Category Archives: Insights

A Dark Testimony II – From a Friend

Others' stuff, Insights
This entry is part 3 of 29 in the series The Problems of Evangelicalism

Continuing our sequence of Dark Testimonies, as part of my series on the Problems of Evangelicalism, here is another beautifully eloquent testimony from one of my friends.

My friend has asked to remain anonymous, so I have of course honoured that – but the story still maintains its power nevertheless. Here we go:

Self – Flagellation 

In the church of my youth, self-flagellation[1] was a spiritual discipline.

I’ll explain.

During communion services, men were allowed to stand up, read from the Bible, and expand on their thoughts a little. Women were generally restricted to asking the organist to play a specific hymn/song, or to pray. If they read from the Bible, they weren’t allowed to say anything about what they’d read out, as that would be considered teaching.

Anyway, one Sunday morning, during the communion service, my father rose to his feet and, in a rare display of emotion, announced, ‘I am a sinner!’. Specifically, he told the congregation about some behaviour he wasn’t proud of, but the heart of his confession was this peculiar passion about being a sinner. Reaffirming his fallen identity in public was very much the trumpet blast of his faith, as it was for many in the congregation.

After he sat down, another man stood up to talk about how ‘brave’ my dad was for telling us of his sins.

My father’s passion for public confession was symptomatic of a wider theological fallacy in the church we attended. Men would rarely get passionate about grace, mercy, or the life and ministry of Jesus, but they loved to talk about sin. With the benefit of hindsight, I’ve reached the conclusion that this was the closest these believers ever got to a mystical experience.

The reformed theology of my denomination didn’t allow for joy. It taught us we were ‘worthless sinners’, and that the only reason any of us could approach God was because the torture we deserved had been taken out on Jesus.

We could stand in God’s presence under a ‘cloak of righteousness’, but always in the knowledge that we deserved to burn.

We spent more time, energy, and emotion obsessing about sin than we did focussing on Jesus and what he showed us about the curative, liberating, inclusive, and unconditional love of God. I’m not even sure this form of faith can be described as Christianity.

– Anonymous

Well. How do you follow that? How far had those people drifted from the simple, light and free, joy-filled faith that Christianity – Flying in the Spirit – really brings?

The testimony serves as a stark reminder that being sin-focused, either/both personally or as a church, leads to misery, drudgery and darkness. Sadly, sin-fixation is endemic in many if not most of today’s Evangelical churches. As I’ve said before,

I’ve also noticed that when you start to enthuse about your freedom while talking with a Legalist – whether they know they are one or not! – the first thing they will do is to try to explain to you why you should not be free.

And this is both symptomatic of a sin-fixation and also the ‘thin end of the wedge’ of creeping legalism; the ‘yeast of the Pharisees’. Bit by bit, any kind of acknowledgement that sin is something you should be looking at, concentrating on or even defending against, any hint of that will lead eventually to legalism. And so, it is especially relevant to look at Hebrews 12:1 once again, “…let us throw off…the sin that so easily entangles…” ‘Sin’ entangles not only by addiction and obsession, as most Evangelicals would interpret this passage – and they’d be partly right – but also that it’s the obsession with sin itself that is what really entangles. How can I put this with sufficient emphasis? The actual obsession with trying to not sin, making sure you’re not ‘entertaining’ any form of sin, trying to ‘stay away from every kind of evil’ (1Thess 5:22), and all that sort of thing. The fear that the ‘devil’, who ‘…prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour…’ might just get a look-in and devour the believer[2]. All these things are themselves the problem. As my friend’s testimony so eloquently describes, it’s not the ‘sins’ themselves that made that church service so dark – it was the actual fixation on sin that is the problem[3]. I say ‘is the problem’ because it’s not just limited to the time and place of my friend’s story, but it goes on all the time in the minds and congregations of legalistic Christians. And it was even the main fixation of the Pharisees back in New Testament times, so it’s not like it’s anything new. The constant battle against ‘sin’ is the major defining feature of many Evangelical Christians’ faith. And that’s so sad.

In Romans 7, St. Paul famously writes about his struggles with ‘sin’, concluding that it is Jesus Christ our Lord who sets him free from all that. Notice that he’s not saying that Jesus stops him from sinning, nor that Jesus quiets that notional ‘other man’, the ‘wretched man’ that persists in his desire to ‘sin’. Instead, Jesus sets him free; He takes away the whole problem by making it so that ‘sin’ is no longer an issue between man and God; it has nothing to do with righteousness any more. Because of Jesus, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because the Law of the Spirit of Life has set us free from that Law of sin and death that the ‘wretched man’ of Romans 7 was subjected to. Many preachers I have heard have commented that the allocation of chapter and verse, for some parts of the Scriptures, was not ‘inspired’ in that sometimes the chapter breaks occur at silly and unhelpful places. The Romans 7 and 8 juncture is such a place, because the chapter break interrupts Paul’s logic flow. However, not one of those preachers went any further than to say that the chapter break of Romans 7-8 is not inspired; they didn’t ever once say why they thought that[4].

Well the reason why is as I have just said above. Jesus has set us free from the need to worry about ‘sin’ because there is now no condemnation. None at all. In fact, given that Romans 3:20 says, ‘Therefore no-one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the Law, rather through the Law we become conscious of our sin’, he’s saying that trying to follow the Law – obeying the Rules, to put it bluntly – is futile and pointless. Now that the Law has exposed ‘our’ ‘sin’, it has fulfilled its purpose. Everyone who believes that they have ‘broken God’s Law’ now knows that; job done, so the Law can now pack up and go home. What Paul does in Romans 7-8, and through all his preceding arguments, is to say that Law is no longer relevant in terms of human righteousness, because that’s all been done by Jesus.

Therefore, being constantly sin-conscious is to deny that there is now no condemnation for those in Christ. Those who are in Christ have been set free from that same Law of sin and death that has no place in their lives any more. He also said – to a different group of believers and at a different time – that ‘if you walk in the Spirit, then you will not gratify the desires of the flesh’. This doesn’t mean that it prevents you from gratifying, or giving in to, those desires, whatever they are[5], but instead that just by walking in the Spirit means that you are no longer walking in the flesh, whatever that means. Walking in the Spirit – walking with Jesus and doing what you see Father doing (Jn 5:19) – is what the Christian life can and should be.

Note that I don’t mean walking around with your head in the clouds singing la-la-la. It’s that the state of being for Christians who realise the freedom of Grace – which is what makes us free to walk in the Spirit in the first place – is that they just get on with their lives, generally conscious that their lives are in the right place with God and that, just by living and doing the right thing, along with things the Spirit prompts them to do, they are living a righteous life. Not by their own efforts, but by resting in the place that God has given them: the place of righteousness, the place of peace, and the place of joy, because that’s what the Kingdom of God is about, not about rules and regulations. Romans 14:17 says that, “…the kingdom of God is not about food and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit”. In that passage, Paul is arguing that eating or drinking the right or wrong foods is not what it’s all about; that’s all irrelevant. What it’s about is righteousness, peace and joy in the Spirit. It’s not about Law.[6]. By that point in his letter to the Romans, Paul had already established that the righteousness needed is by faith, and that that is a gift – a Grace, a charis (Greek), a free gift of God. And therefore his readers have already got it. It’s not something that can be taken away or lost in any fashion.

In Romans 3:21, right in the heart of the passages so favoured by legalists, Paul is actually saying something different from legalism. In that passage he says that the righteousness is apart from Law. It has nothing to do with Law – with behaviour – not even a little bit (Eph 2:8-9). The essence of Romans 3:21 is that the righteousness is almost a new thing, because he says there, “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify”. Not only does it say, ‘But now…’ as if something has changed – which it has, of course – but also the Law and the Prophets testify to it. This means that the Law and the Prophets have ‘handed over’ that new righteousness apart from Law. It ties in with Jesus’s Transfiguration (Mt 17:1-8, Mk 9:2-13, Lk 9:28-36), where God’s voice says ‘This is My Son; listen to Him!’, meaning that from now on, Jesus supersedes the Law (signified by the presence of Moses) and the Prophets (signified by Elijah), This is an aspect of the Transfiguration that is little understood by Evangelical Christianity, and even if you explained it to them, they would choose not to accept that interpretation. I would say that’s at least partly because they want to retain the rules from the Law and the Prophets.

Well, of course they do; it helps them stay sin-conscious! Where would sin-consciousness be without Moses? 🤣

Header picture shows two mediaeval plonkers performing self-flagellation. You’d have thought times would have changed by now, wouldn’t you? 🤣

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Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 Flagellation is being hit with a whip or lash. Self-flagellation speaks for itself; you do it to yourself – Ed
⇧2 As if…. 🤣 He that is in me is greater than he who is in the world (1Jn 4:4).
⇧3 Yes, I changed the tense in mid-sentence there. You got me. Not my normal practice by any means, but it is intended as a literary device in order to show that a past problem continues into the present.
⇧4 Possibly because they themselves did not understand – being legalistically-minded – that the heart of the Grace message is right there.
⇧5 In most Christians’ minds, the unspoken assumption is always that it’s something sexual!
⇧6 And it’s righteousness, peace and joy in the Spirit; the walking in the Spirit that Paul says (in Gal 5:16) means that you will not ‘gratify the desires of the flesh’. By walking in the Spirit, this means that you are automatically – by definition – not walking in the flesh. It does not mean that you ‘prove’ that you are walking in the Spirit because you don’t ‘sin’, as legalists and ‘fruit inspectors’ so love to claim that it does, and as usual have it back-to-front.

A Dark Testimony I – Sonny Ray

Insights, Others' stuff
This entry is part 2 of 29 in the series The Problems of Evangelicalism

We begin our series on the problems with Evangelicalism by sharing some ‘dark testimonies’.

These are testimonies by Christians who were subjected to the dark evils of being part of a domineering Evangelical faith. Testimonies where damage was done, and people were abused to one extent or another. In some cases, there was a happy ending. In other cases, not so much. But I’m going to share them anyway.

The testimonies give great examples of some of the excesses and abuses of Evangelical leadership, their indoctrination methods and their harsh dealings with members of their congregations. As usual, I would emphasise that not all Evangelical congregations have leaders like this; however a potential church member isn’t going to know until they have been ‘netted'[1]. Most new Christians, and also people ‘seeking’ or showing an interest in Christianity, haven’t a clue about the less-than-innocent things that go on in the churches at which they enquire, in their innocence, about the things of God.

As I said in the opening piece of this series, normally I like to concentrate on “…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.” (Phil 4:8) but in these cases, it is necessary to look into the darkness to see what it’s really like in there.

So here’s the first of those pieces, an account of the oppressive Calvinist church[2] background of my online friend, Sonny Ray:

Of course, like I assume most American highschoolers of the early 1970s, I was taught Edwards’ “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.”[3] That was the flavor of the “christianity” (note that I didn’t capitalize it!) I grew up with.

We were taught nothing but fear. I was 14 when I “prayed the sinner’s prayer” and “got saved”. But by that point I already had a decade of KNOWING and BELIEVING in the God of Love. Looking back, I realize that I knew what they taught us was not the God of Jesus. The god (note that I didn’t capitalize it!) they taught me was not the Love of 1 Corinthians 13.

But growing up in conservative, rural, Deep South United States in the age of drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll, they kept us almost perfectly in check by threatening us with hell. And I not only got it in church (note that I didn’t capitalize it!). I got it at home. Mama was the image, in the flesh, of the tyrant god that the Calvinists teach. She ruled with anger, shaming, degradation, all kinds of negative approaches. Not to mention extreme corporal punishment.

It took me a very long time to walk away from that lie. To throw out the tyrant slavemaster and abusive father-figure they showed me. To learn again the God I understood as a 3 year old. The God who’s “got the whole world in His hands”. That was a children’s song my mama sang to me out on the front porch of our house one night. It was very probably the ONLY positive contribution she ever made to my faith. For in THAT MOMENT, I knew God was love. And I wanted to know that God. A God who could love me that much was a God I wanted to know. A God I could believe in.

But even having had that epiphany, I had no control over the indoctrination I received and accepted for the next 40 years! Hell, I was a CHILD. How was I supposed to avoid what they forced down my throat? They were meant to teach, guide, nurture and protect me!

But God love them. I can’t be too hard on them. They only passed down to me, the same errors they were taught.

It took me almost 30 years to escape. I’ll save the details of that for some other time. But when I escaped, I set a huge bonfire, burning that bridge behind me. Breaking away from that hell was traumatic. I knew I had to walk away. But I can’t tell you how much fear dogged me. It took a good while for me to get done with the deconstruction; burn the wood, hay, and stubble; and start gradually building back, stone by stone, the foundation and then the structure of the faith I have today — 27 years later!

