Rants About Religious Freedom Bills

[Brother Jeff]

I posted the following rants to Facebook after Indiana and Arkansas passed "religious freedom" bills designed to enable bigotry against gays.

WTF is the matter with people in this country? Fucking ignorant religious bigots. Bills like this send a very clear message that Christianity is all about HATE. Religious belief warps the moral compasses of believers beyond recognition. If you want to be religious, fine. But it is NOT okay to use your religion to promote hatred of others, especially entire groups of people.

 

FUCK Christianity, FUCK the Bible and the ignorant assholes who wrote it, and if you agree with this disgusting bigotry, then FUCK YOU!

 

 

 

The very second that you use your religion to justify the hatred of others, you invalidate every single bit of it. Think very hard about that fact before you dare to tell me that "God is Love". Christianity is a crock of stinking bullshit, and those who use it to justify HATE just prove that fact.

 

Yes, I am OUTRAGED by these goddamn "religious freedom" bills. If you can't deal with that, then tough shit. Every single person in this country with a functioning conscience that hasn't been warped beyond recognition by religious belief SHOULD BE OUTRAGED!!!

 

 

I have no doubt that my latest posts will piss off some of my religious friends, and I might wake up tomorrow with a few less FB friends. So be it, I suppose. I apologize for the raging anger, but not for the outrage. Outrage is an appropriate response to bigotry, in my opinion. I'm outraged not just as these religious bigots but at myself because years ago I would have been right there with them, thumping my Bible, and condemning an entire group of people based on what ignorant, bigoted assholes wrote thousands of years ago. I suppose I should forgive myself since I'm a much better person now than I was when I was religious, but it's hard. I lost 15 years of my life to the fundamentalist Christian cult, and 15 years after I walked away from it, I'm still recovering from the damage that was done to me. It is wonderful to be FREE, but the emotional scars remain to some degree, and when I see the religion that I once cherished as Divine Truth being used to justify HATE it pisses me off, and it brings back the RAGE I felt when I discovered that I had invested 15 years of my life in a demonstrably false religious belief system. If you haven't been there, I'm sorry, but you can't understand. You can empathize, but unless you have walked in the same shoes I have and made the same journey I have, I don't think you can really understand. If you truly want to take a shot at it, Google "religious trauma syndrome". I guarantee you it's an eye-opener. It's not an officially recognized diagnosis yet, but it involves PTSD-like symptoms that are rather unpleasant. Tonight I got set off and lashed out. I don't apologize except for the intensity of the rage.

 

I hope you will try to understand and not judge me too harshly. Thanks.

 

 

I have thought about it, but I have decided not to delete the angry rants I posted a while ago. I stand by the content, if not the emotion. Bigotry is NOT okay under ANY circumstances. My decision to express my opinion forcefully with a great deal of emotion has cost me one friend. I don't know who it was and I don't really care. I'm tired of walking on eggshells around people and fearing who I will alienate every time I click "Post". I'm not going to walk on eggshells anymore. I just simply don't care anymore. You can either accept me as I am, warts and all, or you can exit my online world. And don't let the door hit you in the ass. I have damned good reasons for feeling the way I do about religion, and I'm not going to change. I lost 15 years of my life to the fundamentalist Christian cult, and it's the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I may spend the rest of my life dealing with the emotional scars and the psychological trauma.

 

I do not apologize one bit for my atheist views. My views are just as valid as any religious person's are and even more so because at least my views have a very firm basis in REALITY. I also don't apologize one bit for my intense dislike of the Bible and the fundamentalist Christian religion. If you had to live what I have been through and you had to make the same journey I have had to make from devout religious belief back to the REAL WORLD, you would understand why I feel the way I do.

My friend count currently stands at 316. If it's less than that tomorrow morning, then so be it. I'm past caring at the moment. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being an atheist and there is absolutely nothing wrong with rejecting belief in God, especially considering the fact that there is not a single shred of evidence that a god of any kind actually exists.

 

Christians talk a lot about love, but they generally do a lousy job of showing it. All I ever hear from Christians is ignorance, bigotry, hate, judgment, and threats of damnation. I'm sick of it and I want NO part of it.

Generally speaking, I'm one of the nicest guys you would ever want to meet. I will bend over backwards to help anybody if I can. I take great pleasure in doing things for others that I know will bring them happiness and joy. But I have my limits, just like we all do, and I got pushed too far tonight and lashed out. If you haven't been through it, you have no idea how incredibly hard it is to lose your religious faith and then have to rebuild your life and your conception of reality from the ground up. It's incredibly difficult and it's incredibly painful. It involves a great deal of emotion and it takes YEARS.

 

I am very happy with me exactly as I am, though I know I have a lot of work to do to recover from the religious trauma that still plagues me years after leaving the cult. You can either try to understand me and accept me as I am, or you can exit my world. Either way is fine with me. I don't enjoy losing friends, and I hope I won't wake up tomorrow morning to find that someone whose friendship I really value has decided to exit my world. But if so, then well, so be it. I know I can be hard to take sometimes, but there are damned good reasons for why I feel the way that I do.

 

Enough said.

 

 

I'm calmer today, but goddamn these bigoted assholes piss me off!

[Thackerie]

Yeah, me too. But one way of looking at it is that the bigoted fundies are outing themselves. More and more, mainstream, ordinary, everyday people are coming to realize that these so-called "loving" christians are actually evil arseholes. Not only are they on the wrong side of history, but they are also moving themselves closer to the day when they'll be history. And that's a good thing.

[Guest Furball]

If they were given the right to actually physically harm unbelievers, these loving christians would be killing us all off in droves and burning us alive with smiles on their faces. These loving, compassionate, forgiving christians would murder us without hesitation if given the right to do so. I hope they get raptured soon, they are a black mark on humanity. -me(ow)

[Merlin]

9

[Ellinas]

It beggars belief (to coin a phrase) that in a supposedly developed Western country legislation based on the advancement of religious doctrines can even be considered.

 

Keep the outrage boiling.  Silence is dangerous.  Qui tacet, consentit (if I remember my Latin correctly - "He who keeps quiet, consents").

[Lilith666]

This issue doesn't deserve the outrage it's getting. So what if Indiana and Arkansas want to make their laws? Why punish the people who live there because they happen to live there? Apparently musicians/bands have canceled their tour stops there because of these bills, and my state's governor is refusing to travel to Indiana unless it's extra super important because of the bill. They've gone overboard with this. Come on.

[older]

 

 

The very second that you use your religion to justify the hatred of others, you invalidate every single bit of it.

 

Perfectly said. I'm saving this to my list of great quotes.