Guest post by Linda
One of my earliest memories is sitting on the floor in a church nursery, rolling a big ball to a little boy who would then roll it back to me. I was delighted with this simple game. An equally delighted adult was watching us. I can’t remember who she was, but I am sure she was smiling and encouraging us in our ball rolling. We were probably three or four years old. I felt safe, happy, and comfortable.
My family went to church every Sunday. I didn’t understand why of course, but it was always fun because there were other kids to play with. Eventually I outgrew the nursery and began attending Sunday school. In Sunday school the teachers were always ladies and they were always sweet. They taught us all sorts of Bible stories. It wasn’t quite as fun as the nursery had been, but it was pleasant and sometimes we got to color. We soon began learning about Jesus. We would sing “Jesus Loves Me” or the song about the wise man who built his house upon a rock, smacking our fists into our palms to show how good and solid the rock was. There was an important message in these songs, though I wasn’t sure what it was.
After a while, Sunday school took a more serious turn. Our teacher taught us about lepers. Lepers were people who had a terrible disease that caused their body parts to rot and fall off. Other people hated them and made them live far away. Only Jesus was kind to lepers. Jesus was better than other people. Like the Sunday school songs, there was an important message in this story. I still didn’t fully understand it, but so far, I liked Jesus a lot. I was glad he was nice to the sick people and he even helped one of them get well. I don’t remember the first time we heard about Jesus dying on the cross to save us, but the teacher started bringing it up every week. She told us it was very important for us to believe that Jesus died to save us from our sins. It had never occurred to me not to believe something an adult said, especially a teacher, so it seemed kind of strange that she thought we might not believe her story.
Around this time, I started learning to read. Thanks to TV, I even learned that all people did not use the same words as we Americans did. Some people spoke and wrote a language called Spanish. It had different words for things like “water” and “friend.” This was amazing. The subject of language came up one week in Sunday school when our teacher taught us about the Tower of Babel. In this story, God punished some men who tried to build a giant tower they could use to climb into Heaven. He did this by switching everyone’s words around. It all made sense now! That must have been where Spanish had come from, plus a whole bunch of other languages I had never even heard of. I found myself smugly wondering why God had written the Bible in English. I decided it must be because English was the best language.
It was the 1970s. Hippies were everywhere. Stores carried posters and signs with slogans like: “Keep On Truckin’,” “Peace,” and “Smile God Loves You.” One week our sweet Sunday school teacher had a warning for us kids. She told us not to believe the signs that said “Smile God Loves You” because they weren’t true. God did not love everybody. I didn’t think much about this warning at the time. I was already learning not to question the things I heard in church. As the years went by and I transitioned from a curious child into a quiet teenager, I grew frustrated with church. Those early lessons about kind and helpful Jesus didn’t mesh with the grown-up sermons about a righteous, angry God. The punishment doled out by God at the Tower of Babel seemed like a prank compared to burning unbelievers in Hell forever. I didn’t understand what we were supposed to do for Jesus. I knew that He had died for us wicked humans, but there was something crucial I was missing. Why did all these people spend every Sunday listening to the preacher talk about it? What was the point? Our preacher spent a lot of time and energy ranting about all these other preachers who had everything wrong. There was a long list of these false preachers. He also had a long list of behaviors that would not help you get into Heaven: praying, tithing, getting baptized, helping the poor, caring for the sick, winning souls, going to church, volunteering in church, building the church, studying the Bible, serving your community, and on and on and on. I got tense just listening to him talk about all the ways you could waste your time trying to be a good person. It was like listening to a song with an overly long introduction. I kept waiting for the tension to break and for him to finally say what we should do to get into Heaven, but he never did.
It occurred to me that church was vastly different from school. In school, you learned about a new subject, studied it, took tests on it, then you moved on to the next level. You repeated this process from first grade to second grade to third grade and so on. By the time you got to middle school, you didn’t keep going over the same topics you learned in grade school; you were expected to have them memorized so they could form the foundation of more advanced subjects. Not so in church. In church you went every Sunday, year after year, to hear the same lecture about how horrible you are and how you deserve to burn in Hell and how Jesus would save you from Hell if only . . . something. What that something was, I couldn’t quite grasp. I wondered if I was dumb. Obviously, every other person in church understood it, so why didn’t I? Confusion morphed into anger and I started to hate going to church. I was closing in on adulthood and longing for independence. It felt like church was keeping me trapped in childhood. My escape finally began when I left home for college at the age of eighteen. I was still a Christian, though I could not have described my actual beliefs to anyone who might have asked. I knew what I was supposed to say, but those Christian-approved words didn’t match up with the thoughts and emotions I kept inside. In college I made the shocking discovery that other people sometimes questioned the origins of the Bible. They talked about it as if it were any other book written by men. Even more shocking was the fact that college instructors now encouraged us students to think about these things. They wanted us to think! I couldn’t handle it. I decided they were all evil. Though I had problems with Christianity myself, it felt like an attack to hear others criticize the faith — my faith! Even so, I did begin allowing myself to think, just a little bit at first. This was the beginning of the end of my faith. It wasn’t until many years later that I finally left Christianity for good. It took a long time to get rid of the fear that I might accidentally come to the wrong conclusion and burn forever because of it. And it wasn’t until the advent of the internet, decades later, that I finally understood what our preacher was really saying all along. I had started reading online articles about Christianity in its various forms. When I came across a description of Calvinism, I realized that there was a good reason our preacher never told us what to do to get into Heaven. He did not believe it mattered one bit what we did, because God had already decided who was in and who was out.