I could go on. But you get the picture.

[Emperor] Constantine I was IMO one of the worst things that ever happened to the movement begun by Jesus. And we’ve already spent 1700 years, this year, paying the consequences of THAT error. And he was only one of the problems — errors — hypocrisies — heresies — the “church” has succumbed to in the 2000 years since Christ.

– Sonny Ray, used with his kind permission

Note how, in Sonny Ray’s experience, even though he had ‘prayed the Sinner’s Prayer’, still his church and family felt they could threaten him with Hell.

This, to me, has to be one of the worst inconsistencies in all of Evangelicalism. ‘He who calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved’ (Romans 10:13; Joel 2:32), claims the evangelist salesman who calls people out to the altar to ‘get saved’. Will be saved. Not, ‘will be saved as long as you behave yourself’, but will be saved. “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:6) [emphasis mine] and other similar reassuring verses.

And then in a typical bait-and-switch, all of a sudden the deal is changed; now you have to behave yourself as well; if you believe that, then it effectively cancels out those verses they used to sell it to you.[4] The idea of threatening the ‘already-saved’ with hell also has this corollary: the person making the threat is also subject to its effects; i.e. they too could ‘go to hell’ if they put a foot wrong, despite being ‘already saved’. The idea of ‘once saved, always saved‘, is anathema to these people because if that was true then they’d lose their ability to threaten. Maybe also they are so insecure in their salvation that they feel that they too would be condemned due to ‘blood-guiltiness'[5] were they to not ‘point out’ errors and transgressions in others?

He also demonstrates something I have mentioned in my previous work: how the pure Jesus experience, knowing God as Father and all that, how it gets overlaid by layers of toxic church baggage, through intensive indoctrination. It really is criminal, although Sonny Ray is very gracious towards the people who did that to him and doesn’t hold it against them.

Anyway, these are just points that immediately struck me; I will leave you to glean your own conclusions and thinking from the story.

Grace and Peace to you!

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Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 I am not including in this series any examples of church/clergy sexual abuse. These are way outside my remit, and to be honest I can make all of my points without going there.
⇧2 Are Calvinists Evangelical? Opinions differ, but for the purposes of this piece, it doesn’t really matter. The abuse is the same regardless.
⇧3 This is a classic/notorious (depending on your point of view) sermon by eighteenth-century preacher Jonathan Edwards, where he describes the state of ‘sinners’ roasting in Hell. It’s not for the faint-hearted. Google it if you want to read it; I’m not promoting such filth on my website – Ed
⇧4 This idea was actually one of the catalysts for me to begin to realise just what Grace is all about, but that’s my story, not Sonny Ray’s.
⇧5 Blood-guilt is an ancient concept from the Old Testament, which is strongly favoured by legalistic denominations where people are condemned for not doing their utmost to prevent others ‘perishing’, by whatever means their religion chooses. It’s particularly popular among Jehovah’s Witnesses who literally use it to guilt-trip their congregants into doing the door-to-door preaching, particularly now they’re not required to count hours anymore.

The Problems of Evangelicalism

Insights, Star Wars
This entry is part 1 of 29 in the series The Problems of Evangelicalism
Series Description

The time has come.

Yes, the time has come.[1] The time has come for me to put out there, hopefully in a series of clearly reasoned and described essays, a clear set of assertions in which I describe the major problems (as I see them) with Evangelicalism, a major branch of modern-day Christianity and the one in which I spent most of the formative years of my Christian life.

Why would I want to do this? And why now? Well, as for ‘why now?’, the unwelcome visit of two evangelists to my house, a couple of months ago, was the catalyst. Even before the time of their visit, I was already in a place where I was realising more and more the problems of Evangelicalism, already writing about them in my blog, and considering writing more on the subject. The evangelists’ visit was the last straw, and (to bring us to the question of why I would want to do this) in the aftermath of their visit, it got me thinking obsessively[2] of just how bad Evangelical Christianity really has got. I’d been thinking already along those lines, as I said, but now the gloves are off and it’s time to ‘go public’ with how I see things. Those evangelists came to me, proving that I’m not safe from the depredations of Evangelicalism even in my own home.

And so, I think it’s time for me to say something.

I have to say that, at the root of things, the beliefs and behaviours of many in the Evangelical movement do such a huge injustice to Jesus, Whom I love above any other, and my Heavenly Father (ditto), that it really is time to set the record straight. Yes, this may become a series of rants. Yes, this may even be presumptious; who is this Tony guy to tell the entire Evangelical world how wrong they are?

But as John Pavlovitz says, this is “Stuff that needs to be said”. It needs to be called out. They need to be called out. And in order to deny them any ability to respond publicly, which they would do because the Religious just can’t help themselves, I will say right from the start that I am also going to disable commenting for these posts[3].

In addition, so very many of Jesus’s teachings and sayings are examples of where He’s calling out the Religious of His time for the way they behave towards other people, usually those they consider less ‘worthy’ than themselves.

And so, I have decided to make completely public my problems with Evangelicalism[4] and describe what I believe are its faults and indeed its apostasy.

Hopefully, this will give an insider’s perspective[5] which may help others as a warning for those who may be considering joining an Evangelical church.

And it may also help those who are already trapped in there, and need some confirmation that they’re not the only ones who are feeling like Evangelicalism has some pretty serious issues.

And who knows, it may even help some blissfully-unaware Evangelicals to see how way off-beam Evangelicalism actually is; how far it has strayed from the things that Jesus taught.

In this series, I will be showing an eclectic mixture of contradictions, hypocrisies, cognitive dissonances, bad theologies, apostasies, heresies, behaviours, abuses, and all manner of other things wrong with Evangelicalism.

And much of this stuff I will present using arguments from the Bible. Why on Earth should I want to present articles about the dark side of Evangelicalism using the Bible, that book most beloved, and indeed in some cases deified and worshipped, by Evangelical Christians? Isn’t there at least a whiff of irony there?

Well, the main reason I’d want to present a Biblical picture is because many Evangelicals won’t listen to any reasoning unless it’s ‘supported by Scripture’. In my writing, I always try to support my ideas with Scripture because I want to show that my ideas can indeed be seen as Biblical if viewed without preconceptions[6].

I realise that there are many good people in Evangelicalism. And Christianity in general does a lot of good[7]. And for the rest, I prefer to believe that what they do and what they think is more the result of a lack of critical analysis of what they were told as a new believer. In fact, I am fully aware that the only reason I was able to break free from the thought patterns of the cult[8] is because God led me out of it. God revealed to me – almost literally in a flash – the true meaning of the concept of Grace, and once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.On the other hand, I think it’s also the case that you can’t see it until it is revealed to you[9]. So I can’t hold it against the people who are still trapped inside legalism as espoused by Evangelicalism. But what I can do is to bring to the light what Evangelicalism is really like, and what its adherents believe under all the glitz and chrome of its public face. Although, given the behaviour of many modern Christians, that public face is also increasingly being seen for what it is.

Hence, this series. Much of what I write will come from hard experience: personal experiences in church environments; experience of helping people who have been damaged by the Religious; online discussions with hard-nosed Christian Pharisee trolls. And it also means that I will be writing some pretty dark pieces, where normally I love to be upbeat. Concentrating too much on the dark stuff is a sure way to getting a dark outlook; normally I like to concentrate on “…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.” (Phil 4:8).  So, don’t be surprised if you detect a little bit of snark or sarcasm coming through, as well as some dry humour;  humour is my way of coping with writing on such a miserable subject. And the articles in the series will also be interspersed with other articles, just to keep things light and also for variety 🙂

Please just keep it in mind that I am writing this series, really, to help people, OK?

For a bit of background, and for a couple of stories about spiritual abuse that has happened to me at the hands of Evangelicals, check out these two posts. You could even see them as being ‘honorary members’ of this series, in fact 😀 The posts are referenced in the above essay, but are included here again in order to emphasise their relevance:

Top Tip: Read the Signs!

The Destroyer of Faith

 

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 The header image shows a scene from Star Wars – Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, with Emperor Palpatine issuing ‘Order 66‘; the order for his Clone Troopers to wipe out the Jedi, the warrior/monk religious class that had been the guardians of peace and justice in the Galaxy for thousands of years. His actual order is, “The time has come. Execute Order 66”. Interestingly, by that time in the history of the Star Wars Universe, the Jedi, while not actually evil, had become atrophied, hidebound, legalistic, culty, self-serving, inward-looking and largely ineffective. I will let you work out for yourself the parallels there with any modern religious organisations – and yes, there are more than one!

While my series will by no means ‘wipe out’ Evangelicalism, of course, (not that I’d even want to if I could!), it will expose in some small measure its problems, shortcomings and yes, I’ll even say ‘evils’.

⇧2 It’s an Autistic trait
⇧3 In the past, I have even had Pharisee trolls trying to circumvent comment blocking by writing to me via the email address intended solely for reporting technical issues. Such commenters should be aware that all comments like that will mysteriously disappear forever, anything I do see of your ranting before realising it is not a technical query email will be disregarded, and all your time will have been wasted.
⇧4 By ‘problems of Evangelicalism’, I mean not only its beliefs and practices, but also the way in which it abuses people both inside and outside the group
⇧5 Albeit an ex-insider’s perspective, but, well, you know churches; they are so hidebound and ossified that they won’t have changed much if at all since last I went to one
⇧6 Not that I do ‘proof-texting‘, of course; proof texting is where people refer to isolated Scripture verses in order to ‘prove’ their assertions. No, I generally use Scripture by giving examples of the things I am talking about, rather than trying to ‘prove’ things from there. There is a subtle difference. The other way I use it – and this is definitely not proof-texting – is if I am discussing a given passage of Scripture, in which case I usually do proper commentary or even sometimes an exegesis.
⇧7 But in Evangelicalism’s case, it is usually with strings attached. Yes, here’s some free food, but you must let us preach the gospel at you before you can have it.
⇧8 Some Evangelical congregations are more culty than others, mainly dependent on their origins, background and leadership, but most Evangelical churches do in fact check the boxes for many of the criteria of a cult.
⇧9 You certainly won’t learn of it from others in Evangelicalism, unless a covert Grace-believer helps you with it.

A Change of Perspective

Aviation, Insights, Others' stuff

As my regular readers will know, one of the basic premises of my blog is that a life of faith has many parallels with the sport of flying light aircraft.

I have a subscription to the excellent ‘Pilot‘ Magazine, and I was even priviliged to have had an article of mine published in it some years ago too. In the July, 2025 edition of the magazine, the Editor, Eugenio Facci, published his editorial and, on reading it, it was immediately apparent to me that he ‘gets it’. Not that this is surprising, of course, because I would say many Pilots feel the same, but he described really well the almost-spiritual freedom and indeed life-changing perspective one gets when flying a light aircraft[1]. I identified with his words so much that I thought, right, that’s one for the blog. Eugenio has kindly given me his enthusiastic permission to use his piece so, without further ado, here it is:

Eugenio Facci

When I was ten, I used to spend a fair amount of time at the local flying club, where my dad was working towards his PPL[2] – and where I would occasionally fly in the back of a PA-28 [3] during his training flights.

One day, one of the club’s pilots asked me if I wanted to fly with him – in a Cessna 152, meaning in the front seat! I was ecstatic! Of course I did: I was ten, obsessed with flying, I (thought I) knew everything about aeroplanes, and the floor of my bedroom was covered with avidly-read aviation magazines.

I said yes, trying to appear absolutely unfazed – I had read somewhere that a good pilot always keeps it cool – and up we went. The Cessna 152 lifted off into the grey October sky. Once level, the moment came: “Do you want to take control?”

It was a very big deal for me. I put my hands on the yoke and looked around, initially just keeping level. Then, a gentle turn to the right. I saw the right aileron move up (what a nerd), the wing getting lower, the world moving. Wow… I was making the world move! What a sense of power, of freedom, of a different existence! The drudgery of normal life seemed so far away; up there in the sky, I felt like I had graduated into an upper echelon of the universe.

The day after, a Monday, I went to school a different person. Life didn’t have the boundaries of before, nor did I. The experience of flying an aircraft had been empowering and (strangely) humbling at the same time. I quietly told my closest friends (I wasn’t sure everybody would really ‘get it’), and those friends saw a different child from just a few days before. Like meditation changes the mind of a zen master, so flying had changed my mind and soul. Most of all, it had given me one of the most precious things in life: confidence, and of the right kind.

