Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Voicelessness and Emotional Survival => Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board => Topic started by: finding peace on November 13, 2010, 01:35:04 AM
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To Mud and CB, and et al.,
I wanted to thank you but it didn’t feel right posting on the other thread – if you don’t want to respond – no pressure – I just didn’t feel right not responding.
Thank you Mud – regarding your response.
I have had a lot of problems with organized religion in my life – my father was a deacon in his church and yet what he did at home was in such contrast with what I read in the bible. I had a very hard time reconciling this as a child. He went to church to be someone instead of learning precepts to follow.
I love proverbs – so very much wisdom to be found there.
I sometimes wonder if it is a genetic/biologic predisposition to respond out of pain/hurt with anger; or, if this is learned behaviour – may be a combination of both…
Biologically it would make sense. Animals do this. My father had a dog when he was a kid. The dog was hit by a car and subsequently died. My father, at a very young age, ran out to the street to help his dog, and before he died, the dog bit him.
The dog’s name was Buster. (I think back on my F, and wonder why he would have named his dog Buster – buster of false truth, buster through pain, my myth buster…)
He never forgave the dog for biting him.
I don’t know what it is like in other homes, but in my house I could never respond by simply stating “that hurt” – If I’d done that, I’d have been chewed up and spit out sideways.
My Foo’s family motto was to show no pain – and I believe that instead of pain, it came out sideways as anger.
There was so much anger in that house.
I am leaning towards a biologic predisposition towards this, but it is hard for me to tell since I wasn’t raised with anything different.
CB – I don’t know if you have any idea of how much your posts and the strength you have shown in them has helped me. You have changed my life for the better for posting here. Thank you – so much. I’ve missed you too. I am glad to see you are posting again.
Now, if we could only get Carolyn, teartracks (where are you – I hope you are ok!), cats paw, Lupita, gaining strength ... and so many more I am missing (Kelly, I would really like to hear from you, I am worried about you …) - so much wisdom all have to offer.
Love Peace
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I have had a lot of problems with organized religion in my life
Who hasn't?
Organized religion nailed Jesus to a cross.
I don't follow Christ to belong to an organization, but rather to belong to the kingdom of God.
mud
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Hi fp,
teartracks is alive and well, but have limited puter access for most of the last two months.
tt
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Hi fp,
I've been a Christian for a very long time, yet I've never identified/joined/desired to be identified with organized religion. I do go to a church which from the outside appears as a mainline denominationa/organized religion bent and indeed it is. I learn a lot there. I echo what Mud said about people despising organized religion and the part about being a part of the kingdom of God. In the present global atmosphere, I think I despise anything (or close to it] that smacks of organized anything. But that's just me. Skeptical - always.
More later,
tt
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Hey FP,
So close to my heart. Ah, purgatory with pictures to go along. I was baptized catholic and attened catholic school. I
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sorry did it again...
I remember the pictures. They were of a gloomy color either grey and white or soft black and white. There was a bench to the right with people sitting on it. There was a woman holding her baby (baby looked happy)woman did not. A man looking really sad (and skinney faced)
an old woman and a child about 4 with a stripped shirt on. I do remember thinking, nah, I don't believe this. I don't care what they say (God is Good). I was only about 7. So I was baptized catholic but I didn't believe all they taught me. Nope not my God. To tell you the truth I don't remember much. I do remember another picture of people in hell (flames and all).
The people who taught at my school (not all) but many were well (disordered) mentally abusive, physical, taught through fear,humilation,
and I hated it there and hated most of them. So I pretty much (was just there) and looking forward to the day...I was out.
And I left the church the same time I left the school.
So zip on through......
I give birth to my first child and she is not here long on this earth. I freak out because I'm afraid she will die before she is baptized.
I questioned (my own belief's) by what I was taught ...purgatory. She might not go to heaven right away.
The whole time I'm screaming to get a priest. She needs one now. There is no time to wait. What if I was wrong. I want her to make it to heaven. It took a long time but she did get baptized. I remember the nurse coming to me and saying your baby has been baptized.
And I shut down.
