Mar 23
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The Women They Don't Preach About
You know the ones. Always early, always serving. The ones who brewed the coffee, folded the bulletins, sang in the choir, and swallowed their questions with communion wine.
They don’t preach about them. Don’t mention the Sunday school girls taught to be modest before they even knew what they were sacrificing.
They don’t mention the woman who led Bible study for forty years but never stood behind a pulpit because Paul said no.
They don’t mention the wives who prayed through black eyes and miscarriages, and were told God hates divorce more than he hates your pain.
They don’t mention the teenage girls given purity rings instead of consent, whose worth was measured in white dresses and shame.
They called it womanhood. They called it calling. They called it faith.
But what they really meant was silence. Was labor. Was second place with a smile.
Those women carried the whole damn church on their backs and were still told to sit down and listen.
When it comes to fear, what do we REALLY care about?
“You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.”
-- Daniel Dennett
Blessed are the ones who stayed alive long enough to tell the truth. . . . *This is a poem from my book Let There Be Thought*
The “love” and “peace” these religions claim to have is always reserved entirely for their own clique.
Before any apologist tries to invoke No True Scotsman on people who do this, yes the doctrine explicitly doesn’t just endorse but outright prescribes it. If you’re wondering where, congratulations, you’ve just identified the beginning of your problem.
Their thing and your thing are the same thing. No True Scotsman won’t save you.
if all religions led to no harm (which I appreciate is absolutely not the case) would it matter if they are true or not? you say that people haven’t made a point when they say their feelings have been hurt, but is truth always more important than people’s happiness? is there any harm, for example, in telling a dying child they’re going to heaven to ease their fear?
Isn’t denying reality and truth a form of harm in itself? It’s delusion, and a failure to engage with and accept reality. Which isn’t isolated to oneself, but affects how a believer interacts with others and the world around them. For example, living entirely for the “next” life rather than fully in this one and only life. Doesn’t it create harm when the belief butts up against the reality, resulting in a conflict, in cognitive dissonance, which can only be resolved by rejecting one or compromising both? The majority of people with schizophrenia aren’t dangerous. So, why would we bother diagnosing and treating them?
One can comfort a dying child without resorting to just outright lying to them. Atheists discuss death with their children all the time (I mean as a subset of our community, not individual fixation).
You can tell them that we don’t know what it’s like to experience death, but there will be no more pain, that they are loved, that you will be with them all the way through, that their life has altered and affected everyone around them, like a pebble dropped into a pond… There’s lots of wonderful, beautiful, truthful things you can say about life, rather than blatantly deceiving them about death.
Kids aren’t stupid. Don’t you think a kid facing a terminal illness can see you struggling to invent a story to avoid telling them the truth? Asking follow-up questions about whether their guinea pig will be there, or the baby mommy lost will be there, whether grampa will have emphysema and dementia, and watching you make shit up right there on the spot? Do you want them dying knowing that you lied to them, saying nothing because they can tell you’re too scared to tell them the truth?
https://religion-is-a-mental-illness.tumblr.com/tagged/death
And really, are you trying to protect and comfort them or are you trying to protect and comfort yourself?
(Sorry, this question has been in my Inbox for quite a while.)