This is not something you stumble upon easily. Nowadays, many young people struggle with confidence, and, quite a few studies seem to show that there are rising problems with anxiety and mental health in younger generations – possibly due to the impossibly high standards and constant scrutiny that comes with social media. As it happens, General Aviation[4] can help with this problem, and various organisations are already very active in that regard. Just to name a few, Youth and Education Support (YES) in England, the Take Off charity in Scotland and, expanding beyond the world of youngsters, Aerobility.

This is great, but the positive social impact of this could be amplified if this confidence-building exercise became a formal tool within the education policy of a country. The opportunity is there; most science topics can be explained in a fun and interesting way by using aviation as an applied example, and many children like aeroplanes – so you would not have to impose a boring topic onto them.

In addition, the big wave of investments that will come with rearming Britain and the Western world is the perfect time to ask ourselves: What kind of youth do we want to bring up? After all, a nation is only as strong as the minds of its citizens, and the UK (like most other countries) does little to train systematically its youngsters in terms of confidence, resilience, and emotional maturity – just to name a few key aspects that flying helps you develop.

Personally, I am very grateful for the confidence, energy and sturdiness that aviation gave me while growing up. I think we owe the younger generations the same opportunities, and possibly better ones.

– Eugenio Facci
Editorial, Pilot Magazine July 2025

Used here with his kind permission.

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 I couldn’t speak for flying a large aircraft, of course, having never done it!
⇧2 Private Pilot’s Licence – Ed
⇧3 That aircraft is described in this article – Ed
⇧4 General Aviation is the branch of aviation in which you find things like private pilots (like Eugenio and I), business jets, TV station helicopters, and all that sort of thing. Mainly, then, flying that is neither military nor really commercial, in terms of the big passenger jets and similar – Ed

On Guilt by Association

Insights, Others' stuff

The concept of ‘guilt by association’ – where if a person associates with someone who others think of as somehow ‘bad’ for whatever reason[1] then somehow that person becomes ‘just as bad as ‘they’ are’ simply by associating with them there ‘sinners’ – has never sat well with me. Even writing about the concept makes me feel sick.

My opinion, of course, is radically different from the norm. If someone is ostracised for treating another person as a fellow human being, no matter what their leanings or beliefs, then it is the people doing the ostracising that are in the wrong[2]. Plain and simple. To these abusers – and such they are – a person associating with someone being shunned means that the person doing the association will also get shunned too[3]. Sadly, in these days of cancel culture and all the other judgmentalism perpetrated by people in general, and especially Religious people (who really should know better, according to their own rules), this sort of behaviour is rife. In some cases, especially in cults[4], it is even taken as far as the complete exclusion of the people involved from their community[5], which intentionally deeply harms the victims of such practices. It’s no wonder that Jesus didn’t do it then, eh?

I myself have never practiced this particular form of abuse (and abuse it is); it has simply never made any sense to me. I have always been aware that others have opinions which I may not share, and that’s fine[6]. Yes, I regularly rant about the Religious, but that’s because a) Jesus did it, and I am feeling His heart on that, and b) they are the people who push their views on others, so they need pushback. But still, I do not do guilt by association. That’s simply not on. And even when it is explained to them that Jesus did it, the boringly predictable response is always, ‘Ah yes, but Jesus didn’t condone their sin!’.

Well that’s correct in one way, but actually it’s only correct because He never even mentioned their ‘sin’ on those occasions – their ‘sin’ being the perceived reason(s) why the Religious considered them ‘untouchable’. For Jesus, it wasn’t even an issue. No, it was the Religious that brought up the subject, via their judgmentalism.

For the Religious, and even for some of Jesus’s followers, the habit of assigning guilt by association was present, and they read into His association with these people that He approved of their ‘behaviour’, as did St. Paul later in places in his letters. Of course, Jesus was having none of that.

And so I present here, in a refreshingly clear and perceptive article, my online friend, Rhonda, expressing an excellent series of points saying why it should not be ‘common practice’ to do ‘guilt by association’, despite it being ‘in the Bible’. Over to Rhonda:

Jesus never taught guilt by association. In fact, if there was one thing that constantly scandalized the religious elite of his time, it was precisely his refusal to treat “sinners” as untouchables. He dined with them, befriended them, healed them, and even gathered them as his closest followers. Prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, Samaritans, Roman centurions, and yes—even Pharisees—were all welcomed, loved, and drawn into his circle of grace. Jesus embodied righteousness in association, never in separation. His holiness was not a fragile thing that recoiled from impurity; it was a powerful, compassionate presence that made the unclean whole.

But it’s sobering to notice that this radical example of love and inclusion didn’t always carry over into the writings of some early Christians—even those who genuinely loved Christ. For instance, Paul, in his more combative moments, wrote of certain believers: “I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves!” (Galatians 5:12). Not exactly gentle. In 2 Thessalonians 3:14–15, he says: “Take special note of anyone who does not obey our instruction in this letter. DO NOT ASSOCIATE (CAPS mine) with them, in order that they may feel ashamed. Yet do not regard them as an enemy, but warn them as you would a fellow believer.”

John—yes, the beloved disciple—also wrote things that sound surprisingly harsh, if, indeed, it was the Apostle John who wrote them, but deep Bible scholars question their actual authorship. In 2 John 10–11, the writer says: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, DO NOT TAKE THEM INTO YOUR HOUSE OR WELCOME THEM (CAPS mine). Anyone who welcomes them shares in their wicked work.” That’s a far cry from Jesus’ warm table fellowship with everyone from doubters to traitors. And in 3 John, the author condemns a man named Diotrephes for not acknowledging his authority, writing in verse 10 that he “spreads malicious nonsense” and REFUSES TO WELCOME FELLOW BELIEVERS—ironically while hypocritically doing the same in return.

Even 1 John—filled with beautiful words about love—draws absolute lines. “THEY WENT OUT FROM US, BUT THEY WERE NOT REALLY OF US.” (CAPS mine) (1 John 2:19). That verse has been tragically used to justify excluding people who think differently, believe differently, worship differently, or honestly question ideas.

All of this, to me, is one of the clearest evidences that inspiration is not the same as inerrancy. People filled with love for Christ can still let fear, ego, and tribalism slip into their words. They can be profoundly inspired and also profoundly human. They can write deep spiritual truth and still get things wrong. We shouldn’t feel the need to paper over this tension—it’s honest, and even hopeful, because it reminds us that God works through imperfect vessels, like them… and like us.

So when we find inconsistencies between Jesus and those who tried to speak on his behalf, we don’t have to reject their words wholesale—but neither must we sanctify their every phrase. Jesus is the touchstone, the lens, the living Word. When the Bible leads us to him, we treasure it. When it seems to lead us away from his example, we step back and say, “That sounds more like us than like him.”

And that’s okay. It just means we’re still growing.

– Rhonda

I think that’s just brilliant. And it’s also an excellent example of how the Bible should, and should not, be ‘applied’ in our lives today – and in our cultures. Not as a one-size-fits-all set of rules, but as a set of documents that were written by imperfect humans who were growing and changing in their faiths, in a world and in cultures that were very different from ours.

We could do with remembering that.

Grace and Peace

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 …whether it’s because of differing opinions, ‘sin’, crime, being on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, whatever.
⇧2 Also, consider this. In the Second World War, in Occupied France, sometimes, escaping Allied service personnel (usually downed fliers and similar) would be found by local French civilians, say hiding in a barn. Often, those civilians would look after the needs of the stricken young man: feeding him, tending to his wounds and so on – just because a) they were human and b) he was human. But if the occupying German forces found out, those giving the help would be severely punished. Just by associating with the escaping airman, then, those civilians were seen as ‘guilty’ by the Germans. There is absolutely no difference between this behaviour, and the guilt-by-association practised by people in society these days, and especially those with an axe to grind – like the Religious.
⇧3 I’m a loner anyway; shunning has no effect on me! 🤣 But I’m painfully aware that others are deeply affected by it.
⇧4 I include much of Evangelical Christianity in this bracket
⇧5 Which makes me certain that the ‘community’ was not worth being a member of in the first place. Pick yourself up, shake the dust, move on.
⇧6 And if a person with Asperger’s Syndrome (me) can be aware of that, then surely neurotypical people can?? And I apologise for calling you Shirley.

“Ex-Batt Christians” – Reblog

Insights, Ministry, Reblogs

Ten years ago to the day, I published the piece “Ex-Batt Christians”, which was what I still consider to be one of the most important and meaningful essays I have ever written. It still applies today, because a) many Christians (including most Evangelicals) are still trapped inside the cage of religion[1], and b) many people are finding their way out of that cage and are unsure of what to do next, or even if it’s ‘safe’ to be outside the cage. 

This piece was almost a parable, and can still be read as such today. Some of the minor details have changed (for example, we no longer have four chickens; just one now and she, of course, wasn’t one of the four mentioned in the essay[2]) but still the lessons are just as applicable now as they were then.

Here we go, then. Enjoy!

My family has a flock of rescued chickens. At present, there’s four birds in the flock, and most of them are ‘retired’ caged chickens.

Caged chickens are what used to be referred to as ‘battery hens’; hens that right from the day they were hatched have never known freedom. From before the time they begin laying, until they are about a year old, they spend all their time in a cage. Then they are either sent off for slaughter or they are rehomed as ‘ex-battery’ hens, or ‘ex-batt’ for short. Three of our girls are ex-batt hens; the fourth was a stray whom we adopted.

Now, about six weeks ago, our two newest hens arrived. Apart from being all bedraggled and nearly bald (we thought they actually looked ‘oven-ready!’), they simply didn’t know what to do with their new freedom. They spent the first couple of days huddled together in the (open) chicken cage, while the hens we already had were roaming about their large pen, pecking at this and that like chickens do. Then, after a couple of days, they dared to come out of the cage a couple of feet; after that, they came right out but hid in the bushes for most of the day.  All the time, they felt they had to be near the ‘safety’ of their cage, so they could bolt back to their place of security. Only after about four weeks with us did they realise that they had choices, they had freedom, and it was up to them how they spent their day. Stay in the chicken coop? No problem. Sit in the shade? Mmmhmm, and have a dust-bath while you’re there. Want to wander round the chicken pen and explore? Go right ahead, it’s perfectly safe. And occasionally they even get let out of the pen and into the whole garden, on what we call ‘rampage’. And they love the freedom!

I’m sure you can see the analogy. I feel that there are many Christians who are still in the chicken coop. They have been set free from the kingdom of darkness, but they are not enjoying the ‘glorious freedom of the Children of God’ (Romans 8:21)

Much of the time, they find it hard to emerge from the ‘safety’ of the coop. Sure, it’s safe in there, but it’s not freedom. Even once they emerge, they are ready at a moment’s notice to bolt back in there.

Jesus was castigated by the religious authorities of His day, for associating with ‘sinners’. He was admonished most severely for partying and having a great time with His friends. Mark 2:18 – “Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. Some people came and asked Jesus, “How is it that John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?” These people – even John the Baptist’s disciples, who were effectively part of a ‘new’ movement – felt that religious observance meant being dull, dry, and having a straight face all the time. No fun is allowed, folks, and certainly no laughing!

But Jesus was having none of that. When the Bridegroom (Jesus) is with us, we don’t need to ‘do’ all these religious rules and observances. We just need to live our lives in the glorious freedom of the Children of God. We can live lavishly, we can live in extravagant, outrageous freedom – freedom that will appear to the ‘religious’ (and those who think they know how ‘religious’ people should behave) to be outrageous. “What? These people believe in God and they’re happy??“

Like when I fly, my home base airfield is near a huge reservoir lake with a dam at one end. So, of course, we do low-level ‘Dambuster’ runs over it. A shallow dive, picking up speed, race across the water at high speed only 200 feet up….and then call ‘bombs away’ and a sharp, high-‘g‘ pull-up into the climb away. Tremendous fun, perfectly legal and perfectly safe. But people hear the stories of that sort of thing and they say, ‘You do, like, what??‘ And to be perfectly honest, it takes a good few days for the grin to disappear from my face after a Dambuster run…. but you see the thing is that we enjoy it. Really enjoy it. It’s part of our freedom. ‘Pilots shouldn’t do things like that’ is only said by those who have not experienced the freedom of flight – and who have not spent all those years of hard training; British pilot training is the most thorough in the world of civilian aviation and we produce the safest private pilots in the world. And yet still we do Dambuster runs, because it’s perfectly safe – because we have trained for it. It’s what we are equipped and free to do.