When I had my 2nd child I went to classes. They spoke about how a child will go directly to heaven up until about the age of 3 without being baptized and I stopped the class. I was angry. I told them everything I had felt and how I felt at that very moment. I thought about the people who had lost a child, as I did, when they still believed children/babies went to purgatory. Some parents went to their deaths (in my mother's time) thinking thier child didn't make it to heaven right away. I just can't imagine how they felt.
And now you say...oops! ....yeah they do? You wanted me to believe everything you taught and you questioned your own belief's, teachings? They were very understanding and just let me roll on.
But I still do have catholic guilt....you know I want to look around...as I type (thinking I'm gonna be struck dead) don't get mad God but ....
and I don't really think I'm going to be struck dead but it feels like...AND WHO ARE YOU TO QUESTION THE ALMIGHTY OZ! I mean that is my thinking about when and how I was taught.
So if I would have kept up with the church I would have known they changed thier thinkiing but I did not. I do think of other's who in their time thought thier children went to purgatory though.
And now I believe in God but my God is a little bit of everyone's beliefs..and my belief's at 7 weren't all wrong (were they).
Love
Deb
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Wait it's limbo where unbaptized babies and young children go. They did away with Limbo.
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It's the spiritual I'm interested in.
The organzied part is for my children.
Lighter
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Hi FP,
Thank you and big hugs for you. Don't be worried I wanted to talk about it. I am alright.
The Pope is set to abolish the concept of Limbo, overturning a belief held by Roman Catholics since the Middle Ages. He is on record as saying that Limbo has no place in modern Catholicism. In 1984, he told Vittorio Messori, the Catholic author, that Limbo had "never been a definitive truth of the faith". He said: "Personally, I would let it drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis."
All those souls have always went to heaven. 1984 is also the year my 1st child was born and died. I'm not sure but I believe in 2005 it was abolished but I'm not sure.
Love
Deb
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Hi Finding Peace,
It is so nice to see your posting here. I am a devout Catholic, I attend Mass daily, pray the Rosary and love the Catholic church and ALL it teaches. I write this with much respect and consideration to those here who posted about their pain and struggles with the Catholic faith's teachings on Purgatory as well as just the struggle with organized religion, a struggle I know all too well myself.
This morning I was reading a bit of George MacDonald. I have loved him and his writings, although he was not a Catholic.
Here are some:
God is the Father welcoming his prodigal children home not just their creator or judge. Whether we realise it or not we are all on a road leading back to him. He is our Home. MacDonald believed that people were either responding to God or turning away from him . For MacDonald there was no absolute need for a moment of conversion as traditionally understood. We are all at different stages on the journey - a journey that has its beginning and end in God.
Spiritual awakening is a process of organic growth rather than a sudden discontinuity with the past. The soul is like a young plant reaching out to the light that illuminates every person whether Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or atheist. Conversion is the moment of perception, illumination and understanding. As we have seen it does not represent a radical new departure but a sudden spurt of growth as the light penetrates our inner being.
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Here is some more that seems to fit in here with the postings in this thread:
MacDonald recognised that truth could be separated into scientific truth and poetic truth (cf. C. S. Lewis' treatment of Myth). He held firmly to the literal truth of the resurrection and the miracles of Christ which he regarded as evidences of the higher law of love.
He followed Plato in thinking that evil was. to a large extent, a result of deprivation and not depravation. Human beings sinned because they did not see the truth clearly, and to have a clear vision of God would mean that they would be so overwhelmed by his love, that all wrongdoing would be immediately set aside. Seeing right was the beginning of acting right, and Christ was the clearest picture of God given to humankind.
He rejected totally the doctrine of penal substitution as put forward by Calvin which argues that Christ has taken the place of sinners and is punished in their place recognising that in turn it raised serious questions about the character and nature of God. Instead he argued that Christ had come to save people from their sins, and not from the punishment of their sins. The problem was not the need to appease a wrathful God but the disease of sin itself.
Salvation is a process of evolution toward Christ-likeness. We are marred by the Self. Sin is choosing not to obey and conform to the will of the Father in response to which God must send his consuming fire to burn the evil out of us.
"The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear." (Unspoken Sermons 1, p44).