I had heard this long ago, this doctrine of predestination. It hadn’t upset me too much back then, because I was so deep in fundamentalist brain fog that I couldn’t process the horror. It just didn’t sink in. Now I thought about all the convoluted, pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook I had heard masqueraded as wisdom. And I realized that the particular message of our peculiar brand of Calvinism did not require years of lectures to understand. It was as simple as it was cruel: God created some people to damn and some people to save. There is nothing any human being can do to change this situation so it is foolish to even try. I cannot describe the way this realization made me feel. I was astonished at how ridiculous it was, and at how many otherwise intelligent adults really believed that this was the sort of thing a righteous creator would do. It still gives me a strange feeling to think about how that church, which I first knew as a safe and happy place, was never anything more than a shrine to violence and injustice.
Sorry about comments being turned off on this post. I have no idea how that happened.
Thanks for sharing your story, Linda. It reminds me of the fact that Calvinism often hides in plain sight. The Southern Baptists have a big problem with Calvinistic preachers taking SBC churches and indoctrinating congregants in Calvinism without ever mentioning it by name. Sort of theological trojan horse.
Predestination in the IFB churches I attended was explained away by saying”God just knew aforehand who would be saved and who would not”. Kind of like watching a movie you have seen before. No matter how many times you watch it the outcome is the same. So they are saying God knows the future ,but, either is powerless to change the future or just decides to not intervene. However the Bible does have within it instances where God does intervene to alter the future. For example, in Genesis’s account about Adam and Eve we have the situation where God kicks them out of the garden he puts a flaming sworded angel to guard them from eating the tree of life “lest they eat it and live forever”. So the Bible is saying here that God saw two different future paths for Adam and Eve;but, that he intervened put a flaming sworded angel there to make sure God’s planned future for them would go as planned. There are other instances in the Bible where God intervenes to change the future of mankind. Again in Genesis with the tower of Babel; God saw something not good if people stayed in one place so he intervened,altered their future by causing them to have different languages and scattering them. There are many examples one could use from the Bible to show that God intervenes to change things. So my point here is that if God can intervene to change the future in other events ; then why would would he not see people being damned for eternity and not do something to alter the future so NOBODY would go through that? It is things like this that show the inconsistency of the Bible.
Evangelical Christianity is a sickness. The documentary, ‘The Family’ (Netflix) calmly and chillingly lays out the viral nature of this tool to subdue and control the world with American Jesus. Doug Coe is your friend and wants the best for you, just like Jesus. He’s dead now but The Fellowship continues its work and American Jesus is its primary tool. As I watch and listen to the talk of the fraternity of men, I feel a bit sick to my stomach because this is the talk of the men of my upbringing in the Fellowship Baptist Church, Ontario, Canada.
Thank-you Linda for this post. Your use of the term ‘fundamentalist brain fog’ is perfect in describing what happened to us. When the heart goes out to sweet baby Jesus and falls head-first into the cul-de-sac of belief, the brain fogs and is doped.
I was never a 5-point Calvinist, but before I left the faith, I stopped believing in eternal security and joined the Free Will Baptists. I suppose that made it clearer for me what I was doing when I walked away from all of it.
Funny thing is, I watched a series on modern physics on PBS several years ago, and the physicist (Brian Greene, I think) was promoting determinism.
The few Calvinists I have been unfortunate enough to know all seem to have a smug, self righteous certainty that they are among God’s chosen and bound for eternal paradise. I’ve often wondered that if you believe in a supreme being who is so arbitrary, capricious and cruel that he decides a person’s eternal destiny before they are even born how can you be sure he won’t just as arbitrarily send you to hell.
Excellent……EXCELLENT POINT!!
I have often wondered–if you actually believe in predestination, what is keeping you from unbridled hedonism, if that appeals to you? After all, if you’re saved, you’re saved; and if you’re damned, there’s nothing you can do about it, anyway. Nothing you can do will help anyone else, in the long run, either. Why live a life of rugged virtue, if it isn’t going to gain you anything at all?
That’s my theory. See you at Fantasy Fest this October?~
Thank you for saying what has been on my mind. Was really wondering if it was that “Wait… wait a minute,” moment or if I’d just not absorbed something correctly. You’re either pre-chosen, miiiiiight win the salvation lottery, or be Chosen by this God person for whatever reason. Any of those ways says to me that I might as well be the Whore of Babylon with every other woman and any married man I can find, merrily having abortions along the way.
Those two specific issues aside, where is any motivation to follow this God’s instructions, or be anything but what suits Me at the moment? How does this Calvinism thing even work????? What is really preventing all-out anarchy in this belief structure?