And so it is with the things of faith, the things of God. Those who live in freedom appear to those on the outside to be completely irreligious. They laugh and joke. They appear to be filled with an inexpressible joy. They party (in whatever way suits them), they dance, they’re free. They associate with all different types of people, including those who society sees as outcasts. They do kind things. They do daft things. And those outside – both believer and non-believer alike – look in and say, ‘No way they’re Christians. They aren’t behaving at all like a Christian should behave’. ‘How can you call yourself a Christian and still do that?’ Y’see, they just don’t ‘get’ it. The thing is that most of these unwritten expectations of behaviour are completely founded in others’ opinions and not in Scripture. Even if they were founded in Scripture, it’s not there to restrict us; rather to set us free.

People of faith who discover this new-found freedom also sometimes feel insecure in that freedom. They are emerging from the chrysalis of rules and regulations, of unwritten behavioural ‘standards’, and are exploring the pen near the cage. They’ re ready to scuttle back into the cage if they feel too unsafe. But you know, God made us for freedom, and ‘it is for freedom that Christ has set us free’ (Gal 5:1). It’s what we were made for! But don’t worry if at first you feel insecure. You no longer have the ‘rules’ as a backstop. But you don’t need rules anymore. Heb 10:16 – “I will write My laws upon their hearts”. Holy Spirit is your backstop and He will not let you fall. In any event, your salvation is secure even if/when you do make mistakes. This is the freedom we possess! Once saved, always saved. Click here for my blog posting on that truth.

So, can you see then that these ‘ex-batt Christians’ really need to come out of their cage and enjoy the freedom of the pen. That’s what they were rescued for! That’s what they were adopted for!

Life in all its fulness! Come on out of the cage and into the pen – or better yet, out into the garden. The freedom out here is wonderful!

chickens
Our chickens on ‘rampage’, having fun 😉

Hope that helps, with anything that’s on your mind or your spirit 🙂

Grace and peace to you.

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 Religion, in the sense of trying to ‘do’ things in order to please God, in order to appease any ‘wrath’ He may happen to be feeling towards them. Essentially, it’s legalism cloaked under a thin veneer of a completely misunderstood and misrepresented ‘grace’. Wanting to please God because you love Him is one thing; trying to please Him in order to appease Him, and thereby avert anything nasty that you fear He might do to you, is another thing entirely.
⇧2 Chickens generally live for about five years; the oldest one we had, Florence, was eight when she died and she was one of the four mentioned in the essay.

On a Similar Road – Reblog

Insights, Reblogs
This entry is part 30 of 34 in the series About the Bible - Inerrancy, Infallibility, Inspiration and Revelation

This is a blog post I published back in 2020 – and once again its principles have come back to my attention.

What if the writers of just about every book in the Bible was a believer on a similar life journey to us, as are we today? What if the writers – St. Paul included – did not have all the answers, but instead wrote from the faith position they were currently ‘at’? What if they wrote from the position of their current understanding, incomplete though it may well have been?

Well in fact that must have been exactly what happened. As new believers, we were told that the reason why the concepts and principles espoused in the Bible are still relevant today, is that humans in general haven’t changed. What was applicable for the writers, way back then, is also applicable for us, today. Human nature, they tell us, does not change.

So, if that’s the case, then anyone reading the Bible today should take this into account. Some of the things, the writers will be right about. And some of the things, they will be wrong about. The Bible did not simply fall out of the sky as a finished tome[1], but was instead written by real people with real doubts and real lives, with all the baggage that this would naturally entail, and each of whom was on a journey of discovery of God.

With that in mind, then, here is the piece. I hope you find it useful:

I have come to realise over the last few days that all of the writers of the various books of the Bible were at different Stages of Faith. Just like us, they were all at different places in their walk with God, and some of them were possibly even at less ‘mature’ stages than we are.

This is visible easily in St. Paul’s writings, as his maturity and emphasis changes with the chronology as well as with his target audience (hint: Paul’s books are not placed in the Bible in chronological order, but in order of content!).

Not only were they as writers personally at different stages of faith, but the cultures they lived in were also at different stages of evolution regarding their concept of God.

So, the guys in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) were not long out of Pagan child-sacrifice culture, whereas those who had returned out of exile in Babylon, hundreds of years later, were very different in their regard for God and His ways.

In the New Testament, the view changes even more decisively with Jesus’s ‘perfect revelation’ of what God is like. “Now we have seen Him”, was John’s implication in John 1:18.

I find this quite fascinating, and it is all very much worth bearing in mind as you read the words written by these people so long ago, and remember that you too are on a similar journey.

But your experiences and learning will be different from theirs – and that’s ok. Amongst other things, the Bible is about an evolving arc of discovery of Who God is, and what He’s like. And it’s perfectly ok – a good idea, even, sometimes – to read it with that in mind.

Grace and Peace 🙂

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 And it’s probably a good job it didn’t, because older Bibles are so heavy that they would have killed anyone if they’d been in the way

Nibbles

Quotations, Insights, Others' stuff

Another collection of bite-sized items from around the Internet (Oh, all right, most of it is from interesting Facebook exchanges this time! 😉 )

The answer [in response to a point highlighting how Evangelicals reconcile two opposing concepts where they hold both to be true] is quite simple: They make it up as they go along. A new idea can easily be formed while consistently ignoring other information that contradicts that idea, if you close your eyes to it. This is the problem with using a series of single, unconnected, out-of-context verses to justify any belief or doctrine – Me

Evil exists. Hell does not, therefore it was not created by God. Satan is our own internal voice, egged on by judgmental people, telling us we’re not worthy of God’s love and/or attention. – Anon

For me, all ‘sin’, whatever that means and in all its forms and definitions, was dealt with on the Cross. I can therefore walk in a perpetual state of having been forgiven. Done and dusted, end of problem. – Me

Music is enough for a lifetime. But a lifetime is not enough for music – John Williams

…you’re also allowed to like something that others deem ‘problematic’: maybe its lead singer is a Communist; maybe a certain name was (a long time ago) associated with the Nazi party; maybe a certain author isn’t a Vegan; whatever. What’s really problematic, imo, is that others seem to think that their opinion should influence our enjoyment of something, such that they tell us why it’s ‘problematic’. Well they can all go and get stuffed 🤣😂😜 – Me

If you find yourself being called a heretic by mainstream “religion,” make sure of three things:
1) Be a “Spirit-quickened heretic” always inspired and illuminated by Jesus’ Spirit;
2) Be “heroic heretic” always daring to believe the braver and better thing about God and man.
3) Be a “happy heretic” always strong in the joy of the Lord, and always quickly forgiving and those who call you heretic in the first place. – Richard Murray

Unfortunately, sometimes the grey religious NPC types twist the ‘unmerited’ idea into ‘unworthy’ and ‘undeserved’. This is wrong. All it means is that Grace is unearned – you don’t have to *do* anything in order to obtain it or to keep it. But they like to mask that by saying that it is not something we are worthy of receiving. More Pharisees shutting the door of heaven in others’ faces. – Me

I hate when they talk about hyper-grace when they want to teach about grace but don’t like the idea of it being freely given without asking anything in return. The idea of grace is too much for the religious mind; it cannot comprehend grace, because grace is free, and religion is work. There’s no such thing as hyper-grace; there’s only grace. Grace is by essence hyper. It’s like the “color” white. White is white. There’s no hyper-white, there’s just white. If you add anything to white, it becomes something else, it becomes a shade of an other color. Grace is grace; if you add anything else it’s not grace anymore. – Yorick Videlson

Plus they are likely trying to twist [a Bible verse’s] meaning to their own ends. How many churches’ signs have we seen where they are called ‘Grace [whatever] Church’ but of course it’s a bait-and-switch for a den of legalism. – Me

Religious people are good at using terms they don’t understand. Actually, using terms at all to describe and define the spiritual comes from a religious mind. A free spirit doesn’t have words to share the divine experience, because it’s precisely that: an experience. You can only let people see the fruits and the effects; you know, like the wind. – Yorick Videlson

The thief comes to steal, kill and destroy. It’s the religious mindset destroying and tainting everything it touches, and thus steals joy. People who are in that mindset have my pity, but not my sympathy. The gates of hell are locked from the inside, said CS Lewis, and they are in there by their own choice. The hell of religion, that is. All it takes is the decision to call BS on the whole thing, and they can escape. – Me

Our ultimate destiny is not a matter of chance nor is it a “choice” that we are free to make. I had absolutely no choice in being created. I had no choice in the effect of Adams disobedience and the universal ramifications of his act. My “salvation” was never in jeopardy especially based on something that I may or may not have done. I am “saved” because of His intention to make it so. God through Christ Jesus will bring the realization of “salvation” to all without the consent of any. We are all in process of becoming the image of our Creator God and Father by His choice not ours. – C Andrew May

For me, I know how much the unclean have besmirched the name of my faith. But I refuse to let them steal my birthright: I am a Christian; I was a Christian before they stole the name and I will still claim that title for the rest of my life. I am a Prince of the Kingdom of Heaven; a child of God and He is my Father. I was crucified with Christ and have been raised up with Him to heavenly places. These things have been revealed to me over and above what a mere book says, and I know them as part of my make-up, as you say. It’s part of who I am, too, and, like you, no-one can take that away. Even (and especially) the Thief and his children. – Me

The reason that Evangelical attack dogs attack mystical experiences is that they themselves lack such experience. [The people who do that kind of attacking of others]  have likely never knowingly known the Presence of God. In the same way as miserable people love to drag others down to their level, so too these Evangelical attack dogs try to deny all valid mystical experiences, so that they think they’ll feel better about their own lack of such experiences. But a) it doesn’t make them feel any better; and b) nothing they can say or do can ever erase the reality experienced by those they attack. The caveat is that not all Evangelicals are like that, fortunately. – Me

While you’re fighting about theology, separating over politics, and just generally distracting yourself with the drugs of popular culture, you’re getting older, your kids are growing up, and plenty of beautiful sunsets are being lost on you. Be passionate about what you’re passionate about, but don’t sacrifice the moments you would have never forgotten on the altar of moments you will never remember. – Jeff Turner

Plus, on the question of it being authoritative. If someone has to tell you that it is authoritative (which they do; it doesn’t claim it for itself) then they become the higher authority because they are vouching for it. Only someone in higher authority can vouch for someone or something, which means that the Bible is not the highest authority. Of course, some Christians might say that God is the higher authority, which is true, but when Christians also say that God would not say anything that does not agree with Scripture, again this places Scripture above God. In essence, they don’t trust God to be able to speak directly to His people. – Me

…non-Christians are asking the L.G.B.T.Q. question before they even enter the door as a litmus test as to whether they will even come in the first place. We can argue about whether that’s fair or not, but we can’t argue about whether that’s reality. They simply will only come to a church that is welcoming of L.G.B.T.Q. people, and not what they call “pretend” welcoming into what they call “second-class citizenship.” – Bill White

Many people today do not value expertise, particularly when that expertise disagrees with their own worldview. But give them a nasty thing like heart problems, cancer or even a headache and they will turn to the experts without a thought. Yes, even paracetamol tablets (acetaminophen) need to be made by experts; I used to work in such a company of brilliant people. – Me

… about what Autism means. To be able to see things, understand things, process things, and remember things in a way that most people can’t do, has to be seen as a gift. – The Autism Curve, BBC (Episode 1, 50 secs ff)

What [Evangelicals] do is yes, they claim the Bible leads them to Jesus, just as Jesus says, but their job is to lead them back from Jesus to the Bible, it seems! – Me

When God awakened me to the truth I was compelled to leave the Christian religion. I didn’t see any value in taking flying lessons from caterpillars. – C. Andrew May

I’ve also noticed that when you start to enthuse about your freedom while talking with a Legalist – whether they know they are one or not! – the first thing they will do is to try to explain to you why you should not be free. It’s usually couched in Bible verses, and [possibly] from a good heart, but still that’s what they are doing. “He gave His word for freedom; you use it to enslave“. And they will claim that they are under Grace but their lives will not show this. I sometimes wonder if this is simple insecurity; they feel threatened to see someone operating out of freedom instead of Law. – Me

I think [legalists] need the ‘security’ afforded by having clear rules by which to live… Even if they consistently fail to live by them (and consequently live stunted lives of fear and self-loathing). It’s pretty sad really, especially when all the ‘evidence’ needed to live a life of freedom is readily available. – Phil Hendry

[It’s] so sad; [legalists] are still clinging to the side of their swimming pool, shouting unheeded and unnecessary warnings to those who are out in the deep waters of faith and living life to the full. – Me

 

 

 

Forgiveness After Religious/Spiritual Abuse

Insights, Others' stuff, Ministry

Some of my more recent articles have been studies concerning religious abuse. Broadly speaking, this could be thought of any kind of non-beneficial – but, more usually, actually harmful – ‘input’ into a person’s life from religious people, which is uninvited, unwanted/unwelcome and/or unexpected. It has considerable overlap with spiritual abuse, and the two are often closely associated. Spiritual abuse, to me, is where someone’s spirit – their personality, their will to live, their enthusiasm for life, all that kind of thing – is damaged by others. And it will come as no surprise, then, that spiritual abuse is very often a result of religious abuse.

