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shawnmmcc
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I was born and raised Catholic. I cannot say when my faith started to falter, it must have been soemtime when a combination of three things that hit my life between ages seven and nine. My mother came very close to dying the first time, her intestinal system totally shut down and no longer absorbed nutrients for over a month. She dropped down from a trim 125 pounds to 80 pounds. My memories of this are totally blocked.
At the same time my father, devout Catholic that he was, started the intense verbal abuse that would last a decade and more or less cause my brother's personality to slowly dissolve. In many ways that is much worse than what follows, watching someone you adore have their personality slowly shredded over a decade has a kind of slow motion horror, and causes you to develop very negative feelings toward the perpertrator. Yet when the perpetrator is your father, the inidividual you are supposed to trust you cannot hate him. You want so desperately to bellieve in your father. It doesn't help that the local Church thinks he is this wonderful, upstadning individual.
Then there is my sister being burned. Instead of slow motion horror, it's all very quick and very focused. She was almost four, and had 65% of her body burned from 2nd throught 4th degree burns. We didn't call them fourth degree then, but they were burns that went through the skin into the underlying muscles and tendons.
When they took her out (I was home and called the ambulence, my mother could not because she had, due to the emergency nature of it, put her out with her bare hands. Her hands were in mitts for the next three months, and were never right after that. They could see bone at the hospital - I knew none of this at the time I just called the ambulence) I will never forget the black shreds of skin hanging off her face, still steaming (this may be why I have terrible problems with visual memory). The smell of the melting synthetics (inexpensive flammable children's clothing, my family got to be a statistic) combined with burning flesh is something that is indelibly stamped in my mind. Burning meat while melting a spatula on the edge of the frying pan is not a good idea for me.
The I get the next decade of trying to help out, giving my parents extra time to rub the scar tissue every night with cocoa butter and other ointments to keep it soft. My sister would try to be brave about it, but after a while she would still whimper. You see, scar tissue doesn't grow, and can actually tighten. My sister has deformed ribs despite everything the surgeons and parents could do, it is hard to keep up with normal growth. You see, to add injury to injury, she has that fine freckling Irish skin, and forms Kelloidal scars at the graft sites. Her "skin" is approximately 80% scar tissue. Oh, and it gets better on the nights after any of her fifty plus childhood surgeries (she had another ten in her thirties) - they get to change dressings. I would help sometimes with that, and the sounds are not always whimpers depending on how badly they stick to the surgical sites.
Of course my father stops seeing his glass as full at all, which in hindsight I understand. It's hard to see you glass as 10% full. It probably contributes heavily to his myocardial infarction (heart stoppage) - all three of them - that nearly kill him when he is 39 seeting our family back even worse financially. Back on topic - so of course the abuse gets worse, and my brother's condition deteriorates. My youngest sister has a very bad accident that mangles her knee, to the point that later in life she gets down from a cabinet and it buckles backwards. She becomes resentful because, unlike in a normal family where a child with that serious an injury gets a fair bit of attention, she gets helped some, gets told to do her knee exercises, and then it's back to taking care of the burned sibling. It wasn't until her 30's that she managed to get past how this set of dynamics had warped her.
And why doesn't my mother divorce him? Especially after the time he takes a 1/2" machine v-belt and "spanks" my sisters on their bare bottoms with it? It's that funny little thing called medical insurance. You know, the burns, the knee, etc. She threatened to put him in jail, I was there listening to her yell one of four times she ever did, but she really couldn't report him. The medicaid system where we lived, and the hospitals she would have been in coupled to the care the burned sister received, would have killed my sister (the system has improved since then, and then started back downhill). In over sixty operations even with the best health care she almost died three times - once immdiately after the burns and twice afterwards, post-op infections. That is why, whenever any conservative whines that we cannot afford a public health care system, or we spend too much on medicaid, etc, - I hope when he dies and goes to hell, he gets to spend a century or so under the tender ministrations of my father.
So my brother goes into the military - oh did I mention on top of it all he may have Asperger's syndrome - and after 16 years, when he seperates his pelvis from his spine in an accident in a military hospital when a 300 pound patient slips and my brother tries to catch him - they kick him out with 15% medical, unable to work as a physical therapy assistant (his training, but the pelvic injury...) and with no feeling from the ankles down. Plus the gentle treatment by my father left him without the werewithal to fight it.