MacDonald would accept no compromise with sin but saw evil as a discord that will eventually be brought into harmony with God when the whole of creation is reunited with him.
Hell is not a place of punishment but a place of purification to prepare one to enter God's presence. True repentance, however, is essential.
"All pains, indeed, and all sorrows, all demons, yea, and all sins themselves, under the suffering care of the highest minister, are but the ministers of truth an righteousness." (Mary Marston, Vol.II, p.321). Some things that we call evil are sent to bring the sinner back to God.
He was open to the possibility that some might recognise good for what it is but still choose the bad, but he did not think this very likely.
Thus Hell is not a place of eternal conscious torment in fire but an ultimate, final encounter with God. Hell is knowing the infinite loss of God and is forced on no one. It is self selected. As C. S. Lewis wrote, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done", and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done". (The Great Divorce, p72). It is a falling out of the hands of the one who loves us.
He believed that death is not an end but a doorway into a greater reality.
"For I suspect the next world will more plainly be a going on with this than most people think - only it will be much better for some, and much worse for others, as the Lord has taught us in the parable of the rich man and the beggar." (There & Back, Vol.III, pp.138-9).
Salvation is rooted in God's love and his will to save, not in the reckoning of accounts. Legal metaphors of guilt and judgement play their part in the Scriptures, but the reality beyond the metaphor is relational and personal, it relates to God' search for fallen human beings and their response or otherwise to his initiative. This search does not cease at the point of human death. This life is simply a stage on the journey Home.
George MacDonald taught a religion of the heart not the head. People could not be driven into the kingdom of God but rather led by example in the doing of good. He thirsted for a [mystic] union with the divine that would enhance rather than submerge human individuality. MacDonald sought to express the divine in the human, and the human in the divine. As Father, God is calling his children Home. God reveals himself through creation but supremely through Christ, the obedient Son.
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Hi Gabben, nice to hear from you.
Sin is choosing not to obey and conform to the will of the Father in response to which God must send his consuming fire to burn the evil out of us.
For me, personally, this lesson conveyed to me in my upbringing...was why feminism was a heartbreaker and lifesaver at once. (Though it's not just for or about being female, it helped me unlearn what my job was, as a girl. Submit, obey...I just don't have enough faith in wee humans to make good use of a fear-based notion like this.)
Hence, a whole lot of trouble with the G-word, but mine isn't an original problem.
You can imagine how scrambled my brain got when I found out my preacher grandfather abused his daughters. Feels much saner as I get older to just remember it was always supposed to be about love. Or that any god I could believe in would be about love and only love. Moral accountability, but never cruelty. It would suffice.
Hops
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For me, that would raise the question of where do truly EVIL monsters go?
Bones
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I can understand that question, Bones. I am just not sure there is any afterlife at all, other than in memories.
But my gut (which is not a theologian) tells me that evil monsters, when they're gone, are just gone. Finally.
They're like volcanoes or plague or tsunamis. Part of nature, horrendously destructive. And then, gone. We can only learn from them how to spot and hopefully contain the next one.
love,
Hops
PS Deb, I think 7 year olds are smart enough to know crazy when they hear about it. Then we bang it out of their brains with relentless programming, so by the time we're adults we can no longer hear the wise child within.
I am so profoundly sorry you lost your baby, dear. So sorry.
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(((Deb)))
Your baby isn't in limbo.
What a notion.
Lighter
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FP,
The people who taught me (there was something wrong with). They were beyond old school strict. Sure they believed in thier faith and were only teaching what they believed in and trying to teach me to believe.
Remember I went to catholic school so I was not just being taught religion. They screamed, raged, humilated, name called, punished,
as any, disordered N or abuser would.
It still feels a little bit creepy for me to even be saying this (about nuns). As a child I had seen them as the right hand of God but represented nothing of whom I thought God to be but how was I to be sure? I experienced them (actions and all) and learning about God.
Hello! Conflict!
In reality I do think that my teacher's (projected) some of thier childhood upon the student's. So I do feel some what sorry for them
and do forgive them.
I only spoke about my experience in grammer school but my friend's in other catholic school's (teaching's were the same) but teacher's were different ...had a good experience.