So, religious abuse could be anything from the Jehovah’s Witnesses (or other religious types) turning up on your doorstep and giving you grief by disrupting your peace and your privacy; maybe deadly, soul-destroying public shaming and/or criticism; or right up to financial, emotional and/or sexual abuse by leadership or indeed anyone else in a religious group or someone who claims spiritual authority over a person.

Note that spiritual abuse does not have to take place in a religious setting. It can also occur in a toxic marital or friendship scenario; basically the issue is a breach of trust, leading to spiritual damage.

And it’s sickening. On so many levels, it’s sickening.

As part of my background reading while researching this huge topic – researching in general, not with regard to my writing – I picked up an excellent eBook the other day entitled, “Broken Trust: A practical guide to identify and recover from toxic faith, toxic church, and spiritual abuse’ by F. Remy Diederich.

Here are the links for the book on Amazon UK and Amazon USA

(I’ll do a mini-review of the book at the end of this article).

 

 

In the book, Remy writes an excellent chapter on how to overcome the anger that the abuse has caused. Embedded in that concept is an excellent section on forgiveness. I have written on forgiveness before, but this post offers you insight into forgiveness in the context of religious/spiritual abuse; this was not specifically covered in my previous article.

So here is Remy’s perspective on forgiveness in the context of religious/spiritual abuse – although of course it can also be applied in other fields too. My thanks to Remy for his kind and gracious permission to quote his work!

Moving to Forgiveness

Once your anger has done its work (i.e. moved you to confront the abuse or flee it), lay it to rest. It’s served its purpose. Let it go. We call that forgiveness.

Sometimes people say, “Don’t forgive too quickly.” I understand what they mean, but this statement tells me they don’t understand biblical forgiveness. Their idea of forgiveness has too much packed into it. Forgiveness simply means to “give up the right to get even,” period. No payback. That can happen immediately with no qualifiers.

Let me clarify what forgiveness is by telling you what it isn’t.

1. Forgiveness isn’t forgetting.   Forgiveness requires remembering the wrong that was done to you, not forgetting it. Surprisingly, forgiveness requires blaming your offender. You can’t forgive someone unless you first assign blame for what they did wrong. You can forget minor offenses. But you can’t forget deep wounds. When you’ve been deeply wounded, you need something stronger than forgetfulness. You need forgiveness. Forgiveness is what’s required when you can’t forget what’s been done to you.

2. Forgiveness isn’t excusing.   Sometimes your offender will insist that you forgive them for offending them and let it go, implying this is the biblical thing to do. They expect this from you because they have minimized their offense and dismissed it as insignificant. They want you to do the same: act like it never happened. But that’s not forgiveness. Forgiveness means to “give up the right to get even.” [1] You can do that without lessening the seriousness of what your offender did to you. You can forgive and still hold them accountable to make amends. Let them know how much they hurt you and what you expect from them. But you can also let them know that you will not retaliate.

3. Forgiveness isn’t trusting.   Offenders often want to quickly smooth things over so you will not withhold anything from them. “Let’s put that behind us and move on,” they say, implying that everything is good now and you can resume the relationship as it was. Forgiveness allows you to put the offence behind you, but trust is necessary to move the relationship forward. Rebuilding trust takes time. It’s important to separate forgiveness from trust. Confusing these two leads to many problems. Abusers will try to guilt you into trusting them prematurely by confusing trust with forgiveness. They’ll say, “You have to trust me. The Bible tells us to forgive.” Forgive, yes. Trust, no. It’s foolish to trust those who have broken trust with you. Jesus told us to be “as wise as serpents and harmless as doves, (Matthew 10:16). To be harmless means we don’t seek revenge, but wisdom tells us not to trust people who haven’t earned it. They are welcome to rebuild our trust, but we shouldn’t offer it for free. Forgiveness is free. Trust is earned. Forgiveness is immediate. Trust takes time. If trust can’t be rebuilt, the relationship must change form. Don’t be intimidated into trusting someone until they’ve earned it.

4. Forgiveness isn’t reunion.   Just because I forgive you, I am under no obligation to resume our relationship. As Lewis Smedes once said, “forgiving has no strings attached… reunion has several strings attached.”[2] That means that if you don’t rebuild trust with me, we will not be able to continue our relationship as it once was.

5. Forgiveness isn’t conditional. Forgiveness shouldn’t be based on what the other person does. For example, saying, “If you jump through my hoops, then I’ll forgive you,” is conditional. Forgiveness is unconditional. That’s important to remember because if your forgiveness is conditional, then your offender has control over you. What I mean is, if you insist on their changing before you forgive them, then what if they refuse to change? They have painted you into a corner. You are stuck, unable to forgive because you set yourself up to fail. Do you really want to give your offender that kind of control over your life? When you forgive unconditionally, no-one can manipulate you anymore. You are free to move on with your life.

6. Forgiveness isn’t an emotion.   People often equate forgiveness with a warm and fuzzy emotion. When they don’t have that feeling, they assume they can’t, or shouldn’t, forgive. But forgiveness has nothing to do with your emotions. It’s an act of the will. You choose to forgive because it’s the right thing to do. Sometimes it takes your forgiveness to activate positive emotions.

There we go. Ripped completely out ot its context, of course, but I think the principles expressed in those paragraphs are capable of standing alone, and still have meaning and usefulness.

Thanks again, Remy!

Mini-Review of ‘Broken Trust’ by F. Remy Diederich

Remy’s style is gentle, compassionate, kind and full of Grace. In the book, he addresses virtually all aspects of this important and complex topic, but without making it heavy and unreadable.

In a completely non-judgmental style, extended towards both the victims and the perpetrators, he explores the nature, causes, effects and possible solutions for toxic faith and spiritual abuse.

The four main sections cover:
1: Defining, identifying and recognising toxic faith and spiritual abuse
2: Practical steps to deal with spiritual abuse – confrontation and its implications
3: Recovery from spiritual abuse, covering many factors
4: How to rescue your faith community from spiritual abuse

Within each section, there are chapters addressing specific factors, each of which is dealt with in a concise and practical, yet gentle and understanding manner. Something that is not mentioned in the above section list is that he also offers practical steps on how to find a new fellowship, should the reader wish to do so.

The book addresses, in detail, the personal angle on every topic. So, Remy speaks to the victims, to their immediate family and friends, and to the congregation as a whole. He even speaks constructively to the perpetrators; how they can identify the problems they have had a hand in, how they can make amends, how they can restore trust – or at least make a go of it. And yet I would not say that Remy issues direct advice as such, but more the principles under which the reader can make their own decisions. For some kinds of abuse survivors, their personal autonomy is one of the things they lost during the abuse, and so he helps them make their own decisions rather than offering advice, which would essentially be telling them what to do – and that’s what they are recovering from. This is a subtle and yet vital principle that is held to in this book.

What I’m saying is that I’m aware of no aspect of spiritual abuse that Remy doesn’t address, with the sole exception of Clergy Sexual Abuse (CSA), which he admits he has no experience of dealing with in the situations he has been in. And to me, that adds even more to the book; because he acknowledges his lack of knowledge and experience in dealing with CSA issues, it makes his writing on the areas he does know about all the more credible.

I have to say that I have never read a book quite like this one, which deals with such a potentially painful and sensitive subject in such a practical and gentle way, making it highly effective. Remy’s love for God and for his congregation, along with his deep compassion for his readers, and other unknown victims of spiritual abuse, shines through brilliantly. You are fully aware that you’re in good hands.

In his acknowledgements, Remy thanks his group of abuse survivors who have provided material, comments and anecdotes, and have also provided feedback for him on how to pitch the tone of various parts of the book. And it shows. It’s almost as if it has been written just for those people – which in a way, it has – but because abuse survivors, even though they each have unique stories to tell, also have a lot of experiences in common, the book identifies with the reader/survivor’s situation in a way that I haven’t seen before. And, as I’ve already said, that makes it highly effective.

If you can only afford one book on how to cope with spiritual abuse and toxic churches, then this is the one to buy. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 Adopted from Lewis Smedes: The Art of Forgiving (Ballantyne Books)
⇧2 ibid, p.47

The Destroyer of Faith

Insights, Stories, Personal, Humour, Asperger's/Autism, Wisdom
A long Essay on Spiritual Abuse and Religious Trauma

TRIGGER WARNING:

This is a personal story involving religious abuse, and contains descriptions of religious abuse, religious trauma, and the techniques used by religious abusers. It may even come across as a bit of a rant, but I think it needs to be said in any case. It’s not for the faint-hearted. You have been warned! 😀

There are certain Christians who abuse other Christians in various ways. These people can so easily wreck and sometimes even destroy others’ faith by their words, by the damage those words cause, by their actions, and by their example.

I quote Oppenheimer above in order to emphasise that this kind of behaviour brings death. It is spiritual abuse, which brings spiritual trauma and kills a person’s spirit within them. Spiritual death[1]. And so, these kinds of Religious people are guilty of bringing that spiritual death to other people – sometimes unwittingly, sometimes as a fit of pique, and sometimes deliberately and maliciously. Sadly, I have seen all three 🙁 Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that they reflect the character of ‘someone’ who is not Father God… indeed, they reflect more the character of the Accuser, who cometh not but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy (Jn 10:10 (KJV))- steal your assurance, kill your joy, and destroy your peace.

But, as always, by their fruits you will know them (Mt 7:16). If their words and actions cause suffering and the ‘steal, kill and destroy’ antics expressed above, you can be sure that that spirit is not from God. And while I realise that faith is a gift from God (Eph 2:8-9), the phenomenon I am describing in this piece is where someone’s God-given faith is so badly desecrated, mauled and smashed by religious abuse – often from a person that the victim should have been able to trust, which is partially why it’s ‘abuse’ – that the person finds it is no longer possible to practise, express, exercise or enact their faith due to the damage that has been done to it. It is rendered lifeless by the abuse endured, partially because the abused person no longer feels safe to express that faith, at least not in the context they live, whether religious or social – or both. That’s why I refer to spiritual abuse as being ‘The Destroyer of Faith’.

In many of my posts, I have railed against Religious people[2] who seem to think it’s their job to police other people’s moral life. Many groups also have people amongst their number who feel free to assume that everyone is subject to their criticism and has to not only listen, but also agree and do something about any points raised, whether or not it’s someone they know and whether or not they have their permission. Certainly, if there is no actual relationship there, then they shouldn’t be doing that.

As a case in point, as my dear friend Derrick Day once said, “If you have a problem with me, call me. If you don’t have my number, then you don’t know me well enough to have a problem with me!”.

Now, granted, you may well offend or injure a complete stranger, in public or in private, and they would be well within their rights to complain to you. ‘Oi! You just trod on my foot!’ or something. And you would hopefully apologise, and that would (again, hopefully) be the end of it. But it’s superficial; there is nothing deep about it, nor is any other action required other than to apologise and maybe pay their medical bills if you injured them. There was no intentionality in it, either malicious or benign; it’s just neutral. I don’t need to expand on this; all of my readers will be familiar with this sort of thing.

However, there are some people, usually Religious people (and some political activists) who demand more. In short, they want blood. They want to know why you did something, what your motivations are, whether or not you are sufficiently contrite (sufficiently, that is, to their satisfaction) and most of all how you are going to make significant lifestyle changes to prevent further occurrences of your wrongdoing. Okay, maybe I’m being a bit hyperbolic, but anyone who has ever received a bollocking from a self-righteous Religious type will know exactly what I’m on about. The bottom line here is that any response to such a complaint is entirely your business, and no-one else’s.