In this same time span we discover that the local Doctor who treated my mother seriously mistreated her. She finally changes doctors, and they rushed her into surgery. They drained five pints of puss out of her abdominal wall (she had NOT been gaining weight, stupid incompetent butcher) - they are called adhesions - and removed all her large intestine, and a goodly part of thesmall one. Plus she had a serious kidney dysfunction. This was all due to fully blown Krohns disease, a nice little illness which combines Lupus, Colitis, and rheumatoid arthitis (and she got the bonus of added complications). She had all three, and the arthritis obligingly settled in her spine. Oh, and important later on. They stopped counting at 200 polyps in under three feet when they biopsied her large intestine.
I almost become a priest, sort of like my brother going into the military. I find out how the Catholic Church is really organized, some of the modern history - Ex Cathedra my a** - and leave the Church. In hindsight I suspect I was desperately trying to prove to myself that I wasn't losing my faith, but hindsight, by definition, is always 20-20.
She spends the next ten years dying - eight years after I leave home. I get to quit college - raise my sisters for three years quite badly, thank you (they have mostly forgiven me, context and all), and take care of a steadily faling woman who was an IQ 180 and now at times has trouble talking. It's random, so you never know if you are going to have a good day, or a day when you have to do it all, including changing the ileostomy bag, etc.
Oh, and that wonderful man, my father? He cannot deal with, and at times yells at her that she can overcome it with her mind. I'll never forget the wonderful time when I had spent the better part of five hours rubbing her muscles down (definitely low brain function she's barely coherent) trying to keep her from going into convulsions - the kidney thing hadn't been diagnosed yet - and then having him come barging into the room yelling at her. She would curl back up and start quivering, and I would have to relax all the muscles again. I finally told my father to f**k off and called the ambulance. A little while later my sisters are old enough to deal with it, and I leave. Sadly for my youngest sister, she now gets to be my father's abuse target. She develops a bit of an attitude at this point.
My mother's health continues to deteriorate, until I receive a call that mom is in the hospital, and she is asking for you. And my father (the whole Terry Schiavo thing got me thinking back to this), after I make a panic rush to see my mom due to possible liver cancer, decides he's spent enough of his life waiting around. So I see my mom - she's quite yellow at this point, I had never actually seen jaundice - and she was holding on just for me.
Funny thing. I had picked up this collection of little ceramic figurines, oh about six inches tall or so, my mother had always liked them. I was giving her one for each Christmas and birthday. Well, I'd given her four, and I had eight more. I ran up to the attic and grabbed them, and took them with me. I have a photo of her, yellow and puffed out at her hospital bed smiling with those eight ceramic figures because I made it. I would have had to throw them out if I'd forgotten them and found them later, now I keep them simply because.
I leave, and she starts to fade out of coherency as the body to shut down due to the metastisized liver cancer. Unfortunately as her mind fails she wants to go home, she tries to get up with all these tubes attached, and they strap her into the bed. Even more unfortunately my Father neglected to tell anyone she is a claustrophobe, and he leaves her strapped into a bed to die as her mind fails. I would have paid for the home care. And, to take advantage of me as the union representative who opposed the little tin god running the government facility where I worked, he f**ks with me, weasals out of giving me bereavement leave, and I miss the funeral. I learned to hate after this, a lesson it took me a long time to unlearn.
Then there is my burned sister. Who finally, in her mid-thirties, waiting for most of a decade for her future husband to grow up, gets married to a man who can see past her burns. Oops, he's partriotic and all that, joins the military after 9/11 and she gets a medal and a government supplied headstone.
Add in the fact that we have discovered my wife has a serious mental handicaps that may prevent her from ever leaving a normal life, and we've only ascertained exactly what the problems are after she almost - accidently - seriously injured my little girl. We'd had hints, and had her evaluated, but it was missed. Review of the evaluations and how they did them show it was done just for state money, with no serious attempt to actually properly do the work when behavioural interventions might have worked.
She has nearly caused several potentially lethal accidents, I have had to intervene multiple times. She tries hard not to and that is what clued me in that she had a big time serious problem - no mother puts their child at risk, at least no normal parent that often. It did not show up at first, and the problems were masked by other factors.
So forgive me if I am just a little suspicious of a theistic god. Just a trifle bit. If aforementioned being is personally responsible for what has happened in my life, or decided that he didn't need to intervene at all, I am going to have some really serious discussions with him/her. That's why I am deistic. I do not believe we are in the hands of an infinitely sadistic being.
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shawnmmcc
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Spiffor - terrible, but other's here have it worse. Velocyrix once posted what his childhood was like, and then there is Albert Speer, who I've picked up hints about his life. I was fortunate, I had a brilliant, truly wonderful mother. My little girl is healthy and bright. My wife loves me, if we can somehow deal with the safety issues (one reason my blood pressure has gone astronomical in the last year - now being treated with triple meds, successfully I might add).
