loveapple

Which part of what I said was this meant to interact with?

 

"the rest of the world sees it differently"? How and why? You have given me no indication of what "the rest of the world" would consider an appropriate response to the daily provocations of kidnappings, killings and Katusha rockets from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Kassam rockets being fired by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa, et la. in Gaza. Or perhaps your only real solution is for the Jews to just lie down and suffer these crimes?

Israel is not the innocent in all this they are just as guilty as the Palestions! Of course the Islamic groups have behaved badly, but Israel has behaved very badly too. How on earth they think their response is going to stop the violence goodness only knows!

I am so very sorry you have suffered so much, but glad you are finding a way through. Spiritual abuse is a pretty new concept. I had never heard the term until about two years ago and realised that was the name to describe my childhood trauma at the hands of the Pentecostal church I attended, and my paternal grandmother.

I wrote this poem which expresses how I felt about the abuse I experienced.

I joined a forum called Crosswalk about two years ago, I was banned as my views were considered far too liberal and subversive!

My children are all grown up now and two have children of their own. When they were young we decided that it was up to them whether they attended church and Sunday School. Both my husband and I had been required to attend as kids and that had put us right off. My husband is now an atheist! As there was no pressure on our children, they all opted to attend church. Our eldest daughter (36) is now an Anglican Priest.

I think that whilst children should understand about faith issues as part of their general knowledge, it is not something that should be forced down their throat. Faith is very much a personal matter in my opinion.

I've heard it said that in Europe that conservatives are more like the moderate (middle of the road)

wing of the Democratic party. That there really is no good correlation in Europe to conservative

Republicans. Don't know enough about that to know if it is true or no, though I watch BBC News.

I guess Margaret Thatcher is the exception that proves the rule.

 

Of course, Europeans are much less religious than Americans. I think those with fundamentalist genes

moved to America in the 1700s. My sister is in Europe proselitizing to Europeans to give up their secular ways.

--des

In the UK I would say that our Consevative party is more aligned to your Democrat party. Labour used to be much more left-wing, but under Tony Blair it is as right-wing as our Conservative party!

St Paul was entitled to his opinions just as we all are. But being a mere mortal the same as the rest of us he wasn't infallible and I disagree with a lot of what he had to say. It is terrible that his views have been used as an excuse to repress women and condemn homosexuals!

Any country that mixes religion and politics is heading for trouble imo!

Welcome to the group, loveapple!! :-)

 

--des

Thank you

Sorry but the rest of the world sees it differently! Israel's reaction is totally over the top as usual ,and they are the author of their own woes to a large extent!

Hi loveapple, thank you for your support! I hope to hear more from you in the future.

One bit of advice is never stop asking questions. If something doesn't seem right to you, even if everyone else appears to believe it, don't accept it until it makes sense to you.

Hi everybody, my name is andy and i'm new to the site. To start out, I'd like to tell you all a little about myself. I've been a Christian for as long as I can remember. I was Baptized Episcopalian and went to a Catholic school for 9 years. I'm now 19 and in the last year or so I've really been starting to question a lot of things and have been wanting to form more of a real relationship with God. Now, the things that really drew me to the ideas of Progressive Christianity were it's basic platforms and ideas that I really identify with. I'm a strong democrat and am really disgusted with the religious right and a lot of what they stand for. I'm also a "secular" musician (although I don't believe that anything is really secular). I've been writing songs for over 5 years now and just recently i've really been getting into the philosophy of it. I've stayed true to to my faith in what I've written and talked about in them in the sense that i don't sing about sex, drugs, drinking, and stuff like that. I've been influenced mostly by artists who really have something to say in their work like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and U2 and I've always believed that the words i write come from God, in the sense that God sort of gives me this message having to do with life, love, tolerance, etc to share with people.

 

One thing that continues to plague me is the the concept of Evangelism. Now, obviously the music scene isn't always full of believers to say the least and the question started to get raised am i supposed to be doing this? or should i simply be evangelizing in my music? and the problem lies in the fact that why would God give me these feelings and emotions if i wasn't supposed to do anything with them and just ignore them? I really don't believe that the God i love would put someone through that. So on the question of Evangelism what does it really mean then? If i keep doing what I'm doing am i going to go to hell if i don't "convert" people? I've always believed that "evangelism" can simply be the way that you live your life as a symbol of your love for the lord, but i read different things and ideas and the different ideas of it get me confused. Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Hi Andy I am new too, I just joined the forum today. I am old enough to be your mother or even your grandmother, but I have lots of doubts and lots of questions. Reading what you have just written I would say that you are on the right tract. If more Christians were loving and tolerant the world would be a much better place imo!

Join the club.

 

Many misguided souls here in the U.S. seem to have taken that practice up as one of their lifetime goals it seems. How boring that must be !

 

I now dread the election season as they are now beginning to air their hate filled attack ads against mostly middle of the road and liberal candidates. It forces one to not watch TV much of the time since the ads are very unsettling with their disturbing and negative messages which are meant to scare unsuspecting potential voters into not voting for such candidates. Definitely one of the downer factors in living in a democracy. People with money are allowed to advertise hate, and it diminishes all who watch or become involved in the process.

 

flow....