Ten years ago, something like that happened to me. In fact, I wrote some of my first posts on this blog in response to that episode. One such example is the beautiful February 2015 article ‘Confrontation‘, which lays out the sort of approach that a believer, at least, would be advised and indeed expected to adopt, when confronting someone with something that has offended them. Certainly, it must be done in a spirit of restoration and reconciliation, not one of condemnation. No Christian should ever do anything that would cause someone to doubt that God loves them, by whatever means, but especially by lading guilt and condemnation, which can take literally years to throw off, and in some cases the person never recovers[3]. Three articles that may help when it comes to people correcting/judging are here (the ‘Confrontation’ piece referenced above), here and here.

Unfortunately, certain Christians seem to excel at that kind of condemnation, especially when it is inflicted on fellow believers. Maybe that works so well because they know that Christians are especially vulnerable to conscience problems, particularly those who are ‘sin-conscious’ and/or ‘sin-fixated’. Such condemnatory people cause tremendous damage and hurt[4]. While for Jesus it’s true that ‘a bruised reed He will not break; a smoking wick He will not snuff out’ (Isaiah 42:3), many of His followers do not have that same gentleness. As a friend of mine said on Facebook the other day, “Christians are the only ones who go out of their way to make sure that hurting people know they aren’t loved by God”.

Aye, I had to admit to him that, sadly, I’ve seen that first hand. In my case it didn’t work, because I know the truth about myself and about how God sees me, but they did try their best. Ten years ago now, it was.

So, here’s the story, with a bit of background too:

In August, 1999, I began my ‘dark night of the soul‘, where I stopped doing Christian things entirely. The short version of this is that I was being stripped of all the junk that had been hindering my faith for so long; religious requirements that had layered over my simple faith, and other things too. And it lasted for fifteen years. On on Sunday 2nd Feb, 2014, God said to me, ‘Ok lad, it’s time to go back’, so I duly went along with Fiona – and I got thoroughly zapped. Here’s what I posted on Facebook that afternoon: “What a morning. First time voluntarily in a church for fifteen years, and getting thoroughly zapped by God: weeping, laughing, complete acceptance, forgiveness. Wow, wow, wow! Going again tonight hehe”. That divine encounter was simply profound. I had never felt anything like that before, and I later said that I likened it to ‘being born again, again’! Since then, I have known that I would never, ever want to go back to the legalistic, religion-centred faith that I had previously had; it was like becoming a butterfly, having emerged from my fifteen-year chrysalis. My chains had indeed fallen off, and my heart was free!

To continue with the butterfly analogy, the problem with being a butterfly is that, while the butterfly can still speak caterpillar, the caterpillar cannot speak butterfly. It’s like you have a different language. The word ‘Grace’ now actually means something, rather than just something you say at the end of each meeting while holding hands and trying to avoid each other’s eyes, or a short prayer at a meal. Forgiveness is real, ongoing and at the same time permanent. You know that God ‘remember[s] your sin no more’ (Heb 8:12, which quotes Jer 31:34). You know that nothing can snatch you from His hand, nor can you jump! 😉 So that by the time of the story I will tell below, my faith was real, vibrant and living, and my assurance complete, my sonship sure and my attitude to ‘sin’ was one of complete freedom to just leave it behind. My joy, despite Fiona’s illness and prognosis, was full and real; indeed, nothing but real joy would have survived the terrible agonies we were going through as a family due to the illness. And my whole frame of reference had shifted, from one of partial reliance on complying with Law, to one wholly, solely and completely dependent on Grace. That’s why I now speak ‘butterfly’!

In December, 2014, in the face of Fiona’s terminal cancer diagnosis, we renewed our marriage vows in a beautiful service in our local Anglican Church, where we were members at the time[5]. The wedding was awesome and many friends old and new came along to bless us, including even some from our former life in West Yorkshire. You know how with some people you have a ‘life bond’; a friendship where even if you haven’t seen each other for like 20 years or more, somehow you just pick up where you left off and things are just as they were before. Well, friends like that.

One of those friends, Sally[6], told us that she was organising a worship conference in February 2015, where Christians from all over the country could get together to learn more about worship. And she invited us to go. The conference was to be a residential one at a Christian centre somewhere well up-country, quite a way from our home in South Devon. But we decided we wanted to go, so we could get a handle on the latest knowledge about practical Charismatic/Evangelical style worship. So off we went, and me just a year into my new life walking in butterfly freedom 😉 There was me, Fiona, our daughter Ellie, and my best friend at the time, a very practical and down-to-Earth man called Edd; we considered ourselves to be each other’s ‘wingmen’. We attended (what they referred to as) seminars, and took part in a sort of ‘open mic’ evening; we joined in and generally enjoyed it. We didn’t really learn an awful lot, to be honest[7], and the food was pretty dire[8]. We learned, a lot of, quite frankly, not very useful words denoting different aspects of (I think I recall correctly) worship practices of the ancient Israelites, and similar stuff, but to be honest it was pretty pithy and not much of it was of use. On the plus side, we met some amazing people and made some wonderful new friends, with whom we are still in touch nowadays, and we still continue to bless each other. While in some of the seminars, I heard things I didn’t really agree with, I generally went along with it because I know that not everyone believes the same thing, even at an Evangelical retreat. But there was one point – it was so insignificant that I can’t even remember what it was! – where I put up my hand and asked a question. The speaker, a lady whom we’ll call ‘Joanna’, was a bit nonplussed by it, she tried to answer it, and later I spoke to her privately, to make sure that she knew there was nothing personal involved; it was a genuine question. Little did I know that I had become a marked man! Obviously, for Joanna and her fellow speakers, the word ‘conference’ was nothing of the sort; it didn’t involve any two-way at all; we were expected to just sit there and listen. I am a trained Adult Education Tutor (I used to teach basic computing in evening classes at a local college) and I know that people have different learning styles; evidently Joanna didn’t know that. Probably not a teacher, or probably so full of herself that… well I need say no more! But the next day, I raised my hand to ask another question, and the speaker (not Joanna), even though she saw my hand up, quickly averted her eyes and ignored me. It seemed to me that she’d been briefed to watch out for that guy with the Yorkshire accent, because therein lies trouble! 😉 And then, in a later seminar, it was Joanna’s turn to speak again and she said that (and I quote) ‘God can’t do anything without faith as a prerequisite’. Well, that was something I couldn’t really accept, and although I didn’t put my hand up (because I knew I would be ignored), I did put a small post on Facebook that evening:

“I’ve just heard the phrase, ‘God Can’t’. And that at a worship conference, no less. Well, I’m here to say God Can!”

That was it. That was all I put[9].

The next morning, I ran Edd to the local railway station early on, because he had to get back to Devon for some football coaching he was doing that day. I returned in time for breakfast – rubbery sausages, some sort of hard-fried egg with a pale yolk (we have free-range chickens, so we are somewhat spoiled!), Sainsburys Savers beans and the Tesco in-house version of Coco Pops. As I was eating my final bowl of (air quotes) “coco pops”, Sally and Joanna approached the table with facial expressions like those disapproving expressions that used to be worn by Cissie and Ada in the Les Dawson Show. The photo here, of Cissie and Ada[10], does not do Joanna and Sally’s faces justice because they both had tight lips like they’d been sucking lemons, and their heads both held in an identical tilt to the left 😂.

Well, they must have indeed been disapproving expressions, because despite being Autistic and generally unable to read any sort of body language, even I noticed, and Ellie called out ‘This looks like an intervention!’ Displaying no humour whatsoever at Ellie’s brilliant comment, as is usual for the Religious when they are ‘on a mission’, they agreed that it was an ‘intervention’. They wanted to take me to task about my Facebook comment of the previous evening. Well, for me, breakfast is a sacred time, for eating not arguing, so I told them I hadn’t finished my breakfast and I was going to do so first. So they sat and watched (something I can’t stand, being Autistic) while I finished off every last orangey-brown drop of cheapo-chocolate flavoured milk from the “coco pops”. Remember this was at a fully-occupied breakfast table with about another four people there in addition to myself and my family – of course, Edd was on a train back to Devon so I didn’t have my wingman there to watch my ‘six’. Anyway, before they started in on me, I made it clear that I am my own man and that I do not recognise any authority over me, including theirs, and they agreed with that on the surface, probably just to get their own way. But in the presence of all these people, in full violation of any Biblical principle about confronting people (Mt 18:15-20) – they made up their own rules as they went along – they proceeded to lambast me verbally about my post, concluding that it was ‘all over the World Wide Web'[11], this being concluded by Joanna’s contemptuous chucking of Sally’s phone (which she had been brandishing) on to the table. Accompanied not only by the obligatory sniff, but also by a demand that I take down the comment. Sally had shown Joanna on her phone what she’d seen on my Facebook feed, and Joanna had gone straight on the warpath. They’d clearly jumped straight to their own conclusions and given it no thought before coming to administer me a bollocking! In addition, she also told me that I had done ‘nothing but contradict her since [I’d] been there’, which is a bit of an exaggeration as I’d only asked one question, and made sure afterwards that we were ‘all good’. Hardly the actions of a disruptive person. And this all being done to a chap who has had only a year to come to to terms with having his faith restored in quite a surprising way, in the presence of my daughter who was just beginning to flourish as a young Christian girl, and my lovely Fiona who had a terminal cancer diagnosis. All these factors; those two women knew about them all. How callous is that? How selfish? I refused to take the comment down, mainly out of principle, because I detest the suppression of free speech just because someone doesn’t like what is written. Fiona was stricken and explained that I have Asperger’s Syndrome, and that most likely I would eventually see their point of view and take the comment down. But they were having none of it. Joanna even said, literally through gritted teeth, that if I was Autistic then they could pray for me![12] I mean, I would probably have got turned into a toad or something! Honestly, words cannot express the depths of the disgust that this episode engendered in me. Needless to say, we returned home that day, missing out on the rest of that last day of the conference – not that we’d have learned much, I’m convinced. Just as the first seminar was being set up – Sally was going to be teaching on that one, so I am sort of sorry I missed it – Fiona went in to see her and to give her a hug; she must have known that this was the last time they would ever see each other and Fiona wasn’t the sort of person who would leave something like that up in the air. But we left. My peace damaged, my mind in a turmoil, my ladies gutted on my behalf. But once the dust had settled, I learned a lot from it as I will describe below. To be honest, I don’t think, now, that Sally intended for Joanna to go off on one like that; I think she was just hurt and shared it with Joanna to share her burden. And Joanna decided to take her already – existing dislike for me (for being trouble enough to listen carefully to what she was teaching and actually ask a question!) into a public shaming event. Shame it tarnished her own reputation more; those around the table got to see just how toxic she was. The old phrase ‘that says a lot more about them than it does about you’ was particularly apropos there! Anyway, I did actually take the post down, within a day in fact, because my attitude was that if it was hurting someone, then it shouldn’t be there, and I messaged Joanna to let her know, at which point she promptly blocked me with no reply. Petty and ungrateful, much. A relevant point here is that while a person may well feel free to take someone to task about something they don’t like, the response to the criticism is always in the hands of the one being criticised. Someone may well feel free to criticise my actions, but they don’t get to dictate my actions. This is a principle that all members of medium- to high-control groups could do with knowing.

But back to the story. It might not seem like much, but for an Autistic person to be publicly humiliated like that – indeed for anyone to have that happen to them! – it’s pretty bad. For someone who is an innocent, clean, joy-filled and free Christian believer acting in good faith – it wasn’t even a bad comment! – to be attacked like that. For a new believer to have to see something that ugly. For a dying lady to have to see the husband she adores being treated like that. That – is disgraceful. And sadly it’s not untypical of religious people to do things like that.

The next few paragraphs may seem a bit random or confused; a bit ‘all over the place’, but please see it as a mosaic of different impressions and realisations, also some expressions of reality, from the fall-out from that event. I have left them like this in order to simulate, in some small measure, the disjointed thinking and shock and damage effect of what it’s like when something like this happens.

I didn’t actually hold anything against the women in the story, and I still don’t. I forgave them, as you can see from the article I wrote only a few days later. I have not published the details of what happened until now; I have certainly not named-and-shamed. I have thought in depth about when – or even whether – to publish this article, or even to write it. Indeed, I am writing it only a few days before it will be published. I have waited on this for ten years. So, it is obvious that it is not coming from a place of either unforgiveness nor bitterness. I am still good friends with Sally[13]. I’m not saying that Joanna is the Destroyer of Faith, nor am I saying that she is a Destroyer of Faith. What I am saying, though, is that her actions are an example of the sort of behaviour that is the Destroyer of Faith.