Linda, thank you for sharing your story. It was fascinating to hear about your upbringing in the church, and your eventual abandonment of its destructive teachings. Once again I am reminded of why fundamentalists are so opposed to public schooling and higher education.
Linda, thank you for sharing your story. Education and the encouragement to THINK and EXAMINE were fundamentalism-killers for me too. It was a painful process. Calvinism started seeping into the Southern Baptist church I attended as a kid. We were flat out taught the 5 points of Calvinism at the fundamentalist Christian school I attended, not to indoctrinate us into it but to teach us to recognize it. It was disturbing as a teen to recognize it and to see for the first time that the True Christian church I attended was slightly different from the True Christian school.
The great irony is that Calvinists refuse to believe Jesus.
People are not damned because God determined them to be damned. They are damned because the Devil steals the seed of God’s word and blinds their minds.
““Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. Those by the wayside are the ones who hear; then the devil comes and takes away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved.”
Luke 8:11-12 NKJV
God does not predestined anyone to damnation. That’s Satanic heresy that smells of sulfur.
Finally, a True Christian stops by and settles once and for all that which Calvinists and Arminians have been fighting over for centuries. 🙂 Glad we got that settled. 🙂
Christian arrogance grows in Calvinist and Arminian soil alike. No Calvinists in Heaven! Praise Jacob Arminius. No Arminians in Heaven! Praise John Calvin. And Christians wonder why thoughtful, rational people want nothing to do with religion.
I can think of a far greater irony…….According to what you believe, The Devil will clearly be the more successful ‘soul-winner’ over Christ……..Let that sink in for a minute!
Rock: “God does not predestined anyone to damnation.”
Zoe: Sure he does Rock. Who made the devil?
Rock’s biblically ‘informed’ opinion is exactly what we must brace ourselves for as the sick President Trump, championed by sick evangelicals, is taken out of the office through impeachment. Watch for sick Trump wrapping himself in the flag and carrying his family Bible. Watch his primitive anger spew. Watch the T.V. evangelists foam at the mouth and make special pleas for immediate funding to fight the ‘devil’ taking over America.This is done in the same way Trump speaks lies and charges others with traits that are in truth his own. He says Schiff is a sick man and of course the truth is that Trump is speaking of himself. He does this all the time, taking accusations against him and merely throwing the exact accusation back. Christianity does this as well. Look at Rock’s quotation of Luke: ““Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. Those by the wayside are the ones who hear; then the devil comes and takes away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe and be saved.” Luke 8:11-12 NKJV
First there is the Word of God, the words somebody wrote on a page. This is presented as the ultimate and final truth needed on which all the rest is based, just as Trump believes that Trump is the the ultimate, unchangeable truth. Now, once you get-away with that subterfuge, then any opposition is defeated impossible, not by reason but by the lack of it. Any alternative view is the devil, the devil (Schiff) who wants to remove the ultimate Trump truth from God and replace it with questions instead of belief. And just in case your need for reasonable thought erupts, let us add that not ‘believing’ means you will not be saved. What silly bullshit this is, once one has been freed from the bondage of ‘belief’, once one walks away from the cajoling club and sits quietly, alone and reads the words on the page. The Bible is full of Trumpist manipulations and Trump does indeed belong where he is accepted, with evangelical Christians: Tell a lie that cannot be supported except to say that it cannot be fully refuted, then build your tax-free corporation on this basis. Rock, beware of any claim that has its basis in words that are not verifiable unless you simply ‘believe’. I won’t do that, Rock. As Gerencser says above, “…And Christians wonder why thoughtful, rational people want nothing to do with religion.” (Well, to be fair, I am not that thoughtful, nor am I that rational but I have ‘believed’ and been saved. I have prayed to the god: ‘I believe, help me with my unbelief.’ I did that for many years. Then I needed to tell the truth, the very simple, human truth. There is no God I can garner. I cannot sustain a ‘belief’ without proof. Schiff has not spoken to me, Rock. I take full responsibility for my choice and you can keep your devil for Christian use, thank-you.
It’s not as BAD as a NEIGHBOR telling me that he had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fourteen years TOTAL TIME he had claimed to spend in the USMC. I had recently relocated from one part of the city towards the Pacific Ocean whereby in this new yet the building is old… PLACE is a one bedroom and the guy who lied to me since last year about serving proud in DESERT SHIELD/STORM since 1990… he’s in a two bedroom apartment near me in the same beach complex. His lies continued on until I did some RESEARCH. He’s not even in the Department of Defense ARCHIVES! He never had served yet I did my four years HITCH back in the Seventies Era! Why am I SHARING?! It’s his big black Mormon BIBLE that had always sat near his desk. He had used two VERY sentimental attachments in my CURRENT LIFE; the Word of God, all 66 books from OLD Testament Genesis to Revelations NEW Testament… Plus ➕ I’m a retread MARINE; all THREE MARINE Divisions, a meritorious mast while on guard duty OVERSEAS. I forgive the neighbor but keeping my distance. My other neighbor who had been renting longer than I knows he’s simply a LIAR. READ JOHN 10:10 LATER!