I must admit that American politics have got pretty scary to those of us viewing them from across the Atlantic Ocean. I am hopeful that there is a more liberal regime next time around!

Maybe you could teach and maybe even be surprised to find support. It's possible anyway.

Not really even my husband isn't keen on the idea!

Here in the UK we certainly do not support Israel in the way that the US does. I think the Middle-East would be much better off if there was a more even handed approach on th epart of the US to the region. I suspect that the US may view Israel as the 'promised' land and therefore special!

It is so good to be on a forum where people are expressing the ideas and thoughts I have had for so long, and have been castigated by fundamentalists for holding them!

I am rather more liberal where faith is concerned than politics. However as a Brit I guess my politics are much more liberal than those of the USA.

The Israelis always seem to react in a disproportionate way to any provocation, making a bad situation much worse. If was a Palestinian I think I would feel a lot of hatred to Israel.

Thanks for the welcome.

Thanks flowperson.

I used to post on an American relgious forum but my views were not liked by the fundamentalists, and I felt I had to leave as I was becoming a figure of hate!

I haven't ever been around them, but I do find their appearance to me majestic in some ways.

 

Out here in the great SW desert in the USA we're just getting started on large-scale solar power farms. These two kinds of renewable energy trends will do nothing but good in the long-range to wean humans from addictive and increasingly destructive usage of fossil fuel energy sources.

 

You should always do what your heart tells you is the right thing to do. In the long term your neighbors will understand the good sense of wind power.

 

flow....

In the UK you would not be able to get planning permission to erect them if your neighbours objected.

I am a survivor of what I believe to be spiritual abuse! I spent many years rebelling against my Pentecostal upbringing. Hell-fire was a constant theme of the sermons, and having a vivid imagination I had no difficulty in imagining myself in the lake of fire. Sunday became my most disliked day of the week; I often developed a tummy ache just before going to church. The pain was real enough, but psychosomatic in origin. My late paternal Grandmother, used to re-enforce the concept of hell when I had to suffer having Sunday lunch at her house, on my own! She would tell me how naughty little girls would burn forever in the flames of hell, if they didn’t repent! I knew how much fire hurt, having burnt my finger quite badly by striking an illicit match. Grandma said that as painful as my finger was, I should imagine how it would feel to be burning all over for eternity! The subsequent terrible nightmares damaged my psyche profoundly. I hope that my Grandmother had no idea of the harm she was inflicting in trying to ‘save’ my immortal soul. My parents were most upset when, years later, I told them what had happened!

I was told I should love God, but at the same time fear him. To me, even as a child, that was an oxymoron. How can you love someone you fear will throw you into a fire to burn forever and ever? For many years I completely rejected God and all things Christian, only revisiting my spirituality after my 50th birthday in 2000. I am still in the seeking phase, and look at life from a liberal Christian perspective.

I was talking over the subject of spiritual abuse with my youngest daughter (30). You can imagine my horror when she disclosed that she had also suffered this form of abuse, in Sunday school, as a child! A Sunday school teacher told our girl that as my husband and I didn't attend church, we would burn in hell, as would our daughter if she stopped attending Sunday school. She was too scared to tell us in case we removed her from this God forsaken place, and she was condemned to hell. I remember that she had a lot of nightmares, and used to come into bed with us most nights. If only she had told us what was happening at the time, we could have spared her years of distress.

I set up a discussion of this topic on a religious forum, and was amazed to find I had opened the floodgates for many to unburden themselves of the abuse they had endured in the past. Much of it was far worse than anything I had experienced. It would appear that spiritual abuse sometimes goes hand in hand with sexual and physical maltreatment, compounding the suffering.

It is possible that some preachers get a perverted sexual gratification from preaching violent sermons. As a teenager, I attended a service conducted by a guest preacher. His sermon should have had an adult classification, depicting as it did, rape and torture among the flames of hell! He was so caught up with his theme that he was practically frothing at the mouth! The congregation were stunned; I was so disgusted that I walked out, taking my younger sisters with me. Our parents, who had not attended the service, were dismayed that we should have been subjected to such a harangue. They were becoming disenchanted with the Pentecostal movement in general, and decamped to an evangelical Anglican church, which preached the gospel in a more moderate and measured way.

Victims of spiritual abuse often feel that God is in some way to blame for their suffering. In consequence, many reject Christianity, thinking the faith has let them down. If spiritual abuse separates us from the love of God, it is on a par with physical and sexual abuse, in my opinion!

I am coming to terms with this childhood ordeal, whilst I shall never be able to forget the trauma, I will endeavour not to let it become so much of a stumbling block to my spiritual growth, as it has been in the past.

Am I one of the few people who actually likes giant wind turbines? I love their majestic loftiness. We own a field where I would like to site some, but fear our neighbours would object!

Do you love or loathe them?

Hi,

I consider myself a very liberal Christian who believes there is more than one spiritual pathway.

I was brought up to attend a Pentecostalist church as a child where I was spiritually abused by the hell-fire and end times scenarios, which gave me constant nightmares! When I left home to marry, aged 19, I kicked God out of my life until I hit 50 six years ago. I am now exploring my spirituality once more. I have many more doubts than certainties!