I wanted to publish the story because I know that this is not an isolated incident. It may well be for Joanna, of course (although I doubt it; usually people who do this kind of thing already have a habit of it), but still, people need to know that this sort of thing goes on in churches, especially those where the ‘authority’ of leadership – even if they are ‘only’ conference speakers – is held as a licence to abuse people. Joanna’s husband is in the leadership team of Sally and Joanna’s church, so she’s probably seen as some sort of ‘untouchable’. The Evangelical idea of ‘do not touch the Lord’s anointed’ is rife in churches like theirs – although their pastor is one of the kindest, gentlest men I have ever met (he’s not Joanna’s husband). I wonder if he knows that stuff like this goes on among his flock?

I understand that my post was received as hurtful, for which I apologised at the time, and I almost – but not quite – understand why. It was their ‘baby’; they had put a lot of work into the conference (although sadly the other organisers hadn’t put much money into the food budget 🤣 ) and they were offended by my post. That said, my post was more of a general comment anyway, it was not targeted against anyone (I don’t do things like that) and it was posted in all innocence.  It wasn’t even about the conference; it was about something that someone said. And if it was that hurtful, why did Sally have to share the hurt even further, except to cause trouble? Why didn’t she come to me, one-on-one? No-one could tell from the post where I was, nor whose worship conference I was at. Part of being Autistic is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for the Autistic person to see things from others’ points of view, especially when it’s all so convoluted, inferred and second-guessed. This is partly why I stay away from people in general, and occurrences like this only serve to reinforce that attitude as being the correct one in my case.

Leading on from the thing about the conference being their ‘baby’, yes – I get that. But I think that linking my comment about faith with the quality (or otherwise) of the conference was really taking themselves a bit too too seriously. This is a classic example of offence being taken rather than given, as I have shared in other posts. When someone is told that offence was not intended, but they still insist on receiving that offence, then that’s a sure sign that the problem is with them, not with the comment or its creator.

As an illustration of how this incident improved the way I approach life, I wrote, in this article, the following, very observant, comment, which references the events in this story:

“Interestingly, about a year ago I was once again subjected to an (uninvited) barrage of accusations/doctrinal correction/call it what you will, from a ‘non-free Christian’, and it made me realise, while in the process of categorically rejecting that person’s diatribe, just how far I have come in my freedom. I never want to go back to that life. My ‘detoxification’[14], as it were, has released me into entirely new freedoms to love people of different views without judging them or trying to change them. And that, to me, is real freedom!”

And now a thought about how some Christians seem to think that they hold some sort of power over others. These Christians could be either leadership, their relatives (‘Elders’ wives’, as it were) or others who feel they have something to say and that they are too important to leave it unsaid. Remember that I stated clearly (after I’d eaten my “coco pops”!) that I did not consider myself ‘under’ Joanna’s authority in any way, which, of course, she then proceeded to ignore. At least from her side, anyway; it didn’t affect the way in which I received the criticism. I still rejected it, and her authority along with it.

Anyway, these kinds of abusive people mis-use the faith position of the victim in order to facilitate their attack. In other words, they know that a fellow believer is likely to have sufficient conscience and gentle heart to listen to criticism, whether that’s in the interest of maintaining harmonious relationships, wanting to ‘keep short accounts with God'[15]or any other good and noble reason[16], and this makes the victim open and pliable for what comes next. Their defences are down; why would they want to raise their defences against a fellow member of the Church family? Until it hits them, of course, but by that time the damage is done.

High-control church leadership invariably go on about people making themselves ‘vulnerable’, citing it as being a ‘softening of the heart’ so that Jesus can change it. There was even a Graham Kendrick song some decades ago, called ‘soften my heart’ which espoused that principle. While the sentiments behind a favourable response to this softening idea is seen as admirable, and indeed it can help some people to become more compassionate, it has two problems. Firstly, such a softening should and must only occur under the prompting and direction of the Holy Spirit, and not from a human, whether or not it’s set to music 😉 And it’s usually an unconscious thing; I find that all of a sudden I have reacted to a need in a way I wouldn’t have done before, and I never noticed that my attitudes had changed. That’s how the Spirit works. Secondly, it opens up the believer to abuse; specifically, abuse aimed at the vulnerability of that softened heart. Abusive leaders take full advantage of that, and this was what happened in Joanna’s case with me. And that’s partially why it hurt so much. Although in my case, the main thing was what it did to Fiona; the poor girl was devastated. As was Ellie. ‘Dad, you’ve come so far, and she goes and does that to you’. And she was right. I would also add that these abusive leaders don’t necessarily consciously realise that it’s the ‘softened heart’ they are targeting; they just know that it works. Or at least it does with people who submit to them, at any rate. I cope with the ‘softened heart’ concept in my own way. My heart is indeed soft; I have deep compassion for, well, everyone, including all life, really – animals, plants and so on. But I also have an armoured box, which granted does remain open most of the time, but it stands always ready to snap shut on the approach of nasty people. That’s how I defend; your method may vary.

And it really is time for these destructive people to learn how to respect boundaries. Even for those visiting ‘evangelists’ on my doorstep a couple of weeks ago; they had crossed a boundary. They had knocked on my door despite the clear presence of signs on the door (and right next to the doorbell, too!) that said ‘No Cold Callers’. I wrote to the church a few days later (of course, I am still awaiting a response at the time of writing!)[17] and said this:

“No-one is going to change their mind about not wanting to be disturbed just because it’s religious people doing the disturbing, nor are they likely to want to attend your church if this is how badly people’s boundaries are respected”.

The question of boundaries is indeed an important one. For example, and at the risk of seeming to behave like them!, only in a church will someone ask you a question about sexual matters. They love it. They will even feel free to ask a couple if they are sleeping together! In our pre-marriage ‘counselling’ sessions, Fiona and I were asked straight up if we had ‘misbehaved’ together. I kid you not. No doubt the Elders got some sort of cheap thrills out of it; Fiona was always absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. But the fact remains that they crossed a boundary in asking us that. Christians do so love to talk about sexual matters, all in ‘love’ of course, and ‘strictly as a matter of spiritual healthiness’. I do think it gives them a cheap little frisson of forbidden sexual thrill. But in what world is it ever acceptable to ask someone a question like that? And even more, to expect an honest answer, which in some groups could earn you instant punishment as a reward for your openness? No way!

The take-home message for that is this: I can see absolutely no reason at all to ‘open oneself up’ to the potential of abuse by lowering one’s defences and making oneself vulnerable. [18]. I share this recommendation so as to protect you, my gentle reader, from making the same mistake. There is absolutely no need to make yourself vulnerable to anyone outside your family.

Let’s put that another way: Churches are not family, no matter how much they claim to be. Blood is definitely thicker than water. When I left my church in Leeds, only a very few people from that church maintained contact with us; those who really loved us. Mark and Alison (who greatly helped us in our move south, although I won’t say how because it would embarrass them), Richard and Elizabeth, Chris and Dawn. That’s about it. Not the Church Elders; you know, the men who used to conclude their Elders’ Meetings with a Chinese takeaway paid for with church funds, when I and my family were living on the breadline and tithing to the hilt. The Elders who told me that I couldn’t buy the church synthesiser to go to Devon with me, because how would they find someone who would know how to buy another?[19] Please don’t interpet this prose as a complaining diatribe, nor as bitterness. Like I said, I’m well past all that. But maybe see it as a warning that you simply cannot trust church leadership anywhere near as much as they would tell you that you can. As they’d be the first to tell you (after saying ‘Do not touch the Lord’s Anointed!, of course!’), they are only human. But it further reinforces my belief that the only reason why they put up with me in that church was because I was just so damn good at leading worship 😀 They weren’t bothered about me as a person.

This is encapsulated perfectly in the following quote from the Irish writer-poet, Dylan Morrison:

“Religious and spiritual movements both tend to come and go, with only Divine Presence remaining constant.
“May I respectfully make a suggestion, one born out of personal experience.
“Don’t pour your whole identity into a movement, no matter what the brand.
“Why not?
“Well, it all usually ends up in tears, disillusionment and deep confusion.
Best to open up one’s heart to the One without change, I reckon”.

– Dylan Morrison

Now, that says it all.

Another factor is the Religious spirit. I go into some detail about that in this article, but for now let’s just say that, as I have already mentioned, some Christians take themselves far too seriously, and that is often (though by no means always!) due to the Religious spirit[20] Here are a few quotations where the lightness and levity of being a free believer are contrasted with the load of being under the religious yoke:

“The Religious of Jesus’ day complained that He was a glutton and a drunkard. Sounds like He was enjoying life pretty much to the full, while at the same time preaching how much God loved people. To me, what they found offensive was that someone could take life so lightly while at the same time taking God so seriously. Religion can’t cope with that”. – Me

“…pride [in this case, pride engendered as part of the effects of the Religious spirit – Ed] cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man “falls” into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Maybe people should more often than not just [accept what the Bible says] and shake the dust off and leave when their message is not being received? According to the Bible, saying nothing is actually a good thing and shows maturity and wisdom. But alas… They probably won’t, because such is the religious spirit[21]. It always has to be right and always has to get the last word, or it will eat them up inside. Their comments will never seem to be about correcting for love’s sake, but will more than likely seem to be about correcting because nobody is as right as they are.” – Tim

“In general, I’ve found that people who are very legalistic try very hard to recruit others to their ranks. My opinion is that the more insecure one is in what one believes, the more that person will need the validation of others, which is often gained by getting others to join them and by refusing to even hear any other views. I suspect they’re also jealous of those who’ve found freedom by not having to beat themselves over the head daily with guilt and shame and “laws”. Jesus made it clear he didn’t / doesn’t appreciate spiritual enforcers, those who think they’ve got such a grip on righteousness that they are hammers, and everyone who doesn’t agree with them exactly is a nail that needs to be hammered.” – Jack B

And yet, Jesus wants even those with the Religious spirit to loosen up and actually enjoy life with Him. Of course He does. Listen to this:

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” – Mt 11:28-30 (Message)

And He meant it, too. For so many Christians, their faith walk is one under the heavy load of religious burdens. My life changed when I shed those burdens and walked free.

“The enemy of the Truth does his best work through the religious folks. He keeps them sin conscious while convincing them that they are Christ conscious. They are the first to throw stones, point out specks and elevate the Bible to the level of an idol. But thanks be unto God that He will bring them too into a realization of Himself through Christ in due course of time. For now ya just gotta love them. They can’t help their blindness.” – C Andrew May

I sincerely hope that this happens, especially to Joanna. Wouldn’t that be great? 😀

Another point is that who would want to go to a church, any church, where it is expected that you open yourself up to this sort of thing? It’s actually the main reason why I’m writing this essay – in order to warn people of what can happen if someone overcommits or overexposes themselves in this sort of environment. Ok, so I am putting people off going. I’d rather that than have them come to harm, and in any case the churches have brought it on themselves.

No, if you want to go to  a church, go to a simple, quiet little CofE church or something, sing the hymns, feel the presence of God (after all, that’s the whole point!) and leave after the service, or after coffee if you’re feeling brave. Don’t let them rope you into anything. And don’t feel you have to put anything in the collection plate, if they have one. You don’t have to tell anyone your ‘doctrinal position’ on matters like Hell, salvation or LGBTQ+ issues. If you feel judged at any point, get out and don’t go back. And never, ever ‘hang on in there’ for just a little bit longer hoping that things will improve, because they just won’t. It might also be an idea if you don’t get drawn in to a political discussion! If you have special talents, abilities or Autistic superpowers, don’t tell anyone. If you’re gay, definitely don’t tell anyone. If anyone asks you about anything sexual (and believe it or not, they might!), find the pastor and report them to him/her. And then leave. Yes, if you go alone, people might ask if you’re married. If you go with a member of the ‘opposite sex’ (and yes I’m aware that this is a ‘problematic’ concept nowadays!), keep your relationship status secret. Keep ’em guessing!  If you go with a member of the same sex, don’t entertain any questions about anything to do with your sexuality. And then report them to the pastor. Yes, there are sick Christians who do indeed ask questions on matters like that…how can that ever be considered normal?? But they do. And then they gossip about you.

