"How Faith Breaks Your Feeler"

'How Faith Breaks Your Feeler"


 The teaching of hell itself, has brought a lot of hell to planet earth. It's one teaching that is destructive to human empathy. Anyone who is okay with people burning for eternity in a torture chamber worse then any of Hitler's concentration camp ovens because it lasts forever, and think that is "just" is having their human sense of compassion and justice destroyed inside. The acceptance of such a fate for millions or billions doesn't endear empathy and kindness on earth. Inside that needled at me always. I am glad I dared to face it. I definitely have already covered how Christianity affected me in negative ways, where I mourn the friends I could have had, and the priggishness it took me into.

Neil Carter makes a list: I agree with called "How Faith Is Like An Abusive Lover"

1. Tearing you down.
2. Gaslighting
3. Excessive Control
4.  Cutting You off from the rest of the world
5. Threats and Fear Tactics
6.  Love Bombing Followed by devaluation
7.  Moving the Goalposts
8.  Projection and Blameshifting.

Christianity affected me in all the ways listed. The whole religion was a giant tear down. I think America may have a special symbiotic relationship with conservative Christianity in our "You are never enough" culture. I was thinking the other day how the self help people are maybe only one step removed from the heaven people but promise money and success if you "obey".
Gaslighting is definitely a part of it all, when you are told even in scripture that you cannot trust your own feelings or thoughts.  Excessive control, well that is summed up in all the love of authoritarianism and having the world run on the dominance, and punishment model.

As I moved away from religion and deconverted, I got more and more horrified by the stuff my old IFB acquaintances were posting on social media.  Their feelers are all broken. Almost all of their political stances is about denouncing someone they deemed as weaker and less powerful then them. They fully support racist agendas and white supremacy.

Some stuff in support of Trump and Republican politics always bothered me, but I noticed a shift even in them. I left the churches before I left the religion, but I noticed they were posting mean and meaner things.  There was even more hatred for the poor, immigrants, and gay people. Trump really has led to a lot more cruelty and empowered closet racists where people did not insult people like this in polite company  but now feel free to do so because the president does it..There is a hardening of people in conservative land. Religion and politics joined together to tell them "feelings" are bad, listen to the powerful. Consciences all shutting down like shutters across the land, so now they can lock kids in cages and it's acceptable.

I find myself winnowing the friendship list, to spare myself the right wing triggering. Today I unfriended someone today who posted a Confederate flag in support of it! This woman doesn't even live in the South and as far as I know never has but the symbol of the racist South must mean something to her in her love of Trump. These folks do show the signs of having their empathy squashed. Their religion made it more possible for someone like Trump, to lead them into shutting down human compassion.