I also failed to tell you that when I graduated catholic grammer school I went to a private high school. All my friend's went to different schools (our whole young life) some different catholic and some public. As a teenager's we were so bonded we all wanted to go to the same high school. In our last two years of high (don't know how we did this one but we did) we got our parent's permission to leave the schools we were in and all go together. Some couldn't go private, some couldn't go public, so we went catholic.
My best friend (I wrote about on the holocaust thread) who was Jewish went with us. She was excused from religion class although she stayed sometimes to just listen about (our faith) and share some of hers. We celebrated in class our faith and her faith (on holidays).
The only time I stepped back into church was the day we graduated. I sat beside's my friend. My family sat with her family.
And when we were leaving....We cried our eye's out.
We loved it there and the teacher's. They taught but they didn't abuse. I still didn't believe everything......
but as you can see::
When it was called upon for (my own personal belief's) and what was taught...I doubted myself.
I guess the catholic church had thier own doubts themselves (as time moved on) a different generation and changed things...
and are well aware of so any people's pain (due to old school). That is why they let me roll on with Anger...
What are you going to do, ya know?
I have no choice but to understand and forgive.
My D is soon to be engaged and wants to be married in Catholic Church. And I said, Go for it!
My experience is not hers nor did I let her experience anything with Catholic Church. She has choice now.
I do think she will have a good experience. I did later on but was so sour to go all out.
I don't want her to be sour for my lemons.
Love
Deb
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Hi FP,
I have no desire to get into the inescapable mire of a religious debate so will try to avoid stepping on any toes.
When I say I seek the kingdom of God, not an organized religion I am careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. I do go to a non denominational church and I subscribe to the basic tenents of orthodox Christianity because I judge them to be true, but I am also careful to not to be blinded as to what is of God and what is of man.
What I don't subscribe to are the adornments and man-made doctrines that have added to the simplicity that is Christ.
I believe the Catholic Church, while full of many wonderful Christians has added man-made traditions and doctrine to the Gospel, just as Calvin hung his own peculiar ideas on it as well.
Since I judge Christ to be the truth I have to take Him as He is. Every idea that veers from that truth is invariably a method by which the originator of the idea seeks to lower God to his own level and create a creator more like him or herself. I have no desire to worship myself nor a God like any other man or woman nor do I believe such a God exists. I find it easy to believe in a supernatural Creator because I see the evidence for Him every day around me, but to me it takes a real leap of blind faith to believe in a God who is moldable or who conforms Himself to his creatures. I don't want, nor do I think there exists, a God who believes the things I do. On the contrary, I seek to know His thoughts and ways and make them mine.
Regarding the various gospels besides the synoptic ones and John; as part of their not throwing the baby out with the bath water the early fathers really did know what they were doing for the most part. The four Gospels of the NT had an unbroken provenance from their authors to their disciples and then their disciples and were only seperated from those forming the canon by a generation or two. The various gospels such as the gospel of Thomas were rejected not because they contained inconvenient truths but because they were known to be later forgeries with no chain of authenticity. They do contain many truths and admirable doctrines but it's a pretty poor forgery that doesn't. Unfortunately mixed with the truths are obvious untruths written for the most part to support some creed looking to supplant or modify the simple message of Jesus; such as gnosticism.
Paul stated in 1 Corinthians that he did not come to the Corinthians with excellence of speech or the wisdom of men but was determined to preach only Christ and Him crucified. Somehow man has turned the simple truth of God's love and sacrifice into the millions of contentious stupid books and competing doctrines.
I will only comment on McDonald's ideas to the extent that they are not contrary to Calvin, whom I consider one of the great but unfortunately also one of the more pernicious minds in history, so much as they are contrary to the words of Jesus Himself and His apostles.
mud
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As a young child, I used to theorize that this world was actually hell and that depending on the life one lived here, one would be reborn to Earth (hell) or go to heaven.
St. Thomas says: "Christ, although established king by God, did not wish while living on earth to govern temporarily an earthly kingdom, because He came to raise men to divine things."
Hi Deb,
Considering the SA you went through as a child you are quite brave and openminded.
Gabben