Despite all this, I would say – and not even grudgingly! – that Christianity in general does produce an awful lot of good stuff. There’s social initiatives, there’s soup kitchens, there’s programmes to help the poor, there’s all the good things that Christianity has done down the ages like initiating national education, abolishing the slave trade, establishing hospitals, and many more things. There’s some really good worship music, that I still find a real blessing (I have a Christ for the Nations playlist playing as I type this, despite them being a highly legalistic organisation[22]) I get all that. And to be fair, I actually think that Christianity does more good than it does harm, for all its faults. But what I’m doing here is to give my readers a general feel for the sorts of nastiness that can befall someone who gets involved in any medium- to high-control, culty, church where certain of its members seem to think it’s ok to interfere in other members’ lives, and to castigate complete strangers just because they feel like it. And I hope I am also helping their potential victims to gain a real and healthy wariness when considering membership of such a group. The thing is, they will inculcate you gradually, so that you don’t notice what they’re doing. One little thing you don’t like here, but don’t call it out, leads to another one there, down the line, where you don’t call that out either and, little by little, they’ve got you. And, sooner or later, I guarantee that someone will be nasty to you; you can absolutely count on it. I think that my shock on being confronted by Joanna was so great because I hadn’t seen it for a long time; she assumed I’d still be susceptible to that kind of thing (because Sally had told her some of my former background, back before I discovered Grace) and she came in with that assumption. And of course it no longer washed with me, whereas maybe it would have done before. Actually, even then, I would likely have kicked back. I was never that badly inculcated. But it made me remember just how bad it is in Evangelical churches for this sort of thing, and reminded me of the freedom I really have by not being part of one. The Anglican church I was part of at the time didn’t have that sort of thing going on (dunno why!) and was only nominally Evangelical anyway (maybe that’s why!)

If you’re already a believer and thinking of joining such a church, or any church for that matter, be sensitive to what God is calling you do do, if anything, and don’t go beyond that. If, during the after-service coffee, someone wants to rope you into something, go and find someone else to talk to. Watch especially for the old lady in the tweed skirt; it’s her job to get complete strangers to bake cakes for after next week’s service 🤣 I kid you not; the first time we went into our ‘new’ Evangelical church in August 1995, there she was, and that was what she did!

Someone wrote a comment to me recently, saying, “Ain’t no hate like Christian love!”, and in a sense, he’s right. While I have a dear friend in Northern Ireland who is currently experiencing the real love of God expressed through a church congregation, it is a sad fact that such congregations are few and far between. Much more common are groups where the love of Christ has gone cold, and all that is left is the cold, shrivelled neutron star (what’s left of a powerful supergiant star, once its fuel runs out) of a church cinder that has had its day, it’s just going on to try and recapture memories of its past glories, and it’s about time it closed. It’s interesting that folks in such remnant congregations generally have only sin-policing and dislike of ‘worldly’ systems as their common/uniting factors, rather than uniting in love and letting that love leak out into their community. In a sense, they are closed systems with no new life. Maybe that’s why their fuel has run out.

For further help, let me say that there are many books out there on recovering from spiritual and religious abuse, some better than others. Search for them on Amazon or wherever, and read the reviews too. Some of the reviewers of a given book may say that although they found the book helpful, there were bits they didn’t like. As always, with anything like this, when you read a book, feel free to eat the meat and spit out the bones. Keep what is useful; discard what is not.

While this attack and the whole incident did shock me, and it rattled me, and gave me what we used to call ‘a bit of a clattering’, it did not kill my faith. Fortunately for me, my roots in Jesus are so deep that this did not damage my faith in the slightest; in fact it made it even stronger because it is in adversity that our faith is tested – not tested by God, Who doesn’t need to test it (He knows all about it already), but tested by the circumstances so that we can see for real how our faith stands in adverse circumstances. However, I did find that the unjust and irrational nature of the attack did offend my Autistic sense of justice; injustice really rankles with me, and I have tremendous difficulty coping with irrationality, particularly from humans. But my faith is based on actual, historical events that happened in my own life which have given me foundational security in my faith. Two of those events (there are more) are given here and here; I even have the dates and times for them, they had such a profound effect. Furthermore, because I am a ‘butterfly'(see above!), the best (or I suppose you could say ‘worst’) efforts of the caterpillars do not reach me on a faith level anymore, because I live my faith at a level they cannot even imagine. I don’t want that to sound boastful – although in some ways I’m not bothered if it does! – but this is the truth. My faith now works at a level that is so far beyond what it was like before my ‘rebirth’, that it bears little resemblance to it. In a way, my former faith was in two dimensions; my new life is in three dimensions. It is as different from my former life as a cube is to a square – the same basic shape, but with real substance. Or, in keeping with the theme of my blog, it’s like being able to fly, and work in three dimensions, as opposed to the two dimensions to which a mere ground-dweller is restricted. Such is the effect of Grace on a believer’s life. I would moderate that with the following two caveats, though:

“Once you say ‘higher level’ (regarding one’s level of spirituality), you appeal to the ego, and all the wrong instincts in people.”

-Fr. Richard Rohr

“When you begin to refer to where you’re at on your journey as a “deeper place,” “higher level,” “another dimension,” or some other such thing, you create a space where pride, arrogance, and superiority can thrive in the name of spirituality. No, we’re journeying, and on this journey, mountains are laid low, and valleys exalted. Every place is an equal place for the sincere, it’s just that we are never all in the same place at the same time, and tend to assume wherever we’re at is the place to be.

“The place to be is wherever you are”.

-Jeff Turner

I still fully agree with those two quotes. But how else can I express it, that which has become a reality to me? Except just to say that I am aware of no pride or superiority in my thinking; it’s just the way things are. I am stating facts, not putting myself on a pedestal. I suppose that at the end of the day, I am just expressing why the comments of the ‘caterpillars’ do not affect the life of the ‘butterfly’, and why they did not in this case (and they certainly can’t make me into a caterpillar again!) It’s that they don’t understand; indeed they cannot understand. Until you have seen Grace, you can’t understand it. But once you have seen it, you can see nothing else, it is that life-changing.

For those whose faith does get badly damaged, though, there is still good that can come of it. As you will have seen when reading this essay (assuming you haven’t fallen asleep, that is), you can learn so much, just as I have done. And setbacks in your faith walk can be made into strengths as you discard old beliefs and ‘faith positions’, and learn modified ones. This is a part of the ‘Stages of Faith‘, which few Christians know about, but which is what growth in Christ actually looks like. Take a look at my series on spiritual growth; while Christians do tell their congregants that growing into Christ is important, and indeed is one of the objectives of the Christian faith, most of them do not know what this actually looks like, much less do they teach it in any detail. And even by reading this piece, you have put your experiences into a wider context, which will definitely help you from this point onwards. Let Jesus lead you into Grace; read this blog and search for all the teaching on Grace. If you want to find it in the Bible, begin with Paul’s Letter to the Galatians and take it from there.

I hope this has been helpful.

Grace and Peace to you all.

Sorry there’s so many footnotes – more in fact than in any other piece I have written. It’s just that in this post, there are so many side issues that needed to be explained, but without breaking the flow of the main piece. Still, I suppose that’s what footnotes are for… 😉

 

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 In this piece, I am describing a different ‘spiritual death’ than that espoused in Evangelical doctrine, which holds that ‘spiritual death’ is what happened to Adam and Eve in the garden. Although God ‘clearly said’ that when you eat the fruit, you will surely die (Gen 2:17), they obviously did not die, else humanity would not exist, if indeed they were the ancestors of all humanity. And so, they invented the term ‘spiritual death’ in order to make that ‘death’ that God warned about into something we can’t see, so that it can be neither proved nor disproved. Clever, eh? Just tack the word ‘spiritual’ on the front and that explains the whole thing without actually explaining anything. In this present case, though, ‘spiritual death’ means the death or extreme (death-like) damage inflicted on a person’s spirit by religious abuse.
⇧2 I define Religion as being the concept of humans trying to please, appease or otherwise placate ‘the gods’ (including the God of the Bible) so that said humans will not be subject to those gods’ wrath, whatever form that wrath may take – volcanoes, famine, flood, going to Hell, or even just plain and simple ‘bad luck’. Usually, Religion involves performance of some kind: doing rituals, magic spells, sacrifices, obeying rules either written or tacitly inferred. Religious people are people who feel that this ‘doing stuff’ is necessary in order for them to be able to approach God/the gods. Personally, I think that’s just a modern form of superstition.
⇧3 Because I am irrepressible, though, I’m still going to sprinkle a lot of my usual low-key humour through this piece 😜
⇧4 The other thing, of course, is that if their target is not a ‘Christian’, nor indeed anyone else who is expected to just behave themselves, and lie back and take such abuse, then their intended victim will likely just tell them to go and get stuffed. Some more liberated Christians might even do the same, myself included. This suggests to me that these abusers only go for the easier targets; those who will not bite back for fear of appearing ‘less Christian’ to others around them. This makes the abusers also bullies, then, in that they are attacking people they see as weak. Can’t be doing with bullies, not at all.
⇧5 Not long after Fiona’s funeral, and just as our Vicar, Mark, moved on to pastures new, I stopped going to the church. There was no animosity, nor did I leave under a cloud; indeed, I am still friends with those dear people. But our house group had ‘ceased trading’ (the leaders felt they were not called to lead it any more) and I just felt that this was the end of that particular season in my life. As my regular readers will know, I do what I see the Father doing (John 5:19) and this gentle breakaway was indeed what He was doing at the time. So I went with it.
⇧6 Not her real name of course; names have been changed to protect yada yada yada and all that
⇧7 Apart from me learning that Evangelicalism hadn’t changed at all in all the time I had been ‘out’, and the worst parts of it were just as bad as ever, as I was to discover all too soon – in spades!
⇧8 Being a Christian conference, the food was most likely provided by the lowest bidder. People familiar with the ‘generosity’ of Christian organisations will know exactly what I’m talking about. Legend has it that when a ‘sinner’ goes to Hell, they will have to pay for their own handbasket because there’s no way the church will cough up for it 😉
⇧9 Edd said later that he was convinced that God didn’t need anyone’s faith to help Him when He made everything!
⇧10 As played by the late genius comedians Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough.
⇧11 Yeah right. My Facebook profile is visible only to my actual FB friends, so no-one else would have seen the comment outside of that circle anyway
⇧12 Like being Autistic is an illness that needs to be cured!!
⇧13 At least, maybe not after she reads this, if she ever sees it. ‘Sally’, if you want to talk about it, you know where I am!
⇧14 That is, my ‘dark night’ followed by my ‘rebirth’
⇧15 Keeping short accounts with God is a peculiarly Evangelical concept (although it has likely been pirated by other denominations too; that’s what religion does) that assumes that every. single. ‘sin’. has to be confessed, individually and specifically, in order for that ‘sin’ to be forgiven. The concept is based on a mis-reading, misinterpretation and/or misapplication of the verse in 1 John 1:9, which says that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness”. As always with this sort of thing, the concept is, and has been, passed down from generation to generation of Christians without anyone (in that group at least) questioning it or challenging it. They just believe it because they’ve been told it. And it stands in complete contradiction to the other verse in Heb 8:12, which quotes Jer 31:34, which says, “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more”. When you really think about it, their ‘short accounts’ concept means that just. one. ‘sin’. in the final second of your life means that you will not be forgiven, because you won’t have had chance to ‘confess’ that ‘sin’. So, say you see someone point a pistol at you and in your mind you think ‘You b@stard!’, then that’s it. You used that ‘cuss word’, even though it was only in your head! You never got the chance to ask for forgiveness. You’re toast. What a stupid concept that is!
⇧16 Or even that they don’t want to argue or get angry, because then they would definitely be ‘seen as’ being in the wrong, and they’d be judged and criticised for that too; for simply defending themselves vehemently, and which the abuser has jolly well asked for. In other words, Christians are, or want to be seen as, ‘too nice’ to bite back. This is a tactic which many abusers rely on to avert any come-back. And that’s absolutely disgusting.
⇧17 This clearly demonstrates that, while they expect others to be answerable to them, they do not feel answerable to others! – [Edit]: Actually, I did later get a reply, which, to be completely fair to them, did include an apology!
⇧18 If I use the first-person pronoun euphemism ‘one’ any more, I’m going to start sounding like a member of the Royal Family, so I apologise.
⇧19 The synthesiser disappeared sometime after that; in fact it was at this up-country conference that I heard (from the lady who had taken over from me in the Musical Director’s role in the church) that it had disappeared. Stolen, then!
⇧20 I don’t really care whether that spirit is one of a type of actual ontological beings, or whether it’s simply the way the human mind works when damaged by Religion (I won’t go into details on that) –  still the ‘manifestation’ is the same.
⇧21 See the fourth bullet point in my article here for more on what a ‘Religious spirit’ looks like
⇧22 I have a friend who was expelled from Christ for the Nations because of a certain ‘sin’ he was struggling with. He was expelled because he couldn’t defeat it; all he would have had to do would have been to keep quiet about it, and he’d have been fine. God knew his heart anyway. But, because of his honesty, they penalised him. That’s disgraceful.