreed with look as bad as possible, and I will speak on some of those things in future posts. Sadly, they did most of this in the name of God. I began to pray and ask God to stop the propaganda spreading. I don’t know how to explain having a spiritual experience, but those who have had one will understand this. I came to understand that the end does not justify the means. If we’re lying, it’s bearing false witness, which is a broken commandment. If we’re using God’s name to give our lie power, we’re using God’s name in vain/wrongful use of the name of God, which is a second broken commandment. I also came to understand that God is not the one that the Bible calls the father of lies; therefore, when we begin to lie, it’s doubtful the end result will be a Godly one. These are mechanisms used to control others, and God gave all of us free will. I came to understand that the Bible tells us in 1 Corinthians 5:12 that we are not to judge the world (non-Christians) or we’d have to leave the world, but we are to judge sin in the church. The Bible and the Church are for people who choose to be Christians and is not to be forced down the throats of people who do not make that choice. I realized the churches that spread hate-propaganda that could easily be disproved with five minutes of research were doing the opposite of that scripture, and that’s what’s causing a lot of the problems in the church (including steadily declining membership), our culture, and politics. Yes, politics! The denomination of my youth told us we had to vote a certain way to go to heaven, and that started a religious divide between the two parties that is now a common subject of propaganda. Something to think about: What if Russia saw what we were already doing to ourselves with religiously incited political propaganda and exaggerated our efforts by adding to what we were already doing during the last election, making worse what was already happening? If, and I’m only saying if, that is a correct assumption, it really shines a light on how harmful propaganda spreading can be to everyone, including our nation. Until very recently, there was someone in my life who was constantly spreading hate against anyone who didn’t see Christianity in the hateful way he did. After watching it for months, I finally told him about the 1 Corinthians 5:12 scripture last week. He could not see and did not want to hear about the sins he was committing in spreading lies to reinforce his hate, yet he kept insisting that if we ignored the sins of others then we were guilty of heinous sins against God. In addition, his anger at learning about that scripture led him to threaten me. Those threats led me to understand what the people who are being threatened by Christians for being different feel like. Don’t get me wrong – that’s not the first time I’ve been threatened for growing in my understanding of Christianity and living a healthier and less toxic version of the religion. The difference is that before I overcame the brainwashing, I thought I deserved it for growing away from my old beliefs. Now, I understand that I don’t deserve it and that it’s despicable to threaten people just because they look, think, or believe differently than we do -- and people who make those threats are the type of ego-driven person I talked about in my last blog post that some are taught to bow down to in order to avoid retaliation.