However, my family had a bunch of very bad breaks, or as one friend put it we were Blue Cross (a US health insurance company) worst nightmare. What's even worse with the exception of my father's heart attack, they were all random. It is that which makes me refuse to believe in a Theistic, merciful God. If all the crisis had not occured, my father might have been a typical jerk dad, you love him but in very small doses. :ironic smile: Unfortunately instead it put a man on the edge over it into monsterhood, destroyed my brother's personality, gave my sister a really tough life, and gave my mother a lingering ten year death. I'll grant Job has me beat, but if I believed this was all because of a wager between God and Satan, I think I would truly despair.
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child of Thor
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And for people who do believe in something, especialy many from the organised religions; i guess its hard to explain why there is so much suffering in the world.
And often the suffering of clearly good and innocent people, while obvious evil-doers seem to be geting away with it.
So thats what never made me a follower of any of the organised religions - their stories of merciful gods and being good being the way, just doesn't seem to coralate with what we actualy see in the world all around us.
Still i've had what i've believed have been 'religous' experiences, impossible to describe and too personal to me to go into here. So i just believe now, and dont feel a need to prove anything - i've come to my conclusions in my own way and i think each person has to do the same in their lives. There is no right or wrong with these things imho.
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Brent
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quote:
Originally posted by Moral Hazard
quote:
We have more Christians who participate on this board than have voted here, so I believe that many of them aren't bothering to answer the poll. |
Really I thought ~20% was high for Christian participation in an godless place like Apolyton.
Y'all mentally unstable athiests should stop complaining; I don't like being lumped in with popish idol worshippers, bible re-writing Lutherans, Robotic Calvinists, or Moron(i) worshipers but you don't see me complaining. I guess I just did. |
As far as I know, no one worships Moroni any more than anyone worships Peter, James, John, Malachi, Noah, Mohammed, John Calvin, or Martin Luther. The Book of Mormon is named for Moroni's father, and is no different from there being Books of Ezra, Samuel, Isaiah or Ezekiel. "Mormons" worship the same god as any Christian or other monotheist. Using that name for our religion itself began with enemies of the church and is technically incorrect. Maybe you didn't really need these clarifications but I guess it doesn't hurt.
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shawnmmcc
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Taoism. With some Christian leanings.
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child of Thor
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Shintoism has its appeal to me.
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shawnmmcc
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Traditional Shinto can be a very kind, gentle religion. If you have children (present or future), get "My Neighbor Totoro." A very approachable movie that is based on the genuine Shinto of rural Japan, instead of the abomination created by the military to create cannon fodder for WW2.
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child of Thor
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@Shawn
That is the problem with many organised religions, they get exploited for political reasons - just look at the recent us elections(a neo-con plan apparantly) 
Last edited by child of Thor on 22-03-2005 at 01:13
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:17
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im jewish (surprise!)
my theology leans toward Kaplans Religious naturalism (G-d is all the forces in nature that tend toward salvation) as a working, day to day base, with an interest in Rosenzweigs Jewish religious existensialism, religion as quest for the eternal, with the existential affirmation of millions of jews over thousands of years as the basis of the possibility of a living eternal, and with a VERY strong bias towards the notion that none of this can be intelligibly discussed in words alone (convenient, I know) but must be lived and experienced. I am also influenced in the way Jewish mysticism is reconcilable, and even supportive of non-traditional views of G-d, as in the works of Arthur Waskow and Lawrence Kushner.
The bible is a collection of writings made by human beings over a long period of time. It (or at least the portion of it thats of interest to me) is not only a key source of Jewish history(used with approriate analytic care) , it is the product of the spiritual struggles of Jews of that time as the moved towards monotheism. That struggle, and the ongoing commitment of the people to it, render it holy. To the extent that the eternal, the force for good in the world, is wrapped up historically in that specific struggle of the Jews, it is correct to say that the bible is the product of what we call "G-d".
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Lord Nuclear
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I'm not Chabad, but I believe in most of their teachings. I go to a Chabad shul every Shabbas, I have personal teachings with the Rabbi twice a week, and I go to their Shabbatons. Two Christian families have recently converted to Chabad that now go to our Shul. One family was Swedish, and the Grandfather was a Neo-Nazi, who has disowned his son because of the conversion, and the other used to be a Preacher in a Church, and wanted to talk about some Jewish ideas, but the Church attenders resented Judiasm, and thus, they kicked him out, so he become Chabad.
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21-03-2005 10:04
I feel for you.
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